Priam's Lens

THREE Helena at Dawn

Littlefeet ran like the wind through the tall grass toward the day’s camp. They still called themselves a family but they were really a tribe, a group of families that moved from day to day, week to week, month to month, never in one place, never allowing themselves to be discovered or captured or worse. They traveled light, almost with nothing at all, and they traveled aimlessly, lest a pattern be noticed and betray them.

They were also quite young, incredibly so. The lifestyle gave no easy out for the weak, the aged and infirm. Although Helena was a relatively recent conquest and remake for the Titans, it still had been close to fifty years. There was no one in the tribe older than mid-thirties; the average age was much younger.

The lifestyle had evolved rapidly among survivors. Those who didn’t develop it, those who didn’t or couldn’t adapt, were all gone now. The older ones had taught the young right from the start, of course, but even after a single generation things had gotten quite muddy and confused. What counted was survival, both of the tribe and of the individual. Nothing else mattered.

Littlefeet was fifteen, although he didn’t know it and had no way of counting it, let alone any interest in why anybody would think the information was important. Like the others of the Karas family, he was naked and quite comfortable with it, and he had long, shoulder-length black hair that was kept trimmed by the Mothers using the sharp tools they carried with them. It did not do to have hair so long that it would get in the way or perhaps cause you to get stuck on something. The men’s beards had the same limitations, but most of them still wore facial hair that was quite prominent.

If a sociologist or cultural anthropologist had been able to study the family, and the countless others that also roamed Helena, from the time the Titans had come until now, they would have been amazed at the speed at which ultramodern civilized human beings had lapsed back not just to their primitive forebears’ state but beyond, almost back to the time of the smart ape. Unlike those apes, though, they still had speech and at least a verbal tradition of what had been lost now so long ago.

Littlefeet was typical for a boy his age; he was by tribal standards an adult, and all adult males were hunter-gatherers when they were not protectors, be they warriors or guards. Modern weapons had long ago been discarded; you needed ammunition and places to get it, or power and the means to recharge, to use them for very long. As with other boys his age, he had fashioned his own spear, ax, and knife, the heads or points or blades sharpened by many patient hours of work out of rock and minerals and bound to the hand-carved wood with a cement made from various muds and then with dried and toughened vines. The ax and knife were held by loops in a thin vine belt; the spear was always carried.

Ironically, the Titan system of remaking the worlds they took over also made the survival of at least some of the populations possible, even if on this primitive a scale. The temperature was always quite warm but well within tolerable limits for humans, and there were no longer any major seasonal variations. Where once great cities had risen and networks of transportation and communication had spread, there were now grasslands and rainforests.

This was pretty much consistent no matter where the Titans settled, with necessary variations for physical reasons. This was the kind of landscape they preferred, and it was the one they strove to get.

The pattern never really varied. A Titan ship, looking strangely like a glowing egg, perhaps two kilometers long and a third as wide, would come in and orbit a planet, whose planetary defenses it would either ignore or, if they were irritating enough, simply disable with a flash of energy. After it had orbited a world so that it could map every bit of the surface, it would begin its process by bathing the entire planet in an energy plasma that simply sucked up any artificial energy sources on the world. How it did this nobody knew; scientists had been able to duplicate its behavior on a small scale but there was no way to know if it was the same method the Titans used.

Once all sources of energy other than nature were removed, civilization simply ceased. Humanity had gone too long and come too far; it was too specialized to know how to handle a preindustrial economy. Nobody was left who could plow fields and sow grain and fruit and raise animals in the old ways. That knowledge had simply been lost because it was no longer needed. Robots and quasi-organic computers did that kind of thing using vast data-bases of material. Without power, they could not work or even access information, nor could their masters. Riots and starvation always followed, although this appeared meaningless to the Titans. Just as they took no notice of attempts to contact or in any way interact with them, other than to flick off irritants as a man might brush off a biting fly, they proceeded to drastically alter the planetary ecosystems. The big ship would spawn smaller ships almost like an amoeba reproducing by fission; the smaller ships, which would position themselves at key areas, appeared to have sufficient power that, together, they could literally cause a change in axial tilts, reapportion air and water so that the weather was what they wished, and then sow and plant right over the surviving people, cities, artifacts of any kind.

Humans had called this “terraforming” and had done it over a few generations; many of these worlds were in that category. The difference here was limitless power; it was done in a single human generation in most cases. During that time ships that attempted to get in tended to be swatted down, and none on the planet had the power to get up and out. After between ten and thirty standard years, with an average of only twenty, populations of up to several billions numbered, at best, in the hundreds of thousands, eking out subsistence livings in the new environment. The Titans took no notice of them still. When the planet was the way they wanted it to be, they then descended. The egglike ships became glowing fixtures on the continents. Few dared go near them; those who did almost never came back.

An interstellar empire that had the power and weaponry to conquer space and some of time, whose weapons could make stars go nova and turn planets into bits of interstellar dust, was helpless against a power that just happened to regard their own rights to life and possessions in the same way that they had regarded the rights of the other races they had come into contact with, and with a power that reduced their great weapons to impotency.

And the worst part was not just being beaten, but being ignored. These new masters were not even genocidal in the pure sense of that word; they simply regarded the populations in their way as totally irrelevant.

The Elder of the Family Maras, called Father by everybody, and who might well have been all of thirty-five and looked half again that, watched Littlefeet come into the camp and gestured for him to approach. The lithe little hunter walked cockily over, but bowed his head in respect.

“Report,” commanded the Father.

“Hunter pack roaming about one hour to the south-west,” he said. They were all taught compass points based upon the sun’s position and a distance system measured in the time it would take to move the entire tribe to that point, a system that only experience could prove. It was adequate.

“Did you track them? Did they see you?”

“No, they were going the other way. Five of them. They were far too relaxed to be hunting. Whatever they had been sent to get, they got. Going in to their den, most likely.”

“We can assume nothing!” the Father snapped, taking a bit of the starch out of the young warrior’s attitude. “They are the greatest threat to us that exist. They are bred to hunt us, and they have been born with terrible weapons that are a part of themselves. Did you get close enough to tell if they were bloodied?”

“I—I did not get that close,” Littlefeet admitted. “They seemed to be stained, but I only saw their upper parts. They actually were very nice looking, I think, but they all looked exactly the same.”

The Father nodded. “Yes, they tend to be attractive. Why not? And they are of the same source, having neither father nor mother, which is why each group is the same. It gives them great power to be exactly the same. They think the same, react the same, and know what each other would do, so they make little noise. The fact that they were not making any attempt to conceal themselves tells me that they must have been bloodied. You saw no sign of a captive or captives?”

“No, Father.”

“Then they took no prisoners for fresh stock. I do not like to hear that any of them are in this area. They have stayed away in the past. We must be more on guard and double the armed watch and patrols just in case they are hunting for breeding stock and have extended their range. Still, I would like to know who they killed.” The Father checked the sun’s angle. “There are still a few hours until darkness. Take Big Ears and backtrack them. Be careful! They have been known to leave traps. But if you can find the remains, try and get the Family name from its tattoos and whatever else you can divine. We must know if this is a one-time thing or something new.”

Littlefeet grinned, proud to have been given such a task by the Father himself. “At once, Father!” He immediately darted off, running across the encampment to the kraal of the young warriors, grabbing some dry hard meal cakes to nibble on as he did so.

The Karas Family had developed a social system that was practical but not followed by all the Families. The males and females tended to live a bit apart, although they interacted. All of the females generally lived together, to make the food, mix the tattoo inks from various minerals, and bear and tend to the young. They also enforced camp discipline and saw to its sanitation. They had the vast majority of the camp under their exclusive control and dominion, and they alone decided who could enter it.

The young males who were of age and considered adults lived in a separate group off by themselves. They played, trained, competed with one another, and did the work that was theirs to do: to scout, to guard, and to fight, and, when the women permitted, to father children with young women. The third, smallest kraal was occupied by the Elders, both males and females, who made the decisions and assigned tasks as the Father had just done to Littlefeet and his buddy, who probably wasn’t going to be thrilled by the assignment. Big Ears, who was much more aptly named than Littlefeet, was not nearly as enthusiastic about long runs and sleepless days and nights as some of his brothers, and he’d just come in from a long day of scouting.

Littlefeet looked around, spotted his friend, and darted over to him. “Hey! Big Ears! Get something to eat! Father has just told us to backtrack a Hunter party!”

“Today?”

Littlefeet laughed. “One good rain and it’ll be a lot harder to do! It shouldn’t take forever. Back by sundown.”

“I’m just dead tired,” Big Ears complained. He was a larger boy, about the same age as Littlefeet but chunky, a wrestler type to Littlefeet’s long-distance runner. Still, the bulk and weight were all muscle; Big Ears, whose ears stuck out like few others’, was strong as an ox. “I figured I’d just eat and drop till sunrise.”

“Aw, don’t worry about it! We’ll manage okay. Besides,” Littlefeet added, lowering his voice to a whisper, “I spotted a newly ripened orange candybush on my way back. It’s in the line they were taking; we can hit it on the way.”

That was more like it. “An orange one, you say? And you didn’t report it?”

“I never got the chance. Hunters are more important anyways. When we come back and report, I’ll add it in, and by tomorrow they’ll have stripped it. Not before we get it all to ourselves this once, though. C’mon!”

Big Ears sighed, yawned, stretched, and scratched him-self. “Oh, all right. We’re not goin’ against no Hunter pack, though, are we?”

“Naw, they was goin’ in the other direction and kinda casual, too. We don’t want to find out where they are, just where they had been before that.”

Big Ears grabbed his spear. “Fair ’nuff. An orange one, you say…”

The Big Knob was one of the forbidden places, places that were said to be haunted by ghosts of the Old Times, ghosts who were looking for the souls of their descendants to somehow recapture the life they’d lost. Everybody knew that you gave those places a wide berth, and, after even this short a time after the fall of everything, there was always a reason why everybody knew something.

Still, the tracks were very clear; the pack had certainly come from here, and had gone there by almost the same route a bit earlier. There was a third track, too, only one way, heading straight for the Knob, keeping low and slow by the looks of it, to avoid detection. The tall yellow grass was at least two meters high all over the plain, so it was very easy to see where somebody might have gone.

“Whoever they were chasing was a big fella,” Big Ears noted. “Bigger’n me, maybe. Whoever they was they didn’t know nothin’ ’bout keepin’ out of sight or coverin’ tracks, that’s for sure.”

Littlefeet nodded. “Yeah, but he sure thought he did,” the small boy noted. “He was just kinda creepin’ through here. Lookit! You wonder how any grownup coulda lived long enough to, well, grow up, as clumsy as this. Where’d this one come from, I wonder?”

“Dunno, and I ain’t gonna track that much back, not this late in the day. But he sure was goin’ to the Knob, and that’s one place I sure don’t wanna go, even in daylight.”

Littlefeet snorted. “You scared of that? Hey, that’s just a big old twisty rock like all the rest.”

“Ain’t what I heard,” Big Ears insisted. “I hear it’s got the ghosts of a thousand of the ancestors and that it moans and talks and tries to sucker you in.”

“Yeah? Well, I can see how the wind could play funny tricks in a thing shaped like that. Spook a lot of dumb folks. I heard a lot about devil spirits and ancestor stuff, but I ain’t seen nothin’ but Hunters and some powerful mean people and I been along the plains and to and from the rivers and lakes awhile. Ain’t nobody else heard ’em, neither! I checked! They all heard it from somebody who heard it from somebody whose best friend got it straight. Besides, if that’s the ghosts of our ancestors up there, why’n heck didn’t they get them damn Hunters? Huh? Come on. Sun’s gettin’ low and I want to get this done and get back.”

The trail was so plain there was nobody born who could have missed it or failed to follow it. The quarry had at least been a little devious, zigzagging back and forth and even backtracking once or twice, but he was so inept at concealing his progress that it had made no difference. For all his efforts, he might as well have gone straight in yelling and singing.

Big Ears eyed with more than a little suspicion the large rocky hill that stood out so prominent and lonely in the otherwise dead flat grasslands. Up close it didn’t look so much like a monster or spook, but it did look a lot bigger and higher, too, and with no obvious way up.

“Here’s where they went,” Littlefeet noted, pointing. “There’s some kind of ledge up there, maybe twice my height. See it?”

“Yeah, sort of. You seein’ them chalky dirt spills, huh?”

Littlefeet nodded. Big Ears wasn’t incompetent, only overcautious—which was possibly the reason the Father had assigned him as Littlefeet’s partner.

Littlefeet tensed, went into a coiled stoop while keeping his eyes firmly on the ledge, then jumped with all his power. He was a strong runner, whose legs were quite powerful; he didn’t make it to the ledge, but he did make it close enough that his hands got a grasp up there, and he was able to pull himself up the rest of the way. His hands were a little scuffed and his arms hurt, but he quickly got over that and looked down at Big Ears.

“It’s a kind of trail in the rock, leading up!” he called down. “You want to try and get up here? If that guy they were chasin’ made it, you sure can! Throw me my spear, first, and yours, too, if you’re comin’.”

Big Ears hesitated for what seemed like a very long time, weighing the risks and benefits, then sighed and said, “Oh, all right. Get back. I’m a lot taller’n you!”

Being almost a head taller did help, although he, too, found the going took every muscle he had. He pulled himself up and over onto the ledge, then lay there a moment, getting back his wind. Finally, sensing his partner wasn’t exactly standing over him, he turned, looked around, and got up fast. “Littlefeet?”

“Come on! I don’t want it to get dark on us here!” his friend called from what seemed higher as well as farther away. Big Ears muttered a series of curses under his breath, picked up his spear where Littlefeet had left it, and started following the trail.

And it was a trail, too, or at least a path, clearly made long ago by somebody for some reason. It spiraled around the big rock, taking him gently upward. It was still pretty steep, and he found himself breathing hard. He was just about to sit and take a break when he came upon Littlefeet and the corpse.

It was a particularly grisly scene, even for two who had seen a lot of ugly deaths. They had hacked him open like animals, and there were blood and parts of guts all over the place. It was pretty tough even figuring out his looks; the skin on his face had been almost filleted off, and the eyes were gouged out as well. And it stunk.

“Notice anything wild about the guy?” Littlefeet asked Big Ears, just sitting to one side on a rock outcrop and staring.

“Huh? Other than the fact that they tortured and ate half of him? No.”

“No tattoos. No marks on the skin we can see at all. No sign he ever wore rings or stuff, either. The hair’s in a kind of fashion I never saw, and, well, what you can make out just don’t look right. Don’t look like nobody I ever heard of, but he looks somehow familiar, like. I can’t figure out how, though.”

Big Ears studied the mess but came no closer. “I think I know,” he said softly.

“Huh?”

“Remember the pictures in the lockets? The Family Chest? That kind of hair, that sort of face—it’s like them.”

Littlefeet squinted and looked again. “You know, you’re right. The guy looks like one of the ancestors. You don’t think any of ’em survived, do you? I mean, like some kind of underground colony or something? I heard stories…”

“Now it’s you with the stories,” Big Ears responded, throwing the smaller one’s logic back at him. “Just stories. Ain’t nobody survived the Titans. Nobody ’cept folks like us. Jeez, I mean, if even a fire in the dry season can bring ’em, you know nobody’s runnin’ none of them old things that took magic power. That’d bring a Titan ball faster’n anything.”

“Help me turn him over,” Littlefeet said, approaching the corpse. “I want to see his back. I think it should be kinda still together from the looks of him.”

Big Ears almost gagged. “You mean touch him? That?”

“Sure. His spirit’s gone to the land of the ancestors now. Ain’t nothin’ but dead, rotting meat. Come on. He’s too heavy and too stuck in his own dried shit for me to do it alone.”

Revulsion sweeping through him, Big Ears did participate sufficiently to let his spear be the lever that turned the torso over. When it did, the head came loose and rolled a short distance, making things even uglier.

“What I thought,” Littlefeet commented. “C’mon. Let’s get back.”

“What you thought? What the hell did you think to do this? There wasn’t nothin’ there but a bare back!”

“A red back. I seen it before on a couple Family members who were hurt bad and hid in the caves for a couple weeks to heal. When they come back out, one or two days of sun, they looked like that. `Sunburned,’ they called it. I noticed it on the shoulders and some of the face. I couldn’t be sure with all this blood and crap, but the back wasn’t touched by that.”

“Sunburned? What the hell you mean? Red, yeah, but…”

“Ain’t nobody burn like that guy did. You burn like that, you’re dead. But this guy burned! So there may be some truth to them rumors after all. I mean, where’s the only place where the sun don’t never get to you?”

Big Ears saw his point. “Underground… Jeez! But what was he doin’ here?”

“Who knows? No way to figure it now. But lookit his fingers on that one hand, there. Smooth and nice as a baby’s, even with the scuffing. This guy didn’t live like we do, didn’t work like we do.”

Big Ears nodded slowly, then shook his head in wonder. “But if he was all protected and soft, then why did he come up here?”

They were both silent for a moment, awestruck at where evidence and logic had taken them. Then, suddenly, there was a voice. A third voice. It sounded quite near, and quite pleasant, but it shouldn’t have been there.

“I can answer some of your questions,” said the voice, a very kindly male voice. They both tensed and the spears came up menacingly, and they were suddenly back to back, looking for the speaker.

“Please don’t be alarmed,” said the voice, which seemed to be coming out of the rock itself. “I mean you no harm. I could not harm you anyway. I am quite dead, I assure you.”

Both boys screamed and ran so fast down the trail they almost walked over one another’s back, and their leaps to the ground and their speed away from that haunted rock set new Family records, no question.