Date Point: 13y3m AV
Southbound Highway 1, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Allison Buehler
“…Okay, I like this one. What is this?”
Julian and Xiù both loved their music loud, whereas Allison had always thought of music as something that happened in the background. It wasn’t that she minded when they wanted to get loud, but it tended to distract.
But sometimes, they maybe had a point. It sure made long drives go quicker, and after being forced to leave Clara behind at the worst time and hide on another planet, the three of them were fighting back against Williams and Hammond as much as they could. Getting to drive their own car on the way out to Chiune Station was their defense, their way of having something that was theirs when their time otherwise belonged either to the Group or to the public. It was precious, even if they were in a convoy with two black Byron Group security SUVs. So, she was letting them headbang in the front while she read on the back seat with her noise-cancelling earplugs in. It was the kind of little accommodation that made their triad work.
“Hmm?” Julian turned it down.
“I said, who is this? She’s got a good voice.”
“Lacuna Coil. ‘Downfall.’ You like it?”
“I liked the guitar solo,” Allison shrugged. “But the lyrics are kinda depressing, aren’t they?”
“…I don’t really pay attention to the lyrics,” Julian shrugged. “It’s the tune, the beat and the bass. Right?”
“Guess that explains why all the songs you listen to are so emo.”
“You just have to throw yourself into it,” Xiù told her, agreeing with Julian who was rolling his eyes.
“And I guess that explains how you can like this and that sugary Cantopop stuff.”
“Different moods, different energy.” Xiù shrugged.
“This stuff is cathartic,” Julian nodded.
“Right! And other songs are for getting pumped up, or for being romantic, or for relaxing, or…”
“You must be getting something out of them that I don’t,” Allison admitted. “…You need a lot of catharsis?”
“Don’t you?” Julian looked at her in the rear-view mirror.
“…Turn that shit up.”
Somehow, the miles just seemed to vanish when he did. Maybe they were onto something, because once she actually started listening Allison forgot about her book entirely and was genuinely disappointed when the road twisted around a bend in the river valley and she got her first look at Chiune Station.
Chiune was the Group’s private demesne on Cimbrean, a place where Moses Byron wasn’t just a CEO and President, but a duke. He had moved every one of the Group’s projects there that didn’t actually require constant access to logistics, the Internet and Earth’s sprawling population. The only reason Misfit had been built in Omaha had been proximity to the rail yards and roads that kept the AAAF fed and fat. The compound was a hive of experimental R&D, a vault full of the very bleeding edge of human technology all sequestered away from the prying eyes of Byron’s competitors. Only Hephaestus had anything more secure, in the form of Ceres Base.
There was no way that Ceres was half so pretty, though. Chiune Station had won awards for the way the designers had played with concrete and sent it swooping elegantly through the air in Cimbrean’s low gravity. A delegation of Locayl architects had supposedly wept happy tears at the sight of it.
Julian slowed them as the forward car in their little convoy reached the security checkpoint, then all three were waved through.
Daniel Hurt was waiting for them on the far side, accompanied by Mister Williams and a pudgy vision of fabulous fashion in a spotted silk shirt that Allison recognized from description as Chiune Station’s director, Levaughn Thomas.
“Took your time,” Dan teased them as they climbed out of the car and one of Williams’ people took it off Julian’s hands to park.
“Publicity, interviews, some old friends to catch up with,” Julian explained. “You know how it is.”
“Lucky for me, not having you three around to distract me gave me the time to put the finishing touches on our plan.” Hurt winked charmingly, then politely made the introductions. “Xiù Chang, Allison Buehler, Julian Etsicitty, this is Levaughn Thomas.”
“So good to finally meet you!” Thomas gushed, instantly confirming Allison’s suspicion that he was completely invested in his silk shirt and fancy haircuts. The man even smelled of perfume, and he shook Julian’s hand with a slightly-too-earnest vigor that left Julian unconsciously wiping his palm on his jeans. “The Group’s great success story!”
“Thanks!” Xiù as always stepped up to handle the pleasantries and let Julian and Allison step into the background where they preferred to be.
Allison took the chance to get a good look at the place. Moses had a habit of bragging up his achievements, but on this occasion he’d maybe been modest. The compound looked like it was fresh off the cover of a utopian scifi novel, minus the flying cars.
It took her a second to recognize the petite, booted figure sitting by one of the reflecting pools and hugging her knees as she idly tore up the grass and threw it to the breeze.
“…Clara? Clara!”
Levaughn Thomas got out of her way with an offended look as Allison barged past him and accelerated to a dead run.
Doctor Clara Brown looked up, smiled weakly and stood to accept and return the crushing hug that Allison lavished on her.
“Hey.”
“Clara, shit!” Allison squeezed her hard. “God I’m so sorry we couldn’t be there, I—”
“It’s okay.” Clara returned the hug, sounding small and quiet and a far cry from her usual chirpy, mischievous self. “It actually helped, knowing you three were safe…”
Julian and Xiù arrived a moment later to shower her in affection and commiserations, and Clara seemed to recover some of her sunshine. She showed off a new nanotattoo design of a catamaran ploughing dynamically through a spray of foam.
“It’s a memory,” she explained.
“You moved out here now?” Allison asked.
“The whole exploration program has,” Clara revealed. “I’m…glad of it, really. I couldn’t face going back to the AAAF.”
“I bet,” Julian nodded. “Where’s Dane?”
“Indoors. He’s taken over looking after the fitness of all the staff here. Cimbrean has some pretty crazy tax incentives about staying in shape, and they’re even harsher for corporations.”
Somebody cleared their throat behind them, and when they turned Levaughn Thomas gave them a crisp smile. “I’m afraid there was a little problem with finding somewhere for you to live…” he began. “We’re trying to find room for you, but—”
“We jumped Misfit over last night,” Clara interrupted him, causing him to scowl.
“Problem solved, then,” Allison dusted her hands together. “I guess we’d better get to work, huh?”
“Well, there is the small question of your office space—” Levaughn tried again, only for Daniel to interject breezily.
“My office is big enough for six,” he said.
“The tour—” Levaughn tried.
“—I’m really sorry, Mister Thomas,” Xiù gently cut him off. “We’ll happily take the tour later.”
“But—”
“I tell you, the change of scenery has been a godsend,” Hurt said, ignoring him entirely and striking out toward one of the peripheral buildings. “I think I’ve got our working strategy for cultural preservation.”
“You have?” Julian asked, falling in alongside him, while Allison invited Clara to come with them by the simple expedient of taking her by the hand and dragging.
“Well, most of it’s what you were doing before, but it’s good to spell it out. I had to tear up half the anthropology rulebook”
“I woulda thought this was anthropology,” Allison commented.
“It’s almost the polar opposite of anthropology. Anthropology is a science, the point is to observe and learn so you know more about yourself afterwards. Anthropological studies are experiments, and the People just wouldn’t survive being used as lab rats.”
“Won’t we learn by doing this anyway?” Xiù asked, turning back to offer the scandalized Levaughn Thomas a smile and a shrug as they walked away.
“A heck of a lot, yeah,” Daniel nodded. “But we learned a heck of a lot about physics by setting off a buncha nukes in the Pacific, and look where that got the islanders.”
“Way to inspire confidence, Dan,” Allison snarked.
“I don’t want to inspire confidence, I want to inspire pants-wetting terror.” Dan slowed and turned, walking backwards. “We’re writing the rulebook on first contact ethics here. Mistakes aren’t acceptable.”
“We know,” Julian told him.
“Right there with you,” Allison agreed.
Xiù nodded. “Yup.”
Dan started walking the right way again. “…Outstanding.”
True to his word, his office was huge, and the door had a lock on it. Dan leaned against it the second it was closed. “God, that man kisses ass like Byron pays him a grand every time he puckers up.”
“Doesn’t seem like Moses’ usual style, hiring a guy like that…” Julian mused.
“Levaughn’s great at what he does,” Clara supplied. “He got this job on merit, believe it or not.”
“Really?”
“Hell yeah,” Dan pushed himself away from the door. “He’s a heck of an administrator. And also, a heck of a peacock.”
There were relaxed smiles all round, and Dan headed to his desk to call up his work.
“Seriously though…are you holding up okay?” Xiù asked. Clara sighed, and shrugged.
“I’m taking it one day at a time,” she said. “It…helps that he saved people. It hurts, but…”
“But you’re proud of him,” Julian finished.
“Yeah.” Clara rubbed her arm then wiped her eyes dry and straightened up. “Can we focus on work?”
“Okay…but you know we’re here for you,” Allison told her. When Xiù and Julian nodded emphatically, Clara smiled and teared up simultaneously, gave them all hugs and then unslung her satchel and pulled out her own tablet.
“Dan and I put our heads together,” she said, “and we figured it’d probably be a good idea if you guys had somewhere to sleep that wasn’t the, uh, ’steel sky-hut.’ Somewhere that’s a bit more grounded in their experience, right?”
“Tent?” Julian asked.
“Better. Hut. Those sketches and photos of what those huts of theirs look like inside gave me some ideas…”
She called up a schematic and put the tablet down so that it could project the model in 3D above Dan’s desk. Allison immediately recognized a People-style hut: They had a distinctive kite shape built around four sturdy poles, with two skinnier poles for a triangular door frame at the “top” of the kite, the peak of which was the hut’s highest point. A small fire pit in the middle kept it warm inside, and rather than needing a chimney the smoke naturally travelled up the tilt of the ceiling and escaped via the door. A knee-high mud wall provided an ample windbreak, and the rain was kept off with a thatch of Tarak-tree fronds. It was simple, easy, and a team of five could build two in a day.
Clara had taken that basic design and worked it into a twenty-first century piece of survival equipment. Insulating composite panels instead of a mud wall, photovoltaic fabric with a mylar inner lining in place of the thatch, and springy carbon-fibre rods instead of the wooden poles. The whole thing weighed in at fifteen kilograms and disassembled into something backpack-sized.
“I signed off on it,” Dan said. “There’s a balancing act to be done here between what they’re familiar with and showing them what ’sky-thinking’ will achieve in ways they can recognize.”
“I figured, it’s probably a good idea if we don’t shy away from letting them see our technology in action,” Clara added.
“They already saw Misfit fly,” Allison pointed out.
“Exactly. Stepping back from that won’t help. We need them to see the magic rocks that make light and music, and watch steel fly through the air. Make it something they’re used to seeing and show them the road to how they’ll one day have things like this that they made by their own hand.”
“By their own hand.” Dan stressed. “That’s the thrust of this whole plan. By far and away the most important message we need to drill into them is that we can’t just hand out these gifts.”
“We?” Xiù asked.
“I’m coming with you. I’ll be your sky-thinker.”
“Don’t you have commitments here on Earth?” Clara asked him.
“CImbrean,” Allison pointed out.
“Whatever. Wherever. Here.”
Dan sat down and leaned back, resting one ankle on the other leg’s knee. “This is quite possibly the most important thing humanity will ever do,” he said evenly. “We’re taking a whole other sapient species under our wing. The last time we did that was with the Neanderthals, and I don’t see any Neanderthals around here, do you?”
“Still on Cimbrean,” Allison reminded him.
“Yeah, and we got it wrong on Cimbrean, too. One castaway took a dump in the woods and doomed the whole biosphere.” Dan didn’t sit forward, but he did fold his arms. “We’re choosing the legacy of our species, here. We can be the destroyers, or we can be the saviors. Fuck my commitments. My publishers can have the penalty for not turning in those three books I’m contracted for. We’re all gonna have to make much bigger sacrifices for the People.”
“Okay…” Julian said, slowly, “…why are you doing this? Like, personally? You’ve never met them.”
“You only get one shot in life,” Dan replied instantly. “You have to do it right first time. You have to do something big first time, something…something that matters. Something that maybe only you could do….and maybe I’m being egotistical here, but I honestly think I’m the only person who could do this. I can’t not step up.”
He paused, and admitted a bashful smile. “Also, if I’m honest? Hubris. Personal ambition. The novelty of it.” He shrugged apologetically. “Nobody’s perfectly noble, after all.”
“Clara?”
Clara had picked up one of Dan’s paperweights. She put it down guiltily, then shrugged. “I…think it’s a shame that you three won’t do more exploring,” she said. “That’s what we trained you and built Misfit for. But…”
Xiù touched her arm a second after she trailed off, prompting her to finish the thought.
“…I guess we have to finish what we start,” she said. “If we find a mess when we’re exploring, I guess maybe we have to clean it up because…I mean, if not us then who?”
“One of the hazards of exploring is being responsible with whatever we find,” Dan nodded. “And it will take…it’s probably the work of several lifetimes. We cannot make them our vassals or our slaves, they have to make their own informed decisions. And to do that, we need to establish a network of trust. There’s no “one weird trick” here.”
“Okay.” Allison nodded. “So where do we start?”
Dan smiled, nodded, and called up his own notes.
“We start,” he said, “By recording *everything*…”
Date Point: 13y4m AV
East of the mountains, Akyawentuo, Near 3Kpc Arm
Vemik Sky-Thinker
“Does it ever stop raining here?”
Everything about the east side of the mountains seemed to irritate Yan. He didn’t like the shape of the mountains, or the soggy green grass that grew short on the swooping, wind-stripped slopes. He didn’t like the shaggy-haired Werne that grazed on those slopes, or the skinny-snouted pack predators that would pick off a weak or wounded one before the People could.
He especially didn’t like the rain.
It wasn’t like it was bad rain, Vemik thought. It almost wasn’t rain at all. It was more as if the sky was more in love with the ground on this side of the mountains, and liked to cuddle up to it of an evening. The clouds clung affectionately to the hills and kissed them with a soft, fine dampness. It didn’t drum on a leather cloak or beat on a man’s back, it just…made everything wet.
And cold.
And it made the trees slippery.
….Actually, fuck the rain.
It did stop raining though. In fact despite Yan’s complaining the weather was dry and clear more often than not so far. They just seemed to have a knack for choosing to go hunting on the dampest days, because while Yan was seemingly irritated by almost everything on this side of the mountains, he still loved the Hunt.
Vemik personally would have preferred to be back in his nice warm dry forge, beating steel. There was magic in steel, no matter what Jooyun said. Magic to do things nobody had done before, like dig up the ground or break up big rocks. A steel axe could coppice and cut just as well or better than a stone one, and if it became blunt then all it needed was sharpening. And if it broke? Take the metal ‘scrap’ and re-forge it!
Magic, technology, it didn’t matter. Steel was already changing everything, and Vemik could see the future.
It was a future without dead daughters.
But the future wouldn’t come easy. The men needed to be strong to get there, and they needed to work, and to eat. Day in and day out. Hunting built the future too. If that meant leaving the forge and showing Yan and the others how to use his bird-spear-thrower—his ‘bow’—then the forge could do without him for a while. It didn’t take long to get it hot enough again, anyway.
Vemik was on his third bow now. The one he’d taken on his manhood hunt had just snapped one day, but he’d been noticing for some time even before then that it was feeling weak and easy in his hands. At first it had been so hard to draw the string that his other arm had wobbled desperately from the strain.
So he’d made a new one, from a thicker sapling; One that was difficult to draw again. That new one had sent the arrows forward with a solid physical thump he could feel in his chest and had driven them deep into the prey…until it too had begun to feel flimsy in his hands.
He’d handed it off to one of the other young men rather than let it break, and had made a new bow.
He’d been proud of this one. With the advantage of his steel knife, he had carved it perfectly and each arrow flew like a lightning strike and hit like one of Yan’s thrown spears…So Yan had asked for a bow. One that wasn’t weak in his hands.
Ketta saplings just didn’t work. Neither did Bathrak saplings, and a limb from a Forestfather had turned out to be just too stiff unless he made it too thin, the wrong shape to string properly. In desperation he’d turned to a technology that Jooyun had once mentioned in passing and had attempted ‘waminating’ several woods together, and after some trial and the odd embarrassingly sticky error with Ketta pitch he’d finally managed to assemble something that held together and shot, even in the rain.
Vemik could just about draw the string halfway, with gritted teeth and his eyes screwed shut from the effort. Yan had drawn it properly the first time and grunted.
“Make it stronger,” he’d said with a nod of approval.
The bigger bow wasn’t ready just yet. The string kept snapping and Vemik hadn’t found a good replacement. He had ideas, but they were just sky-thoughts for now and so Yan was using a “weak” bow that irritated him.
There was nothing wrong with it that Vemik could see.
They needed new ‘tactics’ for the bigger prey. No People had hunted these Werne and kept their adults in check, which made it impossible to get to the easy, tender young. In spear hunting, adults were much, much harder to kill; a big bull could be bigger than a hand of Yans, and they were wary of anything that came too close.
“At least there’s no wind today,” Vemet murmured.
“True.” Yan rolled his vast shoulders. “Sky-Thinker, you’re still small and quiet. Get around there and wait for Stone-Tapper’s stone call. Show the children how this is done.”
Yan was being a little cruel; by children, he meant the young adults who had traded themselves from the other villages to learn the ways of steel and bows. They hadn’t been on a Yan-hunt yet. If they were lucky today, they would go back to their huts aching and hobbled…
And burdened under more meat than they could carry.
Vemik just nodded and swarmed up the trunk until he was as high in the canopy as he dared go; he couldn’t venture much higher than the full-grown men. He’d nearly fallen only a week before, when a branch he would once have trusted to hold his weight had instead sagged and cracked alarmingly, and only his blunt claws rammed into the Ketta’s bark had kept him from falling.
The leaves slapped damply at him as he circled around the herd until he judged that he was in the right place, and descended again until he was sure that the bull would see him if it looked up. He put the Ketta’s trunk between himself and the Werne, and knocked twice on the bark with his shouting-stone.
There was an answering knock, and then silence broken only by the rain’s almost silent breath among the leaves and the odd wet pat…pat when the thicker droplets came tumbling down.
He heard the eerie thrum of his father’s shouting-stone, grinned savagely and dropped off his branch right where the herd could see him. The cows and calves hooted in alarm and shied away but the huge bull turned to face him and tossed its head angrily, ready to charge the interloper and crush him.
There was a resounding thump and the bull crashed to the ground dead. Its harem and herd scattered and stampeded away from Vemik and off among the trees.
It hadn’t suffered at all: a respectful death. The gods would be pleased. The same couldn’t be said for the rest, who were dropped on by Yan and the bigger men as they passed under their branches. Steel knives and stone hand-axes flashed in the rain, and five more of the biggest Werne kicked and croaked their last among the leaf litter.
Yan swaggered up to the bull, put his steel blade to its throat and carved the enormous head off with a triumphant trill to the skies, raising the head high so that the blood would rain down on his face.
“…That’s it?” One of the younger men seemed incredulous. “I thought this hunt would challenge my strength!”
Yan grinned an evil grin. “Six full-sized adults. We need to carry them all back to camp.” He knuckled over to the doubter, picked up one of the cows and threw it over the younger man’s shoulders, which made him grunt in pain under the weight. “This one’s yours.”
The younger man, undaunted, wobbled up to his feet, grit his teeth, and set to it. The others did the same and Vemik did too, which earned an approving snarl-grin from the big Given-Man. They were hunting far from their villages to keep the herds healthy, and that meant they had a hand of days ahead of them spent bullying through the forest brush, each burdened under a huge Werne and their camp supplies. Their crests would droop under the weight of their sweat and their muscles would burn like fire, and by the end of it they would be too tired to do much of anything besides sleep.
None of them doubted they could do it, though. The People were strong.
It was a gift the Gods had given them to keep the forest healthy. Their prey wasn’t nearly as tough, the other forest hunters not so nimble or strong. Yan proved it by picking up the bull by himself and draping it over his shoulders like it was nothing. It was as big as three of the cows put together and he seemed tiny under its bulk. It was so heavy his big feet sank almost ankle-deep into the earth, which spread wide as it tried to flee the burden of Yan and his prize. But despite that he was cheerful, and even under the trial of that much weight there was a playfully light bounce to his step.
“…Where did my arrow go?” he asked.
That question went unanswered for the rest of the day, until they broke the bull apart back at the camp for easier carrying. The arrow was fully inside its carcass having smashed through two ribs, ripped open a lung, skewered the heart, pierced the other lung and lodged itself in one final broken rib on the far side.
That seemed to be the way of the hunts on this side of the mountain. They were harder, longer, and the prey was bigger. And ornery. All good reasons to be annoyed but the meat was good and there was a lot of it. Hauling th e kills home was always tiring work, but an average bull or a great, stomping cow could feed an entire village for at least a day or two. One big hunt like this could fill everyone’s bellies to bursting for two hands of days, or more.
And the gods rewarded their hard work. Everybody was bigger. Everybody was stronger and healthier. And Vemik could see that he was filling out nicely, and that the hair on his tail had deepened and brightened in hue to almost the same shade of orange as the coals in his forge. The women seemed to like that.
Which was…nice. But he still bedded down every night in the village with the Singer. They had another child on the way, and this one…
This one would grow up well fed and healthy, in the world of steel.