Five Tribes

by Brian Nelson

  He trudged on. After a while, Karuma came beside him. “All very clear now, Moon-man, you can’t fall.” The rest of the tribe, who had always walked single file, were now walking abreast. Eric could hear them all around him. Under his feet the grass and sandy earth had changed to something hard and crystalline. Simultaneously, the sun had become fiercer, like a heavy burden that had to be carried on his head and shoulders. The breeze that had been so cool and refreshing had turned into a hot blast, as if someone was walking in front of him holding a blow dryer to his face.

  “What is this place?”

  “The Land of Salt,” he said. “We have to cross it.”

  On and on they marched. It seemed a terrible choice to make considering they were out of water. Almost suicide. Yet they pushed on.

  “How much longer?” he asked Karuma.

  “Oh, not much.” There was no tension or fatigue in the boy’s voice. He seemed perfectly calm, even excited.

  “I don’t think I can take much more of this.”

  Karuma laughed. “Of course you can. You’ll be fine.”

  The sun continued to beat down and Eric felt his legs becoming rubbery under his hips. It was an effort just to keep moving. The heat was like an oven, sucking the moisture out of his body. And just like an oven, it was hitting him from both above and below, as the heat rose off the salt flats in waves. His labored breathing was loud in his ears.

  “There!” Khamko said, “I knew it!”

  “What is it?” Eric asked Karuma.

  “It is hard to see clearly,” the boy said. “The heat . . . it makes everything blurry. I see many things, some moving. Come!”

  He grabbed Eric’s hand and began to run. At first Eric staggered, but his body came alive at the hope of what might be there. His feet cracked the crusty salt as he ran. A moment later, he heard the yap of hyenas, followed by the unmistakable beating of hundreds of wings as a flock of birds took flight.

  He began to feel what Karuma had seen, the presence of many things. There was an energy in the air, like the feeling of approaching a crowd.

  There was the loud trumpet of an elephant, so close that Eric stopped. Through his feet, he could actually feel the ground vibrate. Then he noticed something else, humidity in the air.

  He heard laughter from the other Sān. Karuma tugged him on. A giddiness overtook him and he ran eagerly now. His body knowing what must be there. A moment later he heard the splashing of feet in water, then he splashed in himself. It brought a wave of pleasure that rolled up from his toes to the top of his head. Even though a drop had not yet touched his lips, he felt his thirst subside. He gasped in pleasure then laughed.

  Karuma’s voice came from down near his ankles. “What are you waiting for?”

  He knelt and began to drink, scooping the water into his mouth, splashing it onto his face, neck, and head. He shivered as he felt his body temperature begin to fall. After he had drunk his fill, he sat down in the shallow water and tried to sort through the new sounds around him. He heard the stomping of hooves. The chatter of many birds. The loud huck-huck call of zebra.

  He called to Karuma, “How can it be?”

  “Grandfather says the shell of the earth here is a desert, but under the shell is a deep ocean. If you know where the water breaks through the shell, you will never be thirsty.”

  Eric nodded, then he motioned to all the noises. “Can you describe what you see?”

  “Ah, that’s not easy. There are so many,” Karuma said. “Over there is a family of elephants, and closer by there are ten giraffes, seventy or eighty springbok. Maybe thirty zebras. And lots of birds, some hyenas and gemsbok. We are lucky there are no rhinos, they chase everyone away.”

  But Eric wanted to know more. “What are they doing?”

  Karuma laughed, took another drink, then began to describe the scene in more detail. He described the oxpecker birds sitting on the elephants. A young elephant sucking up water and showering himself. A giraffe with its legs splayed as it drank.

  Eric tried to create a mental image of it. To save it. He would likely never “see” anything like this again so it became important, indeed critical, that he remember it, to create a vision of it. A vision that he could keep forever and share with the world, with Jane and Ryan and Mei.

  He closed his eyes and concentrated very hard, using sound and smell and touch. He heard a splash of light hooves very close. He guessed it might be a springbok and tried to imagine it. He turned to it and closed his eyes—creating the animal in his mind.

  When he opened his eyes he saw it.

  The perfect tan fur on her back, her snow-white belly, and the swoosh of black on her flank. He stared for a moment in rapt amazement, then a muscle twitched on her haunches as she shooed a fly. Eric laughed. I saw that. Their eyes met, and he felt her spirit. In her big doe eyes he understood her wild nature. Her instinct. Her will.

  Suddenly his head swam as his brain tried to process the whole staggering vista in front of him. It came in and out of focus for a moment, then it became crystal clear. Almost too clear. He gasped. Never, it seemed, had his eyes perceived such detail—the bristly hair on the elephant’s hide, the vibrant orange of the giraffe’s tile coat, the dizzying pattern of the zebra stripes.

  It was the most intense visual image of his life and it was rendered in higher definition than anything he had ever seen before. Everything was in focus at once. Everything from the misplaced feather on a plover’s wing to the sun’s white glare on the brown water to the wind-shivering froth that lay at the edge of the pool. Never had his eyes been drenched with such splendor. He was awestruck.

  He turned to Karuma and looked upon his friend’s face for the first time. And this was, in many ways, just as amazing. The young man had what seemed like a permanent smile on his face. He was beautiful and sleek and strong. His skin was the color of shining copper, and his kinky hair was just a shade darker. He wore a small leather loincloth, a beaded necklace, and nothing else. In his hand was a spear. He seemed the perfect boy. The first boy on earth. A creature of permanent gold.

  Karuma cocked his head to one side, perceiving that something had changed about the foreigner. He waved the spear from side to side and noticed Eric’s eyes tracking it.

  “Is it true?”

  Eric nodded, grinning wide. “Hello, my friend.”

  Karuma stood and began calling to the others. “The moon-man can see!”

  It was not a coming out of darkness, for there was no gradual returning of light. Nor was the sun suddenly too bright. His eyes, after all, had already been open. Instead it was as if a loose wire had been snugged back into place. All at once, the world was there.

  He looked around at his Sān family, trying to match their faces to the voices and characters he already knew. Just to see them was joyous. There was Tssatssi and /Uma and Nyando, and of course, shy little //Kabbo, who was just as slim as the others but with a round little belly. Then he saw a striking young woman and knew this must be Naru. Even though she still looked a teenager, she held herself with the poise and dignity of a queen—as one who has lived long and knows the fullness of her power. Like the rest of them she was naked from the waist up. Her cheeks sat high on her slim face, under penetrating brown eyes. Around her forehead was a headdress made from the skin of a cobra.

  He had known that they were small, but to see them for the first time was striking . . . not one of them reached his shoulder. They were unerringly slim and lean, even the ones with round bellies. And it seemed that everyone was smiling. He also saw things that his fingers had sensed before, like the texture of their skin: it had rivulets like a cactus and Eric mused that, just like cactus, perhaps it could stretch to hold water.

  At that moment the tribe seemed to part, and an old man came splashing through the shallow water. The grace of his movement, the pure efficiency of his gait, was like watching a le
opard move. His skin was the same copper color, but his hair was white, as if he had just come in from a blizzard and been powdered with fresh snow.

  His face was deeply lined but when he felt Eric’s eyes upon him he smiled so wide all the lines disappeared. He raised his hands to the sky. “I prayed to Cagn for you! And he answered my prayers!” He stepped forward, and they embraced. “My son,” he said, “I am so happy for you.” After a long minute, Eric stepped back to see his face more clearly, still holding him in a one-armed embrace. And in that moment he felt the whole history of this man. A man who had lived in both worlds and had chosen this one. A man who had dedicated his life to protecting his people—decade after decade. And for the first time since his own father died, Eric felt like he truly had a protector. Here was a man with a pure heart. A man he could follow without question. And a man who truly loved him and would protect him as if he were his own son.

  “I can see you,” Eric said. “I can see you and I can’t believe it.”

  Khamko laughed. “Believe,” he said, “believe.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The World According

  to Riona Finley

  November 20, 2026

  The forests near Smithburg, West Virginia

  “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

  —Max Planck

  Riona Finley moved cautiously through the woods along the deer trail. Up ahead she could hear the sound of the highway, the swishing sounds of the tires that reminded her of the low din of the ocean. Just before the edge of the woods she stopped. She was close enough to see out but not close enough to be seen. She was high on a hill above the road and could see it stretching out a dozen miles in both directions.

  She wasn’t quite sure why she had come here. Everyone had agreed she needed to stay out of sight. She was now #1 on the FBI’s most wanted list and a very busy woman. The assassination of Senator Peck had been a public relations coup and launched her onto the international stage. Membership was up. Crowdfunding was fantastic, and revenue was skyrocketing.

  Just keep doing what you’re doing, she said to herself. How can 140 million Twitter followers be wrong?

  Yet part of her felt that something wasn’t right. She needed to evolve in some way. This morning she’d decided to go for a walk to clear her head. She’d left the cabin at 8:00 a.m. Now it was four hours and eight miles later, but she wasn’t any closer to finding what she was looking for. She had believed her philosophy was perfect, that she had captured the zeitgeist of not just America, but the world. Yet something . . . something still didn’t fit.

  She sat down and tried to take stock in her life: She was a radical. She knew that. She was also proud of it, because being radical was the only way that real change was going to happen. That’s what she was trying to teach her followers through her blogs and tweets. Just look at history, she told them. Throughout most of human history, things stayed the same as the masses trudged along under the whip or whim of their masters, convinced that the way things were was normal and immutable. Century upon century passed under the dictatorial rule of caesars, kings, emperors, caliphs, and other tyrants who fed their followers promises of a better world in the afterlife for toil and abuse in this one.

  Only when a radicalized person arrived on the scene did things ever change. Jesus was the first radical. A man who challenged the existing system, whose teachings of compassion threatened the old guard. Many more came after him. Some were benevolent; many were not. Mohammad, Rousseau, Jean-Paul Marat, Napoleon, Marx, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr.

  With them came radical ideas, new religions, new economic systems, new laws. And while some of their agendas had been ruinous, it could not be denied that they had still been the engines of massive transformation. Because of them, the world was never quite the same.

  Of course, they weren’t born in a vacuum. As Herbert Spencer noticed, societies created these “great men,” but societies ripe for change. Indeed, it was sick societies that incubated some of the greatest radicals. Men who had, unlike their peers, the courage and ambition to act.

  This, she felt, was how she had become the woman she was. The problems of modern society had forced her to become radical. All the complacency, the barriers to power, the corruption, and ignorance had left her no choice but to act outside the laws of the system.

  As she looked back on her life, she realized it could not have turned out any other way.

  There were two defining moments that had pushed her down this path. She called them her “great epiphanies.”

  The first was a realization about the nature of her fellow humans.

  It had happened in the library at Dartmouth, while she was studying environmental science in graduate school. She had come across a 1949 study by two Harvard psychologists who had tested students’ perceptions about doctored playing cards. The study found that the subjects—who had no idea the cards had been altered—were very resistant to acknowledging that the cards were incorrect. The rather obscure study was noticed by the famous historian Thomas Kuhn who grasped its true importance: when people are given information that does not match the framework in which they see the world, the new information is rejected or explained away for as long as possible. “In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty,” Kuhn wrote.

  Here at last was the cornerstone of her theory of history. The great mass of humanity—simply by their nature—was stubbornly resistant to change. Indeed, they would only accept change when they absolutely had to.

  Which, by extension, meant that whole societies were always slow to react to pressing problems, often waiting until it was the very last moment or too late altogether.

  Climate change, of course, was a problem that could not be tackled slowly. The preponderance of evidence had emerged in the 1970s, yet humanity had let the clock tick down far too long. It was now 2026, and if they were going to turn things around, they had to act with an urgency that just did not exist.

  And besides, all the nonradical methods to wake people up had already been exhausted.

  Yet back in that library, even though she knew extreme measures were necessary, she still did not embrace violence. She was a radical, yes, but violent, no.

  Her endorsement of violence took much longer. The process began after she became an assistant professor at Cornell. She still had hope then; she was still idealistic and naive. Being a professor should have been a great way for her to change the world. She saw herself as a shining torch: she would go to conferences, she would do important research, persuade public officials, and all while she would be teaching and mentoring the next generation of activists.

  But the deeper she got, the more she realized the game was rigged against her. Most of her senior colleagues were much more worried about securing grant money than saving the planet. Worse, they were lackadaisical, and their ideas, quite frankly, sucked. Yet, because they were established in the field, they received the lion’s share of the grant money, while her own lab, which was doing important work on Ocean Acidification, was starved for money. That’s when she’d come across a famous quote by Max Planck, “Science moves forward one funeral at a time.”

  In many ways it was a corollary to Thomas Kuhn’s idea about humankind’s resistance to new ideas, yet it was also acknowledging (for the first time in her mind anyway) that death could be a good thing. And as she continued to work and struggle, one year, two years . . . five years. And as she watched the other climate scientists grow wealthy off their insignificant work, she began asking herself, Why not give the mortality rate a little push? You know, just up the percentages a little. She had been half joking the first time she thought it. But the idea kept coming back to her.

  Th
e tipping point came when she was passed over for tenure. It wasn’t because she wasn’t a good teacher or that she wasn’t committed enough. It all came down to money. She was not pulling in the grant money that she (and the university) needed, so she was let go. That night, alone in her apartment, surrounded by the thousands of books that she had read, she got drunk and began to plan her first kill. Much to her surprise, the next day she did not give up on the idea. She decided to really do it . . . and do it right. Using the Socratic method. As a scientist would. What did she have to lose?

  His name was Avery Reynolds. He was a blogger, political pundit, and climate-change denier. A pseudointellectual, Avery spoke with an English accent even though he was born in Ohio and had only lived in the UK for six months. He had a degree in journalism from the University of Dayton and had never taken a hard science course in his life. During his twenties he had struggled to make a name for himself as a reporter, working at a series of regional newspapers before being hired, then quickly fired, from USA Today for plagiarism. He was covering high school sports for the Atlanta-Journal Constitution when he hit on the lucrative idea of being a climate-change denier. Despite having no background in science, he suddenly felt uniquely qualified to denounce every peer-reviewed scientific paper about global warming.

  It wasn’t long before he was appearing regularly on talk radio and TV. He attempted to spin himself as an independent activist, but Riona knew this was a lie. His salary, travel expenses, car, and mortgage were paid for by the Capital Donation Fund, a secretive nonprofit dedicated to “educating the public on the truths of climate change.” It, in turn, received the majority of its funds from Big Oil and the Detroit automakers.

  For Riona, Reynolds was the perfect symbol of the dirty money that kept the climate movement paralyzed. His death would send a message to all those who funded the deception that they were no longer safe.

  She had known from the outset that she had to make her killings as sexy as possible. This was a movement that she wanted to go mainstream. That meant no guns. She didn’t want the bloody corpses of her victims going viral on the internet. No, these had to be Hollywood-style killings—PG-13—with little or no blood.