*I was about to subtitle this “In which things get weird,” but who am I kidding? That was several thousand words ago. -SAH
A Headache Shaped Colony
Skip:
One of those sayings in the IDS that used to strike me as funny was “Expect the unexpected.” Like most of the sayings they drilled into us it was wrong. It should be “expect the insane and unbelievable.”
So Peaseblossom – Brundar Mahar – had talked. With interjections from everyone. And when I looked completely lost, he explained again.
And again. Around the third iteration, I understood why my translator was gagging. “Both?” I said. “Male and female? Hermaphrodites?”
There was a round of resolute nods, though later I would realize they hadn’t got the last word. But they’d understood enough.
I’d thought it made perfect sense, of the too-pretty features that translated in the back of my mind as ‘very young’ because beardless and … other things.
But then they started interjecting details that they thought completely described their society and its strange arrangements. Look, I didn’t understand anything okay? I was like someone who dips a toe at the ocean’s edge and declares he knows the ocean. But I’d understood enough to baffle me.
“So, your lineage is through your parent? Your womb-parent?”
The giant nodded “How else?”
“Right then. And your sire, is just…. Your sire. It’s not the same relationship.”
He shrugged. “There are exceptions, but yes.”
“And cross siblings are children of the same parents but reverse womb parent and sire. And you and Brundar Mahar are cross siblings?”
For some reason the giant looked at the other one, not the slave and not Peaseblossom and blushed a florid red, complete with an embarrassed laugh. “Thank the Maker, no. Half cross siblings. His parent was my sire. That is all.”
The shorter blond, Eerlen Troz, laughed and blushed too. Peaseblossom rolled his eyes.
By then I was rubbing the center of my forehead with two fingers, like when I was trying to solve a difficult math problem back in the Academy.
Look, it’s not that many of the crazy people who set out into the unknown in spaceships that they weren’t exactly sure of being able to aim properly – which was good because they really didn’t know how to aim them – hadn’t had themselves or their children modified. There were people who tried to make themselves and their children telepathic, and achieved limited success; there were those who made their children strong; those who made themselves and their descendants agile, or cold-resistant, and let’s hold a moment of silence for those who tried to make their children unselfish and communal-minded.
There were two rules, however that always held: whatever the ancestors thought the modification would do, it was inevitably wrong and the wildest attempts didn’t survive.
So, hermaphroditic human, breeding true who knew how long…. The tips of my fingers rubbed a circle in the middle of my forehead. It shouldn’t be possible. “How long. How long have you been stranded here?”
They were baffled. They looked at each other like I – personally – had lost my mind. They exchanged a couple of words, too fast and low for me to get. Then Peaseblossom, who though he wasn’t the oldest, or certainly the largest seemed to have some sort of authority, looked back at me. “We have always been here. All other humans, the Draghals, even the star people are descended from us, they’re sports, where things went wrong and they reverted to male and female like animals.”
I groaned deep in my throat, and then realized that I was actually having a nightmare. I’d probably got really cut up while hunting the Kalispen boar in Valhalla, and was lying in bed, delirious, dreaming all of this. Or perhaps I had never actually come out of the regen after my father’s death. I was floating in the tank, at 17, and everything else was a dream. A wild one.
Because I ask you. Is this sense? The world I was sent to turned out to be playing a double cross. And now, now, I’d run into the oldest chestnut of a newly re-discovered population. The People Of The Land fallacy.
If I had been here in the normal way, with a support group for the first contact, and support personnel and, well, the normal way to make a first contact – not that they’ve have sent someone with so little experience – we’d have produced proof that Earth came first, and explained about the Schrodingers, and—
And that wasn’t going to happen. And the People of the Land was not something that I was going to dispel all by myself, little Skip Hayden, with nothing to back it up. So I asked the next logical question, “How long do you have history, recorded or … or legends?”
This time the argument was longer. Apparently there was the Mahar dynasty, the AdLeed Dynasty, the time before settling and the occupation and before that, the great unknown but palaces had been built and….
“Recorded,” said Eerlen who was Mahar’s paren- no, sire. “Recorded history goes back four thousand years. At least—” his hand clutched in what seemed like a reflexive gesture. “At least in the ruby and the other instruments, we have at least four thousand years of records. Since Amissar Mahar. And the time of the occupation was five hundred years. And before that the time of the ten lines. We don’t know how long that was, though. We know the palaces, and some structures in some of the line shelters date from the time, and they’re… we have nothing like it, so it must be longer.”
So, the poor bastards had been lost for at least five thousand years. Not the longest. The longest recovered colony had been in the world fifty thousand years, and it had become very strange indeed. But having acquired a form of science, they could be convinced of what had happened, and had, in fact, integrated completely as allies of Earth. But five thousand years was long enough for any real memory of Earth to be lost.
My nanos now that the relationships had fallen in place let me know that their language was definitely synthetic and weird. How weird? Well, humans had no gender. There was no way to refer to a male or female human. Those pronouns existed only for animals.
Dropped in a world, with no contact with civilization. Their language itself something that held no continuity to the past, and if I was – and I was – familiar with the other variants of ‘new start’ colonies where they had nothing to do with the past, on purpose, they probably were given no history, not even literature.
If they’d been well provisioned, they might have been able to hold onto and create a parallel human civilization. In theory.
What we’d found is that, in the shock of a new world, even non-modified colonies returned to barbarism in a few hundred years. For these people, under the impact of completely new ways of relating, and no history or narrative, it would be the equivalent of hitting the culture with a hammer for the sheer pleasure of watching it splinter.
My guess would be they’d gone back to barbarism in … probably two or three generations.
I self-consciously forced myself to draw my fingers away from the middle of my forehead, before they poked through and massaged my brain.
Which was good, because these lost souls were giving me their history and present predicament.
They had been free and wild, living off the land as nomads. The only recognized bond was between a parent and his minor children, and the bond ended when the children reached menarch. After which, the parent only usually cared about the eldest, the line-bearer, and even then it struck me as a loose relationship.
So, revise. Their social structure had probably lasted a generation. I would have to figure out how this extreme individualism set in. Humans were, after all, social apes. Even these poor lost children of humanity.
That time of happy wanderings also known as the time of the ten lines, as ten central lines held the knowledge and the magic – the magic thing was driving me insane, because it made no sense – had lasted for an indefinite length before their great enemies, the Drahgals, had opened a portal—
My brain rebelled, and I told it to shut up. I’d seen a portal open, after all. I’d tumbled from a tower in Dragha onto green verdant prairie. It wasn’t possible but it had happened, which meant it was possible. Right. Like magic, I’d file it for now, till I had time to investigate.
Their great enemy the Drahgals had opened portals into Erradi, where the shielding – protection? – was weak, and from there they had conquered the land, enslaved the inhabitants of Elly, and kept them in durance vile for five hundred years.
So stipulated, although barbarian cultures weren’t all that good at the COUNTING thing, so it might be five hundred or, you know, five thousand.
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