by Bob Kite
He sat with his back to the barrier, squeezed his eyes in concentration, and pursued information that concerned such a barrier through his internal knowledge base. His perspective shrank to a tight point in his own head and seemed to disappear into a collage of heliobee impressions. He did not understand how it existed, or why, but he saw that the barrier extended across the entire inside of the world and defined seven distinct environs. A roof, high above, enclosed the atmosphere and controlled light, water, and temperature.
Scout’s awareness point exploded outward to refill his body, and he almost wished it hadn't. He felt every pulse of his arteries grate against his brain in an extreme migraine, and the sun that reached through the thinning clouds felt like fire pouring into his soul. He began to scream in pain, but the noise just increased his torture. He buried his hands in his face and pushed into the mud, whimpering for relief. It seemed that pursuit of knowledge was not without cost.
He slowly recovered as the warm sun once again felt good on his back, and he got up and walked towards the river. The demarcation line was now highly evident since he knew what to look for, with crackling clay mud on one side and shiny pink sand on the other. He followed the edge towards the river. The closer to the river, the louder it became until the sound was near deafening as he topped a long, furrowed mound.
The frenzied forty-yard wide water attacked the barrier head on, rebounding and cascading into a swirling sink hole at its base. Too late, he noticed several undercuts along the ridge where he stood, and without warning, he rode a landslide into the maelstrom. Water and mud sucked him three-hundred feet below ground and spewed him out the other side of the barrier through smooth-cut channels underneath the sand.
Scout should have drowned, and did pass out from the beginning effects of asphyxiation, but his genetic engineering was designed to survive in diverse environments and situations. A slit emerged and widened between each rib of his chest, enclosed beneath a permeable membrane. Carbon dioxide bubbled out of the vein-covered edges while oxygen absorbed through large arterial webbings.
He once again regained consciousness lying on his back and looked up at a murky, indistinct sun. He took a moment to realize he lay on a riverbed beneath twenty feet of water. Scout pushed off, swam to the surface, and climbed up the gently sloped bank to look out upon a vast, pink desert.
The intense sun created nearly unbearable heat while the single-digit humidity sucked the last drops of river moisture from his skin within minutes. His gill slits inverted, a darkened nictating membrane closed over his eyes, and his skin crinkled into small, pliant scales.
One real advantage of Scout's namesake genetic design was the ability to survive on just about anything organic. He found he could digest whatever came his way, whether plant, animal or even the occasional mineral. This, in the dead zone between the trespassing river and the desert proper, was a good thing. Excess moisture was toxic to local life, but Scout remained emotionally loathe to leave the river for the unknown expanses of pink sand.
He traveled downstream for countless days, eating mud and hoping for some sign or guidepost that might direct him. He still suffered from the heliobee honey's information overload but found it bearable if he just floated along in his own mind and avoided the innumerable inner rabbit trails that beckoned.
As eager as his Adjudicator psyche was to organize and explore this internal landscape, his human mind quailed at the immensity that threatened to dwarf him and permanently lose what small sense of self he retained.
The river finally hit an up-thrust of hard rock at the beginnings of foothills and disappeared into a sinkhole, where it traveled underground to the far removed ocean. Scout saw no advantage in crossing the river only to verify whether the barrier continued, so turned right, keeping to the sand rather than climbing the foothills simply because it was easier traveling.
The wildlife in the desert had recovered from the Great Blight of the past, although with far less diversity than before. The juggernauts thrived in both the aftermath of the blight and during the hard recovery, but they somehow sensed Scout's foreign indigestibility and always steered clear. Scoopers might have hunted him down just for fun, but domestication had led to evolutionary drift that resulted in a symbiotic dependence on Sephians, and their wild cousins were all but extinct.
Scout's body did not exhibit further secondary chameleon-like responses to this new environment, other than a pinkish skin tone. When he came upon his first Sephian bedouin camp, he spied on them in relative safety simply by his skin tone. It was a small group, just three females, and fifteen neuters, and the camp was temporary as they searched for rare, wild plants. Scout watched from a distance for three days but decided not to follow when they broke camp back into the deep desert. He continued along the border of the foothills while his mind reactivated despite efforts to maintain a semi-stupor.
Several times during his desert travels, Scout turned aside to investigate twelve-foot green crystal ovals, bluntly pointed at each end. They rolled sideways to the prevailing winds, starting from all points of the interior and blew their way towards the mountains. He trekked towards one that lay temporarily stuck, an end buried in a small dune. The sun refracted emerald-green rainbows onto the sand while illuminating the contents of the hollow coffin. The wind-driven rolling of countless years had reduced the Sephian's remains to bones and shredded flesh strips.
Scout could feel an insistent memory that attempted to bridge the knowledge/sanity protective gap maintained between his consciousness and the massive weight of his memories. At first, he clamped tightly against the internal intrusion, but in time his initial panic transformed into intellectual inquisitiveness.
He found he could accept dribbles of information, carefully allowed to seep past his defenses. The information, gathered by the heliobees before the Catastrophe, was a thousand years out-of-date but the mosaic did reveal bits of Sephian culture.
Circumstances forced the Sephians, along with the other races brought into this place by unknown kidnappers, to create a primitive culture since they brought no advanced tools of their civilization with them. As soon as the initial generation with first-hand knowledge of their old space-faring technology passed away, a new culture began almost from scratch.
One of many new social bonding ceremonies was that of setting deceased females adrift upon the sand. The caskets made their way to a series of deep cave openings along the base of the mountains, often at the end of a decade’s long journey. This was related to the ancient creation and afterlife myths of the soul’s journey out of the darkness into life and the lonely return to the depths of creation. Neuters, not considered to have souls, were considered mere conduits for souls from the underworld, which entered during transformation into breederhood. Dead neuter bodies were unceremoniously offered to the scavengers and Juggernauts.
Scout's memories did not reveal whether the Catastrophe interrupted the practice, but Sephians re-instituted the ceremony shortly after the rediscovery of sand-flaming. With nothing better to do, Scout decided to track down and visit the funerary caves. Along the journey, he noticed an increase in density of caskets as the natural terrain created an immense funnel towards his destination. He did not come across any living Sephians as they avoided the area with intense superstitious dread.
He could tell where the desert proper ended, and the cave system began, by the slight rise that ended in a short rocky lip. Dozens of green caskets jostled for dominance with every stout breeze. The lip at the entrance to the caves stretched over a mile in length. Scout looked into the chasm, but even with his enhanced night vision, the difference between the brilliant sunshine and the knife-edged darkness was too deep to pierce.
He saw a steep slope along the far edge where the lip joined the rocky mountainside, so made his way over and began to climb down. The hard granite slope suddenly turned vertical, but he continued with confidence thanks once again to Imuqi design specifications. His palms and soles sprouted tiny b
ristle cilia akin to that on the pad of flies and certain terrestrial lizards. The tiny protrusions reduced to a point only a few molecules thick and stuck to the rock like industrial velcro.
After fifty feet the wall began to slope into a gentle arc and continued in an undulating six percent downgrade. The ceiling roughly paralleled the floor twenty feet above, but narrowed to an opening only a few feet high. As Scout approached the bulging central formation, he felt several stinging wounds in his feet that stabbed deeper as he walked. Gently going to his knees in the increasing darkness, he felt around the floor and picked up tiny green shards of slivered crystal.
He closed his eye for a few moments to increase his night vision. He realized that the mound which nearly closed off the cave tunnel was thousands upon thousands of cracked, broken, and shattered caskets. Scout backed away from the debris field and sat to attend to his wounds.
He considered the concept of an afterlife for the first time in his life while contemplating the vast mound of formerly living souls. In Imuq, when a citizen became infirm beyond healing, they were compassionately placed within a Recyclor. The Recyclor bathed them in a pleasant anesthetic fluid to remove any pain and produced a vapor that combined opiates and narcotics to ease their passing. Later, their constituent parts were anaerobically digested into a nutritive slurry and recycled into the community. The idea of an afterlife never entered anyone's mind.
Scout's Adjudicator self filed data sequentially but created a sub-index by subject. Even though his thoughts and philosophy were Imuqi, he was also aware that his human side leaned towards a belief in a soul and an afterlife. He wondered if that meant that he, too, had a soul; and what might happen after bodily functions ceased. It was just one more investigatory goal to add to his quest to define his humanity.
Focusing on the Sephians as a culture and a people, Scout's fragmented mind created a personae which he, to put the unexplainable into allegorical terms, slipped on like a psychological body glove. He was still Scout but filtered through the worldview of a Sephian. He decided to find a way into their society, a feat fraught with considerable obstacles the least of which concerned his physical form, which was definitely not that of a Sephian.
~o0o~
A small group of itinerate Sephians skirted the edge of the funeral plains, risking ghosts and spirit-wasting disease in the pursuit of a flock of silver floating fruit. The silvers, highly desirable by the nobility of Sidmopisian society, brought a premium price. They floated higher than any other variety and by the time they lost buoyancy in preparation of germination, the juice spoiled.
This close to the mountains, the updrafts often swirled the silver balls downward, which allowed neuters to glide in for retrieval. The group’s finest hunter oriented on a perfect intercept course with a ripe fruit but sailed by without even attempting to catch it when something disturbing caught her attention. On the ground, her female whistled angrily at the lost opportunity.
"Was it not to your liking? Are you bored? Have you decided to transform without the need of female blood? Explain yourself!"
"I, I am sorry Ma’am, but I saw a human coming from the center of the funeral plain! I don't want to die of soul sickness, please, please don’t order me back!"
"Silly twit of a neuter. I suppose you saw something, though. You two, glide up and look around. I don't want another band poaching our silvers. Go, now! You know that humans are just stories told to misbehaving hatchlings."
The two appointed neuters quickly jumped to gliding speed and circled lazily, easily maintaining altitude in the thermals. They landed together but appeared shaken and scared.
"Well, if something is out there, what is it?"
They looked at each other and stammered over each other’s whistles, then the larger looked at the ground and quietly said, "Human. I swear! It's just like the stories; long skinny malformed legs, two bent grotesque maniples sticking out below its neck, and an ugly fruit-shaped head!"
The other neuter remained quiet but continually nodded her head in agreement. The female was about to strike out in rage, when out of the corner of her eyes she momentarily saw something that wavered in the shimmering heat.
She saw nothing when she stared straight ahead, but an oblique glance showed a sand-pink figure that slowly came into focus. The three other females and their entourage gasped as they too began to make out the approaching form.
The chief female quickly reviewed all she knew about humans, which wasn't more than the tales any of the others heard as young neuters. According to tradition, humans weren't supposed to be all that dangerous as long as you did not attempt to contain them or inhibit their movement.
The authority they supposedly had with the gods of the underworld and death was Sephian’s primary fear. It was the humans that were purported to have called up death to walk the world in the form of the Catastrophe because someone had tried to imprison them.
There was another, intriguing side to the stories. Humans had access to all the knowledge gathered through the countless centuries by their lower-world masters, and sometimes, without logical reason or reward, granted this knowledge to Sephians. This usually ended with the lucky individual garnering immense wealth and prestige. When the human came close, despite the blur from his camouflaged coloring, the chief made her decision.
"If this IS a human, and despite my disbelief, it LOOKS like a human, then just ignore it. The stories are clear. Ignore it, and by all means do not get in its way or attempt to sway its path, and we all shall be safe.” The fact that she did not mention the reward possibilities did more to steady their nerves than anything she could have said. Greed, especially in the true desert folk, was a known and understood variable.
~o0o~
Scout followed the group back to their base camp, quite surprised at their non-reaction to him. They tried hard to act as if he were not there, but studiously altered their path to avoid him, and watched out of the corner of their eyes whenever he looked elsewhere. It would help if he could talk to them, but their whistling musical-chord speech was beyond the single notes which were all he could manage.
His human mind safely absorbed enough Sephian memories that he understood them, but they seemed biologically incapable of written language, which closed off that approach. There were always enough neuters around to maintain the oral traditions in place of written libraries.
Scout followed them on their silver-fruit hunts and noticed they were only successful one try in ten. He "remembered" a pre-Catastrophe technique Sephians used for sport, and was curious to see how the current generation would react if he introduced it.
The troop aggressively ignored him as he borrowed some of their juggernaut-gut string and wove a square net, knotting weights in each of the corners. During the next hunt, he stood on the ground beneath the flock of silvers, swung the weights around his head, and released the bolo net to a point above the floating fruit.
The weights opened the web as their centrifugal paths pulled from the center, and the fully opened net settled over three fruits and dropped to the ground after entangling them. The hunting group made no pretense of further ignoring Scout as they stared and stood motionless as he walked over and drank one of the spheres. It was pungent and slightly acidic, definitely an acquired taste, but he could understand why they would be in demand.
He placed the remaining two fruits in a weighted capture bag, circled the bolo net once again, and brought down two more. He left them on the ground, walked a few paces away, and sat cross-legged on the sand to see what might happen. One particularly ambitious neuter looked twice between the bolo and the silver flock and pointed to herself inquiringly in front of her female. The female thought a moment and gave her assent. The neuter went to pick up the bolo but almost let the two valuable silvers loose in her excitement.
The neuter had trouble spinning the bolo at first, but devised a lopsided grip using one large upper maniple in concert with the opposite and smaller lower one
and managed to throw it horizontally. It was a good throw if not very long or high, but it opened nicely. She practiced a couple of more times but could not get an arc much higher than her head. Undefeated, she circled behind the flock, jumped into a glide, and made a perfect throw that netted four ripe fruits. All the other neuters whistled long and loudly in cheer as she landed.
Each neuter insisted on taking a turn, taking a quick lesson from the first, and within a couple of hours they captured the entire flock. This represented more wealth than the band normally would have captured in six months hard work. The chief wasn't certain how one showed appreciation to a human, or if it were even safe to do so, but she was certain it was appropriate to show respect. Eyes averted just to be cautious; she went before the sitting human and bowed low for a moment before quickly leaving him in peace. Scout simply smiled to himself.
~o0o~
Life in the desert tribes was never easy, but they descended from the few hardy survivors of the blight years. They were also fiercely intolerant of those outside their social strata, even and especially neighboring tribes. Before they traveled to the closest trade-city with their wealth of silver juice, each member of the group learned to make bolos at the hunt site, and more importantly unmake them afterward.
That way, no one could learn the secret of their success, a strategy that allowed them to rise to prominence over fellow desert dwellers for generations to come. When Scout left them, even though he was a frightening Human from the Darkness, the small tribe felt more melancholy than relieved, especially the neuters rewarded with a breeder transformation ceremony for their part in the tribe’s rise.
