by
Travis Perry -
The
nomads knelt down when they prayed and then arched their backs to the rear,
catching themselves with hands stretched to the rocky ground behind them, their
faces swinging upward toward Eclectia’s ash-tormented dome of a sky. Their
faces sought the sky, but their eyes remained closed as their lips mumbled
their supplications to the Divine.
Ross
Smit had worked many years to earn his place among the nomads. Most people in
fact, did not even know that the nomads existed—he’d learned of them as a teenager
from a friendly and overly-talkative-when-drinking miner.
He’d
begun his efforts by first pursuing Human Studies at Zirconia University
(though he’d grown up in an underwater colony mysteriously named “Enterprise”),
not realizing for many years how much all he learned fell short of what his
choice of study had been in the Golden Age of Social Sciences back on near-legendary
Earth. He then had studied every fragmented bit he could learn about the
dialect of the northern nomads—during The Voyage, nearly all languages of the
past had been forgotten, leaving what had been called “English” as the dominant
tongue. But that one language had since begun to split and fracture—and the
nomads must have been different from the beginning. Even then, with all the
knowledge of their language and culture he could attain, it had taken four
years of him posing as a friendly trader before they’d accepted him into the
tribe.
He
dressed like them, ate like them, rode their giant insect mounts wherever they
rode to follow their “buzbug” herd (the prefix “buz” did not refer to any sound
the canine-sized insects made—Ross suspected the word tied back to some
now-lost human language), and followed their customs in every way he knew how.
Still, he was not fully accepted as one of them—he once asked them to teach him
to pray, but they’d treated the very request as a near-blasphemy. So he’d learned
to content himself with watching as they rose upright on their knees and fell
backward, over and over, performing the evening prayer as the Whale set into barren
hills far to the west.
He’d
asked once why they did this and at first no one had answered. But finally, as
the awkward silence stretched long, an answer came from one of the old women,
the one who from time to time toothlessly grinned at him and seized his cheek
in her iron grip as she served him supper, hurting him, but meaning only to
show affection, laughing at what a good son he would have made…if only he’d
been born human. She’d said, “To face Immakah,
dear child.”
Through
his studies he suspected the word referred to an ancient holy city on Earth. So
instead of bowing down in humility to the ground as many praying cultures had
done, of course they prayed upward to face their holy city. The sky somewhere
contained the city, somewhere on Planet Earth—which they called “Ard,” though
without real knowledge of what “Ard” was—so of course they faced the sky in
prayer. That moment of discovery, that rapture of understanding—that was why
he’d chosen Human Studies (what he’d once heard anciently had been called
“Anthropology”). It was better than Wizardry—better to know his fellow man, and
thus, himself, than to know the angels and whatever powers knowing them might
offer.
But
this day the prayers did not end with the setting of the sun. “Buzy! Buzy!”
yelled one of the boys left out with the herd during prayer time. On ancient
Earth it would have been like shouting, “The sheep! The sheep!”
At
that same moment the bugs began sounding, their voices repeating in a,
“AhAhAhAhAh AhAhAhAhAh.” Several of the praying nomads snapped upright and
turned their heads. Most continued to pour petitions upward.
But in
an instant the voiced “ahs” came much faster and in a much higher pitch. And
much louder, as the entire herd emitted piercing near-screams. Now all the
nomads, even the old ones, sprang to their feet, their eyes looking behind him wide
with shock and terror. Ross whipped his head back eastward, the direction all
the nomads were looking. He saw what all of them had seen, what his ears also began
register as rumbling thunder. The entire herd, hundreds of bugs, were charging
full speed at the dismounted humans. As were the “aspbugs,” their mounts. All
of them in a frenzied charge all at the same moment, straight at the humans, all
of them together, and screaming, screaming, stampeding westward, as if trying
run headlong into the blazing circle of the setting sun…
