by Joe Darris
He marks its spot, he will need it to cure the hide if he manages to survive this battle. He dons the skull over his own, wipes the eye sockets clean and wraps the mangled skin around him, shrouding his form. He calms himself and releases pheromones--ancient organic odors older than aromas--that fill animals with fear. They work on prongelk at least. He still does not know if kingcrows feel fear, but everything can be surprised, and that might be enough. He scurries up one of the shafts and emerges on the top boulder without a sound.
The hunter charges the bird. His feet, still wet with blood, squelch with each step. He howls and the bird spins around with a startled squawk. The kingcrow attempts to raise its head higher than the approaching wall of deadly prongs but it is too slow, much too slow.
Heightened senses slow down the action to the hunter. His energy converts to momentum as it flows up from each footstep and off the boulder, then through each calve, then each thigh. All of his muscles tighten, contract, then extend as he leaps into the air. The bird lets out another screech that adrenaline pitches down an octave in his ears. His right hand snaps a prong off one of the antlers atop his own head. He hears the chink of crystal as it pops free into his hand.
Then he is above the crow. He lowers the antlers and hammers the kingcrow's skull with the prongbuck's. The bird’s tongue lolls out from the force of the blow. The anarchic antlers that extend past the birds' head pierce its neck in two places though not fatally. Its long neck keeps its body safe.
His attack successful, the hunter traps the deadly beak beneath the cage of prongs and swings the prongblade in his hand into the bird's eye. It punctures the fleshy sphere with a satisfying pop, and blinds the kingcrow's left side. The wounded animal screeches murder to the wind.
The young hunter lifts the antlers, rushes forward, and shoves the bird with all of his strength. It stumbles backwards, then slips down the round boulder, flapping its ungainly wings and screeching in pain. It tumbles to a feathered heap at the base of the pile of rock.
He roars to terrify his enemy into retreat but prepares to leap down if he must kill.
The kingcrow rights itself and refolds it wings. It starts to hop away, gains speed for flight but falters after a few paces with a loud squawk. It hops in place, turning in half circles, testing its injured wing and screeching loudly.
The hunter knows it wants to flee. It is injured and half blind, yet something compels it to fight. He remembers the prongbuck's strange behavior and knows: the Hidden are at work here.
With a mighty shout, he snaps off another prong and hurls it at the kingcrow, sure to aim for its right side. It flies past the bird's good eye and punches a hole in its wing tip.
The kingcrow shrieks, then hops away from the fearsome silhouette of the horned figure, its demons put to rest. The enormous bird, taller than the hunter, beats its huge wings clumsily and takes to the air, favoring its injuries. It gains height slowly, leaving a trail of feathers in its wake. More vomit, this time large chunks of meat and the bird is lighter, it rises quicker.
It screeches once more, either a vow of revenge or a warning to anything foolish enough to attack the fearsome horned enemy.
The hunter, still young but a boy no more, stands until the kingcrow vanishes over the horizon. His bloody shroud whips in the wind, obscuring his form. He looks half bloody man, half mangled elk, a chimera of blood.
When the kingcrow is finally gone he howls to the sleeping moon, then collapses atop the boulder and falls unconscious, too tired to hide beneath anything save the second skin he wears.
Chapter 4
The Hidden were masters of tools. Not like ours, to them, carved bones and strong ropes are toys. Their tools scrape the sky and stab the earth. Even the animals bow to them, some say one day we all will...
Worry not children, they are few and have slept West of Father Mountain for generations... what could draw them from their nest?
Beyond frustrated with Skup's failed acquisition of what could be the greatest instrument in his symphony of life, Baucis showed uncharacteristic restraint and withheld punishment from the gifted vultus pilot. He would still fly; he had to. No one else could manage the flock, but his privileges ended there. No mess hall, no terrestrial food, no visitors. There was too much at stake. Baucis couldn't afford to be soft on the boy.
The Garden had benefited from terrestrial predators, but introducing them had been no easy task. It did not help his Evanimal program to have failures, especially when a success would easily end all debate on the subject. With that animal, he could do anything.
Baucis couldn't stop thinking about the bipedal beast. It was taller than a human (how much taller he could only guess, but if it stood eye level to a biselk…), much more robust, and had long graceful fingers and prehensile thumbs. It was enough to make him want to roll the dice with his own VRC and synchronize with the animal, almost. He had never been great at controlling the Evanimals themselves. He likened himself more to a maestro of old than a musician. That suited him though. The maestros received the lion’s share of the credit. Besides, there was the animal’s probable resemblance to Ntelo’s fabled Wild Man to consider. He knew she could sway public opinion easily enough. She’d done it enough times before. A gift from Nature, she’d call it. That would surely suffice. But one never could count all the cards, if public opinion did shift against the Wild Man (if that’s what the beast would be called), better to blame the musician than the ensemble.
Skup would undoubtedly have been a gifted musician, had he been able to choose the medium. As it was, the boy was one of Baucis's best Evanimal pilots. He could handle biselk, howluchins, and was the first to pilot a vultus with any grace, hence his punishment, or lack thereof. Any other pilot (save his twin sister) would have been stranded in the Spire for a week. Skup had won hundreds of battles against biselk, an animal easily three times the size of the two legged knife thrower. He should have been able to handle the beast, he was almost a man.
At the end of the duel, Skup had claimed that he lost control of the bird, that like the biselk, fear and the animal’s sense of self preservation overran the VRC and he lost control. Baucis expected this sort of puerile excuse from Jacob, but not from Skup, he was supposed to be better than that. Not that the Master ecologist didn’t believe Skup. Baucis hoped that one day he would fully understand and control the chemical symphony that surged through his carefully sculpted Evanimals. He had imagined that a vultus wouldn't have been susceptible to fear; they were the top of the food chain, kings of the sky. Their brain was distinctly different than a mammal's, with less matter devoted to those troublesome chemical drug dealers: emotions. Nothing had ever hunted Baucis's most dangerous (and most controversial) Evanimal, he didn't think it knew fear at all. If it caused the malfunction, the fault must lie in Skup. Even if it didn't, he couldn't punish the bird, but if he punished the boy maybe he'd figure out to fix it.
The boy's failure wasn't all that troubled Baucis. As he strode towards the Council’s chamber he attempted to compose himself. He was perspiring, an easy tell, especially with the harsh artificial lights reflecting off his bald head. His typical pallid complexion was flushed, and the perceptive Council would surely notice his elevated heart rate as his veins pulsed beneath his translucent skin. He took a deep breath through and slowed his step, a counter point to his racing mind.
This animal, this beast, was proving to be quite formidable. Baucis was trying to determine exactly what the beast was. He knew that it was intelligent and adaptable because it had parried Skup's aberrant attacks quickly, using its environment and even its own food as weapons against the attacker. He knew that it was strong and swift from its final assault on both the vultus and the biselk. The beast had shown unbelievable fluidity and control of its shrouded body. Baucis knew the thing understood the interplay of fear and its effects on the mind better than he did. It probably used pheromones either consciously or unconsciously. The VRCs did not have any control over the powerful chemicals, they
remained infuriatingly intangible.
There were too many unknowns for Baucis's taste. He didn't know what the beast looked like, or why it had bothered with the biselk skin. Hypotheses darted through his mind. It could have been trying to protect itself from the vultus's corrosive stomach acids. Perhaps it donned the leather as a ruse to drive fear into the bird's brain. The most troubling hypothesis was that it wore the skull and skin as a disguise- a deliberate effort to hide its own identity. All he had seen behind the remains of his most improved biselk was a hand that used parts of its world as tools, as weapons. The hand and what it implied sent a few scant molecular compounds of fear from Baucis's own drug dealing brain to his body. His pulse did not slow. His delicate hands felt clammy. Despite his immediate discomfort, he was exhilarated. Baucis was unaccustomed to fear. It represented a challenge.
The beast may prove to be one of the most important things ever discovered. It may be the link between Spire City and the surface.
The Scourge had bottled up Spire City. The surface was still rife with the stuff. Even if they could manage to get down, only disease and decay awaited them. Most citizens assumed other parts of the world survived, but there was no way to know. Even on the surface, they could never leave the electromagnetic field of the Spire. Electricity was a kind mistress, but she carried a short yoke.
Baucis’s first theory (totally untestable) was that the beast was somehow related to the apes that lived on the other continents. Across the oceans there had been large apes that used fairly primitive tools. The apes had been the closest cousins of humans and one type, the chimpanzee, shared 98 percent of their genetic code with humans. But the Master ecologist’s lab would never test this biped against those. Speculation ruled this theory. If the beast was one of the known apes, its species must have mutated drastically to become the two legged creature. As far as Baucis knew, those apes had traveled on their hind legs but relied on their knuckles heavily. The knife-throwing beast most surely did not. Still, it was a possibility. Extreme mutations were necessary to survive in a world that produced little beyond stillborn offspring or spectacularly adapted individuals. Baucis had estimated the time needed to evolve such an intelligent predator from the apes, and didn't think the century after the Scourge would give enough time, but it remained a possibility. The biselk had changed much more in last century than the one before and the howluchins hadn't even existed a century ago! Yet his continent was home to none of the great apes and the ecologist had other ideas.
There was the possibility that the thing was human. Some could have survived the Scourge, but Baucis didn't think so. There was too much chaos after its coming, too much death. No one had ever tried to signal the citizenry of Spire City. No radio messages, no lights, no smoke, nothing from the surface to indicate a human population. If the beast was human, it understood the savagery of the hunt more than civilization. Baucis couldn’t dismiss the possibility, but if the beast didn't speak, they would never know if it was their species' brother, or a distant cousin.
The most unsettling hypothesis was that the thing was the Wild Man. The prospect sent shivers down Baucis's spine. He had helped conceive the phrase, along with the Scourge, decades ago with Ntelo, as a way to simplify the dangers the surface represented. He had been as shocked as any when the story gained traction and spiraled into myth. Now Ntelo spoke of the Wild Man daily. Naturalists clung to the gospels and preached them to nonbelievers.
Children of Spire City knew that if they misbehaved, especially if they were wasteful, the Wild Man would come and take them back to the Earth. Nature gave to all, but if someone took too much, she'd take it right back, and the Wild Man was her messenger. Ntelo preached that Nature had fashioned a defender, in man’s image, an ultimate defense against that which sought to destroy her: humanity. Nature's first attempt at mankind's destruction had been the Scourge, and only the righteous had survived that, high above the surface where they couldn't harm the Earth. The Wild Man was the ever looming final prophecy, a tool conceived to make children eat their dinner and seized upon by a populace that had seen all its old religions melt before it eyes yet out of reach.
Of course there was a scientific explanation for the beast, but if the citizenry gleaned onto the idea of the Wild Man, there would be real panic. Baucis knew how to control dozens of biselk, vultus, and howluchins in a beautiful symphony, but five thousand misinformed fanatics was an entirely different sort of challenge.
The entire debacle needed to be solved quickly. Mysteries were dangerous in themselves, but a prophesy was something else entirely. Baucis needed to track the animal to other members of its species, then quickly and efficiently implant each and every one with a VRC. The prophecy was of a Wild Man. One. If the citizenry saw dozens of things working in the Garden they'd say nothing, but if they saw a single interloper there could be a panic.
If he could just find where they lived, Baucis was sure Skup could take weaker specimens with his vultus flock. He regretted being so hard on the boy, but kindness was worthless. No one else could have beaten the beast, save his sister Urea and her panthera, Skup needed to see that.
Urea seemed capable of absolutely anything. Even as a little girl, she had begged the Ecologist to give her a kitty, not knowing the full implications of the request. He had finally given her one, nearly four years ago, on her twelfth birthday, and asked that she try to share the gift. Her work with the panthera had been nothing short of miraculous, and Baucis was now poised to expand his terrestrial predator program beyond the single flagship feline. Soon The dance of evolution would be in full swing, with maestro Baucis holding the baton.
Baucis had worked hard to become a member of the Council, and expand the powers of the Master Ecologist. Before him the role of Master Ecologist had been more or less a figurehead position. Maintaining the scant populations of large animals on the earth had little value beyond entertainment and spiritual well being until Baucis began to change things. He was not the first to implant a Virtual Reality Chip inside of an animal, but he was the first person to realize the possibilities this created for the people of Spire City.
As a boy, he had been enthralled with virtual synchronization. Virtual reality games had been a paltry substitute for the reality of a human's higher consciousness (and later, he learned, an amplified electromagnetic field) overriding an animal's control of its own body. It was difficult. Fear could force a human out of an animal's brain, and some animals were simply incompatible with the VRCs. Animals needed large brains to work with devices originally designed to stimulate a human's cerebellum. Historically monkeys had always been used. Baucis had gravitated towards the Spire's menagerie when he was young, and spent his entire life studying animals, breeding and genetics, with the hope of becoming an ecologist. That was long ago now, back when people still believed they could return to the surface once the Scourge had burned itself out. Once it became clear that that would never happen, Baucis changed his dreams.
He won his spot on the Council when he created his first Evanimals through careful breeding and judicious control of diet. Key traits were encouraged which eventually allowed people to pilot the Evanimals as easily as they'd play a game on a VRC. Baucis cemented his spot on the Council when he began using his breed of howluchin monkeys to grow food on the surface.
Before then there was the rooftop garden, but it was far to small to ever feed the Spire. The reality for most was the taste of reconstituted nutritional paste from the reclaimers. Baucis never thought it tasted that bad, considering it was made of human and animal waste, but when he tasted his first leaf of wild lettuce, harvested from the bosom of the earth, he immediately saw the paste's shortcomings.
The howluchins were effective gardeners, but they were also small, intelligent and uncooperative. Some escaped in those early days. They found glitches in a computer system designed to run games instead of bodies and exploited them. Others were devoured by the various predators that roamed the surface after the Scourge. Either fate w
as unacceptable. The implants were too valuable. Like all things in the Spire, they had been manufactured before the Scourge, when people still lived on the surface and could build anything they desired. So Baucis took the next logical step, and conscripted bodyguards for his gardeners. The biselk were the obvious choice, big hulking brutes engineered in a proper genetics lab. They had survived the Scourge and were flourishing. His Garden would evolve further today, and add a new tropic layer to the pyramid it supported.
Ntelo sat silently in the meeting room when Baucis entered. Her large, intense purple eyes flitted around the chamber. She perspired ever so slightly beneath gossamer winged insects painted on her fair skin. She held her folded nail-less fingers against each other, like two spiders trapping a fly. She alone knew the scope of Baucis's plans. It was imperative to have the High Priestess support his aspirations. She influenced the masses, and though the Council were ostensibly the decision makers, a decided citizenry often swayed their opinion. He avoided the rest of their eyes. Conniving old poker players could sense trepidation down on the surface. It didn’t do him any good to give them a close up view.
The Council had no official legal authority, and instead maintained their influence simply by virtue of reputation. One didn't get recommended to be a Counselor unless they showed considerable knowledge of their field and the people working in it. The important ones were all present tonight. Besides Ntelo there was Rufus Aurelius, the Media Baron, Tennay Promethus, the engineer, Orus Luca, the Weatherman, and Mavis Talik, the disturbingly popular psychologist. They were all well respected, idolized even, and few citizens would support Baucis's plans without their full support. He could have proceeded if he wished, but his constant need of civilians' willing surrender of their Virtual Reality Chips and labor meant he needed no detractors.
