Five Tribes

by Brian Nelson

  But where was the water? He could see no trace of it. No pond or river. But he felt it.

  Still carrying Nyando, he watched the children in front of him round a bend in the great rock. He set the girl down and she took his hand. But when they reached the curve, he discovered that they were suddenly alone. In front of him was only an impenetrable wall of rock. Then he heard excited voices and laughter, distant and echoing.

  The little girl’s strength had magically returned.

  “!guu!,” Nyando said, pointing. Come on!

  She let go of his hand and ran toward the rock, crouched down, and disappeared. Eric followed and only when he was almost touching the rock did he see it: an opening, three feet high and a foot wide, naturally camouflaged by the rocks. Eric ducked inside, following the children’s excited laughter. The humidity coated him the moment he stepped inside. It was like stepping into a pool house. It was very dark, but he could see some light up ahead. Crude spiral stairs led down around a central shaft. At first, he had to feel along the column with his hands, but soon he was able to see. A celestial shaft of light penetrated the roof of the cave, and before him was a sight he would never forget.

  He stood on the edge of a vast underground cavern, looking out across an underground sea. The stairs he stood on kept descending down for hundreds of feet until they dissolved into a rocky beach at the water’s edge. He stood there dumbfounded. How could this be? He looked deep into the cavern, but he could see no end to it. But he could tell by the way the children’s cries and laughter echoed and reverberated that it must be enormous. Then he heard a splash, followed by another. Soon the air was filled with summer sounds—the splashing and screaming and laughing of children at play. As Eric tried to take in the scene, an unbidden smile spread across his face.

  He took his time descending the steps, marveling at their age, and soon stood on the beach. He savored the sensation of the moist sand and wiggled his toes and laughed for no apparent reason. He couldn’t get over the contrast between the dry desert outside and the saturated air just a few hundred feet below.

  On the walls of the cave he saw a thickness of vegetation that was impossible outside. Moss and creeper vines made ideal nests for small birds that were busy darting in and out of the hole in the roof. How could this be? His suspicion that the cave was enormous was validated by the fact that the waves coming into the beach were almost a foot high.

  Suddenly he was splashed with cold water. It was Karuma. “What are you waiting for?” The other children joined in, splashing water at him and shouting “Ha tsa! Ha tsa! ” Come swim! Come swim!

  “Xu te,” he said. Let me be. “I want to look around.”

  “No, no, no!” Karuma said. “This is no time to be a scientist. Now is the time to be Sān.” He grabbed Eric by the hand and, with the other children, they dragged him into the water.

  “Hui te! Hui te! ” Eric cried, playing along. Help! Help!

  He was initiated with a dunk and swore revenge against each and every one of them. They screeched with delight and tried to get away. When he caught one he would toss them high into the air. This they loved and they made him throw each of them over and over. Their peals of laughter echoed through the cavern. After a while they taught him the Sān version of sharks and minnows. He suddenly realized how much he enjoyed having children in his life. Admittedly, with them around there was little peace, but when he was away from them he always missed them.

  As they played, Eric began to notice markings on some of the walls. Intrigued, he took a break from the play and swam across to the far side of the cavern to get a better look. He soon realized they were cave paintings, and there were thousands of them, painted in shades of red and black and mustard. He reached the far wall and stood waist deep marveling at them. They were beautiful, both individually, and in mass. Most of the paintings depicted hunting. Herds of kudu and eland and gemsbok. The animals were drawn as huge, big bellied, and strong, while the Sān were little more than stick figures dancing around them. What made the art particularly beautiful was the economy of strokes. Just three or four lines and an animal was not only identifiable as an eland or kudu, but Eric could actually feel it moving across the wall, as if it had been captured while running.

  Everywhere he looked the walls were covered with paintings, and some even extended below the surface of the water, suggesting the age upon age that the Sān had been coming to this sacred cavern. He swam about, feeling that he was in an ancient art museum. He sensed different emotions from the paintings. In many he felt the thrill of the hunt or the frustration of failure. One depicted a Sān kill that was stolen by lions. Some showed women with very pronounced buttocks and small tubular breasts. Others depicted feasts and dancing.

  But one painting in particular caught his eye. This one showed a Sān hunter on his knees in mourning beside a dead eland. The hunter’s guilt. To see it depicted here, from the distant past, made a bridge across the centuries from that Sān hunter to himself.

  Eric was entranced by the painting, trying to hold the connection, sensing that he was on the cusp of something important, something vital . . . yet the truth eluded him.

  He heard a nearby splash of water and turned to see Khamko swimming up to him. Eric’s connection to the painting was suddenly lost. A moment later the old man stood up by him, wiped the water from his face with both hands, and smiled.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?”

  “Magnificent! How old are they?”

  He gave a lighthearted shrug. “Some are only a few hundred years, but many are over a thousand . . . and some could be as old as sixty thousand.

  “Unfortunately, this is a skill that is now lost to us. Few can paint in the old way and worse, we have forgotten how to make the pigment. I have tried many times, but I cannot create a resin that will last.” He reached out and caressed one of the paintings. “It is my dream that Karuma will learn. He has great skill, but first Cagn must show me how to make the paint.”

  Eric stored the comment away. With the technology at his disposal, finding an organic compound that would satisfy Khamko’s needs wouldn’t be difficult. He touched the paint for a moment, forcing himself to remember the colors as precisely as possible.

  He smiled at the old man and motioned to the cave. “How is this even possible?”

  “I know it’s hard to believe, but underneath one of the world’s greatest deserts are some of its biggest underground lakes. We have kept the location of many of the caves a secret. In fact, my son, you are probably the first non-Sān to ever enter this cave.”

  After a while the two men swam back to the opposite shore, two small figures within the huge cavern, crossing through silver streaks in the water made by the shafts of dusty light from the surface.

  They were met by the younger children who were still frolicking in the water. Eric noticed Karuma and some of the others busy fishing. They held the lines gingerly in their hands and slowly coaxed the baited hooks through the water.

  Suddenly Karuma gave a whoop—he’d caught a fish. He pulled it in and displayed it proudly. Eric marveled at it. Like most cave fish, it had no eyes. But it was also completely translucent, and Eric could see its spine, stomach, and bladder clearly. As he watched its heart beating fast, he felt sorry for it.

  Within an hour they had caught a dozen fish, and the women went outside to make the cooking fires.

  Eric could see the daylight fading through the high hole in the rock. It brought a sadness . . . or was it something else? He had a sudden urge to be above ground again, so he picked up his spear and climbed the ancient steps to the outside. He passed the women at their fires and a few of the children playing nearby. The delicious smell of the fish wafted through the hot evening air.

  It felt as if something was pulling him along. He made a broad arc around two of the rock formations until it afforded him a view of the setting sun. Clouds had rolled in th
at afternoon, promising much-needed rain, and the sun was caught between the clouds and the horizon, a great red eye between two dark lids.

  Eric sat down and watched the sun begin to dip below the horizon. Soon the first flashes of lightning ran through the black clouds like ivory veins. It took many seconds for the sound to reach his ears. Yet as faint as it was, a cheer rose up from the Sān camp behind him, for all Sān love the rain and dance when it comes.

  Eric smiled, but he had to force himself to do it.

  Something was bothering him, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. The horror of the poisoned animals and the killing of the poachers were finally fading from his mind, and he was returning to the easy rhythm that was life among the Sān. Yet something wasn’t right. He would have to leave soon. His time here was ending. And that brought trepidation and anxiety. But that didn’t account for what he was feeling right now.

  Something was going on with his algorithms, if that made any sense. He was wise enough to know that his own mind was too complicated for him to understand. It executed thirty-eight trillion operations every second. Not only that, but his mind had been changing. It had started when he lost his sight, manifesting itself in different ways—feeling the approach of a person in the dark, the mental link he had with the mother gemsbok, and the way he had foreseen the rhino’s charge before it had happened. His subconscious mind was figuring out things that his conscious mind could not. Could all humans do this if they were returned to their natural environment?

  He couldn’t explain it, but either losing his sight or living here had tapped into a part of his subconscious that he had never known was there.

  And right now, despite how perfect everything was around him—the sunset, the coming rain, the smell of baking fish, and the beautiful singing of women—he knew something wasn’t right. His algorithms, that complicated mix of emotions, hormones, and mathematics, were trying to tell him something.

  He leaned forward and sprawled out on his stomach. He didn’t know why, he just had a sudden urge to do it—and he was learning to listen to such urges.

  He waited there for a several minutes. Then he felt an approaching presence. Someone was coming closer. He waited as the daylight slipped away and darkness fell. On the horizon more lightning lit up the dark clouds. The air grew heavier.

  The presence was growing stronger.

  “Moon-man, what are you doing?”

  He turned to see Karuma coming up behind him. He grabbed the boy and pulled him to the ground. Using their hunting signals, he communicated his fear. Karuma did not doubt him; to the Sān such intuition seemed perfectly normal. The boy lay beside him.

  A moment later the first man appeared. He was moving at a crouch, his dark profile set against the last grayness of the day. He was a black man and carried a rifle in his hands. Then came another man, then another. One Black, one Caucasian. They were about 150 meters away. A fourth man appeared. He was Asian, and there was something on his head. Eric recognized the short horns of night-vision goggles.

  Eric knew what he had to do.

  He signaled to Karuma to go back to camp to tell the others. The boy began to slink away, but stopped when he realized that Eric wasn’t beside him.

  More hand signals:

  Come on!

  No, you go.

  You come, too!

  No.

  The boy scurried back to him and embraced him. Eric could feel the boy trembling. “Please come,” he whispered.

  Eric shook his head.

  The boy clutched him tight. “ǀNamtsi ta ge a,” he whispered. I love you.

  Then the boy disappeared into the shadows.

  The poachers were moving toward the gap between the rocks to Eric’s right, drawn by the singing and the warm glow of the cooking fires.

  Eric moved to intercept them. He realized that he would probably die in the next minute. There didn’t seem to be any way to avoid it: he was one man with a spear against four men with rifles. Yet he did not hesitate and he was not afraid, because those were feelings that came from doubt. He knew exactly what he had to do. He would kill all four men before they reached the camp . . . or die trying.

  He took on the mind of the hunter. They are just animals. If you can enter their minds, you will know how to defeat them. The Asian man was clearly the leader, but he was not the best fighter. He himself knew this, which was why he put the poachers in front. The big black man in front, he was the toughest. He would be the first to hear Eric and the hardest to kill. But if Eric could kill both him and the Asian man quickly, the others might run in panic.

  There was little cover for him as he closed in, only the occasionally blackthorn bush. So he moved gingerly over the sand on the balls of his feet. Luckily the men’s attention was focused forward and their ears were filled with the sound of singing.

  He gripped the spear near its metal tip, came up behind the Asian man, and rammed it between the Atlas vertebra and the base of the skull, twisting the blade as he thrust so it would push through the foramen magnum and into the man’s brain. There was a series of pops, like someone cracking their knuckles, as the widening tip of the spear pried open the bones and cartilage.

  Smoothly and without hesitation, he yanked the spear out, stepped to one side and cast it with all his strength at the lead poacher.

  The man had just turned around and was leveling his rifle at Eric. The spear glanced off the barrel and sank into his face.

  Eric snatched up the Asian man’s rifle and pulled the trigger. Luckily it had been ready to fire. Two rounds went into the closest man and he fell. He aimed at the last man . . .

  Nothing.

  The gun had jammed. He fumbled with the charging handle, but it was no use. He looked up to see the face of the last man glistening with sweat. He pointed his rifle at Eric and adjusted the grip, confident of his kill.

  Eric froze.

  An arrow appeared in the man’s neck—half on one side, half on the other. The man’s eyes widened in surprise. He dropped the rifle and slumped over.

  Eric looked toward the rocks and saw Karuma’s silhouette, bow in hand.

  At that very moment a long crackle of gunfire erupted from the camp. Eric realized with horror that there were more than four men.

  He looked down at the bodies that lay around him, his eyes searching them over for information that would help him decide what to do. They had modern equipment, combat clothing, laser sights; two wore body armor, three had night-vision goggles.

  These were not poachers, they were mercenaries.

  Chapter Fifty

  Eleven

  December 13, 2026

  Naval Research Lab, Washington, DC

  “It seems like an important moment—shouldn’t we tell General Walden?”

  “It’s not going to bite you,” Ryan said. “Besides, we’re going to have to do a lot of testing before we show it to anyone. It’s just a prototype.”

  Ryan led Olivia down the long hallway to a set of double doors.

  She looked at the old sign above the entrance: southard gym.

  “You put our prototype in a basketball court?”

  “If we want to impress Walden and Curtiss,” he said with a hint of annoyance, “it needs to look dramatic, and this was the biggest space I could find. Can we proceed?”

  “Okay, okay.”

  He swung the doors open. It was pitch black inside.

  She honestly didn’t know what to expect. For the past two weeks she’d been so preoccupied with Emma that she’d left much of the work on the Global Hologram to Ryan.

  Ryan flicked a switch, and she heard the hum of electricity before the lights came on. In front of her was a huge crescent of iSheets that stood twenty feet high and wrapped almost completely around the room—there must have been nearly a hundred of them, all locked together in a smooth curve. />
  “Okay, I’m officially intrigued.”

  “Do you want to turn it on?” Ryan asked.

  “Sure, what do I do?”

  “Just say, ‘Wake up, Eleven.’ ”

  She nodded, but hesitated a moment, like an auditioning actor about to try her lines.

  “Wake up, Eleven.”

  There was an electronic beep followed by a man’s voice, midrange, relaxed and smooth: “Hello, Doctor Lee. Hello, Doctor Rosario. Would you like to play a game?”

  Olivia gave a chuckle at the reference, but her laughter was cut off when every iSheet came alive as one uniform image.

  She gasped. She was looking at planet Earth as seen from a low Earth orbit.

  “Whoa,” Olivia said, teetering on her feet. The sense of immersion was almost overpowering. She took a few steps back to take it all in. The image was absolutely gorgeous, the detail startling. There it was, planet Earth, in all its magnificent beauty. She saw snow-covered mountain ranges easing down into coastal plains, huge expanses of ocean, dotted with cotton-white clouds, even the contrail of an airliner. “Wait! Is this live?”

  “Yes, ma’am, it’s one of the NSA’s Key Hole satellites.”

  “Amazing.”

  Ryan stayed quiet, letting her take it all in.