The Shattered Sky

by Paul Lucas

  The blue ribbon of the river grew gradually larger as I descended. Humans are generally unaware of this, but a river has two parts: the water on the surface and the air above it. The river is almost always cooler than the land which it passes through, and as such creates a significant heat-sink above it. To a flyer such as myself it was not just a stream of water, but a winding ribbon of cool air that cut through the surrounding atmosphere. Cool air that was in constant conflict with the warmer air around it, creating potentially dangerous downdrafts and eddies. As youngsters, we were always told to avoid riding the winds around rivers lest we fall victim to them. It was precisely for that reason that many of us played many a game of dare over the rivers near the Tower, for the sheer thrill of the danger. In truth, once one learned the quirks of it, river-gliding presented little real danger.

  I had done it many times as a child, and was perhaps overconfident as I swooped toward the watery surface. When I was younger, my wings would respond to my slightest whim, making for precision control of my flight. Now, the rigid and clumsy wings of the glider responded only sluggishly when I was hit with a vicious downdraft. I struggled hard not to land face-first the last thirty meters, and barely succeeded, swooping up and level in a low arc. I blurred past Amethyst and Cloud, who were shouting things at me that I couldn’t possibly hear over the roar of the air around me and the river below. I was over a hundred meters downstream from where I was supposed to land.

  I was plunging at a shallow angle. I could not possibly gain any altitude again, not with the downdrafts around the river. If I stayed on the glider I would not touch the water for another kilometer.

  So I untied the straps in quick succession and plunged the last four meters or so into the icy water. The glider, suddenly unburdened by my weight, shot up at a steep angle. That was the last I saw of it before the surface of the river closed over me with frothing foam.

  Foam?

  I had gone too far down the water way. The river was narrowing, the water moving far more swiftly than I had anticipated.

  I broke the surface, gasping for air. I could feel the current pulling hard at me.

  I was in trouble. The near shore was at least twelve meters away. I could swim well enough to stay afloat, but fighting the current to reach the shore before I ran into really rough water was going to be another matter. Plus, the water was very cold, being mostly mountain runoff. If I did not get out of the water soon it would become a real problem.

  I stroked hard toward the shore, the water sweeping me inexorably downstream the entire way. In the distance I could just barely make out the wreck of the glider, one wing sticking up at a severe angle from the water as the current carried it away. The sight lent a tinge of anger to my efforts. Two solid weeks of hard work swept away like random twigs.

  Five meters from a small, rocky, pebble beach my feet made contact with the river bottom and I began to slog my way toward shore. I stopped immediately when I spotted and an unusual shape on the river bank.

  It was a large, black cylinder over four meters tall and half that wide, choked heavily with climbing vines. At first I thought it an enormous stunted tree trunk, but then I noticed its highly polished surface gleaming in the sunlight. Squinting, I could barely make out what could only be writing chiseled across its surface.

  I had only taken a half-dozen steps toward it when my foot caught on something. It felt soft and squishy and my toes just kind of sunk into it.

  I yanked at my leg hard, trying to dislodge it. The soft and squishy something yanked back with a force I was unprepared for. I almost went under and had to splash desperately just to keep drawing breath.

  Then it began to slowly, inexorably suck my leg down centimeter by centimeter.

  Intense pain sparked, just below my ankle. Like someone was running a dry razor over the entirety of my skin.

  I screamed and thrashed. I was in pain and panicky, with an unknown thing apparently eating my leg and a minute or so away from being pulled under. I could not think of anything else to do.

  I kicked and clawed at whatever was holding my leg, which had now crept up to my calf. It felt tough and leathery. In desperation I clutched at the shotgun holstered on my other leg and had just freed it when I was pulled under for the last time with another scream on my lips.

  FIFTY

  Greetings, stalwart traveler! Welcome to Outland Survival Guide 5.2 for your Iyaku Portable Computer System!

  This expansive, fully-indexed, and easy-to-use database will provide you with everything you need to know for emergency and long-term survival in the Outlands away from KN support, as required under OEC statute 206A section 3 of the Emergency Outland Training Initiative.

  This information guide includes such widely-applicable topics such as emergency medical procedures, flora and fauna identification, food preparation, water purification, campsite and shelter construction, long-range signaling, basic weather prediction, and low-tech means of transportation such as travois, rafts, canoes, and equestrian skills.

  This Guide is here to help you make the most of your stay in he Wilds, to not only survive but thrive a well! With this Survival Guide at your fingertips, no aspect of Outland survival will be beyond your grasp!*

  *In the event of emergency situations, it is recommended that you place your Iyaku Portable Computer system into low-power library mode even if unit is solar powered, in order to conserve long-term battery life.

  --Introduction to the Outland Survival Guide software database, ver. 5.2, for the Iyaku Portable Computer System.

  * * *

  I was not in a good mood the next evening.

  I huddled by the fire wrapped tightly in a thin thermal-reflective blanket. Spirits, I just couldn’t seem to get warm. Occasionally I’d segue into a brief trembling fit or find myself a bit short of breath. As one of my people’s healers I had seen the symptoms often enough to recognize mild shock when I saw it, but I had never had to experience them for myself.

  My left leg was sprawled straight and stiff-kneed before me, wrapped in ointment and protective bandages. It was completely furless from the mid-thigh down, and the exposed skin was blazing bright red. Near my foot, I had actually lost the top several layers of skin.

  Spirits, why was it always my legs that ended up getting hurt? Lerner used to love how shapely they were...

  I had been caught by a river siphon. They were large worms genetically-altered by the Builders that could grow many meters in length. They anchor themselves to the bottom of waterways and feed off the debris the currents wash downstream. The one that had caught my leg was a true monster, nearly four meters in length.

  Amethyst and Cloud had just caught up to me when I went under for the final time. My Orc friend had dived in and cut me loose from the mindless creature. By the time she dragged me to shore I was half-drowned and suffering from the beginnings of hypothermia, not to mention the open bleeding sore the entirety of my leg had become.

  Years ago, back when I had first become interested in Lerner as a potential Mate, I had briefly contemplated shaving off my fur, thinking that perhaps he would find me more attractive if I were as hairless as a human female. Looking at the pink and spindly flesh of my furless skin whenever I changed my bandages, I was very glad I had never gone through with that. My naked skin reminded me of a just-plucked bird about to be spitted.

  Human painkillers kept me from most of the discomfort, and my own healing spells combined with antibiotic ointments would assure that both skin and fur would grow back fully. I should be back to normal in three weeks at most. The only downside was that I had to eat twice what I normally would in order to give the nanites in my body enough raw materials to regenerate my skin completely. That would be like feeding a whole other person, and diminish our food supplies by that much more.

  Adding to my miserable mood was the fact I had little to do while I convalesced. I could not move very much lest I irritate the delicate new skin the nanites were building underneath the bandages. I
had hoped I could play with Dumas’ element body, but she seemed to have completely disappeared over the last day. No one had seen her. I hoped she had not run off or had somehow gotten eaten by something while the rest of us were engaged in my little glider adventure.

  As the days passed the others spent a great deal of time near the "monolith" I had seen on the river bank, as we came to call it. They showed me countless digital photographs and scan readouts of it. Three meters tall and half that wide, it jutted up from the riverbed like a giant poking his finger through the ground from underneath. It was the first sign of sentient beings we had encountered since coming through the teleport node.

  The monolith was composed of fused black basalt, a rare mineral on an artificial world with no volcanic activity. But far more curious and significant were the pictograms that wrapped around the monument from top to bottom.

  They were Myotan.

  Well, not exactly. Many of the pictographic letters were strangely distorted, interspersed with symbols I had never seen before. But they were similar enough that there was no mistaking that the monolith’s alphabet and ours had too many parallels to be a coincidence.

  Cloud and Amethyst set up a secondary campsite beside it after scouring the area once again to see if the monolith belonged to anyone. The mountains still proved devoid of sentient beings. This was not surprising; given the amount of sheer space on the MegaShard, there were probably swaths of territory larger than old Earth's continents that remained untouched by intelligent beings since the Builders had sculpted them unknown millennia ago.

  But someone had come through here before, perhaps on the way to the teleport node.

  Not just anyone, I realized. Myotans had come here. My ancestors, in all likelihood.

  Ever before we had discovered that mummy in the Underworld under the Tower, Lerner had suggested that perhaps my people had come to the Tower from some other civilization. It was one of my husband’s pet theories that we had splintered off from a larger Myotan culture centuries ago, and our earliest legends did tell of us living elsewhere before being given the Tower by the Sky Spirit. Plus, tattoos on that ancient preserved wing the Hall of Remembrance spoke of a long journey from some sphere-like object, an object that could have easily been a teleport node.

  Now the monolith seemed to offer definitive proof. The alphabet on its rounded face could easily have been the precursor of the one I grew up using, allowing for permutations my people may have added to it over the centuries.

  We spent many days trying to decipher the message the pictograms said. The process was slow. None of us were language experts or sophontologists, and the alphabet was different enough that many of the pictograms could have had a dozen different interpretations. If Lerner had been with us, he would have been able to work through a translation in half the time.

  But the monolith’s presence offered more questions than it answered. Why did my people go through the node to begin with? Did they end up at the Tower by chance or design? Why did we lose the knowledge of our original home, wherever that could be? The node back in the Tower was locked on one coordinate: these mountains. What was its significance? And why had we never tried to return?

  The main task of trying to decipher the pictograms eventually fell to me while Cloud hunted for our food and the two humans worked on building a river-worthy raft. Being Mated to a sophontologist for nearly four years made me the closest thing we had to a specialist.

  I do not know when exactly it happened, but I began to find myself talking out loud to Lerner's spirit. After a long period of frustration at trying to decipher the pictograms, I tried to think of what my husband would say. That went from asking questions aloud of him and imagining his answers, to asking him questions that had nothing to do with the monolith. Soon I was talking to Lerner as if he were truly there. I liked to believe he was in spirit, listening and responding in his own way just beyond my ability to hear him. Or perhaps nothing was there at all, that I simply talked to empty air and the rest was my imagination.

  I talked anyway. In odd, quiet moments, when the others were busy or out of earshot, I told him of everything that had happened to the four of us since coming through the Node. I spoke of length of our plans, of ideas and theories I had about the monolith and the origins of our people.

  But mostly what I spoke of was our time together as husband and wife, of the quiet moments he and I shared. Of waking up and finding him smiling at me from across our sleeping mat, where he must have been watching me for spirits-knows how long. Of the time he horribly botched dinner and we ended up eating only raw apples from the orchards; for some unknown reason we just started laughing half-way through the meal and could not stop for nearly a half-hour. Of the time he tried to teach me how to use his computer as I sat on his lap; he kept getting more and more distracted as I shifted about to tap the keys until we ended up making love right then and there. Most do not realize how precious such little moments are until they were gone.

  It was the first time since coming through the teleport node that I could think of Lerner and not have the horror of his death replay endlessly in mind. Often, at night, the tears would still come as they almost always did, but they did not rip at my gut as they once had.

  We eventually translated the monolith's pictograms, at least enough to understand the general gist of its message. It spoke of a great mission undertook by ‘the People’ (Myotans?) to aid 'Those-Who-Come-From-Beyond-the-Sky.' A mission of vast importance, upon which they believed rested the fate of the world-disk. They would proceed to the ‘elsewhere-box’ (the Teleport Node?) to search all the lands under the Shards for the most precious treasure that existed. They seemed to have some sense of how unimaginably vast the MegaShard and the teleport network could be, for the adventurers left in a large mixed group of over a hundred, fearing that their quest may take many generations.

  The second half of the message told of where returning searchers should proceed to, in case their time away had eroded their memories. To our astonishment, it spoke of a vast Builder City beyond the large lake I had seen and of "the People’s" settlement there.

  “So we found an artifact site.” Amethyst grinned broadly as we she looked over the readout of my final translation. “If this is right, we’re on the doorstep to every explorer’s dream.” She saw Cloud and I looking at her quizzically. She explained: “This says a Builder City ruin lies just beyond that sea! Don’t you understand? Builder cities are collections of thousands of UTSite buildings and structures. They’re usually a treasure trove of Builder artifacts, and this one is a virgin find. Fire of my soul, if only we had the Niven’s Folly here! We could lay claim to millions of credits worth of artifacts! Tens of millions!”

  “So we are going to head there?”

  Louis nodded vigorously. “Do you have a better destination in mind? If nothing else, ruins like that usually are an epicenter for nascent civilizations to emerge around. The ancient roads and canals surrounding the cities usually lend themselves well to emerging peoples. And if we could get hold of several working Builder artifacts, it might make our long-term survival much easier.”

  “One question,” Cloud said. “How far away is this city?”

  I dug a hole with my toe. “Um, that’s the biggest problem. My best estimate from the pictograms puts it between three to four thousand kilometers away. Probably more.”

  We were all silent a moment as the numbers sunk in. Amethyst whistled low.

  Four thousand kilometers. The breadth of the North American continent on old Earth. One-tenth of the distance between the Tower of my people and the KN. We knew we had to cross a great distance on foot no matter where we decided to go, but having a concrete destination now seemed to add extra weight to each of us.

  Four thousand kilometers.

  And we had to cross it on foot?

  Spirits.

  FIFTY-ONE

  The MegaShard is the largest surviving habitat, and as far as we can tell, was the largest habitat
of the Eden Sphere.

  In many ways, the Megashard does not make sense. Why build a habitat so large, when building a thousand smaller ones would have accomplished the same thing as far as living space, and been easier to maintain and much less vulnerable to catastrophic damage?

  Of course there are many theories. That the Eden Sphere required machines so large only something like the MegaShard could house them. And hey, as long as you have something so big, why not make a habitat out of it anyway? Waste not want not.

  Or maybe the MegaShard is an enormous experiment of sorts. The one habitat big enough to throw every single lifeform and culture ever created during the Age of the Builders together, and see what happened.

  Or maybe they just liked to think BIG and were gearing up for even bigger habitat projects, with the MegaShard as a practice piece.

  Sometimes that's where I think the Builders went. They got tired of their old toy Eden Sphere, and went off to some far galaxy to create a real one. We were only the warm-up for their REAL work.

  --Neils Bohr Amigachi, editorial, Kylean Journal of MegaShard Studies, volume 2, issue 14, 548

  * * *

  My leg twitched as I limped toward the river, carrying the last of the supplies. The reaction was purely psychosomatic, I knew, especially since my leg was nearly healed. But I could not help it. That river siphon attack of five weeks ago had hurt, and my body still favored the weakened limb.

  We were preparing to leave the following morning, as soon as the sun slid out from its veil of darkness. We had worked hard on creating a large, sturdy raft for the first part of our journey. The records from my brief flight showed that this river probably merged with one of the larger waterways that flowed into the Little Ocean, as the others began calling the large inland sea or lake that lay between us and our ultimate destination. Our hope was to use this rather silly-looking craft to cross at least the first few hundred kilometers.