Cast Under an Alien Sun (Destiny's Crucible)

by Olan Thorensen

  Once outside, he stood in the light and felt warmth against his face. He looked up and, for the first time since his arrival, consciously noticed the sun. That he could look at the sun for a few seconds without having to avert his eyes was one more clue he wasn’t on Earth. The orb was larger than Sol, and the color had more of an orange tint than the yellow of Earth’s sun.

  If he remembered his astronomy, this must still be a Class G sun, like Sol, though a little smaller and cooler. It probably looked larger because this planet’s orbit must be closer to its sun than Earth. Whatever the sun’s characteristics, the colors he saw around him appeared “normal”: the sky was robin’s egg blue, the nearby flowers red and yellow, the foliage a mix familiar greens and darker-hues.

  He walked the paths of the formal garden behind the cathedral, his mind clearer than since arriving to this place. He’d shit and eaten. Normally, he’d say he needed a shower and a shave to finish out the morning rituals, although perhaps in a different order. Shaving didn’t seem to be in the cards here. Every man Yozef had seen since he’d awakened here sported a beard. The lengths, shapes, and degree of grooming seemed left to individual preferences, and the only smooth-faced males were boys still too young to have developed fuzz. Even if he had a razor, to fit in he would have to get accustomed to a beard. He had had one in college as an undergrad, back in his “Look at me, I’m adult and an intellectual,” phase. He hadn’t cared much for the beard then, and the one he was currently growing felt scruffy after a couple of weeks’ growth. He was just going to have to get used to it.

  As for the last of the four rituals—bathing remained. His nose had already noted that daily showers or baths were not the norm here. Although the BO levels were much higher than he was accustomed to, it surprised him it wasn’t worse. Maybe it was the clothing, constructed from some natural fibers like wool, cotton, flax, or bandersnatchi. He already knew he got more odoriferous if wearing shirts made of synthetics, compared to cotton. Still, it got pretty earthy at evening mealtimes when the dining hall fills with bodies who had been working all day.

  He sniffed his left armpit and grimaced. He needed a shower, but not now. Later, before evening meal. For now, he needed to think.

  He continued a slow walk around the gardens and the grounds. An occasional local passed him, giving what he assumed to be a greeting, although for all he knew they were incantations to ward off the weird stranger who might be a demon. He only partly noticed them. He was deep into thoughts about where he was, how he got here, and most important . . . what was he going to do?

  The same thoughts dominated his mind all day and the next. He was here. Not wanting to be here was meaningless. He was here. Simply sleeping in the small room they provided, eating three meals, shitting, and walking around agonizing over what had happened wouldn’t work. What was he actually going to do?

  The immediate answer was obvious. He didn’t know.

  Though he didn’t have a long-term plan, he needed to act on the proverbial advice “Don’t just stand there, do something!” Since he didn’t know what he was going to do long term, at least he needed to do something, if only to get ready for when he did have a plan.

  He stopped in the middle of a garden path and spoke aloud, oblivious to his surroundings and an approaching man.

  “Language. No question. It’s the unavoidable priority. Nothing long term is going to happen or be decided until I know enough of the language to communicate.”

  The man passed, eyeing him carefully and stepping aside to avoid contact with the stranger conversing with the air. Yozef didn’t notice.

  “Yes. Language. That’s what I have to do first.”

  Having a clear, immediate goal both reassured and intimidated him. To know what he needed to do, even if short term, was a rock to stand on. However, it could also be shifting sand. He had had two years each of Spanish in high school and German in college—the latter a chemistry degree requirement left over from the days when much of the world’s best chemistry work was published in German. That those days were many decades past by the time he got to college was evidently irrelevant to the Berkeley chemistry department. Neither language stuck with him, leaving him enough to pronounce the menu items at a Mexican restaurant and stumble through German chemistry publications.

  This was going to be ugly and grueling. But he had no choice. He had to understand and speak the language.

  Having an action plan, he sought out Carnigan at the next morning’s meal and found him eating by himself as usual. Yozef plopped himself down at the same table, facing Carnigan, who appeared a little taken aback at the effrontery of someone sitting with him until he recognized Yozef. The initial frown changed to a twinkle, as Yozef started talking to him in English.

  “Well, Carnigan. Congratulations on being appointed my first tutor in whatever you people call your language. Hope you appreciate the honor.”

  Carnigan grunted, his usual response to bursts of English, and continued eating. Yozef picked up the two-pronged local version of a fork, held it up with one hand, pointed to the utensil with the other hand, and said, “Fork . . . fork . . . fork.”

  Carnigan looked at him speculatively, then raised his eyebrows and said back, “Sonktie . . . sonktie . . . sonktie.”

  They moved on from there: head, eyes, hand, foot, chair, bowl, and knife. Once they finished eating and went outdoors, the lesson continued: tree, sun, clouds, path, wood, rock, on and on. Yozef forgot many of the words immediately, but repetition encouraged him that the overall task wasn’t hopeless.

  The lesson ended when Carnigan shook his head and made pushing and chopping motions with his arms.

  “Work. You’re saying you need to get to work. Thanks, Carnigan for picking up so quickly what I was trying to do.” Yozef patted his shoulder and watched him turn and stride toward the barns.

  It was a start, but he needed to write down what he heard. He needed a pen and paper. Or a quill and papyrus, or whatever the equivalent was here. Brother Fitham. He was the one to check with.

  It took an hour to find the elderly brother who had helped him in his first weeks. Fitham was hanging laundry on lines behind the guest quarters. After exchanging unintelligible comments to each other, Yozef mimed for writing materials. Later that evening, when Yozef got back to his room, on his table sat a stack of blank pale-brown paper, several sharpened quills, and a stoppered vial of ink. Thus began the first, and certainly the only ever, English dictionary to the local language. He wrote down everything he could remember from Carnigan, perhaps twenty nouns in English and how he transcribed the equivalent local word.

  He grimaced at the results. It looked pathetic. Oh well, the longest trip starts with one step, he recited.

  The next morning, he brought paper, quill, and ink to the morning meal. Carnigan filled in nouns Yozef forgot from the day before, then left for work without further contributions to the dictionary. However, word had spread, whether by Carnigan, the abbot and the abbess, or the general observation the stranger was learning their language, and other staff took up the lessons. Whenever a staff member served a meal, he or she would point to each item and pronounce its name. When walking on the grounds, men and women pointed to buildings, doors, hoes, rocks—on and on. As he passed people, they greeted him with phrases whose exact meaning he didn’t understand but assumed were versions of “Hello,” “Good-bye,” “Good-day,” or whatever were common greetings.

  After a few hundred nouns, he moved on to verbs. By the end of the first sixday, Abbot Sistian approached him with a boy about thirteen years old. The boy carried several thin, bound books and additional writing materials. Sistian and Yozef managed to communicate enough for Yozef to understand the boy would provide lessons in the local language, both spoken and written.

  Thus began Yozef’s serious study of Caedelli, as his young tutor gave him the name of the language and the people. He came to suspect Caedelli was an ancient ancestor of Indo-European, which, if correct, put the transplantation
from Earth probably no later than 5,000 years BC. As he had noticed while bedridden, about one word in three or four seemed related to one or more of the Earth languages he was familiar with: English, Spanish, and German. He remembered from an anthropology course that among diverse Indo-European languages, some of the most common and important words had similarities—words such as mother, father, water, and occasional other nouns, although the similarities varied. While Caedelli words for mother and father sounded familiar, sister and brother didn’t. The color blue sounded like “blue,” and “red” and “black” were familiar, but no other color sounded similar enough to stretch credulity of ancestry. “Cold” sounded like cold, but “hot” sounded closest to a local animal, and “warm” was a female body part whose specificity he didn’t explore further.

  As his vocabulary and knowledge of Caedelli grammar increased, he learned details of his environment. The enclosed cluster of buildings he found himself in was a center of medicine, religion, and learning, and he conferred to the complex the title of “abbey,” which he translated as making Sistian and Diera the abbot and the abbess, respectively. The abbey was formally named the Abbey of Saint Sidryn, commonly referred to as St. Sidryn’s—Sidryn being the name of some past religious figure. The nearby town was Abersford, the Province Keelan, the land a large island named Caedellium, and the planet was Anyar. From observing activity around the complex, Yozef had already figured out the cycle of days was by sixes, a sixday—five days of work and one day of rest and worship services in the large cathedral-like building. He learned the seasons (four), the months (nine, plus a five-day start-of-year festival), and a thumb pointed upward from a fist meant the equivalent of a raised middle finger and not approval, a good thing to know.

  Language by total immersion. His brain often felt fried by the end of a day spent memorizing words, practicing phrases and pronunciation, and a gradual increase in the morning reading/writing lesson from two to four hours each day with the boy assigned to him by the abbot. By the end of two sixdays, Yozef had enough words to try asking questions and understand answers. He learned that his tutor was Selmar Beynom, the youngest son of Abbot Sistian and Abbess Diera Beynom. Another son, Cadwulf, was about eighteen years old and studying at the abbey. There also were also two Beynom daughters, older, married, and living with their families elsewhere. Selmar was diligent and tireless, so much so that several nights Yozef dreamed of being back in the fifth grade and drilled by a relentless Mrs. MacMurty.

  “God, what I wouldn’t give to talk to someone in English for just a few minutes!” he mumbled to himself after one language lesson on past and future tense. “Someone other than myself.”

  He found himself singing softly just to hear the lyrics, which got him more than a few stares. Singing and humming to yourself seemed common here, but his tunes were not any the locals had ever heard. He got smiles at the obvious gaiety of “Yellow Submarine,” “Jingle Bells,” and “I Get Around.” More mixed looks accompanied hearing him whistling or singing “Everything Is Beautiful,” “Imagine,” “I Walk the Line,” and various Bruce Springsteen numbers. He was surprised he could remember most of the lyrics to so many songs. Maybe whatever the Watchers did had improved his memory. An alternative explanation was more melancholy: Maybe the lack of English made his brain work harder to remember what it could before losing details of Earth forever.

  Chapter 8: Thorns

  Even with Yozef’s commitment to master Caedelli, there was a limit to what his brain would tolerate. As a counterbalance, he began helping Carnigan in his daily assignments a few days after he started language lessons. The weather was warm that day, with a breeze coming off the ocean, and increasing cloud cover suggesting rain later in the day. He had been on one of his slow walks around the grounds after morning lessons and came upon Carnigan hoeing weeds in a vegetable field outside the complex’s main wall.

  Damn if this isn’t a scene that might go viral on YouTube. The hoe looked like a toothpick when handled by someone who looked like he could carry a horse.

  Yozef stood watching, then, without a conscious decision, went to a shed he had seen workers taking tools from and picked out another hoe. He went out to where Carnigan worked and started hoeing in the next row. Carnigan looked up from his work, nodded to Yozef, and went back to the weeds. Yozef kept up with the hoeing for almost an hour the first day before lagging. Even hoeing weeds was a major exertion, given his condition. When he had dropped several yards behind and audibly puffed, Carnigan took the hoe from his hands, turned him around, and pushed him gently but firmly toward the buildings. He rumbled something to Yozef, who without understanding a word, knew Carnigan said, “Nice work, but that’s enough for today.” On subsequent days, Yozef met Carnigan either at morning meal or at the main abbey entrance and followed him to the day’s assignment.

  Thus, Yozef learned more than just weeding. Within a month, six sixdays, or thirty-six total days to a month by local custom, he experienced cleaning stables, brushing horses, milking cows, chasing ducks for the evening meal, pruning in the formal gardens and orchards, loading and unloading wagons and, less to his liking, moving voiding vats to refuse pits, rinsing out the vats with buckets of water, and putting the vats back under the commode platforms of the voiding house. Fortunately, Carnigan’s turn for that task came only once a month.

  Working with Carnigan gave Yozef’s brain a break, and his body strained with physical work unlike any previous experience. The rest of the hours into the evenings were absorbed with further language study. By the end of the first month, Yozef had learned enough Caedelli to pick up stray pieces of conversations and even carry on limited exchanges.

  One morning Carnigan came to the morning meal, but instead of his usual loose trousers and pullover shirt, he wore heavier, tighter clothing and an over-vest of thick leather, like a version of a jerkin—a type of leather clothing worn on Earth in the 1500–1700s. Yozef scanned the room. Several other men in the hall wore similar clothing.

  Yozef mimed and used his limited Caedelli vocabulary to question the different dress. After several minutes of stumbling through words and gestures, Yozef thought he understood Carnigan and other men would be gone for two sixdays for some unclear obligation.

  After eating, Yozef followed Carnigan and watched the men saddle horses and secure packs to other animals. By the time they left, the jerkins were added to with helmet-like protective headgear of thicker leather with inlaid metal bands. Aside from those general features, there was uniformity in neither their gear nor the weapons. Each man carried an assortment of swords, lances, muskets, pistols, and a few large crossbows.

  The number and array of weapons mesmerized Yozef. “Christ, man, what the fuck are you guys getting ready for?” He had previously noticed men from the village carrying knives, yet nothing more deadly.

  Similar to clothing and weapons, the horses and the tack ranged in quality, sizes, and colors. Carnigan rode what resembled a grayish Percheron with a dark mane and tail, a horse suited to pulling large wagons or plows or as a mount of a very large rider. Two huge flintlock pistols hung from Carnigan’s saddle, he carried a lance two feet longer than other men, and a battleax hung across his back.

  Yozef eyed the wicked-looking double blade. My God! he thought. That thing must have belonged to Paul Bunyan. I doubt I could swing it with both hands, but I’ll bet Carnigan twirls it like a baton. Yozef swallowed, and a taste of bile touched the back of his throat at an unbidden image of damage those blades could inflict.

  A grizzled man shouted to the others, and the men followed him out the main gate. Carnigan nodded in passing. Yozef climbed a ladder to the rampart inside the complex main wall and watched the men ride toward the village a half-mile away. Other single men and small groups joined them on the ride. By the time they reached Abersford, the group had grown to perhaps twenty riders. They disappeared into the village, then reappeared several minutes later, and forty to fifty riders headed inland on the main road. Yozef couldn’t ma
ke out details, but they rode in a mass, reminding him more of a Western movie posse than a military unit.

  “Well,” Yozef spoke aloud, “so things aren’t all idyllic here. This isn’t some Amish village. The people may live the simpler life, but something out there required guns and blades. Bandits? Rival clans? Predators? Whatever it is, it’s serious.”

  When the last rider dipped behind a hill a mile away, Yozef climbed down from the rampart and walked back to the complex.

  Carnigan had indicated he would be gone two sixdays, but it was four sixdays before Yozef saw the big man again. Then, one morning, Carnigan and the other absent men sat at morning meal. Yozef didn’t press where they had been, as he sat and ate with Carnigan. He hadn’t realized how much he’d miss the gruff man.

  Maybe it was only because Carnigan was the first person Yozef connected with, but, even so, Yozef liked him. He might look menacing, and Yozef could believe it wouldn’t be a person’s smartest move to get on Carnigan’s bad side, but there was more to him. And Yozef had a hunch Carnigan was brighter than he looked, yet with a more common sense of the world smarts than book learning. He was also kinder than others might think.

  With the men back, Yozef returned to the routine of following Carnigan in his daily duties, yet Yozef’s awareness had changed. Seeing Carnigan ride off with other men armed to the teeth, by the standards of this world, meant there were physical threats to warrant having armed groups of men.

  He’d been so focused on learning Caedelli and getting through each day that his universe was limited to his room and the abbey complex. Obviously, there was more he needed to know to survive and build a life here.

  The recognition of dangers outside the abbey walls brought back other questions that had temporarily retreated. Questions about the Watchers. Their unknown physical appearance was not as important a question as their intentions. Yozef inferred that the Watchers had been around this part of the galaxy for a long time, at least some thousands of years. He believed Harlie when the voice said the Watchers didn’t know who had transplanted humans, both here and on the other planets; Harlie said there had been multiple translocations. Why had he ended up on Anyar? Simply a convenient place to dump him, or was there some rationale? Why Caedellium? Was the island a deliberate or a random choice? Were there other survivors of the collision dumped on Anyar? He doubted he would ever know the answers.