Tales of Reign

by M E Wise

  I run hard and as fast as my feet will carry. I can feel the wind and pollen thick air rip past me. The broadleaf foliage tears at my human skin and I often wince but never falter in my pursuit. Pursuit? Yes, I believe I am chasing something every time. Failing to catch whatever it is I am pursuing! Am I after prey or am I the prey? The physical excursion is something the Mor’h do not understand. For me it is a release of tensions I can’t even begin to describe to a people content to use roots almost like a verb for life.

  I run until I can’t any longer, falling to my knees spent sometimes, and others tripping on a vine or bushel of thick grass. I lay there like I lay now, conversing with myself about the nothings of being out of place. I think of the stinging cuts I have received from this world; familiar and metaphorical. They will both heal. They always do.

  The crashing and snapping of limb and shrub fill the air as the ground groans in thuds. A massive beetle crab bursts from the tree-line! I am too close to his territory! The sheer size of this Insectae crowds the higher limbs of the trees and they snap under its force. This beast aims to break me as well. I pause for a moment and without fear allow him to go about his display, using his horns to crush a nearby boulder and snap a trunk razing a tree to splinters. I begin to invade his mind; if one can call it a mind. Insectae have little of thought but function cyclically and simple to keep balance in their realm of brutal nature. I put fear in it. Fear is universal in almost all creatures. I share my own fear, evident with the pounding in my chest.

  The massive, spiny hair covered appendages shake and it rears in pain or is it anger? The thing tries to retreat but I pursue its backward movement recovering a sharpened portion of tree it unwittingly provided me. Thrust after thrust I begin to rip through the exoskeleton! I howl with my work and growl with an angry pleasure unbefitting anything natural to this world and I enjoy the separation. I am primal, an alien animal, a mammal-I am man! Human!

  We both collapse. One dead, the other an unwilling victim. Why had this happened? Why did I react this way? The beast was fleeing? Would it have done the same? I look to the mess I have made and I feel ashamed but indifferent all the same.

  “Was it necessary to end the thing?” Qz’s voice travels up my spine and we link.

  I feel him close by and several other Lo’Mor’h in the sharing as well. “That thing would have killed me!”

  “You could have left the Insectaes domain!” Chimed in Wan Sah a familiar teacher. Wan Sah flashes images of walls, barriers and signs in the link.

  “It wasn’t even a challenge to your mind or your body!” Attacked another distant Lo’Mor’h that was to faint to sense. Who also drove fast visions of war on Earth with his words.

  “I had one choice! Myself or the bug! I am in control not some insect!” I started shouting across the plain and quiet garden. My anger turns to a feeling and pushes back mentally through the sharing. I turn quickly to find Qz standing a few paces away. There is no change in his face or reaction at all. I resent them and their insults. I don’t have a clone to fall back on, I live one life and make the best of it. His judgments always feel unfair.

  He challenges me, “Is it control that you want Reign? Is this a need?” He moves forward in the stiff manner they move. The other Lo’Mor’h slowly unlink one by one. He breaks his link and speaks aloud. It is like hearing words from someone with a numb tongue. “The Mor’h do not behave this way. We removed that part of ourselves ages ago. Some have thought it to be the first wise decision our people had made. To abandon fear of competition through self-perfection…”

  “Are you perfect, Q’ua Z?” I cut him off with a glare. “Is your current state perfection? Are you trying to perfect me as well?”

  “Reign; you are a child of the stars. You are not the makings of your genetics. You must understand that life and that all the complexity of form dissolve in death but the mind remains.” Qz sympathetically tilts his head.

  “Then explain the dramatic response to the dying of this creature who does not think? Who has no higher thought than to attack, to consume, to dominate or even suffer under the territorial nature of another of its kind!” I stood much taller than Qz. The Mor’h do not intimidate easily.

  Qz straightens himself, “Your condemnation of a living creature while excusing your own actions Reign answers that question.” He is link speaking to help his speech.

  “Explain to me again my name, Qz.” I say coldly. “Why name me Reign? What’s my human name?”

  “You have learned in shelter. You have experienced the world in your mind and in images that only entertain the value of what they actually represent. Reign, we have given you so much more than you know. But this communication is ineffective-” Q’ua Z reestablishes the link.

  Images and happenings pour into the sharing about my new path. The Mor’h want me to go home. They want me to go back to Earth. The images show vast differences in the culture there and a great insecurity. A sense of my own insecurity fills the link with curiosity, intrigue and freedom. And I can feel Qz pull back in something like fear. Could it be fear for me? Or of me? But fear? There is a genuine concern about what needs to be done and what that is asking of me. He breaks the silent link and utters, “The Tah’l have requested you at the Cathedraline, to receive sharing with the council core.”

  Why would the Tah’l or the council want to engage me directly? “That doesn’t make sense Q’ua Z. The council has never requested me in my entire life. That’s 25 years they have had to even address my presence on Mor’h. Should I be concerned?” Even with our rivalry, Qz wouldn’t leave this unanswered.

  “Contain your fear Reign. This meeting is soon. And your future sooner. But first you must find your root. Take a moment in the garden and share with it your worries, your rage and your fear. It will calm you. Think on what happened here.” Q’ua Z turns and moves away at a quick pace for a shortened clone. The link fades but not quick enough to hide Qz’s distracted sharing.

  Images of the Mor’h before my current knowledge briefly filled the link. They feared and warred as any creature would for territory and preservation. They controlled their known space and the nature within it. They are afraid of something and I don’t know what it is. The Mor’h have stabilized their slow extinction and I could even say gained a steady truce with it. I have no idea how they declined so quickly. Somehow I think that truth and their fear share the same place in history.

  I walked to a hilltop and I sat in the grasses there, above the flowers and the shrubs a distance from where the soil has already began absorbing the corpse of the beetle crab. I began to link with the nature around and part of me connects with the life here as I had been taught to do with the Mor’h all these years. My five human senses fill with the life around me, both in the ground and in the air as the wind steadies me. I sense the scurrying of all that the garden holds. Guilt wells up in my stomach for the Insectae I killed. The garden does not judge or forgive me. I become part. I am part. The stillness becomes activity and the activity is existence at work.

  My human mind begins to wander and I stir over the images of the path ahead. Humans swarm in their technology. They control the air on other worlds. They have lost harmony in their ways. I think I know why the Mor’h want me to go. The Mor’h’s transgressions into Sol space are veiled in shadowy truths. Why did they choose Human and Mor’h? Q’ua Z avoids this discussion. They all do. I sometimes fade in and out of links around me for some unspoken truths but the Mor’h keep their secrets close. I feel that they know this and block me from their sharing at deeper levels furthering my segregation.

  

  I have only been off world once in my twenty-five years. The Lo’Mor’h raised me in such a disciplined and isolated atmosphere. Each day was full of study; the sciences and culture very much dominated the lessons. Their technology is vastly superior to that of my Earthen ties. Couple that with the ability to link and seemingly download experience, understanding and the imagery seen through another
’s eyes, also speed the learning process. But I must admit I find it difficult to often digest those projections. They are often colored, as Q’ua Z says, with the feelings of sharing. Many times I have wondered if the sharing is always truthful. The Lo’Mor’h say that subterfuge is impossible because the oneness of the event brings with it the character of each person making it difficult to mask intention.

  Synthetic projectors mimic the sharing in the Forum of Education. They produce images in the air with an interactive format allowing the user to toggle it like a chalk board of light; described so by Wan Sah who taught me old Earth culture. Wan Sah provided me with a real chalk board as a child. She also fed my creative side as she said this was absolutely important to my ability to grasp unknown knowledge when it seems too new to process. There were lessons in art, both the aesthetic and the martial. It was these studies that would lead to being off world. As I wait alone in my quarters for the council to call for me, my mind rests in this moment; this past memory.

  I begin to link with this room and let the memory come alive again.

  “Distraction seems to be the essence of juvenile humans.” Wan Sah declares addressing my long stare.

  I snap from my day dreaming, “Sorry Lo’Don I can’t help it. I think I am bored. I know this is no excuse.”

  To mimic human behavior Wan Sah places her hand oddly to my shoulder. “As your Lo’Don I must teach you even the things that bore you. Perhaps we need to be unconventional to approach this subject. A human field trip maybe?” Wan Sah to me was a her. The nature to which she approached addressing humanity colored our sharing’s with more emotion and sincerity than any other Lo’Mor’h I had contact with. She moved more fluidly than the others as well, with an almost graceful respect to being aware of such things. I think she admired dancing, the martial arts and the athletic focus of many human past times. Though not competitive by nature being Mor’h, she never expressed need for it.

  The excitement of leaving the training room and finding fresh air and adventure brought a bounce to my step. I was thirteen, going through something called puberty, an uncomfortable period of life to say the least. I could only imagine what a community of adolescent pubescent people would be like; disturbingly chaotic I would assume. My surprise was multiplied when Wan Sah handed me a vacuum suit!

  “Wan Sah! Am I going to space?” I gleamed as only a young man could at my age.

  “To the Lotus Array Station Five to answer your question,” Wan Sah pauses awkwardly, “Yes.”

  My vacuum suit had been designed for me. Each is tailored to be precise and function at the utmost level of efficiency. They fit comfortably and are laced with bio-synthetic webbing that regulate temperature and monitor the physical bodies attributes as well as the suits protective value in the environment that body is in. A small communication device is built into the neck that directly penetrates into the spinal-cord at the smallest molecular level. This interface allows person to person communication at long range to offset limitations in the sharing while also allowing the wearer to directly control the processes of their suit. Even sharing had its limits. I quickly undressed and put it on as fast as I could.

  “Does your suit, suit you Reign?” Asks Wan Sah playfully, as playful as the Mor’h can be.

  “It’s amazing!” A cool tickle shuddered down my spine as the suit and I aligned to form a new skin through the spinal port. It is much like the sensation when the sharing links are formed. The sensitivity in the hand coverings is amazingly like my own fingertips and even goose bumps formed when a breeze blew by as we step out of the training room. We wind through the connecting tunnels and corridors of the local Columns that surround the central Cathedraline on the power tram. We travel very fast; as the trams always do, to the outer portion of the circular city where the space ports are.

  Small vessels, referred to as bell craft, all of the same make are seated neatly on the five charging platforms that make the points of a larger polygonal port platform. The Mor’h believe in a sacred geometry and it shows in their construction. Again some trace to their roots as they say. Or as Q’ua Z would say, “in the smallest bacteria we find structure, a balance we must acknowledge as truth.” I have never observed a root system with any regularity so this was always an argument between us. The fractal world of smaller things did have a unique way of being the same.

  I shied to ask why there was little activity. The limited number of Mor’h I had encountered seemed to relish their space. I have not known the Mor’h to be explorers, watchers maybe, but they did build a vast network of space knowledge somehow. As we entered the bell craft that could barely fit five Lo’Mor’h, I felt slightly claustrophobic. Wan Sah noticed this, “Do you wish to continue Reign?”

  “Every ounce of me wants to continue Lo’Don. For a moment I just…I just.” I tried to find a suitable explanation for something so human but before I could bring it to words Wan Sah linked.

  Images exchanged instantly and my feelings were made whole for Wan Sah to experience and there was understanding. Her lips formed the words, “your birth was not a comfortable truth. We have not experienced such a transition in reality for so long I almost cannot fathom such a thing. As traumatic as your first moments are and were, you must move forward.” She may not be able to understand that such advice was not practical. I live with every moment as it shapes me. The Mor’h seem to accept things as they are or solve how they should be quickly. If being human was the confusion I felt while growing up, then that is what I know of being human.

  We move into the bell and the craft comes to life. A voice of some forgotten Mor’h greets us from the walls as if to surround us. “Welcome passengers. Where must we travel?” Lo’Nor were specialized and saved consciences to their purpose. Lo’Nor acted as guides, pilots or sources for direction.

  “Destination Lotus Station Five Lo’Nor,” announced Wan Sah as she glanced at me. “This will just take a second.” She spoke for my presence only. Mor’h technology for the most part worked by linking, a more mechanical form of sharing.

  My hair stood on end and a static charge formed heavily in the air, then there was a flash. A distinct noise echoed for a moment as my ears rang. My nose burned with an electric smell and I felt weightless. “You may demagnetize your suit Reign. Enjoy this as a human would.” She says. “What just happened Wan Sah?” I clung to handles nearby. “Short jump.” She answered.

  I took Wan Sah’s invitation quickly! The floor beneath me phased out of view and opened up to a vision of Mor’h glowing from underneath us. We were hanging in the heaven’s, adrift and in zero gravity. This feeling was so overwhelming I felt tears well up in the corners of my eyes and let them fall. To my close left I made out Wan Sah’s figure working on docking procedures on the floating display. Her dangly form had fixed angles like a stick figure drawn in the fetal position. Her own eyes were lit by the photo electric glow and I compared them to the mouse lemur of Earth biology, over-sized for her face and full of anxiety.

  The Mor’h, especially the Lo’Mor’h always appeared so rigid. Wan Sah slipped from time to time into a zone that I felt mimicked a living mannequin trying to be human or less clone-like. Her head was much like a human’s but more angular. No clones have hair like I do, they may have some petal like crest that fit smoothly and at random some newly linked clone will have a dandelion like coif that molts in a month or so. Being of plant origin I have noticed they develop slight hues in color during seasons to offset their dominant grayish skin color. If it weren’t for their chloroplast like blood, they could almost be translucent.

  With her work finished Wan Sah turns from the console and the screen disappears leaving her thinly outlined like a five pointed starfish from the light behind her. Beyond her I catch my image in the reflective panel of the craft and I am once again forced to acknowledge our differences. I am truly alien. I have never had a Mor’h draw an immediate distinction to that difference though. Earthen history and story-telling was loaded with prejudice. H
ow would humankind see me?

  We dock and find the artificial gravity heavy. Our vacuum suits adjust accordingly and we begin to move more freely. The atmosphere is thin in the room and I feel light-headed. My suit configures a geometric canopy around my head and compensates for the oxygen I am missing. Array were larger than they appeared. Massive solar shades doubled as monitors. They were sparsely equipped with devices I didn’t recognize.

  “And this is why I brought you here Reign.” Wan Sah expressed while motioning toward the large open oversight on the bridge. “You are having trouble with putting things into perspective. Think outside yourself and less inward to understand greater concepts. The self is important but only as it belongs to the whole.” Mor’h glowed brightly in the less shaded panels.

  “Plant my feet.” I said wide-eyed and captivated by the galaxy painted in the back ground of planet Mor’h. It is beautiful and immense. I realize that as long as I live this may be the first time I truly understood that my existence; however minute, completed something much greater. The universe accepted me and my part was yet to play out it’s worth.

  Wan Sah found herself busy for my sake. I stared for what seemed like an eternity. I loved the stars and astronomy. Each tiny flicker of light was another story or existence. Most of the universe will never know a single soul who could marvel at its closely kept secrets. Sometimes I wondered, like this moment, does the universe even care we exist at all? Or was it happily unaware?