CINCHAR DIKIO
1560 4D
Jeff woke in total darkness and near-silence. His body felt stronger. He rolled over, needing to urinate, and started to haul himself upright. A soft exhalation nearby made him look up, but he could see nothing. “I have to pee,” he mumbled, reaching out with both hands like a blind man. He was still on his knees. A hand took his, and he was drawn to stand.
A flapping, and a dim world revealed itself through an opening. A thin person led him out of a tent into a starry night. As his eyes cleared, he saw Bonnin surveying him carefully. He gestured to his crotch. Bonnin pointed to a dark patch of ground that had been dug out. As he unfastened his suit and relieved himself, he looked around. They were on a flat plain, surrounded by tall grasses in every direction. Close by, tents stood, securely staked and trussed against a steady wind that kept the grasses rustling softly and bending in a single direction. Large, tightly-wrapped bundles of cut grass stalks lay in well-ordered stacks between tents.
Unfamiliar smells chimed in his nostrils: whiffs of pungent sweet smoke, animal dung, rich florals, and an astringent acridity like drying mushrooms starting to burn in too much heat. He inhaled deeply, drawing in the night air, tasting its slight dampness, trying to catch a chance reminder of Dree‘s lemon and cedar taste from their last and only kiss. In the air a few murmurs and stirrings marked the sounds of people in communal rest. Stars rode between long striations of black night clouds.
A commotion of barking and shouts broke the quiet. Jeff wheeled all the way around, staring, in a crouch, and turned toward the sound, seeing the flicker of a torch carried at a run into the group of tents. Bonnin had left him alone. He moved cautiously toward the tumult, unable to pick out any words he recognized.
He peered around a tent’s slanted corner. A fire flared into full light; men and women stood arguing and gesturing. One man pointed away from the tents, repeating a word Jeff couldn’t make out. Several men and a few women came running up, carrying bows and long knives. One woman held what seemed to be a long gun. She spotted Jeff, pointed, and shouted, “Seetah!”
He froze, then came from behind the tent. Turquian Saa strode up to him, grabbing his arms and dragging him out into the group. “City man, we found your woman and your flying machine. You must tell us what you came here for.”
“I’m not a city man,” Jeff began. “I don’t know any cities. I don’t know anything about this place.”
Turquian Saa raised a fist, his face dark with anger; Jeff flinched in his grip. Then another voice, a bit higher but ringing with authority, interrupted. “Stop, Turko. Listen to what he says. If you hurt him, he will say anything to make you stop. Then we will learn nothing.”
Jeff was set free to stand. He turned, swaying slightly, in the direction of the second voice.
“I am Cinchar Dikio. Your name is Cheff Arakanesi, isn’t it?” The speaker was a man smaller than Turquian Saa, but powerfully built, with a long face and glittering gray eyes.
“Yes,” Jeff said. “Jeff Harkness.”
“Tell us who you are.”
Jeff asked, “May I sit down? My legs are very weak.”
“Yes. Tell us why your legs are weak.”
Jeff began. “My story is very long, but I will tell you what I can. Do you have stories about your beginnings, before the times of your grandfathers?”
Cinchar Dikio chuckled. “Of course. We keep records. We are civilized people. Only City people think we are savage and stupid. We trace our beginnings to a sky ship, many thousands of years ago. From that ship came all the… colls, the families of Tarnus. Even the City people.”
Turquian Saa broke in. “Chindi, the woman…"
“She will still be sleeping when we return. Listen to him, now.”
“I came from a sky ship yesterday,” Jeff said. “I rode a little ship from the sky ship down to this place. My ship was destroyed when it fell through the sky. It can’t fly any more. There was a woman with me. Is she alive?”
Cinchar Dikio ignored his question. “Your skin is very pale. If you are human, why is your skin so light?”
“When I was in the sky ship, there were people with all different shades of skin, light and dark and different colors.”
“Where are all these people now?”
“They are dead.”
“What killed them?”
“They grew old and died.” Jeff didn’t want to try to explain cold sleep to these people, and he still didn’t understand how he himself had survived that way for five thousand years after his companions on the starship had left him.
“Why didn’t you grow old and die too?”
Oh, great. “I was in a long sleep. Machines woke me up.”
“Machines. Like City machines?”
“I don’t know. I have never seen cities here.”
“Who is the woman?”
“She is my friend. She helped the machines wake me up and bring me here.”
“Why won’t she wake up?”
Jeff tried to stand. “I want to see her. When you found me, I was trying to find help for her. She is hurt.”
“Hurt?”
“Her leg is broken.”
Cinchar Dikio beckoned, and two men approached Jeff. “We will take you to her. Then we will ask you more questions. This is a strange situation for us.” He nodded toward Turquian Saa. “Many of us want to kill both of you for coming on our land from the Cities. I do not want to kill you, not yet. When we come to the woman, you will tell us your story, and then we will decide what to do with both of you.”
The two men picked up Jeff in a sling as if he weighed no more than a child, and in a long torch-lit line, a group of the Incarnastar people headed out into the night with him.
