Date Point: 15y5m AV
That Show With Steven Lawrence, New York City, USA, Earth
Daniel Hurt
The music was the secret. The otherworldly singing and beats that underpinned his montage of the People’s lives and history was literally otherworldly—It was the Singer, Yan’s niece.
Persuading her to let him record her voice and play it back for others to hear had been a delicate philosophical argument. Ten’Gewek language and culture weren’t yet quite up to speed with the notion of copying. They saw a thing being Taken, or being Given. Sometimes both at the same time, but the point was that whatever was Given or Taken ceased to belong to one person and now belonged to somebody or something else. The notion that a thing could be Given/Taken and yet still remain with the original owner had been tricky ethical ground at first.
Daniel had tried to compare it to childbirth by suggesting that a mother gave life to her baby but did not lose her life in the process, but the Singer had countered from experience that the process of birthing a new life was exhausting and weakened the mother for a little while.
Ultimately, appeals to the male side of her philosophical nature had been more successful. She worked steel as well, made good knives, rings, fittings and fastenings. When Daniel had pointed out that Humans still made steel things despite Giving the knowledge of steel to the People, she’d finally nodded understanding.
“A man teaches a boy to hunt, he still knows how to hunt himself,” she reasoned. “Giving without giving…”
“And Taking without taking,” Daniel had echoed. She’d thought about that for some time, then consented to let him record her.
Now, behind images of her people in their technological prime, her voice was ululating skillfully on the peculiar scale the People used in their god-songs. It had nothing to do with Western musical traditions, but Daniel had given the recordings to a composer friend-of-a-friend anyway to see what they could make of it. Their irate spouse had later called Daniel up to complain that this alien material was keeping their other half awake far too late into the night.
All worth it. It underpinned the footage perfectly and kept the audience rapt enough to let the imagery and the editing he’d paid so much for pour in and fill their heads with a sense of both loss and potential.
The last moment was just the Singer’s voice, saying farewell to the day. It took an astonishingly long time before the first person started to clap, and from the look on some of the faces Daniel could see, more than a few people felt that applause was entirely the wrong celebration of what they’d just watched.
He had to admit: He had chills himself.
It had certainly affected Steven, who made a croaking noise that might have been “…Wow…” and then cleared his throat. “…Wow. That’s… that’s been your life this past year, huh?”
Daniel nodded. “I’ve learned… so much,” he said. “About who they are, about who we are… It’s been a privilege like no other, and I’m going right back to it as soon as I’m done here.”
“I can’t blame you. That said…your actions among the Ten’Gewek haven’t been without controversy.” Steven clearly felt it was time to address some of the unspoken thoughts that had been hanging in the air for months.
Daniel nodded and tried to keep his trademark knowing smile off his face. Now was not the time to seem smug or unquestioningly self-assured.
“I’ve spent my whole life in academia,” he said. “Coming up with ‘gotcha’ questions to probe the way my test subjects were thinking about social norms and tracking the way people usually become more conservative with age… To go from the rarified, controlled environment of universities to a literal jungle really… it drove home just how different the real world is from ivory-tower academic circles.”
“For example?” Steven asked.
“Uh… for example I can’t control for what the People figure out for themselves. They’re thinking about us just as hard as we’re thinking about them and in some ways they have an advantage on that subject because they see us as just another tribe. They don’t have generations of pop culture and philosophy to give them preconceptions about what aliens should be like or how we should think. But then there are events.”
“Events?”
Daniel nodded. “Interviewing people and presenting them with moral or social dilemmas in a quiet, calm interview room is one thing. Seeing the People live through a year, negotiate where they draw the borders of their hunting grounds, watch them come under attack and fight for their lives even while they’re in the middle of figuring out basic metallurgy and how to pickle their food. They’re encountering real scenarios, not carefully configured hypotheticals.”
“Even so,” retorted Steven as he leaned forward, “You can’t say your methods have been anything like orthodox. There was that whole ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ affair…”
The audience laughed at that one as the screens switched to a video clip from Xiù’s perspective, showing Daniel so completely wrapped up in rapt gorilla-men one could hardly see him.
“Well, I’ll do the same thing with you as I do with the Ten’Gewek,” Daniel replied, chuckling at this own image. “Why do you think I read them Doctor Seuss?”
Steven leapt on the opportunity to mug for the audience. “I ask the questions here, professor!” he exclaimed with mock outrage, and let the reaction happen before sitting back and appearing to think. They’d gone over the basic outline of the conversation before the show and to Daniel’s delight Steven had really engaged with it. He didn’t, however, know how his host was going to reply.
“…Well, to be honest Daniel I don’t rightly know. Same reason you read it to kids, I guess?”
“And why do we read it to kids?” Daniel prompted him.
“To teach ‘em to read.”
“Right!”
Daniel nodded and adjusted his sitting position slightly. “Now… I didn’t teach the Ten’Gewek how to read. But I did introduce them to the idea of reading. They saw one example of simple repeating sounds matched by simple repeating marks, but then they started to teach themselves. And quickly, too. And this is the important bit: We didn’t progress past the basics. They had a long talk about things and decided that they don’t want to know how to read English until they’ve invented a writing system of their own first.”
“They… don’t?” Steven asked. Daniel’s assured smile returned.
“They don’t,” he repeated. “They understand, Steven, they really do. And that’s what I mean about our pop-culture preconceptions about how aliens behave. We have this awful tendency to assume that aliens are stupid, when in reality they know perfectly well that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
He sat forward smiling. “It makes the whole Prime Directive thing almost totally obsolete. So… yes. Our methods on Akyawentuo have been unorthodox but the orthodoxy was only ever hypothetical, it was never tested in the real world… and it turned out to be flawed.”
“I take it you’re going to write a book about all this,” Steven said and burst the little bubble of seriousness that had begun to form around them.
“Of course! I’m already writing it!” Daniel beamed and heard a few little chuckles. “The working title is ‘Belonging’ And it’s about… a lot of things, but the big one is purpose.”
“…You were inspired to write that while living with a tribe of stone-age aliens?” Steven asked, with a note of incredulity.
“Tribal living is all about purpose!” Daniel exclaimed, warming to his subject. “A Man of the Ten’Gewek provides for his tribe by hunting and laboring where it’s needed. A Woman provides with children, by gathering…things we like to think we’re civilized out of, right? There’s no such thing as ‘women’s work’ in the West, or so people want to believe.”
“Be careful, Daniel! I can feel the lynch mobs a’gathering already!” Steven cautioned him, to a mixture of mirth and the odd supportive sound from the audience.
“They can come and get me on Akyawentuo. I’m sure Yan would love to meet them.”
Right on cue, the producers brought another stock clip of Yan being…well, Yan. This one was a brief moment that had happened recently where Julian had snatched a werne shank out of Yan’s hands and ran off, to which Yan hooted happily and…
The audience’s sympathetic groans were highly satisfying. Julian had been banking on being able to outrun Yan all day but in fact Yan had the same shocking short-distance turn of speed as a silverback, with the result that he barrelled into Julian after fifty meters or so and knocked the wind out of him by scooping him up in a clothesline grab and tossing them both up into a tree.
Seconds later, Julian was stranded high in the branches and Yan was swaggering back down to the ground with his meat in hand. To his credit, Julian eventually de-tangled himself and thumped down to the ground with maybe a little less grace and a touch of imbalance.
The Tarzan act still went down well, though. There were a few wolf-whistles as he straightened up, mopped his hair back and grinned. “You’re gonna share that, aren’t you Allison?”
Allison, who was enjoying her own Werne roast with her Oakleys hooked into the collar of her tanktop and her hair tucked up under a patrol cap, gave him a sly grin.
“Nuh-uh, Etsicitty. You gotta get your own now…”
The clip faded out to enthusiastic applause. Say what anyone would about those three, their unconscious on-screen charisma was compelling.
“Yan seems…a bit like a bully,” Steven ventured. The sudden change in tone unceremoniously quieted the audience.
He wasn’t wrong, but Daniel had come to feel a fierce sense of loyalty to Yan over their time working together and he rejected the suggestion with a sharp shake of his head. “He isn’t, really. That was play. You have to remember, the Ten’Gewek—and Yan especially—come from a very…robust place.”
“That would certainly explain the changes since we last met. And in Julian, too. And Allison, for that matter.”
“Yes.” There was no point beating around the bush about it, but he had other things to discuss. “That’s really not the important bit right now. Importantly, that isn’t just a physical need. It’s psychological with them, too. Yan is in charge and he needs to be in charge, to keep proving that he’s in charge in a big and obvious but above all harmless way. Given-Men are all like that to degrees: They are in charge, and nobody had better challenge them on that, except maybe the Singers.”
“That seems…primitive.”
“Maybe. But what does that even mean, Steven? Is ‘primitive’ it just another word for ‘unfashionable’?”
“I’d argue that lack of medicine is pretty darn primitive.”
“No, that’s just technologically lagging behind. Which is a perfectly reasonable definition of primitiveness on its own, but you claimed that their culture was primitive in the way it approaches authority. Which it is! But words like that carry a freight of negative connotations that needs picking apart. The People are technologically primitive, and they can be breathtakingly savage when the need arises… but they are not Primitives, or Savages.”
That was the cue for another round of video. “We have something prepared on this point, ladies and gentlemen. I must warn you this is graphic, and viewer discretion is advised.”
This was a completely different side of Julian—covered in blood and coming down from his vision. He had become a Man of the People, which was anything but a civilized process—It was a rebirth in blood, pain, exhaustion, life-taking and drugs. He looked like an animal. It was a peculiar way to begin proving Daniel’s point, but he needed it to give context to what would happen next.
There was a Giving involved as well, but that part was especially sacred and Singer did not want it recorded. It was a shame—that would really have helped with the sell.
“This is the Ten’Gewek rite of manhood,” Daniel explained. “Julian took it. There were some negotiated changes for his safety, but as far as Yan’s tribe is concerned, he’s one of their own now. It needs to be said, before anyone asks…it was made very clear to all of us this was going to happen somehow, somewhen, someway. Yan can be…persuasive.”
“This,” he added as the firelit scene faded out to green-tinged night camera shaky cam footage, “was four days later.”
Allison’s voice. “Daniel! Daniel! Up! Now!”
“I’m up, I just… what’s going on?”
“Raid. Get to the ship.”
There wasn’t time to dawdle. The footage was a sickening blur of half-seen shapes as Daniel scrambled out of his tent and toward the ship. Walsh and Hoeff were present but their faces were blurred out to preserve their anonymity and they paused with Allison at the bottom of Misfit’s ladder, aiming their rifles off into the dark as hoots and war cries echoed out of the woods.
Hoeff’s distorted voice. “Where in the +IMPRESSIVELY LONG BLEEP+ is Etsicitty?”
More shaky footage as Daniel hauled himself up the ladder.
Xiù’s voice, tense and scared. “He’s a man of the tribe, remember. He has to fight.”
“…+BLEEP+.”
Daniel paused at the top, steadied his camera. Xiù was next up the ladder, which she slapped as she reached the top. Even in green-and-white night vision she looked pale and stressed as she ducked through the airlock into the ship’s interior to take her place in the pilot’s seat. Allison was up a moment later and turned back to aim out into the dark again.
Walsh’s voice was also scrambled. “He’s +BLEEP+ crazy, they could gang up and tear him in half!”
“Yan won’t let that happen,” Daniel told him.
Hoeff’s voice. “Tiny! Up!”
Metallic clanging preceded the moment when Walsh joined them on the airlock entrance, which was suddenly much more crowded. Allison ducked backwards into the ship. Daniel hadn’t followed her with the camera, but he remembered watching her jink sideways and vanish into the engineering section. It was a well-drilled, smooth operation that they’d rehearsed a couple of times but that night had been the only time they’d ever done it for real.
There were flashes of sweeping light down in the village that dazzled Daniel’s camera. Crashing and hooting noises filled the night… and then silence.
The audience were stone-faced and silent as they waited for whatever happened next.
Finally, the call of a bullroarer thrummed loudly on the night air and the camera footage jolted as Daniel gave a relieved sigh.
“That’s the all-clear, right?”
“Yeah.” Hoeff’s voice. “All clear.”
The video ended abruptly. The audience blinked as the house lights came back up, and murmured amongst themselves.
“…So?”
“It was a probing raid from one of the disaffected tribes on the periphery of the valley. They snuck up along the riverbank under cover of night.”
“And what happened?”
“Steel knives and spears versus knapped flint and wooden clubs. They retreated before anybody was seriously hurt. Julian’s Surefire light did a lot of the work, too—Ten’Gewek have very sensitive night vision.”
“Why weren’t those servicemen down there?”
Another rehearsed question, and Daniel accepted it with a grateful nod. “This was… we were never in any real danger. Let’s get that straight immediately. This sort of thing is almost normal in their society. It’s like… when I was in the scouts, we’d raid each other’s dorms and steal stuff or dump water in somebody’s bed just to show that we could. Right?”
“I’m pretty sure you didn’t bring knives and spears to the party,” Steven said drily.
“No, but we still wore our clothes. And believe me, a Ten’Gewek man without his knives would feel just as naked as I would have if I’d raided a dorm in just my underwear.”
“So…why?”
“Yan is the Chief of the Given-Men. Challenging him on his own turf is brave. The fact that nothing actually happened is beside the point.”
“…Again, why?”
“To show off for their women and to the other tribes,” Daniel replied. “To prove to themselves they’re brave. But most importantly, to impress Yan. Here’s what he had to say about it afterwards…”
Daniel had taken the ensuing footage the next morning on too little sleep, too much coffee and the dregs of last night’s adrenaline, which he hoped excused the slightly unsteady camera footage. His GoPro did a good job of compensating for little twitchy movements thanks to modern advances in image processing and field optics, but there was only so much it could do.
Yan looked fresh, energized and full of life. “Was good raid! Brave! Smart!” he boomed. The big dude was bouncing in place with an almost Vemik-like glee at the evening’s activity. “They come, they stand up strong, they go before any stupid hurt. Later, maybe our tribes meet and we +BLEEP+!”
Slightly shocked laughs rippled around the studio. There was no mistaking that expression on his face, nor the lecherous trilling of the other men. Allison could be seen raising her eyebrow in the corner of the video, which only drove Yan to greater heights.
“You curious, Sky-Storm? Yan can teach!”
Allison—whom Yan outmassed many times over—huffed and a smile plucked at the corner of her lips. “You couldn’t handle me, big guy.”
There were cheers and laughter from the audience, matched and exceeded by Yan himself who trilled uproariously and swaggered away with a spring in his step and a certain…twitch in his tail.
“I should invite him on,” Steven said seemingly without realizing.
“Invite Vemik! Your control room will never work right again.”
More laughs. It was a shame that Daniel didn’t have as much footage of Vemik being his usual enthusiastically curious mobile disaster-area self to show this time, but it had all been off-topic. He was here to make a point after all.
“This is all very entertaining…” Steven said, and brought the conversation back on script.
“There is a point to it,” Daniel promised. “Two points, really. The first is that we do the same thing. Every time Russian bombers stray near British airspace, every time the US sends a carrier group through the South China Sea, every time soldiers goose-step at each other across a demilitarized zone…it’s the same thing. It just feels less civilized when the Ten’Gewek do it because we’ve been doing it for longer and we’ve added a few layers of harmless pomp and ceremony. We probe each other’s borders and posture, and so do they. The only difference is that their cutting edge military technology is a steel knife, while ours is a Firebird or a Weaver…
“But the big point,” he continued, “was summed up beautifully by Xiù in that clip. ‘He’s a man of the tribe. He has to fight.’ The Ten’Gewek live something on a daily basis that’s becoming increasingly absent from our lives: Purpose. Belonging. Being part of something bigger than working for somebody else’s profit just so you can make rent at the end of the month.”
“Hence the theme of your book.”
“Exactly.” Daniel rested one leg lightly atop the other. “Purpose. People need it, people want it, people spend their whole lives desperately looking for it. In church, in their families, in their career…wherever! And a lot don’t find it.”
“Why not?” Steven asked
“I think… we’re big thinkers, these days. Everybody has a head full of the big problems in life, the big crusades that they want to see a seismic shift in. You know, the things like women’s suffrage, racial equality, LGBT rights, protecting the Constitution, freedom of speech…and those are worthy fights. But they’re too big for one person to fix in just one lifetime, so if the purpose you’ve internalized and made into the only one that matters for you is one of those and you labor for decades only to see nothing change—or worse, backslide—is it any wonder that it hurts you in your soul?
“So… yeah. Have your big mission, by all means! The world needs dreamers. But you need a small mission, something little and parochial on a scale your monkey brain can grasp. The well-being of a handful of people who are near and dear to you.”
Steven tilted his head. “I can hear people accusing you of being parochial and selfish already.”
“Well, yeah! I am being! Because humans are parochial and selfish by nature! We can think bigger than that and we should think bigger than that, but that side of ourselves is a little skinny rider sitting on top of a big elephant. The rider can persuade the elephant, but he can never force the elephant. When the sun sets and you go home there needs to be something small and personal waiting for you, even if it’s just… keeping your kitchen tidy, your bed made and your clothes ironed. Even if it’s just looking sexy for your spouse, or making progress on your matchstick boat, or writing another page of your novel.”
Daniel stopped waving his hands and settled down again. “I go into this in much more detail in the book,” he said.
“How thick is this thing?” Steven asked, and got a chuckle.
Daniel joined in, then looked back up at the big screen where a slideshow of some of his best pictures from Akyawentuo were fading across each other.
“…Let me tell you how the encounter ended, for closure’s sake,” he said.
“Sure.”
“The next day, Yan and all the men of his tribe went over to the other’s territory. They did everything they could to announce their presence. They were brash, hooted loudly, all that. Their Given-Men met…and I guess the best word for what happened next is like pro wrestling, or a Haka, or something. By the end of the day they were all friends, the tribes got together…and, well. They did what Yan said they’d do. Ten’Gewek do that.”
A small smirk flitted across his face. “Julian wanted me to stress that he didn’t join in that particular duty.”
There were nervous giggles, and Daniel’s grin got both broader and eviller. “Though because he’s my good friend I can’t resist letting you folks know that he was offered…”
Steven made an incredulous noise. “Boy oh boy I can’t wait to get viewer email this week, folks.” The nervous giggling became more heartfelt laughter and then settled.
“It’s important to note, though. It’s important because we need to keep ourselves very aware of taboos and cultures if we’re going to have any hope to understand them, and help them grow. Hell, their psychology too. It’s just different enough to trip us up if we’re not careful…and that’s what this little story was meant to show. That understanding is critical. We need to help them understand their purpose amongst the Sky-Tribes, as Yan so economically put it one day.”
“And that, tragically, is all the time I can afford to give you, Daniel…” Steven said. It was pretty obvious his producer was prodding him hard to move forward. “Which personally I think is a tragedy, and I know the panel tonight will be very interesting…”
He got a series of agreeable noises from the crowd and one guy even shouted “keep him on!” Daniel held up a hand to the superfan.
“No, no. I don’t want to take up other people’s worthy time,” he said. “It’s a big subject, I can’t go over it all here on this stage.”
“But we can,” Steven pointed out, “have you back next week.”
Whoops and cheering let them both know how that suggestion was received and Daniel grinned. He’d enjoyed popularity before of course but now…
“I guess I’ll still be in town…” he conceded, as though his appearance next week hadn’t already been negotiated before he ever set foot in New York.
“Well then… Daniel Hurt, it’s been as magical as ever, and I’ll see you later on for the panel…” They stood, shook hands, Daniel took a shallow appreciative bow for the applause and retreated out of the limelight to let Steven get his show back on track.
Mission half accomplished.
Date Point: 15y5m AV
Hell, Hunter Space
Rachel Wheeler
Hunters were… well… hunters. They were lazy, sloppy and bullyish hunters with no appreciation or respect for their prey that relied more on overwhelming numbers and a vast technological advantage to bring about mass slaughter, but they were hunters nevertheless. They had the instincts, the senses and the wariness of born predators even though their utterly crazy corkscrew moral compasses had persuaded them to engineer every possible need for those things out of their hunts.
It was hard to tell whether or not that made sneaking up on them easier. They were certainly capable of sharp sensory acuity and situational awareness, especially with assorted cybernetic sensors in place of at least two of their eyes… but their sheer swaggering certainty in their own invulnerability was hopefully an Achilles heel.
Ray didn’t intend to make the same mistake as her enemy.
They weren’t there to attack, that day. As much as her finger itched to start pulling the trigger and never stop, they had exactly one shot at stealing that Hunter ship and escaping, and if they blew it by taking out years of frustration and fear on the Hunters at the wrong moment… well, none of them were getting out alive. A hunt like none they’d ever seen would come down.
So instead, they were recording a hunt for later analysis. It wasn’t a pleasant thing to record.
What they found was…a depressingly simple tactic. They pretty much just charged and attacked. This was undeniably effective against a panicking herd of Vgork whose alpha bull fell to the dirt with crushed ribs and a concave forehead in the opening volley, but there was no style to it, no finesse. The Hunters treated the casual slaughter of a dozen sapient beings like Ray would have treated grabbing some cold cuts from the fridge.
Back when they had cold cuts, anyway. Or a fridge.
They only took half the herd, she noted. The rest—juveniles and pregnant females—were permitted to escape, so there was at least some discipline and thought behind the assault. They let the herds regenerate between assaults, which might take years considering how slowly a sapient being normally matured.
The unfortunate adult males and older females, plus one or two who’d simply been unlucky enough to catch a stray pulse round, were promptly set upon and torn to bloody pieces. Most were not lucky enough to have died first.
Thank anything remotely holy for extreme telephoto lenses. The sights in Ray’s viewfinder were horrific enough, she really didn’t want to hear the agonized squealing as well. What few noises did reach them from the feeding frenzy below and far away were stomach-churning and heart-wrenching.
To her left, Cook made a softly interested noise rather than a repulsed one. “No tactics at all.”
“They don’t need them,” Ray commented. One of the larger vgork males was still on his feet and he lowered his head and charged. He looked about as big as a draft horse, and Ray’s instincts said anything that big charging hell-for-leather into something as spindly-looking as a Hunter ought to smash it like a Jenga tower.
The Hunter just snarled ferally as its personal shield emitter deflected the charge, and then gutted the heroic male with a lazy swipe of its fusion claws.
“Those could dismember us just as readily,” she pointed out. They were speaking quietly, almost in a whisper, despite the open distance and the masking din of the hunt.
Cook nodded. “Yup. Think that shield’s any good against bullets?”
“That’s a question for Jamie…”
The last of the unfortunate ETs finally and mercifully expired. Once upon a time, Ray would have crossed herself. Instead she willed her stomach to settle down and focused more on what the Hunters were doing.
“…Gotta be hard to see with their eyes full of blood like that,” she commented.
“Hard to smell anything too. Or hear anything, I bet.”
“How d’you figure that?”
“All them bones in the mouth going crrrunch…” Cook actually lavished the word, the sick bastard.
Ray repeated her urgent instructions to her belly that it was to sit down, shut up and think about something else, and gulped back on her disgust. “Fuck sake, Cook…”
“Whatever… Point is, we found our moment. Lookit them, not a one’s on lookout or nothing. They’re just pigging out, oblivious. We could walk right up to them and shank the fuckers.”
“Let’s save shanking for if the rifles don’t work…” Ray murmured. She aimed her viewfinder at the Hunters’ ship, which had looped back around and come in to land after firing its assault pods into the ground right in the herd’s midst. As far as she could tell, whatever bottom-of-the-pile dreg that had been left to fly it had piled out as quickly as it possibly could and left it empty.
It occurred to her that the top of that ramp looked like the kind of spot three people with guns could make good use of…
“…I’ve seen enough,” she declared.
“Aww, Ray. Thought you were made of stronger stuff.”
“No, I mean I’ve seen as much as I need to see,” Ray retorted, and bit down on the urge to call him the uncharitable thing that had just popped into her head. There were times she worried if maybe Cook might like what he did, in a twisted way.
“Yeah, I gotcha,” he promised. “This shit gets to me too.”
Ray truly hoped he was being sincere.
They backed off from the ridge and retreated into the foliage once again, back towards the canyons where home awaited. As awful as Ray was feeling, underneath it all there was some hope at last.
Their plan was beginning to look like it might actually work.