WORLDWALKER

       By Eric R. Ashley



Prologue


A killer on a quest for redemption appeared ex nihilo on a bridge over a ravine.   Sheathed in black merhorse leather worked to suppleness to match the contours of her fit and athletic form, and holding low and ready in her right fist a bloodied gladius hispana, the woman cut an intimidating figure with her sharply defined muscles and her loose cat-like stance. Except for the dazed look in her eyes left there by the aftershocks of dying once again, and this time a failure.
Keila von Wellington claimed (to the select few she gave an opportunity to ask, who were also indiscreet enough to inquire which joined set fell too a vanishingly small number) to have rent the short, stabbing sword still dripping a Sumerian noblewoman’s blood onto the painted bridge slats made of two by fours,  forcefully from a dying Nero‘s hand by her own victorious one, and without chipping a fingernail.  It made a better story than telling the truth that her mother had bought it on Ebay® as a birthday present. And mentioning the reality that she had destroyed the insane emperor with the mini-Uzi  usually slung on her shapely hip gave the wrong impression that assassinating him had been an easy mission.  Instead, that trip through that dimension had been close to a raging catastrophe for several days until she pulled it out at the last second, and eviscerated her true target while dying in the process, but dying victorious, not like the last world where she had killed and died to no good end in search of helping The Other.
Always the Other.  The Other needed her lethal mercy, and Keila needed the Other’s forgiveness.
A half-full Russian Army duffel bag lay slung on her left shoulder while the wooden slatted and arm-thick rope strung bridge wobbled topsy-turvy under her spread feet.  Below her tightly laced, booted and spike-tracked feet, a pine and Joshua tree interspersed forested ravine tumbled down the mountainside to the verge of a city just visible to her swaying eyes, in the arid dessert verge’s clear airs.  Dizzy and on the edge of blacking-out from the transition to this new space-time, Keila collapsed, thrashing about wildly, flinging her well-muscled body to the edge of the bridge and underneath the generous safety rails provided for nervous visitors.  A rectangular, white painted metal sign proclaiming the location as the Whispering Pines State Park and its Mendoza Valley Overlook Bridge, and closed on Mondays, creaked on its blocking chain as her weight shifted back and forth on the very knife-line of plummeting a failure again, a hundred feet to her death in the ravine.
Her eyes snapped open, flints of green as she exerted control over her body the way Svengali had taught, yet her flat stomach curdled as she looked straight down past her left shoulder flush with the end of the slats that created the footpath of the bridge.  Another two inches of nightmare inspired movement, and she would be dead here and now in this space-time, and more important to Keila von Wellington, another error would be chalked up to her account. Granted, she would be alive in an altogether different space-time for she was a verser, a world walker, an immortal who lived forever as long as she was willing to occasionally die from mischance or mayhem, and then willy-nilly visit another world.  But still the loss of a chance to rescue her Other, the doppleganger that Kara had condemned to a slow death, in this world would be another reason to scream amidst the cruel  and lonely nights.
Keila existed as a peculiar sort of immortal.  Her kind neither aged, nor bred, but a bullet, a fall, a ravaging spell, or any other sort of harm fatal to the human she had once been could destroy her body in this world, and propel her into another universe altogether.  Hell, nor Heaven, nor sweet Oblivion waited for her as far as she knew, unless you counted her current existence as hell.  Instead, she had trod out her mission on worlds uncounted.  Ran beneath blazing twin suns like the eyes of Surtur come to burn the world for the giants, and across frigid plains where the sun had died of old age, and pursued her path in places where the concept of sun made no sense at all.
With professional economy and practiced grace she reached her leather clad right arm and the sword back over her shoulder from where they hung almost over the edge to shift her weight, and flopped on her back.  Keila rolled to her seat, and continued in one flowing motion to reach for the flap which drooped over the opening to her army duffel bag.  After parting the Russian Army’s green flap over the capacious hold of bullet resistant fabric, she slipped into it the bloody gladius she planned to clean later.  The mission came first, always, even before cleaning tools.  The weight of the well-used sword having rolled her over on her back to safety, and halfway to her feet,  she looked up at the crystal clear blue sky, and felt the ache of the arrow to her throat dissipate like a bad memory.  No doubt the primitives on that last world thought they had banished a demon.
“Focus, focus, Keila.  That’s right.”  She told herself soothingly as the splitting headache of transition also faded along with the bizarre dreams that attended her chosen means of travel.  Even if she had not realized what she bargained for at the time, she had still signed on the dotted line.  And then she found that the Bonelord had a lawyer’s sense of words, and a hummingbird’s social ethics.  But then what did you expect from a being who claimed to be able to avert death, for a small fee?  She cursed herself in fourteen languages before clamping trembling hands on her fine-boned mouth to stop the flow of abuse.  Still shaking in her sudden rage, Keila waited until her control, which she had traded lessons at with a dark-haired gamma ray research scientist, reasserted itself, and the fury was again clamped down inside her.
“Enemies?  Pests?  Weapons?”  She checked about, swiveling her cleanly etched and sharply featured head.  The face of a Valkyrie could have been heart-stoppingly beautiful and heart-shaped if the teeth were not set so firm as to bunch her jaw muscles.  In a minimum time pattern she checked the whole sphere around her for possible threats as one never knew what weirdnesses, what little rococo death traps a seemingly innocent footfall might unleash in a new universe.  Keila could deal with the baroque threats, the skies raining blood, or rampaging dinosaurs; it remained the little things that killed you.  Pausing from her inspection to roll forward smoothly into a kneeling position, and reach out a long arm to retrieve a gleaming clean stiletto stuck point-down in the middle of the bridge where it had fallen, she noted no human or other sentient enemies standing about with mouths gaping at her entrance to this continuum sitting quiet among the uncounted vastnesses of realities.  No large animals ready to compete for food stalked nearby, ready to pounce or challenge her, and since nothing had tried to nibble her toes off while she woke up, she decided there were not any pests of consequence.
“Good.”  The word came out harsh, precise, metallic, and too emphatic.
A few quick steps after rising in a smooth flex of her legs, and she fell into a  driven and driving pattern.  Her running feet clattered down the bridge to where she scooped up her mini-submachine gun from the location the King‘s Champion had stripped her of it in that last frantic stand.  Casually, Keila replaced the clip with a full one, only slowing slightly, and strapped the odd little gun to the dark green canvas belt slung about her thin, but defined by its corded muscalature, waist.   The duffel bag, from which the ammo had appeared, she reslung  on her back, still not breaking stride, and it went across both shoulders after a trice, and she looked about for anything more.  One of her knives, a Tanto blade had been stuck in someone to her right in the previous world.  Keila looked, and more importantly felt down, and knew with that inhuman sense all versers had, that it rested below her in the ravine.  Maybe in her next world it would be easier to get.  No time to retrieve it now, she decided with a twinge of guilt.
“What Gato doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”  She muttered as she stretched her now healed muscles by lengthening her stride in preparation for another hard workout.  The transition to death, and back to life always healed everything including abused muscles; except for the heart.  She had left Gato behind her many worlds ago; he pledging eternal love and giving her a knife as his clan did to show he would rather use it on himself than be parted from her.  She had turned and blown him a kiss before stepping in front of the bullet train.  It had been unusual for her to show even that much emotion to one of her “one-night stands”, but the boy had gotten under her skin a little too much in just twelve hours.
Irritated, and scowling at seconds lost remembering the past, Keila began running faster down the remnant of the swaying bridge with a mechanical perfection taught in hard schools by men who started each day thundering their rage at miserable recruits, and ended it with quiet satisfaction, except for about her.  Keila had washed out even though the program had her as number one in physical skills.  Granted she had not planned on fighting in their little war, buts still the insult rankled in her armor over her heart.
She followed the sense off the bridge and onto a pine-needle strewn path.  The ability had been honed in many universes as she continued her quest to undo a great wrong.  With this skill, something she had taught herself that separated her from everyone else, even other versers she could find her way without fail to the Other.   The feeling, like an eye tracking a snake from its tail to its fanged head, led directly to the Other laying, possibly, even probably on her death bed, somewhere out there.   No doubt the Other fought dying, and needed Keila’s intervention.  If only Keila could get to her in time, and not lose her own cool like in the last world where the Other had died to no good end as a result.  Then Keila could pay penance for her own crimes.
Her pale lips tightened to whiteness at the remembrance of failure, her failures, and she lashed her soul to focus on the Now, and on the purity of the long, loping stride as her custom foam-soaled shoes that could resist a .38 round went down and up the strange forest path under the pine trees with no reason she could see for it to be here out in the middle of nowhere.    Everything would be all right; she’d make it be all right, Keila swore to herself again as she ran across the top of the mountain that overlooked Mendoza, Arizona.

End of Prologue.

[16 blank lines suppressed]

Chapter One: Home World



In his parents’ Neo-Victorian slabbed, ginger breaded, wrap-around front porched, and eclectically styled on the more private inside, and back wall home, the man considered the upcoming death of his sister in a roundabout fashion because it was too painful to face straight-on.  As a teenager, with his younger sister,  he had helped construct the house, hammer, nail, wooden peg, and finishing cloth under the ramparts of Mendoza State Park, a beautiful, hand-crafted house he would never see again after this day. In fact, he had less than an hour remaining in his own life.
  Jackson Wellington padded sock-footed up the gleaming gold pinewood backstairs to the tower bedroom of his terminally ill younger sister, Kara.   He counted this Monday as starting another work week of caring for her in the throws of her bone cancer, even though he‘d done as much the previous weekend.  This way of thinking gave him some pattern in the dreadful limbo, the grotesquerie of shadows, fears, and rage that his life had become.  Despite all the optimistic promises and shining dreams of medical researchers, the early twenty-first century still sacrificed its best to the ravenous beast of cancer.  Jackson, never “Jack”, for he was dignified in his own way, almost pompous at his worst times, wandered lost, hoping for a path, any path really, out of this recurring horror.
Carefully balancing on three thick fingers, and a several times broken thumb, and holding high the bamboo plate holder with its navy blue ceramic plate full of green beans topped with melted American cheese and a hamburger jazzed up with tomatoes and similar cheese, he arrived slightly out of breath on the third floor landing.  His paunch dragged at his lungs in the climb, and he panted.  More exercise with rattan swords over the weekend,  and less coding on the computer, and an end to fear and grief would help his condition, but no such cure was likely soon.
Duplicates of the plate waited downstairs for him and Kara’s best friend, Stephanie of the peach-colored complexion, and the weirdling ways.  The spacious islanded kitchen that he had just left was decorated with plentiful tools that he used for bachelor cooking, and a bright yellow and white tile pattern.  More white than yellow, but there were plentiful yellow blocks, and sun symbols on white, and even yellow star symbols.  Mother and Kara had designed the room, and it showed their taste.
Mother’s chocolate Labrador sat up from his rest spot on the landing, and beseeched him for a bite, even a nibble, but Kara had always had even during childhood and her teen years what Jackson felt were odd prejudices against eating food after a dog nosed it.  He gave Kemper, which was the name a teenage younger self had beseeched for to add a little respect to a dog that had almost been named Fidorencio, nothing more than a pat on the head with his left hand while remembering the way Unix, his dog, had always laid there during his boyhood before the car crash.
He reached out a blue denim shirted arm, flexing his brawny and corded with sword-trained forearm muscles, to push the brass plate of the handmade pine door inset at the right corner of the hall landing. It swung open soundlessly, since Dad, or Jason Wellington, was a woodworker renowned worldwide for his artistry and craftsmanship.  Unfortunately neither of his children seemed to have that gift although Kara did have some skill with a hammer and basic carpentry which she had used in the service of the Mendoza Community Theatre. The door, a double-paneled solid core inscribed with engravings of Kara’s faces from childhood to adulthood chronicled the loss of baby-cuteness to an awkward teenybopper stage to the now beautiful young woman with the haunted eyes, and the too thin cheeks.  Jackson had a similar one, but he felt certain that Dad had only made his to seem not to favor Kara.  This was okay.  Both of the men of the house felt an obligation to defend their “little girl”.  Its just that Jackson felt he was not very good at it, which was true.
The door led out into the rearmost room of the house, a tower room suited for a princess and attached late, from which one could see the Joshua tree forest through two windows, and the city through the other three if you looked between the pines in the dappling the front yard.
Kara lay in her inbuilt twin-sized bed around the corner and across the octagonal tower bedroom.  Her thin body writhing in the harsh Monday morning sunlight from the most easterly window, the one facing the forest, as she fought off monsters, a monster, a bone man, in her dreams.  The pale white cotton sheet entangled about her like a strangling snake slipped back enough as she struggled and revealed that she had slept in her clothes again.  Jackson recognized the orange tank top, and the pair of navy shorts.   The shorts were from her older, happier days when she was a starter on her high school volleyball team--the Mendoza Cactus Choppers. Her face, while a bit broad was essentially heart-shaped.  A pert nose, creamy skin dappled with freckles across the cheekbones, and when opened, kindly green eyes had caught the look of more than enough boys to make Jackson, her elder by four years, fully sympathetic with his father’s woes at seeing a wide variety of idiots and poseurs blow through her life.  For a long moment, he stood there, really seeing her, as he rarely did these days, saving the image for later when no original would be available.  Fine bones, shoulder-length hair, only a bit over five feet tall, and so thin, dreadfully thin.  If only she ate more, then maybe things would work out.  Can’t fight on an empty stomach, Jackson thought with a frown on his large face.  Rubbing his outsized jaw in his empty right hand, he plucked off a bit of tissue paper from this morning’s shaving mis-adventure, and tossed it in a small wire frame basket filled with a plastic grocery bag from Wal-mart.
But while she had cut the poseurs some slack, eventually she gave them the boot, even that scum-for-brains Bill.   Jackson still regretted not beating him silly, although that would have been redundant, and no matter what the Wellington’s pastor advised about forgiveness.  His fingers tightened on the bamboo plate, and the whole thing trembled threatening to tip out of control onto the floor.  Calming down took a second of reasserted self-control, but his eyes still flamed with cold fury which perhaps crept out into his voice even as he struggled to control it.

“Hey wake up, kid, I’ve got your lunch, and you get to eat it all this time.”

Jackson spoke soft and slow giving Kara time to blink awake and resettle after the trauma of her dreams.  Besides this way he lessened the chance she would bore and alternately horrify him with another retelling of those nightmares of hers. The creepy tales of encounters with bone men had started up a month ago today.  Coincidence played no role in this recurring plague.  One month ago, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, Kara went to a supposedly routine, yearly check-up at the office of her oncologist, Dr. Corrigan, a noted cancer specialist who had researched at the Mayo Clinic.

“I hope you didn’t make too much this time.”   Her voice drifted out of her half-open mouth so that he had to strain to hear her.  Eyes were open, but not really focusing.  It tore him up to see her so down, and wan-faced.  Jackson bit his own lip to keep in the pain that threatened to rip free of his controls.  Then he breathed.  It was gone. He was fine.
I can deal. He lied to himself, something he was good at.
Kara dragged herself listlessly up to her elbows, not looking directly at him.  Only the quick denying jerk of her head, the only speedy thing about her, kept Jackson from striding across the tongue and groove floor like a lord, and lifting her upright with a casual force.  Kara’s eyes of green peered sideways at him resentfully as she rose further, making him self-conscious.  He looked down at himself and evaluated.  Standing slightly over six feet tall in white tube socks and brown twill pants with a loose blue denim shirt fleshed out by two hundred plus pounds, okay two-twenty-five and at least ten of that contributed by his pot belly, he loomed over her.  And with his forearms bulked from his weight-lifting class, he looked like Strength Incarnate next to her weakened and almost cadaverous self.  She winced; it obviously hurt her soul to look at him.  Jackson was not sure if he would be willing to trade places with her; he supposed he should be.  But what he knew was that he wanted out of the room and soon, or better yet, right now.  But that was impossible.

“Here.”

  He took two steps, and thrust the plate out toward her left eye, and held it there until she recovered and then straightened up a touch to grab the plate.  By that time, he wished he had waited and held onto the plate until she muttered the word “ready“, or withdrawn it temporarily, but any such acknowledgment on his part of her sickness would just set her off in a ranting frenzy.  Jackson started to realize how little he understood his little sister; he had thought he knew her since he grew up in this house and the previous rancher with her and the folks, but now he realized they had moved more in parallel orbits instead of actually being together.
She took it with a snappish expression, and Jackson gritted his teeth not wanting to fight with her, not at this time.  Kara stared moodily at the plate that had looked a little undersized when he held it, and now looked ridiculous and huge in her twig-like arms.

“Just eat as much as you can.”

Jackson said weakly, feeling like he had already surrendered the battle by giving her a concession before she said something.  She picked at the bun, and tilted her long neck to examine the cheese on green beans as if putting American sliced cheese over a canned vegetable constituted some sort of novel idea.

“Look, I eat it all the time.  Its good stuff.”

“Yeah, you.”

  She whipped around her head, and stared with green eyes darkened with pain into his brown and bewildered ones.  The obvious and unspoken words were in the line of ‘you’re not sick, you’re not dying of bone cancer which came back after a total remission.’  He flinched, and then his temper came back.

“Eat.”

  He commanded, jabbing a thick finger, scarred by a few rough jobs, and the building of this self-same house, and worse by the car wreck that Unix had caused that had almost killed him.  The finger pointed firmly at the plate.  She stared up in shock at the sudden forcefulness with her mouth dropping open slightly.  Jackson’s blunt finger impelled her because of what he had not said, but she had heard.  Kara needed the food to give her strength to fight back.   Jackson looked away, not liking the confrontation and yet liking it too much.
The nearby nightstand where a spring clover green napkin like her fingernails in color draped over mashed potatoes and pork chops and once frozen miniature corn on the cob testified against her.  Sadly, he noted again; she did not eat enough.
Jackson turned back all the way around to face the door, pumping his fists in frustration at being unable to get her to fight, to eat, and looked dourly at the granite statue of the Goddess resting on a red cherry wood stand to his left by the doorway as he had walked in.  It was placed just a bit from the wall, so that you looked like you were bowing to when one carefully ducked into the room to avoid smashing a forehead into the unusually short doorframe Kara had insisted on in tribute to an idea in the house FallingWater.  The architect, Frank Lloyd Wright had  the notion of forcing the walker to bend the head in an attitude of reverence upon entering a serious room.  Put here, it looked like you were bowing to the Goddess when you stepped in.  Grumpily, Jackson wanted to drop the thing into the Art Deco wastebasket next to the stand.
Peeved, he examined the doorframe looking for the hammer marks, the smiles, he had imprinted four years ago when he and Dad built the room.  Jackson waited, willing to do almost anything to avoid turning back around, and facing Kara again.  He hated her so much at times that it scared him.  Worse, he wondered what was wrong with him.  He should love and care for his sister, not hunger to scream out rage and abuse at her.  So he kept his face away from her, because he did not know what he would do if he turned about.
Looking back on the statue, he wondered if their then pastor’s insistence on kindly ethics in the matter of the “subhuman” as the rest of the Family named Bill completed a rift.  The boy had agreed with a play director that Jackson was privately certain was a pervert who had told Kara that she was ’too fat to be Juliet’.  Jackson began to believe those ethics had been misapplied and that drove Kara to another faith than that of her childhood.   Or maybe it had been the cancer, he mused with another moment of rare perception.  For him, matters of questioning faith were not the stuff of casual thought.  Faith meant actions and acceptance of doctrines.  Perhaps if he had beat Bill and the pervy director about the head and shoulders a few dozen times she might not have wandered off, and all this madness might not have come down on them.  Maybe she would have been healthier and stronger since she would not have gone to trying to starve herself to ‘get thin’, and then been able to fight off the disease?

With his short, intermittently bit off fingernails driving painfully into his palms, Jackson struggled to control his breathing to stop from screaming at the world his outrage.  To stop from yelling at God asking what he had done wrong that brought this horror upon them all, he focused his mind a thousand feet away through the wall, and just breathed as his sensei had taught him.
“For some things there is no understanding on this part of the Wheel.   You simply must bear the pain.”  His master had said in a typical non sequitur at last week’s practice as the other students sparred under the bright lights on the mats with bokken, and Jackson a slightly more advanced student, practiced his iajeutsu, his quick draw and slice attacks on a helpless punching bag.  He had jerkily nodded in response to the concerned, delicate words of his sensei, and continued his murderous campaign against the bag.
In ways, he preferred his occasional weekend sparring bouts with Sir Adam Whitehall of the Society for Creative Anachronism whose real life name and proferssion was Mark Richards, fellow computer geek in Mundania to his training at the dojo.   The Society, ‘dedicated to the Middle Ages as they should have been’ offered him a chance to hang out with some friends, get out of the house, and dance with some pretty girls even if the dances were cutting edge for the fifteenth century.  Best of all, he got to trade blows with Sir Whitehall.  The shorter, yet stout man seemed to understand his rage since he had lost his own father two years ago.  The two of them went at it hammer and tongs with thick rattan staffs substituting for swords.  Heavy shields, and plate metal armor kept them out of the hospital.
The crashing noises of their combats could be heard clear from the fighting field at the local park all the way  a hundred yards away to where high school girls would pause from running the red, circular track to watch the two warriors slam each other with full force blows.  But despite his frenzy, there was an art to the combat.  It was different than his new found love of Ken-jutsu, but much more than simple mayhem.  The reason he found for loving it was that it gave him an outlet for the storm brewing in his chest, the furious lashes of lightning rage that frightened him, and the swirling storm of generalized wrath that kept him bunching his large hands at inappropriate times.
The chomping of green beans in small quantities behind him lightened his heart which began suddenly singing, and assuring him of victory, and strengthened his theory that they, the Family, needed to get tough with Kara.  Of course, right now, Mom and Dad were off scouring the globe looking for unconventional cures so the house held just him and Kara, and her one loyal friend downstairs who, of her many acquaintances (he refused to call them friends after they revealed their true nature) had not fled.
Feeling lighter than air, he took some more time to give Kara more space to eat, and bent back over the statue of the Goddess bought by Mother in Rawalpindi, India on a business trip, and the curved three-legged prototype stand holding it up.  The gorgeous stand, designed and built by Dad in the basement, he could understand on a number of different levels, even if his carpentry skills only extended to laying boards straight, and hanging doors.  Later, a number of outrageously over-priced copies were built and sold in expensive shops in large metropolises which helped explain how Dad and Jackson and Kara had the money to add the tower he stood in to the “Pine Palace”, their two story slabbed in neo-Victorian style, but per Mother’s demands quite modern on the inside, family house that Dad and the rest of them had built.
The house artistically fit together well, except for Kara’s octagonal tower overlooking Mendoza, Arizona.  Why they built it was simple or so Dad had claimed.  Four years ago had been Kara’s fourteenth birthday.  It had also been “coincidentally” the time when Kara had “conquered” the cancer and the scourge of her fourteenth year had gone into total remission for the first time.  Now the monster had come back, and the parents were gone leaving supposedly to take a long planned world cruise, but really to do a desperate search for unconventional remedies in foreign countries with laxer regulations, and to take a rest break before the long siege which would surely end in tragedy this time.  His face tightened, and tears threatened as they did many times each day while his good humor crumbled away beneath him like he was standing on an unsafe cliff with rocks, and water below.
He could respect Mom and Dad’s strategy, but for him the methods of war seemed more apropos.  He heard the metal fork clunk down on the plate, and suddenly knew that Kara wanted to speak to him.  And all he could think of was to retreat in haste.  He had no strength in his soul to face her.

“I need to go.  Got a guest down stairs in the kitchen.  Need anything, you hit the intercom.”

  Jackson said all this in a rush while fighting rising panic, and without looking at her, but his shoulder twisted back in her direction as if he wanted to turn while his eyes clung to the doorway he had built as a path of escape.

“Not going to come up and visit me, is she?”

Kara’s voice sounded weak and needy, and Jackson forced himself to turn to face her.  She had eaten most of the green beans like the good little girl she had once been.  Of course, she had reached eighteen years, and not likely to see twenty, and the boys did not call her a little girl anymore.  But he saw the outraged ten-year-old and the inquisitively sweet six-year-old little sister clearly in her at the moment.

“Doesn’t want to see me like this, does she?”

Kara said with her lower lip trembling.

“Course not, hasn’t she visited you like every other day? Just not today.  She wants to talk to me today.”

Jackson said with gentle exasperation even as he thought of all her other friends, the glamorous, and the crusading that evaporated.  All except for Stephanie and the people from the Community Theatre where Kara had worked as a carpenter and make-up person had vanished like the fog between the pine trees of their front yard by noontime.  And frankly he wished Stephanie would dissipate away as well, but he could not tell Kara that he tried to block her friend’s visits.  And especially not now with that wounded, vulnerable look in her eyes.  This was going to be tricky, he noted as he thought of his coming talk with Stephanie.
He saw Kara’s trembling and haunted eyes and knew something special bothered her, but he could not guess what it was, and well, he needed to go.

“You, ah, finish that.”

Jackson said, pointing a shaking finger on his left arm at the half-done plate lying on the bed, as he backed to the door.  She looked up at him with her pert nose and shockingly pale face.

“Jackson, I, I, thank you.”

“Uh, yeah, no problem sis.”

He said, and turned in the doorway, the two siblings and their father had built, to escape the room.  Shoving Kemper, the chocolate Labrador out of the way, he bolted down the stairs two and three at a time.  Only his lack of shoes on the slick and glossy staircase kept him from doing four or five at a time.


Kara sat aside her plate a bit further, and lay back without bothering to put her napkin over the top of the plain, and now dessicated food that she had ate to please her adored older brother.   She felt sure she knew what Stephanie wanted to talk about to her five years the elder brother; her best friend from grade school laying upstairs and dying by inches.  Tiredness lay like an ache in her arms.  And her right arm trembled to the touch in its lassitude.
The doctors, a team of them, led by Dr. Corrigan, had explained that she had malignant fibrous histiocytoma, an unusual form of bone cancer which may have been brought on by the radiation treatments to cure her previous bout of cancer.  In other words change out her osteosarcoma which had affected her leg, and metasized to her arm, and get a new cancer later with a longer, more difficult name, and with one  with that dread word “malignant” in it.
Her previous fight had her losing a chunk of her tibia bone in the calf of her left leg, and having it replaced with a metal rod.  And she had taken a slew of chemo, bleomycin, cyclophosphamide and actinomycin D.   Now, they were discussing amputating her arm, and loading her up on more chemotherapy.  Perhaps the same, perhaps a different half-lethal to her, and not lethal enough to the cancer cocktail.  It could be methetrexorate or something else entirely.  For now, they had her on BCE, her old treatment because osteosarcoma and MFH reacted in similar fashion to the chemotherapy.  But there seemed to be a marked lack of enthusiasm among the doctors, a more wait and see attitude, and she felt sure she knew why.  Her case was hopeless, and they did not want to tell her.  So they tossed her a bone, and tried to make her feel cheerful while they waited for her to die so she would get out of the way, and not clutter up the path for the real patients, the ones they could save.

“Enough with the psychosomatic symptoms.  You can’t feel it yet.”   But it was not true she knew even as she said it, even as tears streamed down her hot face.  Her right forearm was tender to the touch, and a slight fever raised her temperature to where she could not sleep comfortably.  Always tired these days, but she told herself it was not the cancer, but the lack of sleep and the missing of meals.  That explained the weight loss too, Kara decided for the tenth time.
Kara scolded herself for worrying without real conviction as she raised her stick-thin right arm to glow almost translucent in the sunlight from the window over her bed.  She tossed aside the rest of the sweaty cotton sheet with a moment of spirit.  Really needing a shower, but unable to muster the drive to take care of herself, she lay back onto the bed, and felt tears drift down her nose.

“If thine arm offend thee, cut it off.”

  She paraphrased to her situation a Bible verse she had learned in a childhood Sunday School class.  If only it were that easy, she thought as she slipped unaware into the edges of slumber lured there by her weakness, and the first full stomach in days.  Kara would quite happily use the dull paper cutter at the old church’s office to whack her arm off if that would save her. But it would not.  The cancer had recently metasized, and spread to her rib cage below her heart, and it threatened to go to her regional lymph nodes.  The fact that it had not gone straight to her lymph nodes seemed to be a good sign, but she could not be sure since deciphering doctor-ese on the Internet was more than she could handle right now.  And she did not think such an amputation would help that much anyway although the doctor had not agreed.  He, Dr. Corrigan, had asked her as she sat in a wheelchair just four days ago, and he had bowed before her like she was  queen, and asked her if he could lop her right arm off.
She had made a brave show, and refused.  Claiming that she would continue fighting whole of body, but who was she really kidding?  She had no will to fight left in her.  The only thing she desired was a place at peace where she could hide.  But no place appeared in front of her eyes, and in the end, she did not know what she wanted only for it to all go away.  And Dr. Corrigan had not insisted, not yet, which made her suspicious.  Did he not care?  Did he know something he was not telling her?  Or was she being irrational?  It made her want to scream because on top of everything else, she seemed to be losing her mind.
Meanwhile images of her cutting her wrists with that paper cutter flickered in her brain, and she fought them off with her coolly horrible questions about private amputations.  She knew what Jackson thought; he remained so easy to read.  Jackson supposed her jags of not eating a reversion to her self-destructive anorexia of two years ago after Bill had dumped her as “too fat”, and thus her last conscious thought for the moment faded with the pale flickers of the reasoned mind to be reborn as the gaudy extravagances of the dreaming mind.

The hand-made door of her octagonal shaped, tower room creaked open which surprised her for a second since she did not remember it being closed.  The door moved with the kind of dreadful slowness frightfully hinting of tortures to come, a kind of laughing, soft, quiet that insinuated something it would never come out and say waited on the other side of the door.  With her stomach tightening, and the green beans lying heavy and brick-like in her stomach, she sat up in bed with an ease that let her know she dreamed.  Looking around she saw none of the familiar comforts of her room.  No statue of the Goddess, no cross-stitch Bible verse by Grandma Haldwin, no layered posters of Cats and Les Miserables and a dozen others covering the wall between the door and her bed.  And outside the five windows lay pure chaos, a swirling shine of malignant lights.  She lay alone with only her nightmare for company.

A hand with sharpened fingertips made out of bone reached around the door, and began to ever so slowly push the door further open.

“Enough with the strip tease.”

Kara projected total control of the situation.  The monster at her door giggled at her pretensions.  Invited, he stepped out of the doorway he had secluded himself in, and into her room to loom with his head almost at the ceiling.  He or it shrank back to more human size as he steeped further into the room.

The Man of Bones still towered over six feet tall, and his structure of skeletal bone comprised of both the splintered and still healthy, and bones that dripped a stench-laden gray goo on the floor revolting her stomach like chemotherapy.  The skeleton-man bobbed in front of the open doorway with a kind of defiant and blatant impossibility that hurt her rational mind, which had half-believed in a skeptic’s universe.  The Man of Bones had come for her again as he did every time she tried to get some rest from the horrid real world.  No relief waited for her if she hid in dreams or came in trying to lose herself by laggardly forcing her reluctant body to work in her waking hours.
Kara Wellington looked past her unreal enemy to the door, and then to each one of the five windows of her tower bedroom for a path to safety.  The bright chaos had vanished.  Outside her parents’ pinewood Victorian influenced house, the populace of Mendoza, Arizona kept busy despite the harsh Monday morning sunlight. They could not see the specters, the shapes that shadowed and stalked them in her nightmare, but she could see death all around for she hung just above its fingertips.

“So tragic, so young, and a second time, why it’s almost like that God you worship doesn’t like you very much.”

  The buoyant, impossible figure of alternately slimy and flaking, cracking bones joined together to sway in semblance of a jaunty life, a skeleton to torment her dreams for the last month after she received the dreadful news again. I’m dreadfully sorry, miss, but there’s been a relapse…

“You’re not real.”

Kara said, rising and standing atop her inbuilt bed, which took up one of the sides of the many-sided room.  But her voice, and her bare arms and even her orange tank top quivered and telegraphed her lack of conviction.

“I’m a dream, ‘tis true, but who taught you this foolishness that dreams are unreal?  Yon hard, materialist, skeptical, calmly rational, so they tell themselves, world, and yet you know that death comes for each of them.  You can see it.  You can see me.  Who now is the bigger liar?”

  The Man of Bones ended sliding down on a breathy note biologically impossible for a creature without a voice box to produce.

“Quit talking like Everett, Mr. Tobias, I mean.  This is my dream, I make the rules.”

Her demand brought her stepping forward combatively atop the mattress of her custom-built bed she and Dad and Jackson had built four years ago to celebrate her fifteenth birthday they all said, but in reality the bed reflected the joy of the whole Wellington family that she had any birthday at all.  Now she might well die in it four years later, but she almost felt determined that she would not do so with the Man of Bones dancing attendance.
  Her broad almost heart-shaped face, and protruding bones radiated rejection, and a bit of hauteur, which hid her embarrassment at using the talented off-Broadway actor’s name so familiarly.

“W-Well y-you should call him Mister; you’re never going to get a chance to be on first name terms with him.  And you should because you have so much in common.  You both like shopping…”

“If you’re saying he’s gay, I don’t believe it, and even if it were true…”   She had a crush on the older man who had taken the poor actors and the disheveled director of the Community Theatre, and simply said, with a winning conviction at the beginning of what had looked like their final season, a few words.

“We can make this work.”  And it had been true because everyone believed that Everett believed it.

Her tiny bony fists doubled up, and her green eyes drilled unflinchingly for the first time into the red eye sockets of the Man of Bones, her personal nightmare, at the insult to someone she wished for a friend.

“My, my, what terrible times we live in.  An agent of the Grim Reaper, and yet I have to be politically correct.  No, dearie, his similarity is much closer than that.  You know what he shops for; ‘smokes‘, and right now, well, right now he has a tiny spot on his lung, too small to be detected by your so-called advanced medicine.  He croaks in less than ten months I do believe. Poor thing. Sad really.”  The Man of Bones tilted off his skull to the right, and contemplated his phalanges in his hand like he was commiserating about the woes of the world, instead of a primary cause of them.

Kara collapsed weeping on the bed, and began lecturing to herself frantically.

“It’s all a dream.  A dream.”

But the fear possessed her that this horrid prophecy came to her as a true omen, a warning from the future, and that the cute, and funny, and elegant stage actor she had admired when she paused in hammering down a patch on a weak spot on a metal framed, and wood plank supported scaffolding that held the lights at the Mendoza Community Theatre would be a corpse within a year.  Such things did happen, she sort of believed; the others in her coven, the Joshua Tree Coven, had said so in quiet tones of great seriousness when she had driven to meet them two weeks ago.  Too bad most of them lived an hour north of Mendoza, or she would have their support closer to her.

“Now, I thought we cleared this up already over a week ago.  Am I, the collection of electrical impulses in the human brain, any less physically real that a table which according to your human experts is not really solid?”

  So saying he rapped his knuckles on a now-cleared former TV stand, as he waited with a half smile horribly aping the real thing, and then he sat in the brown metal folding chair her older brother Jackson used on occasion to sit with her.  Jackson made her feel as if he chose to be as far away as possible and still in the room, and she hated that.  The Man of Bones sat in exactly the same spot, and she felt him too close like he breathed on her neck.

“Yes, Stephanie, the Lady of Azure Purple, my high priestess, said you were real.  And that it would help in my healing if I banished you.  Whether a real sending or just a real horrid dream she never clarified, but to her you were real.  Happy?”

  Kara sat up again in bed with ill temper and disgust shoving aside fear of the monster.   The effort to sit up on the wrinkled sheets still felt easier than when she did it in waking life, but also a mental weariness dragged at her.  Despite that, her bony arms and slack muscles and too-prominent cheekbones protruded aggressively, and  highlighted her chin, which stuck out in a sign that she chose to fight rather than meekly surrender.  Maybe a fight would cut short the nighttime rerun of her doom.

“Tee-totally ecstatic.  Why words could not express to you my satisfaction.”

The monster seemed disposed to ramble onward making fun of her like a mischievous child pelting the roadside with trash from inside a car, but Kara cut him off with a brisk and impertinent wave of her right hand happy that so far there had been no blood and screaming.  Maybe she had her nightmare on the run.  The time to attack had come, she decided with inward flutterings.

“Goddess, protect and preserve your servant.”  She spoke the first words of a spell that began on the tenth page of her Book of Shadows.  Unlike some of the others, she had little skill in the Arts, and had never experienced the direct presence of a god, if one could.  Part of her still remained skeptical about the whole thing.

Kara pressed her hands together in front of her as a sign of devotion.

The Man of Bones started, and then he smiled.

“Changing to Goddess, rather than to God?  Which Goddess exactly?  I do so love to know which of the Powers to thank.  Is this because of the last feast of pain when we spent time together? You did not thus before, what does this mean?”

“It means, I signed up with a new remover of bad guys.”  Her grim-edged voice sliced like a sword, and she repeated her prayer with a vengeful thrill.

“She, whoever she is, will not do any better than the Christian God; you have tellingly decide He had no solutions nowadays with your problems since I came back?  So whom are you going to choose next when your Goddess does not pan out?   Santa Claus?”

“Not your problem, Wyoming.”

Kara hissed trying to heat hauteur into grimness of purpose, into a desperate fury that would instill fear into her enemy.  He laughed, and the sound came mild from his lips, but the light tones cut sores on her arms like glass shards spun from his mouth to tinkle and tumble prettily, and then to slash the soft insides of her white frail arms.  As her blood dripped onto her white sheet, she saw the Man of Bones staring at it with a fixity of purpose and a depraved hunger that creeped her out.

“I’m real, Kara, darling, realer than you imagine.  It’s these others that are fake.  The Easter Bunny cannot save you.”

  He rumbled out the words like a cave leading down into endless torture, leaning toward her with an avariciousness that terrified and repelled her.  Her stomach could not decide if it wanted to throw up, or shrink into a tiny ball, and hide.  As the dream blood now ran down her cheeks to mix with her tears, Kara just wanted the whole thing to be over.  She looked about her octagonal room, but it was closing in on her from all sides, and so she bent her head to cry hopelessly, and thus missed the way his yellowing teeth creaked apart, dribbling venom and corruption in a fine, spattering gray foaming mist dotted  with small chunks of black cinder from his jaw line, in what passed for a skeletal smile of satisfaction on the Man of Bones’ “face”.


Back in what is known as the real world, Jackson dashed down the tower flight of twenty stairs to midpoint, and stepped to his left, and down, through a doorway.  Inside his room he passed the beginning and end of a huge pile of cardboard boxes full of modeling parts to get his laptop which rested atop clear, plastic boxes adjacent to the cardboard, like the foothills of a greater mountain.  These clear acrylic boxes holding as yet unused parts of the latest model railroad he had planned to build before everyone’s life fell to pieces in the wake of Kara’s announcement.  He paused to pat the boxes in silent promise as his fingers itched to open them, and to start working on the grand scale model of Pennsylvania Station he planned as the reward for his two years anniversary in his own business as a computer database consultant.  Jackson already had the spot in the basement claimed after he had removed the earlier mountain railroad line, and donated it to the local cancer center for the kids there to gawk at.  Nothing quite like a model railroad to take your mind off your troubles, he knew.  Even his father who was not much for the modern world, preferring hand tools, had enjoyed his varied table filling extravaganzas.
The matte black laptop he retrieved held enough data for him to get busy catching up on analyzing the relational databases needed for Federico’s Pizza House, Incorporated.   The small chain scattered across Arizona and West Texas had serious inventory control problems.  The projected timeline for the project put him into the beta test of their new database by now.  But life or perhaps more accurately, death had derailed him.
A flashing light on his answering machine which sat atop a Dad-made wooden desk engraven with volcanoes and dinosaurs from his earlier teenage obsessions,  reminded him, yet again, that he remained at least a week of solid craft behind on his contractual obligations.  No doubt, Rob Jamison, the owner of Federico’s, was calling again to see if he “should switch the job to someone else.”   The businessman mimed concern, but Jackson cynically thought it only skin deep.  Still he intended to give the man nothing to say about him behind his back to other business owners.  The new plan theoretically solved his work problems, but every time Jackson started on it, he stopped.
The plan had no place in it for dealing with his sister’s upcoming death.  He had no idea what to do about it, so he reckoned he could just put it to the backburner until he did have a plan.  This non-plan did not seem to be working that well as her ghost preemptively haunted him.  Right now, if he half-turned his eyes to look out of the corner of them he could see a nine-year-old little girl, sitting on his bed, reading his comic books in great secrecy to avoid the wrath of her brother.  The little scamp had taken a magic marker and tagged each cover with a dot to help her remember which ones she had read.  He smiled until he remembered how he had yelled at her for a week over that misunderstanding of property customs.  She had seen a worker at a store marking off things to be sold at a discount, and Kara following the adult’s example thought it just the thing to do.  After that, she left his comic books alone, and he collected quite a gathering without enjoying it as much as before.
Jackson scooped up a book he had been avoiding reading, Dealing with Death. The stack of five different books on grieving was his mother’s way of saying he needed to face some unpleasant, no horrific, mind-shattering, world-blasting likelihoods.  The books were sitting on his queen-size bed like a scorpion, or a pool of malignant magic which if he looked at would cause evil to happen.   Sighing, he added his practice sword that he used to battle Sir Whitehall off the rack on the pine paneled wall above the head of his bed since he planned on working out later in the afternoon, but still even in making those other plans, he could not forget his contract that he kept failing to deliver on. The lack hurt his pride, and he could feel his dreams receding.  He could have easily moved out already, but he had been trying to push every dime he could into his business, trying to go big-time.  Perhaps another year of solid effort, and he felt certain that he would have been well-established, a recognized player, and making enough to avoid the whole apartment thing, and move on to getting a house, and eventually even retiring at a young age after selling the company.  Then Kara, and his dreams were trailing smoke.
Scowling and berating himself, he looked out the sliding glass doors that let onto “his” private deck, a ten by ten space overlooking the small patch of green lawn forced by humans with irrigation hoses and sod squares and much diligence onto the dessert sand.  Wishing that he could go out there as he often had just last month before everything fell apart, he casually drifted around the bed’s foot, and toward the window.  Longing to kickback in his green-painted Adirondack chair, he spied just the left side of its unoccupied mass, and sighed in deepest longing.  If only he could get moving on this program for Federico’s Pizza he had already received a down payment on.
The hill behind the house blocked the Sun except up where Kara “lived“, as it rose toward noon, so the sloped toward the edges backyard stayed comfortable and he wanted to be out there losing his worries in the preoccupation with constructing code and building tables.  But he had a guest in the kitchen that had hopefully left, and if so he could get moving on his projects and lose himself in them.
Jackson’s scowl lasted down the rest of the stairs, across the smooth, white pine of the Upper Hall, and down the broad curving staircase to the Dining Room.  Kara had planned to come down that staircase when she got married.  Another dream broken, he nodded sadly, to himself, wondering if becoming an adult really meant becoming used to failure.

“What did that poor laptop do?  Eat a file?”

Stephanie asked from the doorway of the kitchen as she looked at him crossing the huge, airy dining room.  Her hair naturally grew blonde, and the makeup highlighted her creamy skin, and her scent remained peach from the first day of high school sophomore English to now which he could smell as it wafted into his face.  Her drawl never let you forget she came from South Carolina originally, and she had been apparently the most popular girl in her school back there to listen to her stories.  And she had played the status game at Jackson’s high school with a professional ease like being popular had been her job; so well that she came close to taking class president and beauty queen.  Her late announced decision to let Tarot cards guide her voting in school government had scotched the election, and sealed her rep as flaky.

“What are you still doing here?”

  His exasperation came through clearly even as his mouth ran ahead of his thought, but he did not apologize for the rudeness.  His unadmitted hope had been for her to become bored and go home to her tiny apartment filled with crystals and feathers, and enough incense to choke a cafeteria full of computer geeks.  He squeezed past her, and into the yellow tinted kitchen, a room that went very well with Stephanie’s sunny looks.  In fact, as he turned to stare at her where she waited leaning back against the door frame, with her soft silk blouse, a faint ivory, and her dark black pencil skirt, he felt his mouth go dry.  She looked so kissable, yes, that was the word, but every time he had gotten close to her, it had ended in disaster.

“I felt like Kara needed me.  I still feel that way.  Besides, you have food you promised me.”  As if aware of her effect on him, she straightened up into a more normal, and less relaxed and seductive pose.  Still she looked good to his eyes which was just more salt in his wounds.  The older brother clumsily hitting on his younger sister’s best friend was a bad joke, and he was the punch line.

  She spoke slowly and with difficulty, expecting to be mocked at any moment.  Instead, Jackson walked slowly further into the kitchen biting back the urge to blurt out something like “just go away, quit trying the patience of the dead“.  He looked around at the island, and the brass pots that hung above the tiled island, and reflected partial images off the glossy tiles of the island, and none off the clay tile floor.  Seeing her taking a seat miserably on a bar stool, he felt a surge of pity, but then seeing Stephanie returning to her deck-shuffling, and halfway through drawing Tarot cards from her deck hardened his mind.  Adding in the red taper candle, red like dried blood which rested by her right elbow along with the bag of white crystals that had to be sugar or salt because even Stephanie was not whacked enough to use cocaine did nothing to improve his mood.

“She doesn’t need you.”

  Jackson forced the words out as he retrieved Stephanie‘s plate from the warmer.  Somehow, Stephanie affected him this way.  He tended to either speak without thinking at all which simply was not his style, or labor to achieve a point.  But he repeated himself because that is what he had meant to say, just not the right tone.  So he let it stand.
Stephanie raised an eyebrow, and then looked thoughtfully at his sword, and at the book on mourning he had clutched in his left hand next to the laptop.  Now the whole mess lay atop the tile-covered island in the center of the large kitchen.

“What you mean is that you don’t think she needs anybody.”

Stephanie intuited and spoke her diagnoses.  Appalled at the indictment that he felt hid in her careful words, Jackson just shook his head.

“You are so far off base, as usual, Steph.”

  The dismissive words, and attitude helped calm and center him, as they were a familiar form of dealing with Stephanie and her whacked out views.
Stephanie raised an elegant eyebrow, and he stepped into the trap knowingly.

“Look, your mysticism and prayers to the ‘Goddess’ are garbage that is wasting her time.  Especially when you tell her the Man of Bones is real. ”

He ordinarily would not have gone so far as to explicate his disdain for her Wiccan ways, but the stress got to him.

“So, because I’m a high priestess of a religion older than yours…”

Stephanie began, but Jackson snorted.

“Please, I still remember you flipping through Bullfinch’s mythology after English class trying to ‘pick out a goddess’ to worship.”

She breathed in and out which distracted Jackson a bit, caught at his breath, and then grinned with a rueful smile that turned into a genuine laugh.

“You got me, I’ve been listening to the ‘grievance sisters’ too much.”

“You know, I liked you at one time.  Not now, not like that.”

  He added hurriedly with a partial glance back upstairs toward his bed, which unconsciously to him, but quite clearly to her revealed the direction his thoughts had run to.

“I know.”

She said in a smooth voice forcing herself to be tender and hopeful that the breach between them could be healed.

“How?”

“ We know, we always know.”

“Wiccan high priestesses?”

  He asked with a return to skepticism.

“No, girls.”

He smiled this time.

“But you’re right, we weren’t right for each other.  I’m a bit mystical, and you’re well, you.”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

  He nodded.  They shared a chagrinned smile, in remembrance of a shared history that might have, but never quite did have them joined in wedding vows.  And then he breathed in, and restated what he thought while she reflected.  There had been a driving fire in him, and for her, she did not know what she wanted, although her younger friend had introduced her to a toothsome older brother, and she had wanted him.  But a sword was for war, and a formless, too frequently indecisive cloud was not good for him.  She only had a few rules that she lived by, and the rest of the time she just wandered, searching.  And she could not explain for he would laugh at her.  But one of her rules was that you stood by your friends, and so she was here in a room looking at a man who could barely stand her, and she had fantasized about hearing wedding bells with him.

“I don’t think what you are telling my sister is right for my sister, either.”

“What do you think is right?”

She said softly with a piercing glance, coming back to her present moment.
For a long second, he just opened and closed his mouth, and then he said.

“That‘s not the point.  You are causing her problems.  This talk of her dreams being real doesn’t help.”

“So what should be done for her?”

“We, we, well you should not do that.”

“Maybe you are right, just for the sake of argument.  What should be done for her?”

“I, how the heck should I know?”

“Exactly.”

  She nodded as if she had scored a point, and he stared blankly back at her.  She just blandly began eating the green beans with cheese while she waited for him to catch up.

“Lead, follow, or get out of the way?”

  Jackson asked slowly as he thought back over his relationship with his little sister.  He still thought Stephanie’s spells and Tarot readings did more harm than good, but at least she tried in her wacky way.  He just let his little sister fall down without picking her up, or even forcing her to pick herself up if he could not do anything.

“I need, I need…”

He said and paused smacking one hand into the other as he realized he totally lacked a plan other than he needed to be active.

“What?”  Stephanie asked searchingly, raising an eyebrow.  This was only one of the reasons she had not followed through on her interest with the cute older brother.  The only time he could be still was when he had locked himself into deep concentration on a problem.

“I need to go out in the back yard after I eat, and do some exercise with my sword so I can clear my mind.  Then my mind can get out of the rut its stuck in.”

He said with increasing distance becoming lost in contemplation.  The conclusion heartened him, as it served as the beginning of a plan of attack.  And he always felt better attacking than defending even if his games had taught him much about the value of a good defense.
So saying, he joined Stephanie sitting down to eat green beans with cheese on top, and a hamburger.  He ate it all not out of love for the food, but because he was following his own advice to eat hearty.   Stephanie ate maybe a third.  Jackson looked up as he finished, and at her plate for a long pause.

“Definitely, need to have finer food rather than straightforward bachelor cooking.”

  He said in a focused quiet that let her know his brain already sought answers in a heightened state of alertness she had gifted to him.  Jackson walked out into the backyard not saying another word.
    Taking his practice sword with him, he unsheathed it and started practicing with the rattan “blade“ while his face maintained a distant thoughtful stare that left Stephanie and the rest of the world outside.  He put the sword one-handed over his right shoulder since he was right-handed, and then stepped forward, and slowly, like watching a water droplet form to become a potential drop, he brought the blade down in a high forehand strike on the invisible head of an imaginary opponent.  Then he repeated it walking himself forward across the lawn until he came to the edge of the greenery, and met low scrub, and rock.
Turning about, he began again, and for several minutes she watched his vicious sword strokes fade into smoothness as the repetitive moves took his anger away, and smoothed the frown off his face.  The muscles of his rangy form left her wishing it could have been different, but even without the cards, Stephanie knew they had never been meant for each other.  He was a sword, fierceness inside and coolness wrapped around the outside.  She thought Jackson focused, harsh on others, but even harsher on himself and very non-empathic.  She, she was a mist, a fog with no real direction.  She kept herself popular because it had been easy, and it preserved options.
To distract herself, and because she felt that a turn for the better had just happened, she took her deck of cards out again, and smoothed them out on the granite countertop that formed the endcap for the tiled island. Her last draw for the two siblings had Death coming for both of them.  Now with Jackson engaged in a more positive fashion maybe she could save one or even both of them.  Even without her cards, she knew that Kara sought death, sought a final respite from all her struggles and fears, and that Jackson’s guilt, poorly understood by him, and so obvious to her, would rend his life, and the cards said draw him to end his own in repayment for his fault of not saving his sister.
The Knight of Swords, and Hanged Man were Jackson and Kara she thought, and that partially reassured her.  Before, Jackson had been Death, and now he fought it.  But in drawing their fate while listening to the huff of Jackson’s breath through the opened window into the sloping backyard, she still drew Death.  A chill ran across her skin.  She’d seen things that defied scientific explanation, invoked the power of Diana, and the healing hand of Freyja, and despite the arguments of statistics and the psychologists who claimed random chance and self-delusion, she knew sometimes the hand of power reaching from Beyond into her poor corner of space-time.   It was not just a fragment of some subconscious knowing as some Pagans taught, but she remained certain that it was a Greater Reality.  Stephanie felt that prickle across her skin, sweeping up her arms, and down her back, and that seemingly irrational and nonsensical knowing  that coiled down behind her middle chakra unless you allowed for the existence of the Powers. Stephanie began to weep helplessly over the counter and her cards and the coming Doom she did not know enough to avert.

“Don’t cry, High Priestess.  Deliverance is here.”

  Stephanie heard Kara’s voice say softly, and she raised her head and turned to look into the mad eyes of the black leather clad and heavily armed Keila von Wellington.  This woman was Kara, if Kara had been a weightlifter, and healthy, and inclined toward guns, and skin-tight black leather.
It was a doppleganger, and according to her traditions, a harbinger of death.  But one needed no esoteric knowledge to realize that.  Instead, one look into those wild, white, staring eyes, eyes filled with guilt and shame and a determination that world may end, but she would undo a wrong, and a quick glance to a shiny leather gauntleted glove that caressed an Uzi that rested along a stomach so tight and muscled as to be weaponized, and you just knew.
Death had come, Stephanie knew with a certainty that defied any rebuttal, the knowledge snaking its way out of the chakra behind her belly button to flood into her brain.

“Back, and begone from here, in the Holy Name of the Lady.”

  Stephanie whispered with a terrible intensity while tears flooded her cheeks again, and she clutched the bar for support, but the sudden raindrops of grief did not block her vision.  She found herself standing, leaning against the bar stool she had been sitting on.

Keila flinched for a moment, and then smiled slow, and odd.

“In another world, a different one, you might be able to enforce that spell, High Priestess, Stephanie isn‘t it, treacherous one, but here and now, are you anything more than a card reader?”

Keila’s chuckle, and the dreadful reflection of Kara in her face and body, or what Kara should be, well muscled, and healthy, infuriated Stephanie as did the insult on another level.

“Yeah, I am.”  Stephanie snapped out, abandoning her pretensions to a Southern accent.  And she grabbed a three-gallon size brass pot by its wooden handle from the hanger above the island to bash over Keila’s head.



Outside on the back lawn, a slim band of grass sloping up a hill, Jackson practiced, and talked to himself.

“So, I should get up and do something.  Make the situation better.  Keep the opponent off-balance.”

  His voice began to gain in enthusiasm, the kind of enthusiasm that brooked no challenges as he paused in his exercise to address a fugitive pine tree escaped from the forest atop the hill he practiced alongside.

“Time to make little sis some triple chocolate fudge cake.  And then stuff it down her throat.  She‘s not going to starve away on my watch.”  He gritted his teeth. “Time to tell her to get some exercise. To follow all of Doctor Corrigan’s recommendations to the letter. Even time to get back to the Community Theatre, and help them with whatever goofy play they are putting on now.  And this time, I’m going to attend every one of the shows.”
  Jackson ranted with increasing enthusiasm and put the sword down into a cutting sweep that ended five feet away, and subsequently marched toward the back door that led into the kitchen.  He expected to see Stephanie through the abundant glass windows or the sixteen panes of the summer cottage like door, but nothing.  Surprised that she had gone home, he asked himself a question with a bit of jauntiness that mixed poorly with his shadows.  The determination it bespoke joined better with the shadows in unending conflict.

“Why fudge cake?”

He asked taking Stephanie’s part in the conversation.  Kara might object, all right, almost surely would, but he thought she would eat.  Despite being cadaverous, she would worry about the fat and the sugar and the calories.  But he knew her lust for chocolate.  Chocolate could seduce her.  Ryan had been one of her boyfriends, one of the few he had liked, and so he had advised the boy to get chocolate as a make-up gift. Idiot had went for movie tickets instead to a ‘blood and guns’ flick, and not realized he would be watching it alone.
Jackson stomped in like a conqueror and thumped his practice sword onto the island.

“Why?”

  He said as he began to look in the pantry.  He noted that Stephanie had left a neat stack of Tarot cards, and one lay face up, a Death card.  His lips tightened, and a bolt of nonrational fury flooded his nerves.  He waved it aside with a broad, yet flexible hand muscled by sword-work, and trained by typing to grace, knowing that he struck out at Stephanie because of the pain he felt.  She must have gone upstairs, and he could not really fault her for going against his expressed wishes.

“To strengthen you.  A body needs food that it loves, and chocolate fudge cake has a lot of authority.”

  He said shifting with purpose back to his imaginary conversation.
A faint yelling from upstairs disturbed him enough to stick his head out of the kitchen to ask Stephanie, if she still visited downstairs, what was going on.  Confused, and seeing nobody, he turned back, and looking down, he saw her, Stephanie’s, leg extending past the other side of the island.  Without a second thought, he ran over to her leaving his practice sword behind him on the bar but knocked spinning, and crashing unnoticed onto the clay tile floor along with Stephanie’s deck of cards.  The Hanged Man fell face up.

A darkening bruise on her cheek and chin, and the steady rate of her still all too distracting breathing reassured him, but the sight of Death as a Tarot card in her hand sent a chill up his back. Obviously, she had a double deck of cards, but two of them so close together was stretching probability.  Then he heard Kara’s static-laden shriek from the intercom on the wall-papered wall above the Mickey Mouse phone he had gotten Mom when he was twelve for her birthday.  It was a piece of family history, and so loved for its hideousness which did not match the horror of the cry to him.

“Help, intruder!”

The wail stopped suddenly, but Jackson already crossing the kitchen doorway having surmised what had happened to Stephanie, did not notice.  A sprint through the house, and up stairs and back across the house made him grateful for his teenage days when he had done this run many times (to his father’s annoyance) to get back to his room after raiding the refrigerator.  Back then, he had timed himself on a stopwatch for amusement. Today, he broke a record with his full-out charge.  His body thrilling to the command, and his face etched with horror, he soared more than ran.
Up the final flight of stairs, he could see Kemper, mother’s Labrador retriever, a chocolate brown mass of muscles lying on its side above him on the landing.  Terribly worried that he chose wrong and made a mistake, Jackson still took the time to fling himself into his room, and scoop his gladius hispana off the wall above his queen-sized bed.  He had a katana up there as well, but the gladius remained the weapon he was truly comfortable with.
Spinning back with every ounce of speed he could muster, and holding the gladius halfway up its leather braided sheath in his left hand, he bolted toward the door of his room.  A sudden spin of direction as he pivoted on the door jamb with his right hand after he pelted out his open door launched his body rightward and up the stairs charging them three at a time, and trying to be faster still.  His feet slipping under him, but he changed to pressing down hard on the stairs, and the good, solid wood hardly creaked as he thundered upward.
He held the scabbard and sword in his left hand parallel to his chest at a hand-width above the mid-point of the assemblage.  The braided leather of the scabbard’s exterior soaked up the sweat from his palm as it had been designed to do. Mom had chosen green and black for his katana, but this weapon’s sheathe was black and white strips of leather interlaced in a caramel colored frame.   And if a burglar had invaded their house, knocked out Stephanie, and frightened Kara, why then Jackson was most willing to add red to the gladius’ color scheme.  Up the rest of the stairs to the final landing, panting a bit, racing past a snoring Kemper, he faced the solid door to Kara’s room that was braced open a few inches by one of Kemper’s out-stretched  back legs.
With Kemper laying on his side with his chest oddly heaving, and the door to Kara's room hanging slightly open, he paused a micro-second.  Realizing he had made far too much of a thunderous racket to justify any reconnaissance, he slammed the door fully open with a bare foot strike whose bruising impact he barely felt in the adrenaline rush.  The door sprang open.  A door catcher installed by Dad and Kara grabbed the door as it rebounded off the wall behind the door which had been his plan.
Lurching forward and sliding in on top of the Navajo blanket inspired rug he knew lay further in the doorway, he dropped to one knee, his left.  Let's see any burglar be ready for that he exulted as a defense against the terrors and fears of his exposed position.  If someone was waiting for him with gun pointed his way, he was without protection or cover other than speed and surprise of position. He slid halfway across the room just as he had done dozens of times as a child.  He and Kara were always hiding the slide stops that their parents put under the rug to prevent such games.  One time they had used a potato cannon, Jackson had built to launch the hapless slide stops over the fence.  When they hit the neighbor, father had not laughed, but instead made them weed for their neighbor every day for a month.  In that month, Jackson had learned vastly more than he wanted to know about various herbs as the owner had been an old-time hippie dedicated to herbal remedies.
Jackson looked up and saw a thin, black leather clad woman standing atop his sister's bed.  The woman stood with legs wide in her clinging and glossy leather pants, and each foot rested on different sides of Kara who lay sleeping, but her chest oddly heaving, just like Kemper.  A stiletto held skillfully in the intruder’s left hand, and some odd sort of auto pistol slung on a nylon strap across her well-muscled back threatened him and Kara.
Every ripple of muscle visibly threatened beneath the tight clothing of the intruder.  The abrasive and overtly sexual clothing seduced and shrieked distractions and warning to avoid her, but Jackson grasped that it also told of what she would do before she did it.  Loose clothing hid intention, and her body shouted an announcement to the entire world.  She came to do murder.  Oddly, she had not unsung her weapon, which Jackson certainly would have if he heard a homeowner charging up stairs to get him.  But there was no time to think, to study this oddity further.
A red-yellow grease stained and glowed upon her piercing blade as she dipped it in preparation for plunging it into the helpless sleeper, his sister.  At the same time, the murderess switched her left foot, the one facing him so that if Kara moved in a dream, she would still be kept pinned to the bed by the  casual intruder’s foot resting on Kara’s chest.  Muscles twitched and shifted in arm and shoulder telling of these plans, and more.  Jackson saw this clearly enough in the light from the only open window of the five available in the octagonal, almost circular tower room.  The light gleamed golden, and fell over the bed, and rose as high as to show a shapely shoulder on the standing assassin.  The face of the assailant remained in shadow helped by her jacket‘s hood.
No time for a full-fledged internal debate and  decision, but his action came not as habit either.  Master Yoshida and Sir Whitehall would have been proud of Jackson in that moment as the student demonstrated both the teachers thought.  Yoshida, prone to mutter to himself in Nipponese, as he surveyed a lesson, had said very often “the boy, still just a boy, despite his age, lacked enlightenment and maturity despite his technical proficiency."  Sir Whitehall merely said, “Practice, practice, practice.  You have to do more than learn these moves, they have to be built into you so that you do it right without thinking.”
Jackson drew his sword, and snap cut from left to right while raising to take a half-step forward on to sounder footing.  The blade stopped, froze, a half-inch from the heavily armed intruder's throat.

"Do not move."

Jackson ordered breathing deeply, but rapidly.   His blood boomed its pulse in his ears. The message fell from his lips like an eagle diving, stooping upon prey, a thing he was well familiar with from some of his trips to help companies located on dessert land.  The words,  a simple purity that could not be improved upon, chilled the room and everyone‘s emotions with the almost tangible presence of imminent death.
Kara’s sleeping face turned toward him, and he saw this out of the corner of the eye, and wondered vaguely and lightly why she still slept.  Or what the intruder had done to her to make her sleep?


Kara turned upon her bed toward him begging for rescue from the Man of Bones, but her voice could not reach out of the pit of her dream state to the waking world, even though she knew in her dreams that her brother had come as hoped to rescue her.
The leather clad would-be murderer turned her head as well, and to his everlasting horror, he recognized her now that sunlight did not blur her face.  Looking at him from inside her leather hood was Kara, and smiling too widely with Kara‘s smile, but gone wrong.  Steely, vicious, and not quite sane her smile was.

"Brother, I assume?"

She breathed the malicious words out.  A light of wildness filled her eyes as she made her decision.  He looked strong enough to rescue himself, she could be seen to  rationalize, although not the exact meaning, and which Jackson did not understand at all other than some decision had been made.  Which was okay, Jackson intended to protect his sister like he should have been doing all along, but her face, her face…
Jackson gasped like a fish out of water; his legs wobbled.  What madness had come to this octagonal retreat from the outside world?  How could Kara, and Kara in a black leather suit be here. Had the strain ripped his mind to shreds?  He tried to do as he so often did which was find refuge in avoidance, but the enormity of it was too much, too smack dab in his face, and so he found himself entranced staring into not sane eyes.
“Nice sword.” She tapped her similar blade hanging in its sheathe, and then spoke once more. “Mind I use it?”
Keila dropped the faintly gleaming dagger, a long narrow spike with a needle head, point-first into Kara, and pushed her own neck softly onto the gladius’ razor edge.  Her head rotated to her right, the side facing the window, mercifully for Jackson since he only saw the back of her head as it fell after the smooth decapitation.  It made a slow one-and-a-half gainer as it fell spurting blood on walls, the sleeper and somehow on Jackson.  He would remember that fall in nightmares for the rest of his life.  The fall, a dreadfully slow tragedy without enough time to miraculously redeem it, and just enough time to comprehend the horror that had occurred, scarred his mind.
The head bounced, and the stiletto plunged into a too-thin chest cavity narrowly missing a lung.  On the rebound the head and body which were slowly collapsing poofed into a thin cloud of dust.   The miniscule fragments of a life gone were glowing golden in the afternoon light of the single open window drifting,  and summed up the remainder of his Kara, or the other Kara, or something.  It made no sense.  His thoughts looped, came back to themselves, and set out again with no help.  He could not see, or hear, and strength flowed from his body like he was bleeding-out so great his grief was.
Jackson looked for her body in mounting disbelief, and nothing of her greeted his eyes, as he had known it would be.  He collapsed screaming on the floor in an agony of grief and guilt and terror for his sanity.  Indeed, in his mind, he teetered on the brink of insanity, and then for a time toppled over.



Kara staggered awake from her peculiar dream in which another self told her of coming to rescue her from death and opening worlds uncounted to her passage.  Awareness of a pain like a severe burn in her left side motivated her prayer.  Not yet, not yet, Lady.  She prayed for the pain that she knew would come; to come back much later.  Metastases caused much agony.  Jack's cries of mortal injury roused her completely from her miserable sleep.   Bewildered, she saw as she leaned over the edge of her bed, that he lay crumpled to his knees in a fashion with his legs twisted under and beside him that she thought would cause her twigs to snap if she tried to duplicate it.  But this was not right, for nothing could hurt Jackson. He was always strong, healthy, and filled with so much energy.
She sat up impatient with him, and looked over at the ritual circle and the statue of the Goddess for strength and wisdom.  The Goddess, fallen and tipped over, worried her at the edges of her mind, but bigger and more immediate problems assaulted her right now.
Another pain hit her as she eased her legs over the edge of the bed, and onto the floor.  Jackson’s naked and clean gladius strewn on the floor lay in ambush of her sockless foot.  Chunks of fresh pine had been gouged out of the polished tongue and groove flooring in a random pattern around the top end of the blade, and she gasped as her foot spattered blood onto the cuts in the floor.
Her whole body ached although her right side and right foot were the freshest.  Unfortunately they were not the worse.   Inoperable bone cancer, the judge sentenced her a month ago, but she put aside these reflections of her own grief and terror with an effort.  She so wanted Jackson to be strong for her, and not the other way around.   And now, he went, and sliced open her foot like an idiot!  If she had not been so worried about him, and in such pain herself, she would be yelling at him right now.
Kara glared at his hunched over body, to give herself strength, for these days she felt weak down deep, in a way she hated.  She needed help to do things she had once done without thought.  In her private thoughts she knew that some or all of this caused a crippling emotional shock, and her body should still be functioning mostly fine to her crude senses, but then emotions were as real as gravity and sometimes as hard to contend with as that ancient law.
She bent over to hug him around his shoulders since she could not reach more of his huge to her muscled back from her bed.  The feeling that she lacked the strength to rise held her down.  And the fresh hurt in her side also kept her on her bedside, and she bit her lip to keep the whimpers from her stinging foot inside.

"I killed you, I killed you."

  He whispered to her with his head held low.

"How?"

She asked practically while stalling for time to think of a more helpful response to this absurdity.

"I cut off your head.  You were right there, and I cut off your head.  It looked like you wanted it."

Self-loathing and a disgust at self-destruction thickened his voice to a rumble.  Grief bleaked his tone of voice.

The story held altogether more detail than she wanted to know.  And her brother's fear that she would kill herself had been alluded too, as well, in the “dream” which she would just as well not deal with right now.  However, she supposed that since she had inflicted many of her dreams on his unwilling ears that this could be called fair recompense.

"Only a dream like mine.  Remember after my tenth birthday, and you..."

She tried to steer the conversation back to sturdier ground.  He shuddered, and with a degree of frightening self-control stopped sobbing.  He turned red-rimmed and almost black eyes toward her green ones in the dimness.  Silence fell for a span of ten seconds.

"No this is real.  I ran up here."

"Sleepwalking then."

She suggested without much hope.  He considered this for a long pause, and took the familiar path of ducking out of responsibility.

"If so, then I am a danger to you.  We should call Mom and Dad back from the cruise."

Their parents were on a round-the-world cruise with the unspoken rationale that this would be their only vacation before the long siege of illness that would kill their only daughter in about two years.  And Jackson had opposed this with, for him, a high degree of subtlety.  But Kara had seen right through his smokescreen, and imagined hatred rather than the truth of despair as his motive.
Anyways, hope still existed, but not in Kara's heart.  New therapies were being developed all the time for her and the few others with her problem.  Part of the reason for the trip became to talk in person to specialists in other countries that were suggesting too outlandish cures for the stodgy and bureaucratic Food and Drug Administration to approve.

"I'm sure you'll be fine. I'm sure you'll be fine."

Kara lied repeatedly to bolster his spirits with practiced ease, using her mother’s words to her, back to her brother.

"You would not hurt me."

She added as she thought that he already had.  He had opposed the trip, not wanting the duty of looking after her.  Now he sought to cut the trip short.  Kara wanted to cry at the cruel stab of it.  She pressed her hand to her side at the notion of a piercing wound, and came back with a hand smeared in blood.  Her wondering eyes saw a stiletto drop to the bed, totter on wrinkled sheets, and then clatter to the floor next to the gladius.  She did not recognize it she thought dreamily as she fell sideways onto her bed.

Nightmarishly, Jackson saw the stiletto, a thin and gray deadly sliver of steel well suited for hiding fall before him.  It fell in a one-and-a-half-gainer before bouncing on the floor.  Black spots were in front of his vision and he lurched to his feet.  A buzzing headache rewarded his effort.
It had been real, not a dream, he knew with a bolt of certainty.  And then his mind cleared from the horrid fogs of insanity, and he wondered why he wavered on his feet while Kara seemed to have passed out again.  She lay on her side such that he could not see her wound.  Looking at her face, he thought it seemed touched by blue.
The symptoms were of carbon monoxide poisoning he thought puzzled.  Wondering if he had quite by accident stumbled into his sister's suicide attempt, and not considering that nothing suited for that lay about, he took a step toward a closed window.   That thought did not make sense because of the unshuttered window beyond his Kara‘s bed, the one that the other not-Kara had died astride, but he was shattered and befogged and in no shape for good judgment at the time.  He stepped awkwardly toward the nearest window without a dresser or bed underneath it to bar his passage.  Fumbling half-blind in the gloom and with the spots conjured up by an oxygen starved brain impeding his progress, he took shallow breaths trying to compromise between his need for oxygen, and his revulsion at inhaling poison.
  His slowness gave the carbon monoxide or whatever it was more time to work.  In the distance he heard Kemper barking frantically up to him from the bottom of the staircase where the dog must have retreated in a burst of good sense.  He tried to say that he was coming, but the words would not come out of his mouth.
  He realized as he got the latch of the shutters partially loose that he should have stuck his head out the unshuttered window above Kara‘s bed, and just shattered the glass.  Finishing ripping out the small square of swinging wood from the two-by-fours of the functional shutters cost him a fingernail.  Had he known the price beforehand, he would have gladly paid anyways.  Jackson had to protect his sister, even back in elementary school his parents had impressed that upon him.
Grateful that the inner glass window had been fully recessed upward or this would have been even more difficult, Jackson pushed on.  The mild weather made such an arrangement with the window practical.
Throwing open the near airtight shutters strained even his large biceps and triceps which trembled, and ached; lethargy seemed to grapple him so that he almost fell in his tracks.  Then the shutters fluttered, shook, opened.
But a sudden bout of even worse and unexpected weakness aided a devilish blast of wind.  The gust slammed the doors back into his face after a faint glimpse of light and life.  Bleakest despair assailed, but the sight of his goal gave him a reckless strength.
  His legs treasoned against him, and he wobbled back a step, yet, absolutely horrified, driven by a fear that reached beyond conscious control, he drove himself forward.  No time to fall down on the job, he heard his too active brain remark with morbid humor.  He flung the shutters open in a still air to bang authoritatively into the shutter catchers on the sides of the tower that his father had installed.  The action thrust his arms out into the open and his head followed.
Clear, fresh air felt good against his face, and then his legs collapsed underneath his weight.  He fell at his too ample belt line onto the windowsill, and ponderously with his body not responding to urgent commands he tilted forward.  His arms waggled, but futilely.
At least I saved Kara.  See you in Heaven, little sister.  He thought as he rotated over the edge of the windowsill.  He fell straight with his arms outstretched below his head, and continued to rotate out of control so that his back struck first, after plunging three stories onto a rock-strewn Arizona hillside.


Kara watched his struggles for a while with a calm fatalism as she lay on her thin, small pillow, unmoving.  Surprising to her, her thoughts returned to the faith of her childhood as she waited to die rather than this new thing she had acquired in the last year.  The only thing that had the power to rouse any emotion other than a peaceful waiting was the irritation about the unfair arbitrariness of it all.  Some random, bizarre accident had gotten her after all.  It made one suspect all faiths as just covers for the chaos of the Universe.  Her awareness drifted away and she turned her back on her suspicions and was grateful for the lack of pain and the peace that more, a Good, awaited.
Unknown to her, the death that came for her chose her specifically, for seemingly good reasons.  And her story of Life had only just begun, as with her brother’s story.  And out there somewhere in the seemingly infinite worlds there waited her nemeses who walked the road to Hell.  That is, the one paved with good intentions.  And behind her, making her dance, stood a Man of Bones who had big plans for the two of them.

End of Chapter One.

[27 blank lines suppressed]

Chapter Two: Talking to the Shade



A dry heat baked the weariness from her thinned muscles, and relieved some of the soreness reaching into Kara’s cancer-ridden bones, especially the bone of her right forearm.  Thin dust swirled about and faintly tickled her pert nose.  The doors of the shutters in her tower room all banged open and clattered in what sounded like Morse Code.  She did not know the telegrapher‘s tongue so she could not be sure.
Despite the weirdness of the dream-laden moment, it felt good to recover from her injuries or at least be offered a respite, especially that sword cut to the neck.  She lurched upright gasping shocked at the weird notion, and cursing her reaction internally even as she did so.  Her neck could be being held on by a thread if that had been real.  She could have just killed herself.
But no pain other than a faint twinge accompanied her rise.  Kara felt her smooth, muscled, but too thin and undecapitated neck complete with the silver cross necklace given her by a former and lamented boyfriend, Robert of the light, brown hair.   She forced herself with blinking eyes to try to take the last step across the boundary between sleep and the waking world.  Failed, but she remembered there had been no sword cut, but a stiletto stabbing.  Sitting in what felt like dust, she strove to put her mind in order.
  Another had been sword cut according to her older brother, Jackson, with his too-incredible tale.  Now, she remembered a burst of sickly smelling gas in the face stupefying her to immobility after she tabbed the intercom for help as the Other her, a healthy in body, but mad in mind Self had come striding into the room.
Warily, she opened her eyes a steady fraction, and began searching bitterly for her assailant with the vengeful fury of the new to the horrors of violence.  But this had to be a dream, she told herself, because who would want to stab her with a stiletto?  Not seeing a figure looming over her, she closed her eyes again preferring the comfort of ignorance rather than the inexplicable reality she had just glimpsed.
The madwoman who Jackson said he killed had looked remarkably like her very own self if she, Kara, had been healthy, and buff to boot, and inclined to wearing revealing skin-tight leather.   And the other had spoken in her head, and shown her things in her dream.  But Kara still felt sure that this was all some sort of involved dream, and if she wished real hard then maybe she might be able to go back to her tower room, and slowly die in something resembling peace.
She should be spooked at seeing another Her, except allowing that she knew what wonders some theatrical paint could work, she did not believe it.   A moment’s glimpse half-asleep, and then forced into unconsciousness, followed by a stab wound…well, it sounded unconvincing in the extreme.  If you ignored the dust under her knuckles, and the dry heat, and the wind that seemed to come from far places to wash against her face.
Kara had served as a makeup artist in a Community Theatre up until a month ago in another lifetime when she had been healthy, and strong.  If not for that she might have sworn the other present in her tower bedroom a moment ago to be a twin.  Dismissing that, she put into a box the rest of the experience; the words in her mind and the images the Other had shown here were caused by the drugs Kara had to take to hold off the cancer.  A simple hallucination ladled on top of an already weirdling experience it must be, she told herself. Like what she had seen when she opened her eyes.
ABCD
  No sound but long sighs of the stifling wind reached her ears.  Kara rippled her shoulders slightly ready to stop at the slightest pain from a dagger wound in her ribs, but found nothing.  She tried again more vigorously, and came up empty-handed.  Happy somehow to have avoided permanent damage at the hands of that maniac, she considered laying back and trying to make the whole thing be some sort of bad dream.  It did no good, second by second, the dust, very faint and pervasive winds etched her face, and winds blew past heavy with the smell of dust.  No way these came from her nicely air-conditioned and air-filtered Tower.  Somehow that crazed woman with the too-bright eyes had kidnapped her, and dumped her in the dessert.  Thankfully, she did not seem to be bound by ropes or handcuffs.
    In a few, fleeting seconds she changed her perspective from wanting to hide from the truth to desperately needing to know.  Boldly, she opened her eyes fully for the first time.  Shock rattled her so hard that it left little space for thought.
Dusty, red plains dotted with black and dirt-stained slabby jumbles of rock drooped away from her.  She sat on a rock that could be called a dark pink with rust colored  particles skirling up from a movement of her bony right hand, while her left covered her mouth, striving to hold in vomit or a scream.  The temperature was warm, but for someone acclimated to Arizona, it was actually familiar.  That was the only thing that was familiar.
A dry heat pervaded the air that soothed aches, and cleared up asthma conditions.  She choked as a faceful of tiny particles swarmed her, and found lodgment in her lungs.  Not as good as Arizona for the asthma sufferers she decided.
How did I get into the dessert? No, better, how did I get into this dessert? She questioned herself as she got to her feet, and looked all around her, only seeing more of the same, except in the far posterior distance, a low, long range of mountains.   Trying unsuccessfully to match the scene to some Earthly picture she had seen once in a magazine or on a travel show, Kara gulped down another batch of dust before it could interfere with her breathing.  After that, she kept her mouth closed.
The possibility occurred to her that she had passed into some sort of afterlife.  She had supposed she had been dying.  Of course, Kara had too much experience with that conclusion.  Twice in the last year, she had been certain she slipped on the icy brink of death as panic accelerated her heart or crushed the air from her lungs.  The spells that Stephanie had taught her helped her calm the fear, and so in the back of her mind, Kara begin chanting the rhyme from page four of her Book of Shadows.
As Stephanie had taught her, or as Azure Purple, which was her chosen name in working, as Turquoise Yellow was hers, she envisioned a candle in her mind.  One of the pale white taper candles they had made together.  She saw herself twine together two slim, fragile branches, a pine and a cedar, for exorcism and healing, and then light them with a commercial fire-lighter, a plastic toy like a cigarette lighter, but far bulkier, and easier to use.  Then repeating the name of A-then-a, over and over again in a mantra, she took the twin branches which had merged into one distinguishable whole branch, and lit the candle.  So clear was her imagining that she felt the world stand at a distance, and the airs grow still about her.
The branch gone, she saw the candle floating in darkness in front of her, and into it, she poured all her fears and terrors, until the candle flame whelmed higher and higher.  With a sensation of rolling light, like fog drifting from her skin, she put out her hands and grasped the candle.  A sudden wind in her dream snuffed it out, corresponding to a breeze in the so termed real world. A pit opened before her, and she dropped the candle into it, and then as the earth closed over her candle of the good earth’s own will, taking her fear with it, she whispered.
“It is done.”  Feeling renewed, she looked up, and wiped her face with her hands, pulling back her hair into a ponytail, and scooped a hair holder out of her short’s right front pocket.  Then she examined the area again, feeling more competent, and relaxed.
Scattered about her in the near foreground were some of her possessions, she realized instantly upon looking that close.  A laptop tilted open, and faintly beeping caught her ear and then her eye, and she strolled over, holding onto her flat stomach to ease her nausea, and to shut the yammer up by turning the machine off.  Kara fumbled at the familiar task, still distracted by the vista. But it got done.
The laptop had rested on her desk for her internet search on a cheaper type of face paint for the Community Theatre. The Communitarians, as they called themselves, had kept trying to find little jobs for her to do, while making self-deprecating jokes about what harsh taskmasters they were.  Kara had appreciated the chance to keep busy, even as part of her wanting to head into full retreat from all contact.  But the Communitarians had made it so easy, and they had chosen such small tasks that her desire for contact had overridden her rout.  Tears came to her eyes.  Kara wondered where they were.
She looked to the left where she somehow just knew an item of hers lay.  A hand-decorated leather tool belt with painted stencils of names of her friends, and theatrically themed engravings lay on a small rock that looked like limestone.  The belt held a half-dozen of her most vital amateur carpenter’s tools.  Sprawled on the rock, and with the hammer fallen out like the whole thing had fallen from its hook where it had been stored in her closet.  A look past her laptop brought into sight the ever-growing village of pills she hid in a chest of drawers, her BCE mix, and her anti-nausea medicine, and her immune booster, and her anti-depressants.  Kara gathered them into a pile, and wondered what to store the lot in.  Then she shrugged, put on her tool belt, and in the nearly empty nail pouches joined finishing nails with anti-depressants, and the BCE chemotherapy cocktail of three drugs went with  the ten penny nails.
The anti-nausea and the immune booster went into her front pockets of her thin shorts making the material bulge most ungainly, but it was not a fashion show after all, she reminded herself.  Even still, she hated to appear unattractive, even all alone out here.  It was one of the things she had shared with Stephanie.  Both had enjoyed the dating scene rather well.
Looking about, she too quickly found her other items, which were resting in the sand as if they had been teleported here and not moved an inch from each other in the process.  The sheer oddity of this brought a furrow to her forehead, and had her biting her lip.  If the madwoman had brought her here, then Jackson must have not been around to stop her.
Her memories came back to her.  Seeing Jackson fall out of the window while she lay like a useless cat not doing anything.  Not helping him, or herself, but just lolling on her bed as he fell too…  She could not say the last word, it was simply impossible.  Jackson was Jackson.  Immortal. Invulnerable. When she had a problem growing up, she had merely told her father, or her big brother.  No one at school ever threatened her, not after seeing him forcibly stuff Rudy Greenwood into a locker after the boy had started rumors about her, and Rudy had been accounted tough, a wrestling champion, but her older brother had handled him like he was a child so great was his fury.
Jackson did not understand why she had become a Pagan, but actually he was the birth of it.  Seeing him come storming down the hallway, with other students flying out of his way, and grabbing Rudy by the leg and neck, and lifting his classmate into the air, he had looked like Thor come to slay a giant.  Invincible. Indestructible.  Someone you could always lean on.  But even cancer had been too much for him.  Of course, face the truth, Kara, it had been too much for you too.  The fairer, more just part of her reminded herself, but the little girl who had not wanted to date an upperclassman with a bad reputation, kept wanting to believe in a perfect knight undefeated.
Most obvious of items lying about the pinkish rock where she had been dumped, a chambray long-sleeved shirt of considerable utility.  This gladdened her eye.  If she had to go on an unexpected trip, then she wanted this shirt.  By itself, the shirt disproved the oft-disproved dictum that you get what you pay for in the store.  The cost had been low even on clearance, and yet it stayed presentable and stylish for the last three years despite a rafting trip, and an impromptu game of softball on an unexpectedly muddy field that some cute boys had talked her into joining.
The odd precision of the placement of the items intrigued her. Perfectly matched to where they had been in her room, except for the things that looked like they had rolled upon impact.  Temporarily, she set aside her theory of it being the afterlife unless the stories of the dead taking treasured items with them were true.
But there were no tire tracks, no footprints either.  A gust of wind reminded her that if she had been laying here long the wind could have obliterated the tracks.  However, her muscles did not feel stiff like they would if she had slept for a few hours on a rock.  ABCD
Means, motive, and opportunity she reminded herself from the thirty strong collection of mystery novels that held a place easily reached from her bed on her slightly limited wall space due to her sacrificing shelves for windows.  Her brother, and her nurse, a rather handsome young guy with plans to be an EMT, that is emergency medical technician, and Stephanie from down the street, and a few other friends had the means to know where everything in her room lay.  They had visited her often enough.
Motive?  Well, a few friends, okay most of them, had gotten tired of her moaning and grumbling and made them scarce.  Kara tried not to blame them, but she felt betrayed.  Her brother remained the only one who seemed to still begrudge his aid with any significant amount of annoyance, and yet he still hung around.  Kara felt chilled in the heat, and resolved to quit the line of thought.  It had been a fun if morbid game, and the fun had flown.  Her brother had not done this too her, she told herself with more firmness than was required.
Method?  Well she could be easily knocked out by any number of simple tricks with chemicals.  Once unconscious, her almost bony frame would be easily toted especially by someone of her brother‘s large physique.  She hissed at herself to stop.  The doctors had warned of letting negative thoughts run away with her.
Remember, you will not be as high as a kite, but both feet will not be touching the ground at the same time either, a short, dark-haired doctor-fellow with a winning smile, and a proud picture of a beautiful wife on his wall had told her as he gave her the prescription for the pain pills.
The thing she missed most about the whole thing, not just the cancer, but also the whole ball of wax meant that the ease of going on dates and parties vanished.  Seeing delighted smiles from the males and cautious but still welcoming smiles from the girls when she walked into the room had been replaced by steeling herself against the inevitable looks of pity.  She had been no raving beauty she thought, but poise and a smile add a lot to an ordinary girl she had told herself over and over until she mostly believed it.  And it had been fun to play the social game, but now it just hurt.  Back then, she would not have yearned to pick up a cute married doctor, because she had standards, and stealing guys was just not done, but he was the only male that had smiled at her the whole week.
A sudden fear grabbed her that she had become like the Man of Bones, a creature of the undead.  Never dying, never living, just haunting the pain-filled for some obscure and disgusting reason of its own.  Kara knew that she would rather die than become such as that.  She grabbed up from the pile of stuff around her feet, a mirror, and examined herself.
Shoulder-length dark brunette hair fell in waves in an unstructured bounty easily pulled back into a ponytail by her thin and accomplished hands last year when she still played Frisbee golf, and flag football, and hiked the mountains of Arizona.  Now, it seemed harder.   A pert nose with high cheekbones, and soft green eyes with a complexion that hinted at some Native American ancestry completed the mirrored image of herself that she examined.  Nothing seemed out of place, everything about her looked bog-ordinary.
Kara pulled herself back to the present, feeling a little better after remembering some good things, and certifying that she was not undead.  Get a grip, Kara, she snapped mentally.  Her frown was caught in the mirror, and she straightened it out, having been taught by Mom to try for neutrality when you were ticked off.  The fake smile she produced for the mirror exposed a string from a green bean caught between her small, fine teeth.  The banal bit of reality convinced her that somehow, whatever had happened was not a dream.  Her dreams never had those little details in them, she mused as she used a fingernail to work the vegetable matter out of her gumline.
She had ignored the encircling sand that went out as far as the eye could see as she gathered her stuff.  The simple task that she had assigned herself of picking up her stuff, and most importantly, without thinking about any of the blatant impossibilities of her situation had helped her stay numb, and not scream at the twilight sky.  Her mind refused to look up, or even fully consider what she had discovered, fearing more puzzles, but even without looking skyward she could tell it flamed unusually bright and yet dim at the same time to make a non-terran quality of light.
A book of crosswords, a dozen pens; two notebooks; her statue of the Goddess; four ritual chalks (one for each cardinal direction); incense and a burner with a spider incised in it; an occasionally used diary with magnolias imprinted on the cover with a yellow binding from when she was fourteen; a red leather Bible with Kara Rochelle Wellington inscribed in tiny, gold letters on the front cover; a plastic lime-green canteen from her Girl Scout days; a four person tent; her brother's army bag he had bought used (she almost lost control of herself when she saw that, and she fought back sniffles); her purse; a big block of chocolate; her fluorescent Shakespeare’s head key chain with attached mace®; a jewelry box; a scarf of a green that matched her eyes very nicely; a makeup kit; feminine necessities; a silver bell that had been the first method of summoning help when she had gotten sick (later they installed the intercom); and a butcher knife that she had long ago privately named Tomato-Killer, and that ritual working had converted into her athame almost completed the collection.
Conveniently it had a white handle, and plenty of space to hold the runes that she had inscribed on the blade.  The three girls in their coven that Stephanie privately labeled the ‘grievance sisters’ had snorted in dismay at her using such a mundane tool for working magic, but, well, she did not know how to explain it to them, but it was special to her.  It was the first knife she used to help her mother in the kitchen, and the first knife that she had bloodied up her fingers with as she learned how to cut thin slices of tomato just like Daddy liked for his salads.  Dad had pretended to ignore the blood spots on the tomato, and ate them with complete enjoyment. But next day, she had a glove of rubber and steel mesh to protect her hand as a gift.
“The proper tools, daughter. A lot of success is having the tools, and knowing how to use them.”  He’d said as he squatted down to outfit her.
Having to walk about twenty paces to pick up Tomato-Killer gave her time to start worrying.  Ignoring the spatial part of her mind that insisted on repeating that the knife had buried itself the exact distance the kitchen had been from her, if you ignored the two intervening floors, took focused effort.  The blade had been point down, and sunk deep in the sand. Next to it, incarnation number three of the protective glove rested.
Still fighting the facts, and trying to nerve herself up to facing them, she broke out the melted in the heat chocolate with one hand and ignored as best as she could all the unpleasantness and strangeness around her.  A pair of grungy, but preferred tan parachute pants lay in what could have been the bathroom.  She put on these, her favorite kick-back pants over the thin jersey shorts which offered little protection from the dust.  Next to them, her favorite little black nothing dress still hung on a padded hanger, but the hanger lay dropped on the soil.  That rather expensive slip of fabric she stowed in her brother’s duffel bag near the top, and carefully folded.  In the bottom, she considered tossing the pills in, but rejected it since it would make it too easy to ’forget to take the medicine’, and then started to pile the other stuff on top of her party dress.
A tan belt that she found with uncanny ease despite its camouflage against the reddish dust held up her pants since her scarecrow figure certainly could not manage that feat.  She started to divvy any of her stuff leftover up into the abundant pockets of her parachute pants, and the duffel bag.
When she finished she looked up since that was the promise she had made to herself.  A dim ball of light a hundred times larger than our Sun, but still not nearly as brilliant stunned her face, and stuttered her mind.  Kara had thought she had been ready for this, but she was not.

"Goodbye Kansas."

She mouthed, and then her arms began to tremble.  She began chanting a repetitious prayer, a mantra, to the Goddess as she stuffed her mouth with hunks of melted chocolate.  About halfway through the block she had calmed enough to go to a steady nibble.  The prayer soothed her as well.
“Gracious Athena, grant me your wisdom.” She prayed, and the only thing that occurred to her was to finish the chocolate since it would not store that well in the heat. If that was an example of Athena’s wisdom, Kara put herself down as officially disappointed.  One expected better from a goddess than practical advice. ABCD
Soon, she finished eating the last of the chocolate in a nervy rush, and rather than spoil her tank top, or her ratty, old parachute pants that she wore to protect her spindly legs or rub her hands in the dust, she licked her fingers meticulously clean.  All right, enough panicking she told herself, and then giggled at the wildness of it all.
For a change, her impulse to throw up a binge treat had not kicked in to bug her.  The thinness had little to do as yet with her cancer.   Her giggle threatened to get out of control within a few seconds.  Focus on the real world, she told herself, and then regretted it as a bellow escaped her at the notion of this being the mundane world.  But nothing else happened; no hysteria followed the explosive release.
Wherever she was, it was not the real world. And since no angel or demon or spirit guide had shown up, she figured it was not the afterlife either.  But it could not be a dream because she was not that good, that precise in her dreams.  Kara knew this for she was quite familiar with her own dreamscape, and this was nothing like it.  That left only uncertainty.  She could not be here, yet she was.
She looked around for a possible destination.  The heat caused her blouse to stick between her breasts and the dust made her sneeze.  Shade is first, she decided, and shelter is right behind it.  Kara chose the largest of the nearby piles of rock.  It looked to be a mile or so away, and was formed of three main rocks.  The shortest was on her side, and leaned against the tallest and thinnest, and on the far side a squatty mass held up its end.  Nicknaming the rocks, Pint Size, Corn Stalk, and Giant Fat Toad, she headed for them.
The duffle bag hung awkwardly on her back, but she stopped, and got it adjusted fairly well after a few tugs.  She set off again, heading across the dessert without a drop of water.  It was the only thing to do she said mentally in an English accent and in a fey mood that appreciated her difficulties, but still wanted to make a joke.

“Only proper thing to do.  Besides, the natives are always saying only mad dogs and Englishmen wander about in the sun.”

Her accent sounded decent, being shaped by years of watching British comedies, which had the virtue of not being so blindingly predictable as American sitcoms, and so had won her approval.  Will I ever see Dr. Who again? Kara wondered with a rising sense of panic at all she had lost.  But she pushed it aside, choosing to concentrate on projecting the “Mad English Explorer-Very Dashing” like it was a role in her Community Theatre.
At first her passage across the dust kicked up enough dust to make her resultant sneezes as the gritty substance invaded her nostrils into a back-bowing shaking of her torso.  She wrapped one of her scarfs, a dreadful thing in a fashion sense, but quite beloved all the same, that her mother had knitted for Kara’s eighth birthday.  Poor Mom, a gifted businesswoman, but born without fashion sense.  The scarf, a bright orange and yellow thing that went quite well with the red dust, went around her face, and she bow-tied it carefully behind her head.  Shuffling, never quite lifting her feet seemed to help as well with reducing the dust.  Cheered by this demonstration of her adaptability, Kara continued with more energy for a while.
But soon her inherent weakness dragged her to a gasping halt.  She collapsed with a painful thump on some hardened soil, a thin dusting of minute particles covering the almost rock with a slippery sheen.  I could die here, she understood as a faint, but growing possibility.   It seemed totally unjust of the Universe.  And the rock pile did not seem any closer.

“ Just walking across this dessert to reach a bit of shelter might be too much for me.”

She studied her aching body in faint disbelief at its weakness.   Panic threatened to flare and her breathing became rapid, but with the fear of imminent death came another thing, the same inner fire that had defeated cancer the last time slipped out of hiding, waved the battle banner, and sounded a still faint trill of “Charge!”.  At that moment, she changed inside.  Resolving to eat more, and to try to build up her strength firmed her will still further.
The thought occurred to her in passing that she had been trying to weaken herself with this flare-up of anorexia and bulimia so that when the cancer made its play in earnest that her end would rush upon her.  But that thought fled quickly, and she did not pursue it for she found her spirit unready for that much light.
Kara pushed herself back to her feet the first time with a wince and a quick lurch. And she proceeded onward across the slowly descending plain of smoke sand, the crystals filled the air, sometimes thicker like the sheerest curtain, sometimes invisible, but always present.  About her green eyes, she felt the tiny particles etching away at her face, and her eyeballs.
Her jaw she kept firm for several minutes until her temporary burst of energy flagged, and she consequently found herself sliding down a slick dip of rock in the plain covered by a deceptive and dreadfully thin coat of sand that made it like ice.  The thump five feet down stopped her still for a moment, and then she paused deliberately to assess damage.  Nothing more than a bruised butt she decided with relief. If she had more meat and fat on her, it might not have hurt at all.
This second time she collapsed required her bending over to push her upper body off the ground with her hands while her legs got the rest going.  Then she straightened up being careful on the water-smoothed rock, but without her moving forward and with careful attention it felt much more manageable to stand on, than stride across.  By this time, the rock, her chosen destination, was noticeably closer.  Granted, she had gotten out of condition, but she was quite sure that it was further than one or even two miles away when she started.  Appearances deceived in this strange desert. ABCD
Her close study of the ground revealed a slight irregularity under the gauze of sand.  A fossil of a clamshell, she decided, and it looked mangled like something had smashed it in service of a plan to find sustenance.  That implied life, but in some far distant era so she chose to be mildly pleased.  The broken clamshell further indicated she still lived, and did not wander some weird afterlife.

Slowly, the slab of rock grew closer, but her strength faded even faster, as well.  And a faint dust, a finer thing floated in the air now that she trekked lower into the shallow vale her feet took her into.  Despite her scarf, this dust drifted into her mouth to absorb increasingly precious liquid.  Kara wondered why she bothered.  Every challenge met took out of her heart, and merely opened the door to another problem.   Exhausted, and depressed, she fell to the ground in her tracks, and would have wept, but she did not want to spend the water for tears.

The third time to rise required two efforts, and some of her limited resources of raw courage for it simply had to be done if she wanted to live.  And with a crashing feeling, she found, even more, that she very much wanted to live.  Panting with effort and the wash of emotions, she stood, leaning on her knees with the palms of her hands.  Then she looked up, craning her neck back, and judged the distance.

“Only a football field or so. I‘m going to make it. I am.”  Reassuring herself, her stride lengthened a tad.

An hour and thirty-five minutes after she first stood to her feet, she leaned against the rock pile with the shade of a half-dozen great stones rising above her to aid her.  Upon getting closer, she had seen more rocks in the mix, and some around toward the back of the pile.  The highest, Corn Stalk, narrow and thin, loomed forty feet above her head.   Licking her lips to taste the salt, and desiring to retain moisture remained her current preoccupation, but it felt so good to rest out of the direct light of the horizon-spanning thing in the sky.

With a light that glowed faintly, and stretched from right to left, there was no way, she could be on Earth.  But looking at it did not seem to hurt her eyes, and indeed it seemed a small bit dimmer than before.  Almost, she thought she could see high clouds of wispy nature coming between her and the baneful messenger that told of her exile.  If so, she rejoiced.  A bit more coolness would not be out of place.

But then a wind kicked up, like in the dessert of evening time, and peppered her with heavier pebbles.  Still tiny things, but they stung, and so she searched about while holding an arm up to protect her face.  No more wind seemed to target her, but she could hear it gathering force.

  Standing, and then quickly sitting in the shade had seemed to begin the process of her slowly cooling down from a stifling feeling to something like comfort.  The fresh water scented breeze of the evening felt good as well, as long as it did not throw rocks.  Her body lurched, and she resembled a great whippet hunting dog, as she cast about for the source of that delightful odor.

  Kara paused, worried in her tracking as she realized the scent trailed forth from a dark area in the shadowed rocks.  Yet, her need drove her on, and with steps precise, while her legs and arms trembled, she passed under an overhang a foot thick in search of water and respite.  No pool of water greeted her eyes.  Instead, the dimness concealed a greater density of darkness that mimed a cave mouth.  It was about ten or so feet tall she judged, and in the shape of an “A” with irregular, probably jagged edges along the vertical sides, and a sandy mouth.

Making herself go on seemed unfair, and she bounced back and forth in place with her eyes fixed on the portal.  But her parched tongue kept speaking insistently to her brain demanding water, and turning fatalistic she knew water headed her list of necessities.  Die in their, or die out here.  The other problems that waited to crowd in on her consciousness, and provoke trembling and balling up and hyperventilating, she pushed aside.

Her keen eyes searched the sand in front of the portal, and saw no tracks.  The sand looked roughened, and loose so that without true skill, she could not know for sure if anything walked in.  But, at least, no giant paw print with obvious talons barred her path.  If it came to that, she supposed, she would have to keep walking to find another of the many rock jumbles she had seen.  Maybe she would survive to the next one. The thought made her feel sickened by despair, and so she edged forward into the dark.

Rationally, Kara had considered the situation, and decided that her need for water outweighed the risk of wild animals, snakes, or cave-ins, but still she marched at a timorous, dread-filled pace, a few inches at a time.

Wanting to slap herself for the fogged state of stupidity caused by her drugs or just the appalling state of disrepair she had let herself slide into, she remembered the small Maglite ® on her carpenter’s belt.  With a light in her left hand, and a claw hammer in her right, she continued the slow hike into the cave mouth prepared for bears and wolverines and bats, but not for a translucent androgynous humanoid figure hovering above and shedding light over a still pond.

"Hello, are you, are you by any chance Human?"  The floating figure asked with a polite inquiry like one was at a dinner party, and wanted to know if the coat on the chair was yours, or someone else’s.  The voice sounded like winds rushing out of a notch in a wall, but words could be discerned in the midst of the breezes that suddenly swirled around the cavernous space.

Kara flinched, her mind not accepting the existence of this impossibility, and her eyes fell down to see between the slabs of black rock her path covered by red dust for her first few yards into the vaulted space.  Then a creamy, heavy sand began, and the dust cleared from walls and the air.   Feeling a twinge of relief at the prospect of rest in a cool  and clean environment, Kara forced her eyes to track up, and the sight of the strange creature in front of her suppressed her craving for relaxation.

Her hallucination was still there!

While her body whined about rest, and water, she studied the thing in the air, and asked the first thing that popped into her head.

"Is there any other option?"

  She replied, and then grimaced regretting her sarcasm.

"At least five I'd say. The strong Darvinus, and the Blitken of the Blue, the V'ia who do not live entirely in the here and now, the lizardian and faded nobility of the Takhierna Clans, and the singular entity Ches-t--vam-si-la-mer-inta.  But, you mean to say, yes, right? You have to pardon me, I'm feeling a bit thin and worn, and my memories of human mannerisms are patchy as well."

  The floating figure slid up to the edge of the pond toward her, and Kara retreated a pace, and it settled for a beckoning hand sketching a welcome.

“Sit child.”

She nodded, and took a few steps forward, and leaned against the cool stone of the wall to slide down to the a seat on the slightly damp and hard-packed sand.  She yearned to dive for the pool, but with the last vestiges of self-control, she waited.

"Look, Mister, what on Earth is going on?"

Kara restrained her urge to cry, but it showed in her trembling voice.

"You’re not on Earth anymore, of course.  Excuse me, but is this your first transition, child?"

End of Chapter Two.

[9 blank lines suppressed]

Chapter Three: Something Crawling



Jackson’s world spun like a dust devil and victimized his hapless body with blows coming at him from an array of invisible kick boxers situated all about his undefended torso.   Sand shirled and whizzed all about his face which might explain why he could not see the men who were beating him like a rug.  Indeed, he could not see his feet to tell if they were there, but after a hard punch to his chest that maybe knocked him or the world over, a whirling wallop, his toes rested on solidness.

Hard-packed sand supported his ribs and his head he realized belatedly as mad visions skied away.  His body lay stretched out like a martyr on a cross,  but for being facedown like a marooned castaway.  Heat from a sun warmed his dry back through the blue denim longsleeved shirt he usually affected as his work uniform. The stench of rotted vegetation and smell of salt water sent messages through his nose of a something highly improbable.

He had been inland, in Arizona doing something his brain shied away from remembering.  Jackson ignored those messages, hoping they were further nightmares, and strove for more sleep.  The stranded man got his wish, and drifted off to uneasy slumbers.




Something crawled up the side of his neck and woke him.  He froze, after an initial jerk, in a position even more still than he had been when sleeping.  Not venturing to breath, except very shallowly, he thought a bit, and then mentally shrugged.  Stretching out a brawny left arm, he paused to reconsider.  Whatever invaded his space had transgressed almost to the right side of his neck after traversing most of his left side without waking him.  He could wait a minute, further praying that the bug’s discoverer had not named it a brown recluse, and that it did not choose to stop for a sit down or a trek upward into his hair.

Jackson assigned the various possibilities odds from his many hours at the war gaming tables.  Most likely he judged the critter to continue on, and the odds of its doing so and ultimately getting slapped were five percent better than his normally deficient left arm going for the kill right now.

Waiting for the player running the Nazi Panzers to make a mistake in order for Jackson’s pieces representing a dug-in battalion of infantry to win the tournament had been more nerve-wracking.  It had been worse than this because if he had misjudged he would have been a joke for the next month among many of his friends.  Here, well, the result would be simply pain to be borne, and then a visit to the Emergency Room.  He would not lie to the doctors, but he could be evasive with the best of them if they questioned how this happened, and what he had done to avoid it.

.  Then chillingly he wondered what a bite so close to his brain and heart might do to him.  It would not be like his cousin Ted’s bite on the arm that the drunk had told everyone a rattler caused.  Ted has a little problem with the truth Jackson told himself,  thinking even now that it had looked more like a rat bite, or even Ted trying to juggle steak knives.  Remembering gave him a way to stay focused on his current mission of avoiding noticing the sweat beading on his neck and back from fear.

The events of a few minutes, hours, or whatever ago came back to him.  Suddenly he shook slightly, trying to hold still while in a frenzy of impatience for this bug to continue its slow crawl across his unusually sensitive neck.  He needed to think and think hard about the strangeness crowding in upon him.

In moving the back of his arm he found the stretch made him grimace now that he had become fully aware of his own body.  It felt like sunburn, he decided in astonishment.  He opened his eyes to see a strip of white sand that receded into the far distance.  A ways on, he could see that the sandy path bordered itself by jungle on his headward side, and by a wild sea on his footward side. He lay on a beach.  From the sound, he wondered if when he finally turned his head that there would be a resort hotel.  He did not think so.  It sounded…unspoiled.  He gulped back vomitus in the back of his throat which got the bug moving again, but not far.

Last he remembered, he had been …say it, spit it out he snarled at himself…He remembered falling to his death in Arizona hundreds of miles from any beaches, let alone totally undeveloped strips of white sand without any bikini-clad nymphs sitting atop plastic coolers full of melting ice and half-cold soft drinks.

The crawly thing on his neck aggravated his sunburn with its precisely placed legs, and he wondered for a moment if he would be able to reach that far with sunburn inhibiting him.  But then he reasoned that adrenaline would kick in, and let him do what he needed to do.  He began to reach back, and the movement of his arm translated up shoulder and across the trapezius muscle to his neck.  The unexpected movement of his neck concerned the creepy-crawly, and so it fled backwards along the path it already knew.

  The bug stopped its race, and sat on his neck, on the left side, probably thinking it a haven Jackson supposed, and wishing for a better plan but unable or unwilling to hold himself back, he awkwardly lunged at his neck to crush the bug against his increasingly burning skin.  He missed, and it fled right.

He lurched in desperation to his hands and knees, and pounded his neck with his right arm.

It hurt to be slammed so hard in his neck, that at first he did not notice the lack of a sick crunch under his fingers.  Then he felt an ominous tickle from his right pectoral muscle.  Looking down let him see a moving wave that swept down his shirt.

This shirt, a blue denim that he named a costume to his war-gaming buddies, and a uniform to his employers when he had to come in to make a too frequent report on progress rippled as the bug crawled underneath it.  Now let it be a burial shroud he thought as he pounded on his chest, once, twice, and finally thrice bellowing and bashing like Tarzan before achieving the long-sought victory.

He pulled open his shirt, and saw a long-bodied insect with brilliant wings of yellow and red layered stripes.  The center mass resembled a brown twig smushed by a street-flattening roller which must have been his frantic hand.  Gingerly he reached a long arm up under his shirt after he pulled the front tails loose of the brown twill pants.  Scraping up the load of insect body parts, and staying for thumb-scraping piles of corn-yellow insect guts turned his stomach, a bit, and would have done more if he had been the sensitive sort, he decided with rising complacency.  It had been nothing to worry about, he decided, and he wished he had not wasted so much time on an inconsequential.  Granted, the bug looked totally unfamilia, but what of it?  There was still the problem of the beach, but one problem at a time.

After rinsing his hand in an opportune wave, he mouthed a question.

Where did Kara go to?

He scanned quickly all about.  To his right, if he faced the sun-reflecting water  lay a strand of white fluffy sandy beach, a narrow bar of safety between a luxuriant, and dense jungle that could easily hide a full native tribe of headhunters, and a horde of enthusiastic tourists taking pictures of the quaint custom of Jackson-in-the-Pot, and an enthusiastic sea full of powerful waves.  The same lay to his left, except that the beach on his left went on and on.  Looking back to the right side beach it also spun on toward emptiness until it halted for the curve that hid the beach after two hundred-fifty or so feet.  Further on, the right side beach continued after interruption as if forming the mouth of a harbor or cove.  He stood alone in the world, he thought with a small bite of loneliness, but with a peculiar relief as chains of responsibility, and expectations slipped from his back.
Here he could do nothing to solve the pizza companies’ problems, or save Kara a mite of her pain, and so he put from him the duty to worry at these conundrums for a solution. Strangely, he felt a spike of interest in both, and compassion for Kara.  So he whispered a quick prayer to the One who was everywhere, even in this wild place, while looking out at the untamed sea.

After praying for help for himself as well, he thought to yell for the mortal equivalent of it.  But, bending back his head to make noise reminded him that he might not be all that alone.  The imagined New Guinea headhunters might not come out to welcome visitors,  but a shout might bring an escorted trip to that stew pot. So he resolved to study things a bit more.  Besides, he had already yelled as he fought the strange insect.

Jackson looked up at the exotic trees that formed a patchwork rampart against the tide that only a forty foot tall tsunami could breach.  Examining the fern-like stalks in the too-brilliant light dancing off the sand crystals worried him because he had seen a travelogue with his parents a couple years back, and none of the vibrant green pictures of  New Guinea that he remembered looked like it had these plants or trees or whatever they were in them.
He did notice many enormous trees however that a mandatory class in college botany had introduced him too.   Who knew that a general science course chosen for its supposed ease to fill out a requirement would end up having a use?  The palm and the cypress seemed in evidence, but until he got closer he could not tell for sure.  So he strode toward the dark and forbidding jungle edge.  As he cleared his first five steps he paused because he felt sure something hid under his foot.  Stopping, he saw a disturbed patch of beach.
The spot on the beach slightly mounded up in its center with broad-brush strokes that angled towards the spot as if something heavy and thorough had been at work.  Curious, he looked about to see if any wild life appeared before bending down to get his hands dirty.  After a minute of too hard sand he reconsidered.  Only the nagging sensation of something down there which feeling he could not remotely begin to explain urged him on.   He had never been one for paying too close attention to his instincts except where danger waited in question.   But somehow he knew that an item hid down there.  Just like it felt there were more in the tree line.

“Pirate treasure, me hearties, its calling to ya’.”  He murmured in a rough voice making a jest.

Shrugging he dismissed his worries about the spooky feeling since fear merely blocked clear thinking according to his sensei, and followed his intuition.   Finding a huge shell took a minute of casting about for one as his calves got covered in fine whiteness, and then he accidentally stepped on the seashell.  It sliced open his foot and his sock a bit.  He really wished he had donned shoes before charging up the steps to Kara’s rescue.

Not that whoever abducted him would have necessarily let him keep his shoes. But, as mother had told him when he prayed for presents for his fifth birthday, ‘you cannot get, if at first you do not ask‘, he reminded himself. And remarkably, he thought with a grin, God had sent him just the right color toy truck, “a red one with blue and green stripes on the side.”
I hope and pray that you are alright, Kara, he whispered to himself and to God, but very quietly.  Hopefully, she would find someone to take care of her wherever she was, like Mother had taken care of him when he was five.  Kara needed someone to watch over her, and someone who did a better job than he had done.
The foot wound dribbled blood in its narrowness,  and it went deeper than he liked he decided after stripping off both his white tube socks and carefully examining the gash in the pad directly behind the big toe of his right foot.  As he turned over his foot in his hand, he noticed that his hand showed complete healing of the wound he had given himself with the paintbrush when he broke it.  No scar, or scab marked the spot.  Like if it had never been, the skin looked.
The hair on Jackson’s neck and back stood up, and for a long pause he stood and looked around.  He kept half-expecting to hear the ominous phrases of “You have entered a dimension not of sight and sound, but …” drip out of the air around him.
Next thing you know, I’ll be seeing Great Cthulu slip up out of the water.  He looked toward the water, and saw something large splash out there.   He could not be sure what it had been in the distance and the dimness.
It was only a large shark or a whale. He told himself his heart thundering, and his throat gulping for something that was not there.  Don’t be silly.  He could hardly see out a hundred yards in good detail, and that brought home the fact that day swooned toward dusk.  And that made him check the water‘s edge, and he thought it had advanced, but he could not feel sure.  It could be my imagination, he reasoned, and his skeptical side retorted, just like this feeling that something is down there in the sand. With an effort, he reminded himself of Master Yoshi’s teachings on fear.
Abandoning his foot and the fear, he bent over to dig enthusiastically into the heavy and very fine sand with both his hands and the shell.  It took time that had him hearing things in the sound of the surf that endlessly beat upon the shore.  He imagined hostile eyes peering at him from the forrest.  And then he felt a smooth hardness as he dove his arm through the last gauzy barrier of sand.
He shoveled back more dirt letting caution fly to the wind.  He saw and felt at the same time a nest of centipedal like critters, only much longer, that rested themselves near or on his hand.  Freezing again in place for the second time, he groaned to himself in dismay.  With his other hand he scraped back more than half of the loose sand at the bottom of the hole he had dug into the beach.  Easily a dozen little green and black “centipedes” hung about near his ungauntleted hand.  They had been buried next to an egg of surprisingly large dimension.  He examined the centipedes that were easily three-fourths of a foot long, and he began nerving himself up to drag out his hand oh-so-slowly.  Centipedes of that size would not be content with a minor sting he knew, unless they were so large as to not need a sting he thought.
With his inner, mental ear hearing the water rising and confusing his outer ear as to reality he knew that he might not have much time before the water came and stirred up the centipedes to a frenzy, and that judging the time remaining would be hard.  Also, he recalled reading that tropical night fell fast like a curtain being dropped across a stage at one of the performances Kara had supported.  He began to draw his hand out, and he saw a head flop loose from a body.  Laughing in sheer relief he leaned back and flung his hand out of the hole.
Some, attentive-for-a-turtle, a very big turtle granted, mom had provided an early morning breakfast for her egg.  In order to keep the snack from crawling away, she had snipped their spinal cords.  Kind and gruesome all at once he thought, although he wasted little sympathy on the centipedes having been stung by one as a toddler and then again as a new-hire for his first job of insulation installer.
The gruesomeness of nature sometimes bothered him as a believer in a loving God.  He understood the existence of evil since humans had to be free to choose good or evil in order to be free at all, but why did this turtle paralyze these centipedes?  He shrugged, other problems pressed for his attention.
Still something in the small pit continued to call to him.  With a backward glance at the definitely rising waters he dove a hand into the pit past the disgustingly squishy centipedes.  His fingers closed on the handle of his katana, and he hollered for joy.
  Then a piercing sensation in his right hand ring finger followed itself by an indescribable burning feeling that rapidly transmuted itself into raw agony.  He screamed like a hundred cars breaking violently at a stoplight.  The world wavered and went away.

End of Chapter Three.

[15 blank lines suppressed]

Chapter Four: Shady Plans


"You’re not on Earth anymore. Is this your first transition, child?"

The figure asked tenderly while Kara shuddered.  It had been obvious that this could not be her home planet, but hearing it confirmed brought tears of abandonment to her eyes.  Not trusting herself to speak, she nodded in the affirmative.  Then she wondered what he or it or she meant by "first".

“Well then, let me explain.  As best as I know, you’ve been infected by scriff.  It’s a subatomic, even sub-quarkial substance that in a mass looks like a golden goo to our eyes.  Its behavior is rather like mercury in the mega-structure world that you and I inhabit which is not its native domain.”

Kara remembered a flicker of a dream that had invaded her own.  A terrifying madwoman with her face saying words meant to be reassuring.

“I’m going to rescue you.  This scriff has your cure from death.  It will save you.”  The madwoman with her own face had said in the dream.

  The other Kara had nodded at a stiletto covered with red and gold greases swirled together yet both still separate.  More horrified at the turn in her dreams than at the familiar horrors in them, Kara had fled back to the Man of Bones while the other had cried, I have your cure!

“So, now I have heavy metal poisoning in addition to everything else.”

  Kara said with the bitter gloom ironically lightened by the fact that Death came for her anyways.  She could not die twice.

“You raise some intriguing notions.  I wonder what would happen to someone already scriff-infected if a quantity of scriff were dumped down her throat.  Arguably it might stay in its unstable form without a chance to vanish.  Interesting, very interesting.”

The shade speculatively tapped his teeth with his fingers as he thought.  Kara had caught herself doing so when she had taken her SAT’s a few years back, and she now resolved to never do it again.  This creature sounded morally repulsive.  Casually discussing medical experiments on humans, or sentients already afflicted?  This outrage could not be let go by, could it?

Kara stepped back from her temper for a moment.  Who am I to judge another?  Maybe in his culture its okay to experiment on other people?  She cursed in her head at the moral dilemma, and then apologized to whatever God or Goddess existed and listened to her thoughts, but her tongue, even dusty and stiff, had a fire in it that demanded she speak.

“Look, Buster, put your little fascist notions of mad scientist medical experiments to one side, and then leave them there for the rest of your life, or whatever it is that you have.  Tell me what the symptoms of a scriff-poisoning are, or I swear, I’ll …”

  Kara raised a threatening arm, and her cheeks flushed, and her mouth bared open in an instinctive display of teeth, while the hot fury parched her more.

“You’ll do what?  I’m hardly here.”

The figure said dismissively, flicking one of its own fingers through its glowing insubstantiality.

“I’ll banish you.”

Kara jumped up, and dug around in her backpack for her incense and incense burner. 

“By bell, book, and candle, if I have to.”  She added.

She knew in a sinking moment that she did not have a candle. But she kept digging anyways hoping for a successful bluff, or a clue to rise up and hit her, so to speak.

Mother had given her a bell to ring if she felt too bad to get out of bed to get something.  The highly engraved silver piece had been molded and then engraved by a noted artist who lived just north of Mendoza.  Kara hated to think how much it had cost, or so she told herself.  Actually, she liked the idea of her mom buying her such a nice gift.  Now it could find another use, and no doubt Mom would be pleased when Kara told her the story. Mom had that way, she looked into your eyes, and saw the truth.  Lying to her had been pointless.  She would believe this insanity.

The figure started, and then stared at her for a moment, and then rubbed its foggy head as if searching for something lost.  It lowered its body closer to the pool so that it would be on a level with Kara who stood on the outer edge of the rise around the pool.  That should help diffuse tensions it looked like it decided.  Looming over this one, and bullying her would not work.

“There is no need for a religious service.  I’ll be happy to explain, if you stop your rummaging in that backpack for a ghost killer.”

Kara looked up, and saw that they were now eye level, even if twenty feet apart.  She understood the meaning of that she thought, and she hated to press a concession.  But, her legs were so tired.  They were trembling.  So she sat down again in a half-collapse.  She leaned over, as she sat with legs crossed, and panted a bit.  The panic started to fade a bit.

The ghost floated down further even though doing cost it pain she saw, and it scooted as close to her as it was able at the moment without speaking a charm of help.


“Are you all right?”

“No.”

Kara said with tears in her voice, and tears on her face that were hidden because she had her face bent toward the sand floor of the cavern.

“I’m so tired, and I’m thirsty, and I’m just not well.  What’s the prognosis?  What horrible effect is scriff-poisoning going to have on me?”

“So far we have noted no adverse symptoms, but then I have never talked to a doctor about the effects of scriff in ordinary life.”

“What about un-ordinary, extraordinary life, say the kind that would bring a once Arizona Wildcat to a red dessert with some sort of ball of fire stretching from horizon to horizon?”

She started in a reasonable voice even if it trembled, and despite that her query ended in a scream.
The ghost or whatever shrank back from her fury for a second, and then pulled it forward even closer.  She calmed rapidly.

“Sorry.”

And “Precisely.” sounded together from her and it.

“Hunh?”

  She asked aware that it sounded stupid, and not caring at that moment.  Then she berated herself.  Weakness may well cost you your life.  Get it together; you have got to appear strong.  Quit begging for the water it guarded.  This thing is not your friend.  You can’t cry on his or her shoulder.

“It, scriff, brought you here.  You died in your home world, usually some sort of electrical explosion.”

“Murder with a stiletto.”

She interrupted flatly, and then wondered at her certainty.

“Well that and carbon monoxide poisoning.”

She knew the details of such a death because she had contemplated doing it to herself every night for the last month.

“Really? How extraordinary.  Anyways, before you interrupted, I said that scriff brought you here.  And when you die here, it will take you to another world, and another and another, and maybe eventually back to here.”

It said ending on a rising and hopeful sounding point, at least to itself.

“I didn’t know that ghosts could be insane.”

She said cuttingly, and then regretted it.  I am just so tired she thought excusing her meanness.  And Kara knew how worn down her body had become for the illness intimately acquainted her with her own weakness.  The physical plus the emotional strain of the few hours she had been awake had taxed all her limited strength.

“Who better to tell you of the afterlife?  If this was the afterlife, but it is not the afterlife.  And, I am not a ghost.”

“What then?”

She said hating to be made the straight man.

"The memories of the Last Emperor who existed in flesh and died and lived and died as you do.  I am the guardian of the sentient species that he ruled over near five hundred years past."

"Memories, how?"

Kara asked with skepticism, and yet wonderment roused her slightly to raise her head.

"Sorcery; it involved a red stone."

The ‘ghost’ said with laconic defensiveness.

She laughed feeling slightly refreshed and she said to it with a kind grin,

"Now I know you are having me on."

"I'd offer to prove it, but I need my scraps of power to try to keep things from derailing further among the races I stand guardian too.  Besides you would simply claim my proof to be advanced technology.  But you were willing to admit I am a ghost.  I hardly see the difference between that and a spell-shaped memory."

He said with grave dignity.

“You are probably already explaining me away as some sort of hologram.”

Discomfited by the keen perception of the Last Emperor's shadow, she held her tongue and tried to think deeply.  Dryness in her throat reminded her, and greatly daring, Kara gathered her stuff, and stumbled to her feet.

“May I have some water please?”  She asked, and knew that if he or she said no, that she would fight for it; she would have too.

The Shade absently nodded, and floated up and off to the other side of the pool to get out of her way while it pondered something close to its heart.  She settled down next to the pond edge to scoop up water in her hands.

"I think we can do better than that."

The shade turned and waved its arms grandly trying to make an impression of good will and status, Kara noted with her mouth full of a fine, mineral tinted water. Definitely spring water, she thought.

Then, a stirring of emotions worried her as it definitely came from outside her own self, and an engraved and encrusted golden cup shimmered into place next to her right hand.  Despite the paranoid warnings from her stomach she took it up. Her first attempt failed.  The cup weighed far heavier than it appeared too.

"A parting gift and a quite easy spell it is summoning the cup from an Inner Chamber storage cabinet.  I can do this much magic without hurt. I wish all my problems were so simple.  I must go and intervene in a quarrel.  Feel free to stay the night."

  The shade said, and then the chamber emptied as another spell took the shade away, but not as far as it advertised.  For the shade waited and watched from nearby in a chamber  hidden in the rock on the other side of the entranceway.

Using two hands she filled the massive cup and drank a little.  Her stomach knotted in paranoid protest, and her throat almost refused to swallow.  You need the water, body, so drink.  The harsh taste of the water mellowed to a faint mineral taste as she forced herself to relax.  After drinking two whole goblets full, she hefted the cup one-handed.  Solid gold still surprised her with its weight.

"Only the best for the Emperor.  Thank you for your help."

She called out as she stretched to her feet in the cool dimness of the shadowed and echo laden hollow.  The watching shade winced at her words of gratitude, while watching her leaning over to splash water on her face.    The need to play a role had passed, and now she/he/it held its place without peace of spirit.

To take his mind off such dire things, he struggled to remember the emotions that such a lean and graceful female body would have evoked in his past life, but to no success.  Actually, she seemed rather skinnier than he expected from his memories.  He and it consulted his memories.  She appeared attractive to judge by his reactions to other less physically ideal females when he had been flesh and blood, but still she looked cadaverously thin, and indeed scrawnier compared to memories that he/she/it could not access, but felt waited below his surface where the minds had merged.  Indeed, even thinking of those forbidden things, tilted his/its consciousness into her control so that the questions faded in the transition like thin and scouring sand blown on the desert wind.

The shade mused to her quiet partners of the similarity between this unlikely savior and her own self.  She had felt increasingly attenuated this past century.  As the centuries of her guardianship wore on, this last chance hope for survival waned.  The ecosystem failed, and the faith of the subjects of her/its/his world began to lose their faith in the power of the fabled Emperor to reach out of time and protect them and their heirs from the madness unleashed by a selfish fool at the center of the galaxy.

There remained not much time left for the Emperor‘s Last Outpost, and if this one could not be leaned on for help then things looked grim for the survivors.  Looking at this one, a female of some race (the other parts of the merge knew, but the She did not) which she did not attempt to discern for boldness had been long beaten out of her, and the shade saw the visitor did not seem not ready if she would ever be.  Still this one would have to be made to serve if all possible.

  And he/it/she could only hope that the dice roll worked, for even at best this represented a gamble on a slim chance.  But that instinct for life for the many he protected increasingly poorly pushed him.  And the result of this desperate calculation dictated that this visitor not have peace or hospitality within the Shade’s realm.

End of Chapter Four.






Chapter Five: Along the Beach



Jackson woke from the giant centipede sting’s agony feeling blurred and shaky and thoroughly wet.  Indeed, sopping wet up to his knees, he saw that whenever a wave thundered in too land his legs would flop up and down, in a random pattern.  The tide came in slow, but gained momentum rapidly.  The large man scrambled to his feet, and worriedly surveyed the rising water with a few snapshot glances.
Turning around, he staggered forward into a momentary pool of a half-foot of brine with bits of twigs and other stuff floating in it.  His sword lay where he had flung it in his agony.  Jackson went back to the hole, and saw no centipedes left, only foot-long turtle eggs with splotched on cream colored leathery shells.  The insect snacks had probably floated off with the tide, he thought gratefully.  Jackson retrieved the few remaining items of his.  The bright blue water resistant diver’s watch floated submerged between two eggs, and a splayed open, water-soaked copy of Wolfling that he had been in the midst of reading, and in some bizarre twist of fate had been transferred from the downstairs den to this beach were all that he could see.  Both had been left in the hole by some acquisitive and gigantic sea turtle, along with his unsheathed murder weapon.
His hand throbbed a bit, but it was not inflamed.  Jackson studied it, curious, and more than a bit alarmed.  A gash went all the way to his finger bone in his right hands’ index finger.  He knew from Kara’s case that a needle jab all the way to the bone was terrible in its agony.  Still his hand had not inflamed.  This surprised him.
It had probably been an unparalyzed and still surviving centipede that had got his probing finger, as the little terror lay docile amongst its forcibly impaired brethren.  You would think that the poison would have doubled his hand size by now.  Resolutely, he ignored any implications of that, aided by the rising water.
Taking several steps up the beach to the still dry sand, he slipped on the watch, and gently crammed the still wet paperback novel into the left back pocket.  The right back pocket, his wallet resided in by long habit.  The sword, he held by the hilt since the scabbard was not on available.
A few more steps in his bare feet, with the sand irritating his cut, and a disturbed section of sand caught his eye.  More cautiously this time, he fished out the novel, and mentally apologizing to the author, Lars Walker, he used it as a makeshift shovel to dish aside the skirmishing waves of sand.  The effort popped loose the scabbard, and gold Cross® pen, an affectation that he almost never used as a pen, but as a pointer for his occasional Powerpoint presentation to a small company interested in his database management and construction services.
It took several minutes of shaking the black and green ribbon banded scabbard before he was fully convinced no sand remained inside, and even then he cracked open one of the leather buckles on the scabbard just to take a peek inside for certainty.  The ache of his injured hand forbad a more thorough check, but he felt sure that it was clean.  Thus he slipped the naked katana home.
  Holding the blade in front of him, he studied the jungle even as the waves rushed in behind. Dense foliage, so tightly packed that the evening sea winds hardly moved the greenery except for the very tops hid its secrets well.  But he could tell, just from looking at the trunks of the trees, if they were trees, that the local biology was going to be very different from Arizona.  When the waves began lapping at his feet, he had no choice but to move upward.  Soon he reached the edge of the jungle, and he nerved himself to enter.  No snake or bird rose up and contested his passage, or even made its presence known.  The jungle seemed singularly empty or even dead for such a lush and vibrant entity.
He pushed aside the fronds of a lesser copy of one of the great not-trees near him.  It reminded him more of a monstrous fern, but with bark along most of its “trunk”.  Spread out underneath its leaves of great length lay his stuff from the house back in Arizona.  Calmly he considered, and then he agreed with his own prognosis.  Wherever he might be, it was not in Arizona, and wherever home stood in relation to his present locale remained disturbingly undecided.
A rattan sword, he easily found among the tiny, or normal Earth-scale ferns that carpeted the alien jungle floor.  He told himself, he spotted it so effortlessly because of the yellow and black colors of the handle.  But in truth he had known where to look from the start.  Even if the colors did not match he gratefully stacked it next to his real sword.  It would serve as cane, or blocking weapon, or indeed as its original purpose as a practice tool.

A backpack celebrating Luke Skywalker, he scooped up next.  Hefting its weight with a shake, he decided it had everything still in it.  A worn, sky-blue background iron-on patch of Princess Leia added little to the attractiveness of the scruffy bag.  But he liked it anyways for it reminded him of boyhood fantasies. Too bad he had not found a woman like the Princess, he groused to himself as he slipped it on his back.
Computer reference manuals for a near half-dozen Window‘s application programs, and a small bag of dice unlike the roleplaying gamers he knew with their Crown Royal bags bursting with every sort of die imaginable, and a HO scale freight train car he‘d been researching the history of, and a half-dozen boxes of bottle rockets that he had meant to drop off at the Mendoza Hills Rescue Mission for days now, filled the main space of the backpack.  He wondered if he ever would be able to drop off the bottle rockets now. Clothes, a whetstone, and some other items completed the assembly.
He had begun to expect the worse, and this slowed him down.  It made him cautious and thoughtful as he moved about in an alien environment.  He looked for the unexpected traps that could cripple or kill.  From many different sources he had heard that a crippling injury could be nearly as bad as being killed if you were alone in an untamed wilderness since the one usually led to the other.
Jackson looked deeper into the darkening jungle all about him with its plenteous trees and not-trees, and where in the few spaces not occupied by a trunk he could not see further than ten feet into its dimness, and decided that this qualified as untamed wilderness.  Somehow, he did not expect to see a subdivision of huge houses and tiny lawns being willed into being by a developer any time soon.  Ordinarily, that would have made him happy, since he disliked “city in the country” thinking that it combined the worse features of both, but here and now he would have fallen down and kissed the nearest square packet of turfs just laid down in planning for a real lawn.
A set of jeweler’s screwdrivers in a five-in-one screwdriver, and a sprocket set, and a magnetometer completed his array that he kept in the outer pocket of the backpack.   The well-worn patch of Princess Leia covered the pocket flap, for good luck like hers, as he described it to any who asked.  Personally, he thought that Carrie Fisher had been outstanding in the role.  He’d had a crush on her for some months after watching Star Wars for the first time.
Too bad the rest of her career had not been as stellar as the beginning.  But still, how many people even get one shot at greatness?  Goodness knows, it had evaded him so far.
Scooping up the rest of his stuff remained suspiciously easy.  Jackson studied the problem for a bit as night came crashing down around him.  Then he realized his mistake.  The time for pure science or any type of science is when you can afford to do it, he lectured himself as he peered about in dismay.  Near total dark with only starlight to light his path in a thick jungle darkened his mood.  Where to go to sleep?

Looking about, he heard a movement in the brush.

    He instinctively grabbed his two swords, and supposition flared into being, but he logically forced it aside for now.
  Concentrate.  He warned himself as he stepped back cautiously and testingly to the beach.  A foot of land stood out as the apparent shelf to hold him on between black and murky waters to his right, and the trackless jungle on the other hand.  And nothing came out of the jungle to eat him, yet.  Jackson waited for five minutes, by his watch, and nothing came out of the trees with fang and claw extended.  Sighing, he put up his swords in their respective sheathes, and looking about nervously grabbed the rest of his stuff.
Fleeing at a dignified pace, he wandered down the handy beach path for long minutes growing increasingly pleased with himself.  He stopped to
A slight crunch from behind him spun him about like a Wild West desperado, and pierced his delusions of adequacy.  Nothing to see out of, what he had come to call the ordinary greeted him.  Only fronds swaying in the wind mocked him with uncertainties.
He pressed on.  A heavy bit of leaf, sword shaped for a giant, extended over his pathway and above the lapping waves.  He jabbed at it several times with his rattan practice sword.  No great and rude beast from a nightmare launched itself skyward, or horizontally for his throat.  Still nervous, he pushed his way into the mass of leaves, and shortly out the other side.

“Well, I’m still in one piece.”

He told the jungle in a soft and slow voice.

Continuing on brought him stretches that were totally covered by water.  At first thin sheens, but then full puddles.  Upset to traverse the foaming water, and wondering in his half-dazed state if an undertow could form in six inches of water, he plodded ahead anyways.  It only harmed his nerve, and his rewetted feet.  Happily the salt water did not sting his cut, so the seashell’s dastardly attack must have closed by now.  He patted his feet dry, and took out a spare set of socks, and his “hiking” boots which did not get used for any sort of hiking more than traipsing up and down city streets, but held up his weight admirably.  Putting them on took a couple minutes in the near dark, but he had done it so many times that the lack of illumination hardly slowed him.

Then the rains came.  Big, fat droplets spotted the water to his left first, and then seemed in his overexcited and dour imagination to concentrate on him.  Jackson looked about for shelter.  Nothing was readily visible so he kept on into the deepening shower.
A hundred more feet brought him to a hollow tree of enormous proportions.  Its canting fall had collapsed and tore the neat fenceline of the jungle’s edge transforming it, in a smashing second, into a small clearing facing the tumultuous water.  Jackson made for the monstrous trunk, overtopping his head by a handspan or more, with weary relief only to be stopped by a large two-legged shadow that stepped out from under a spreading palm just short of his target.  Thinking he might be spooking himself in the inconstant light, he advanced toward it, and shortly saw teeth glinting in a brightly friendly face.  Shocked, his heart started to pound loudly, and his fingers felt nerveless.
A green and roughening sea surged to the beast’s right, and his left which made escape that way deadly.  Going back?  Perhaps, that might work, for otherwise it was the clearing and the beast.  Looking closer, he saw feathers that clung tight to its form.  In the main, it looked like a titanic ostrich.  But it had the attitude of the wolf.
It was not an accident that the creature showed itself.  He was being hunted, Jackson knew with sinking determination.  While he still had courage and time he needed to act.  Flexing his fingers to reaquaint them with command, he pushed the fear down by posing to himself the computer’s choice.  A binary set of fight or flee with no setting for stand and dither in terror.
The beast understood his increased enthusiasm, and moved to block his path.  Such action could not be friendly.  He drew his katana and flourished it so that the faint bits of moonlight that got through the clouds shone off the razor-sharp blade.  Jackson dropped into his beginning horse stance, and swept though a short kata meant to get the delicately stepping creature to understand horror of his fang killing it.
  A crunch to his right, and behind him eased his unconscious worry about making an idiot of himself.  The fang-toothed monster’s response to his demonstration attempted to prove that the effort, any effort, by him would be useless.  He would be swarmed when they got good and ready.  No single fang would be enough to save him from being lead item on the dinner buffet.

What to do?

Still holding his katana with his left hand, and occasionally flourishing it, Jackson shuffled around in his backpack for the thin and rectangular boxes of cardboard.  Taking the first one out with trembling fingers felt like the hardest thing he had ever done.  His fingers clutched steel-hard on the box of minor fireworks.  Bottle rockets, hmm, I hope you work.  He thought and prayed as he told his fingers to open the box by ripping a lapel at one end loose.
The fingers in his left hand remained obstinately crushing the lightweight container for fear of his dropping it.  He cursed his weakness in his head while maintaining a pleasant smile for the pack of carnivores that had him surrounded.
The leader cocked his scaled head inquisitively.   The mass of it was uncertain, but the size was about a football.  A similar shape as well, with a bent back ruft of feathers like a Mohawk haircut down the center held his eye as the head flicked back and forth in quick spurts and jabs that were not at all human.   A mouth, almost of the size to take Jackson’s whole head in opened, and a dozen glittering stiletto teeth shone pale and sickly in the moonlight.

Definitely a carnivore.

Jackson thought that only curiosity kept him alive right now.  His heart lurched as the leader indicated boredom by turning aside.   The most casual threat of death Jackson had heard in a second-hand tale did not match this, and for a moment his mouth hung open at the sheer audacity and impudence of the creature.
He wanted to yell defiance. The craving for respect passed reason and his survival instinct.  Or maybe, the capacity for rage maintained another way for his survival instinct to get him moving.  Maybe a frantic little man huffed and puffed in his head while punching and hammering motivation buttons as fast and hard as he could do so.
I am a man.  Fear me. Jackson knew that species not familiar with humanity would not recognize a human as the superior species, but he emoted anyways striving to push the thought into the air.  First, he did not concede that he might have traveled far enough to make unfamiliarity a problem.  Second, he simply did not care, or so he half-believed. He tried to proclaim the message out loud, but his courage failed.
The alpha male, a two-legged dinosaur, looked back sharply.  The prey had changed.  It stood like a youngling of another predatorial species, and the smells of battle lust that wafted off it were strange and bitter.  But still, no danger appeared to the perceptions of the lead one, none that the pack could not deal with anyways.  The single claw moved slow and feeble, and better it could not protect from all sides.  The pack would feed soon.
  But to be safe, he would wait a bit to draw the prey’s secrets from it.  They had time.  The prey, with his worry and tenseness, would get tired before them.  He had no doubt the pack could take the prey, but it better to take him without injury to a valuable pack member.  And the prey stood too small to interest one of the greater ones, or so the lead one hoped.  Not sure, for he was young at his role in the pack as the eldest two had died last week in strange fire.
But, while Jackson’s lungs would not draw the oxygen for the bold gesture he wanted still more good came of it.  The courage drawn up from the well of his spirit could be turned aside like water for another use.  He did so with a graceful touch.  The same cool flexibility of mind that coexisted with fears and rages made him a good wargamer, and a fine programmer.  Now, it might save his life as he pushed past, around his fears.
  A Bic® lighter that he kept for sentimental reasons of memory slipped out of his pocket in the company of his hand, and the box of bottle rockets.  A grandfather, now gone, had sped himself on the way with the lighter and the accompanying cigarettes, but more to the point had entertained a young child by making flame appear and disappear.  Deftly reaching over and rubbing the edge of the cardboard lapel,  Jackson kept his eye on the lead one even though he was certain the attack would come from behind.  If the situation fell to pieces anymore than it already had he intended to jump toward their ’spokesman’, and make them defend themselves.
The lapel came up, and he tore it three-fourths loose with his keyboardist trained and flexible fingers.  He upended the carton confident that not all of the rockets would fall free.  They were his flight to freedom, and he thought that surely he would need more than one.  The other fourth of the lapel caught most of them, and only let a couple slide a half-inch clear.  No doubt such a falling pattern had been discussed in the offices of some manufacturer, and deemed a good thing.  For Jackson, the minor flaw threatened to throw him out of his groove, and back into his stasis.
Still eyeballing the lead creature, Jackson scooted the box through his hand, and his palm now sticky with sweat, and drew out a couple rockets while holding his breath long enough to make him wonder why he got dizzy.  He breathed in and out, and then flicked his Bic®.  The monster in front of him leaned back.
Flame spouted on the end of the bottle rocket’s fuse.  He held it for a long count, and then tossed it.
The pack of hunters lurched back with eerie grace.  Their long and thin necks twisted in unpredictable patterns, and so too their upper bodies but to a lesser degree.   But Jackson kept his eye firmly on the spokesman in front of him who had done as the others, and then turned its teeth-slicing head back to watch.
Flung from his hand toward the creature in front of him, the bottle rocket began to ignite.  Jackson did not know if he wanted a long flight or a short one and a boom nearby.  Which would scare the beasts worse he wondered?
A wave came in and its top-most froth caught the fuse.  It sputtered, and re-caught, and fell into the water.  When the water sloshed back out to sea, only a blackened rocket remained amidst the seashells.
Determined even more to live now that he had almost seen his plan succeed, Jackson reached for another rocket.  But with cunning more than animal, the lead creature eyed him, and hissed as it stalked forward.  Not knowing what to do, Jackson gave into instinct for a second.
Perhaps it would end up giving him time to climb a tree or a gigantic fern?  He hoped, taking his katana in his left hand and charging forward with a lot of zaishin, or spirit.  But he used his best understanding of the term, which meant that he swung and yelled with a lot of enthusiasm.  The lead dinosaur stopped, and then tried to backpedal.  Jackson’s advance left no time for such niceties.  The creature turned and fled, but it did so only for a distance.
It knew that the youngling’s legs were ill suited to running.  The flankers would catch up to it in a moment, and cripple it.  The creature vaguely hoped for a hamstrung cut for that would mean that the prey would be alive and helpless.  The creature could not articulate why this thought pleased him, but it did.  And this type of thought that his kind had always had separated his kind from the others.
  He heard nothing from behind.  The pack hunters were weak in that area because they were meant to be the chasers.  So he turned his head back again, chancing a strike to see what the strangeling prey was up to this time.
Jackson had stopped and kneeled because he suspected they would try to hamstring him.  He hunched his shoulders, and hoped his backpack would protect his kidneys.  Searing pain lanced his left shoulder and he bit out a curse that would have shamed him normally.  Another strike almost simultaneously gouged his left hip.  The pain just encouraged him to move faster.
He shook the box upside down, and suddenly time seemed to slow.  Seeing each rocket individually as the clump of them cleared the box, he breathed out, and dropped the box, and snatched the rockets with the same hand.  Reversing the rockets, he gave the Bic® a long flare of flame as he ran it across all the rockets.  They caught strongly, and he flung all but one away from him to the left and right and lastly behind himself.
The last one he held by its stick like a throwing knife.

“Don’t try this at home, kids.”

He said with irrelevant mockery to the creature slowing in front of him.  Rising to his feet he heard the hisses and booms around him, and the pack scrambling away.  Grinning in exultant victory he moved his arm a tad to prepare to throw the last rocket.   Enough and more for the creature staring at him in dismay; the alpha male bolted.
  Jackson drew back his arm and smoothly and without excessive force flung the rocket, but his throw could not outpace the incredible acceleration of the dinosaur.  The rocket caught, and it gained on the creature to explode a few feet from its backside, and send the lead one into a mindless and panicked rout screeching out its dismay and fear to all who heard.  Jackson leaned back and laughed long and hard.  He did not realize it, but it sounded to the denizens of the jungle like the war cry of a powerful predator.
Many in the jungle determined to stay clear of this new creature, but there were many who cared not that he had beat back a puny flock.  They did so every day.
Jackson waxed ecstatic for long moments.  Now he began to understand why people sought out dangerous situations.  He had always avoided them with a thoroughly justified caution, but now he wondered if he had been depriving himself.
The air inhaled so sweetly, and the crash of the waves sounded like joy.   He wanted to jump up and down, but he decided to press onward instead.  Soon he came to appreciate the lack of wisdom in that decision because as the adrenaline rush left him so did the last light of the moon and the stars as the cloud cover moved to a hundred percent.
He walked at the edge of a jungle that suddenly had new noises.  Worried, he drew out a box, and got another bottle rocket.  That did not seem enough so he went back for another one.   Still his fears remained hovering about, and he recognized as he staggered from exhaustion that his adrenaline crash left him hardly in shape to meet any sort of enemy.
So he turned about and went back until he came upon the fallen tree at the woodline with a hollow trunk.  Shockingly tired by now as the adrenaline rush had fully left him, he considered it a godsend.  He forced himself to be reasonably cautious looking for quantities of crawling bugs, and mammalian residents alike.  Not a thorough search, but the best he could manage during this exhausted moment as he wobbled around using his Maglite® for a quick inspection.  He clambered in, and lay down in the confined space for most of the trunk was still solid.
Jackson woke to the sound of repeated booms.

End of Chapter Five.

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Chapter Six: A Spell Prepared  abcd--need work making shade more likable and driven

The Shade watched as the newcomer to his domain stretched out to sleep by the Pool of the Ruby.  Obvious to even his/its precipitations, even dimmed by great age that beyond the problems of a bone-jutting figure, her body showed deeper signs of being dreadfully ill.  Well she would not get much medical care here.  Such were luxuries in this, the last outpost of the Empire.

It shall not fall, while I stand, he promised his sources, as he/her always did when the Shade thought of the charge given him by the Emperor.  The sources were faint beacons who lived in his memory even if he could not remember them as any more than a snatch of phrase, and an intent to save this last planet.

Bleary-eyed, the newcomer drove her body to her feet after nearly getting comfortable on the sand, and began to open a near half-dozen bottles for pills of various sizes, mostly large and cylindrical.  The names written on the side of the little, orange plastic containers meant nothing to him, but he did know that such a profusion of bottles spoke negatively about her health.  Finished and obviously disgruntled by forgetting an uncomfortable duty, the newcomer forced her body back to the chosen resting spot by the pool.

Curious, it watched the energy flows within her body as the pills took effect.  Much of these patterns of force seemed to consist in rebalancing things which other medicines had set off-balance.  In sum, the mass of drugs weighed her down toward death, although the Shade could see the knot that the drugs were trying to untie with clumsy fingers.  But even the primary flows of energy were too poorly targeted, and created destructive whirlpools of distracting force with more frequency than they helped.  Indeed one had no constructive purpose at all.

Baffled, it shared the view with the others who only sadly nodded for such agreed with the general sense of their memories, even if the specifics were blocked by the Sources or simply faded.  Medicines only poorly aided the sick, and with such crudity that many died who had they simply another arrangement of medicines need not have.  The whole thing seemed inefficient to it, and sadly barbaric to the others.

After watching fitful sleeping for many hours, and gathering his strength, he/it had a fierce attack of moral compunction.  Is this visitor really a verser?  There were other ways to world travel he knew from his memories of his Sources’ studies under many mystics and mages on eerie worlds and equally among humdrum landscapes.  If she is not, then you are killing her, sacrificing an innocent on the altar of political expediency.  And if she is, then are you not still doing so?  He nodded yes to his own question.  Yet he, for he was almost fully a he, at this moment, determined to go ahead with the plan.  A small chance of life for his many he protected justified risking her life in his mind.  Still, if he had a throat, his heart would have been in it.

The Shade reached back and remembered one of their most ancient memories.  A sun-dappled room, a half-full classroom, and a teacher leaning against a desk who soon became aghast at his horrible behavior formed his oldest study group.

“In Falkin’s theory of justice if a deed increases the good for all but one without harming that one, then that deed is inadmissible.”

“Will this be on the test?”

A voice called out.  The teacher ignored it as he concentrated on indoctrinating them into his latest enthusiasm.

“If I could start a great enterprise, an organization, that would vastly benefit millions of people, but one person would not receive blessing, should I do so?  Falkin would say no.  Indeed, we should save everyone.”

The teacher stood and paced as he finished the question. His voice acquired intensity and precision.  The students were hooked.

A looking back and forth among the females, and then a looking to them by the males decided the question quickly.  The females, in that class as in most, held the moral center of gravity.  In that culture, decried by many as a patriarchy, the females set the agenda for the society, and the males to win their approval tried to carry it out.

And without much surprise, the Shade recalled disagreeing with everybody including the professor who strove to conceal his approval of his class so as to seem objective.  The Shade considered that he or was it she had been harsh.  The professor had no doubt wanted to be impartial, but he also wanted to inculculate the proper moral attitudes as he saw them.  This led to a less than perfect poker face, and subtle hints such as smiles for those with correct understanding.

“I think yes.”

The shade’s source had said standing up in defiance of the groupthink.  The question seemed obvious to him, and he could not hold his tongue.  It would be nice to save everyone, but you could not, so why worry about it?

“Why?”

The professor asked impatiently.

“Isn’t everything founded on innocent blood?”  The Shade had gone completely the other way, trying to appeal to the professor by using the man’s, (or was it a wholly different gender than something human?) own terms.  Memories wound together so that he did not know, who or what had experienced this or that.  He looked to the past, and saw a faded collage of different lives with parts that might well be sheerest fantasy.

The professor saw things in utter black and white.  Either a project was wholly noble, without any taint of selfishness, or it was utterly black-hearted.  This was the logic that the Shade had tried to bend back on the man, but to no avail.  His attempt at being clever was ignored, and his dissent was memorialized, eventually in the school newspaper.

Affrighted by true disagreement, the professor turned loose the dogs of political correctness on the student who yawned, not much bothered.  You had to be sensitive to be bothered by “a pack of Chihuahuas” as the student had told his friends as he dealt with the attacks.  Eventually, it went beyond the class.  He had wanted to get written up in the school newspaper, but not as a moral leper.  But he continued to cheerfully assert his position over the weeks, even past the point where the whole thing bored him.

Only one girl, that day, had raised her head from the book she used to ignore everyone in the class, and asked an intelligent question.

“Behind every great fortune, there is a great crime?”

She had asked with quizzing eyes.

Excited, he had pounded a fist into his hand, which he had never done before, but it seemed the thing to do.

“Exactly.”  Not that he meant that, but how to get all his words out of him, and so he had gone for the quick answer.  That was why this memory kept digging at him.  Long ago, he would have accepted the memories of harassment and the laughter behind his back, and the spray-painted car, but the seed of the tree of his pain was the knowledge that he could have spoken true and clear, but chose to be lazy.

She looked disappointed and returned to her book.  And he had wondered how he had failed again to win the green-eyed girl’s respect.  That question, he had been quite used to by then, seeing as he asked it a dozen times a week.  The Girl, as he thought of her, studied philosophy, and theatre, and sociology.  He has almost had her, but somehow she still saw him as stupid, juvenile.

The powerful memories of being denied The Girl and the related persecution affected the shade as he hoped.  They still hurt because even though he had deluded himself into believing his soul an invulnerable tower; it had not been true, for even the strongest tower could be besieged. 

But the various hurts in a complex medley that left him not knowing how to draw out the poison brought back strength with its pain.  It revived a dusty life force that puttered patiently inside him.  The new power coursed through him with a perilous electricity however.  It threatened to slip loose of his timeworn grasp, and rend him asunder like lightning hitting an ancient tree.  For the Shade was not much more than Memory and Will constrained by a few ancient scraps of sorcery and the time-eaten remnants of a great sacrifice to try to redeem a greater evil.

Gasping under the impact of the power and with tears of regret at a long dust piece of sophomoric foolishness, and the wholly predictable reaction of a wobbling establishment that felt frightened caused a power surge to spin through his/her/its being.  The images of the tears as they fell only heightened the power which increased the strength of the memory, and began to throw loose sparks of knowledge into the ether, and so the cycle fed on itself, until he blanked his mind with a scream that surely was heard by every sensitive across the Bright Side of the Emperor’s Last Outpost.

His visitor sat bolt upright, and looked about unseeing, and he did not notice such was his agony as her/it drew him back together again.  And Kara lay back down to dream troubled dreams of college boys screaming her name.

Waiting and watching for the visitor to wake through the middle of the ‘night’ caused no hardship for him after he reconstituted. Indeed, it gave him/her/it pause to accommodate to the new spurt of power, and since an inhuman patience came easy for the Shade with no flesh to sustain the tick-tock of time’s onrushing need for novelty, he/she/it merely noted the brightening of the light as the upper clouds evaporated, aided by complex mechanical devices buried in the crust of this refuge planet.  On this planet, the ordinary turn of day and night was impossible, so the Emperor had done his best by cloaking the planet in clouds during the “night”.  But lately, just a century ago, the machines for that had begun to fail.  And what had been an arid, but habitable land approached true dessert.

The light rose outside the cavern was data that inspired no action, other than a brief hope that soon they might find a home, or there would be no need.   Worst still, the Shade knew that logic and its structure would allow it to survive longer than anything on the planet, even the Ches-la-ver-min-at, a wyrm-like and singular intelligence who delved even deeper than the Takhiernas, would die before him, for the great mind was still just matter.  Why he/she/it might be so unlucky as to survive until the Man of Bones came at the head of his armies to claim his dessert at a grand buffet of pain.

The visitor got up after a while, and wandered about cleaning a knife blade of a dried seed, and rearranged her backpack for greater ease of carrying, and visited a shadowy spot to refresh herself.  Then she made her way back over to the pond as the Shade continued to watch invisibly.

Once seated again, and eating one of her three granola bars, the visitor looked around to study her enclosure since the Shade did not seem to be around.   A small pond of remarkably clear water centered the space and lay in an indentation in the sand in the fifty-foot long open cavern.  The refuge from the strangeness of the ball of light outside looked formed out of massive rocks fallen tilted against each other, and stolid with ancientness so beyond his/her/its age as to make the Shade the veriest infant.  It had found and surveyed the giant bones of some mammoth creature in the corner of the room buried under the thick sand lost in some ancient era from before the Shade or even its Sources came.

On the far side, past the pond lay several more yards of sand, and then a lighter spot against the rocks hinted at another exit.  To the visitor’s right, past where she had refreshed herself, drifted a decline into darkness that the visitor had seemed to not notice until she looked around thoroughly.  Above the visitor’s scanning binocular vision, as its versatile neck craned backward, the A-frame of the tilted rock slabs faded into darkness which the visitor could not know. with its clearly as evidenced by its occasionally stumbles, spectrum-limited vision,  met in an irregular roof  forty and fifty feet up.

The visitor stood facing the pond in the dim light that flowed in the entrance, and leaned back, trying some alien ritual, he/she/it imagined.  Probably religious in nature, the “it” part speculated as popping sounds from the visitor’s back lofted over to the Shade’s sensitive hearing.

The grunts were probably prayers, and this seemed as good a time as any.  Strike while the victim lay in communion with a God, and the burden of what might be a murder would rest lighter on the Shade.  Somehow, he doubted it, but he would pay any price necessary to save the Empire’s Last Outpost.

He spoke the words of a spell learned on a distant plane by her original Source, and the Shade swayed and for a second flickered in the drain of vital energies. No thoughts or anything other than the potential for them existed for miniature spans within that second. One of my most pressing questions almost got answered it thought solemnly as it stabilized.  Do incomplete and faded copies of memories have a soul, an afterlife?



Kara felt a great weariness start in her legs, and spread to her back, which she had been vigorously stretching and popping.  The fog of weakness spread thence to her mind.  She tried to step back, and away from the water‘s edge which suddenly looked dangerous, but the ground lurched or she wobbled.


The shade weighed his options quickly.  Had he been alive he would have been terrified, but all he had left of his original’s substance was intellect and logic with a leavening of other things like emotions with the name, but not the force. Thankfully, this kinetic strike he contemplated, took less out of the merge named the Shade, being a simpler spell than the other suppression of energy of life

. "Once more into the breach, dear friends."  He/it quoted to himself.  He struck at her thighs with a smashing crash of kinetic force that continued outward to carry her into the pond.  She would drown he concluded.  Everything would work out.

Kara felt her body being driven forward by a nigh irresistible force like a wooden desk being rammed into her legs, and she instinctively spun into a back flip.  The axis of spin was too low, and she moved slow in her dazed shock.  The ground smacked her hard in the face.  For a moment, the Shade exulted and then for ten minutes the Shade hoped.  She remained, she did not disappear, and no pile of dust replaced her body.  He/her did something he could not remember clearly the last time he did.  He cursed futilely as his/her/its victim dragged herself back to her feet.

"What happened?  Shade, Emperor, are you there?"

Kara spit blood out past her once white teeth.  She felt her teeth with her tongue, wincing, but doing a thorough job.  Nothing knocked out or wobbly she noted with distant gratitude.  A prying finger double-checked, and wiped sand particles clean from her mouth.

She ran a strong hand over her chin.  Its cuteness spoiled by a large abrasion, and contact with her hand sent spikes of pain through her skull.  Still she kept up the self-exam.  A broken jaw would be disastrous in her situation.  If she could not talk to the locals, then they might easily do all manner of normal to them, but horrifying to her, things.  Everything worked properly, she found as she gingerly rotated her jaw, and then she realized she had already spoke.

"I'm missing a couple cards from my deck.  Better go look on the floor for them."  Her wan voice drifted out and faded into the distance like it had never been.  She made an effort to clear her mind.  It had little effect, and indeed she felt miserable like what she expected later in her fight with cancer.  Her left arm, the one burdened with the cancer, began to ache in a way that an ordinary person would be hard put to ignore.

Something about staying here seemed a bad idea, as if the atmosphere was oppressive and deadly, and so she warily walked outside into the night air.  A moment of nerves paused her next to the spot on the tunnel wall in which the Shade hid herself while he stopped cursing, and tried to remain calm.  She and He and It conferred together mere inches from Kara;  the visitor they deemed held the power to be a latent and maybe even a full-blown sensitive.  For his/her/its long-range plans that helped, but if he had a disaster in the short-range then the long-range would not matter.  If she was a Sensitive, she might be able to kill the Shade right now, in its moment of prostration.  And there was little doubt that it would be justified, for had not the Shade tried to murder her?  The Shade asked itself these questions feeling revulsed at itself, and its duty.

Kara walked out into the not-night;  well lit by the blazing thing in the sky.  A soft touch of psionic suggestion brushed her mind, and since she really had little preference it sufficed.  She turned right, and headed forth on her original course.  The Shade had said that other people lived here.  She would just have to find them.

Walking cleared her mind, and let the fight-or-flight adrenaline rush be washed out of her blood by the already over-taxed physical cleaning systems in her body.  An easy-going and altogether cooler stroll with a stomach full of water sloshing around in her was a far distant thing compared to her desperate trek of earlier during what she considered the daytime.  Meanwhile,  the spell to suppress her life force took an unintended toll.  The bone cancer in her system saw holes in the defenses of her already frail body, and sluggish responses from the protective agents, and malevolent and out-of-control cells surged outward growing and metastisizing.  What had been two years off, suddenly shrank to mere months.  But still Kara felt mostly fine, although her arm ached with each beat of her pulse.

No heat rained from that brightness in the sky, and she found herself able to  look on it without hurt.  Once she might not have chanced staring at the Sun, or whatever it was, or at least not so thoroughly as she did now, instead she gave it considerable study.  Her defense against years of parental counsel to ‘not look at the Sun’ was asking herself the worse thing that could happen, and that brought a sarcastic response.  I could hasten the onset of blindness by five years so that at ninety instead of ninety-five I go blind?  By then I will have been dead well over sixty years she told herself.

Laughter trickled up out of her throat, and she just let it come.  Standing there on the nearly empty plain of pale, reddish dust dotted by an occasional darker blotch of half-stumbled stones while some unknown light filled the sky from horizon to horizon made her chuckle.  She started to smile for the first time in days at the weirdness surrounding her.  The madness of her situation became all just too much of a muchness.  Kara laughed out loud so that her voice cracked off a nearby butte.  One piece of insanity might have brought her to her feet with screams of terror, but this was beyond any reasonable, or even unreasonable expectation she had ever had.  The full minute of hilarity passed, and she felt better although she could not say for sure what had originally aroused her humor.  The episode made little sense in her now more cheerful frame of mind.

“Okay, let’s think this out logically.  Kerry, what a dweeb, had said woman were more emotional than logical.  I ditched him after two dates.  Let’s prove mound of muscles wrong.”

  She spoke to herself as she began again with her casual walking across the pleasantly cool dessert.

“That is not the Sun above me, not mine, and from what little I remember of my astronomy class, not any sun.  It’s whitish.  And a white star is a white dwarf, I think, and should therefore not eat the sky.  The only thing that might work would be a planet in a far orbit of a super-giant that somehow in total disagreement with modern astronomy is not red, but white.”

  She paused to take a breath and collect her thoughts.

The Shade listened as well as it could from a distance without wasting power to bestir itself.  If this visitor had great powers of  imagination she might begin to guess the truth.  The Shade wondered if that would be bad, but it did not know. So, he/it would not intervene.  Besides, the plan was to let the candidate run on her own for a while to develop strength.

“Now we know that any theory in disagreement with modern science is a priori wrong.  That is until next week, when the establishment changes its mind and speaks ex cathedra to show the new revealed truth.”

She spoke sarcastically and knew herself to be somewhat unjust, but they had failed her; she died slowly, and right now justice seemed in limited supply.  Sticking her lips together firmly in rejection of expected behavior would have reminded any of her older relatives of a little girl who would compress her lips as she politely defined bull-headedness with her ways.

The dust had cooled while she slept, and idly she wondered what walking out here in her sandals would be like.  It would probably feel good for a while, and then the dust would start to cake to your feet in an icky manner.  Not like sand, but more like walking in baby powder.

*Not at all.  The powder is most comfortable.  A good roll in it is always wonderful.*

And the Shade drew back for this race, above all others, offered the greatest danger of discovery.  The Takhiernas were naturally telepathic from before birth.  They had a supple grace to their minds that matched their bodies, and fighting one was always troublesome.

A precise, and leathery voice in her head objected with courtesy but definite disagreement.  She pictured a dapper English gentleman lord at his country estates speaking such, and she laughed in response to her fantasy.

*I do not look that way.  I am not ugly.*

"Pardon me."

Kara said fighting back giggles.  Knowing that she sounded frivolous, like a teenybopper, but Kara thought, really, what else was there to do with voices in her head?  She would as soon die with a song on her lips as a scream, she thought with a definite sense of freedom as certain mental shackles fell off.

*Agreed.*

The mental voice said dryly with a touch of mischief notable in the tone.
A long, rainbow scaled neck slid out of an unnoticed hole ten feet in front, and five feet to the left of her advance.  The wedge-shaped head turned toward her, and goggled.

*Great star of the Emperor’s sceptre!  But you are, unusual, possibly unique in  my experience.  What species are you?"*

"Human, and you?"

She forced herself to ask the question, and hoped that she did not break some social taboo.  The creature’s neck extended for at least two feet out of the hole with no sign of shoulders.  It was as flexible as the body of a boa constrictor which it resembled in size and muscles, but the glittering scales attached to its neck were utterly different.  Its head was a wedge that came to a several inch square point, and a small mouth opened just half and inch with a tongue flicking out to taste the air.  The eyes were on the sides of the head, and gleamed like lost phosphorescence deep in the ocean.  The outer rim of the eye was a deep turquoise, and the inner ring was midnight blue with the inmost retina area, if such creatures had those, being the glowing of an inner light.

*I am a Takhierna; of the Ninth House of the Clan of The Setting Sun.  Our enemies fear and tremble at our shadow.  What is a human?  I do not remember or know all the races that joined with us in the Great Flight for I stay close to home.*

"Bipedal, mammal, we do not have telepathy."  Kara remembered that the Shade had mentioned this species in its list of the locals on this planet.   She spoke with an increasingly hard edge as the impossibility of the situation crushed her television-trained calmness.  This is no TV show; this is not E.T..  This is real.  What do I do now?

"How sad for you, Human.  I recommend you come inside for a refreshing drink, and a sit down out of the cold."

"You speak? English?"

"Well, yes, of course, as you can hear.  It merely took me a little time to absorb your method of speech from your speech center in your brain.   A rather haphazard, but intriguing language, full of flexibility and potential.  But, please come inside.  It is still chilly."

The lizard head and neck squirmed back inside, and Kara doubtfully stepped over to the eight-inch wide entrance.  It seemed an animal hole.  A click, and a five foot wide, circular hatchway that included the “animal hole” opened up like a gull wing door with the metal lined rim just inches from the tip of Kara‘s feet.  The door came even with her head, and she could see that it had an outward ripple of something shiny like chrome that would fit precisely into the indentation in the rim of the doorway.  Both looked well-worn, but sturdy and well-made.  Dust trickled from off the door past her curious face.

  A wide staircase led down into the dimly lit underground house.  With faint spicy air wafting warmly from the depths; an aromatic scent that reminded her of cinnamon, but not quite rolled into her face, and swirled around her.  She felt the urge to swoon, so agreeable was the smell.
The straight staircase led down into the dimness, about ten feet wide. Formed of native stone minus the dust, and highly polished with brightly colored geometric symbols etched into the rock, and then back-filled with some colored stone it intrigued Kara.  The obvious chafing of long use also showed on the flats as a darker and smoother area in the center of the flat where feet over what must have been centuries had rubbed stone to slick gloss.
Her host leaned against a black cloth hung wall, draped himself on a sandstone pedestal, and picked sand out of his neck with one of his lower claw edged limbs all at once.  Rainbow striped scales on the neck turned to a duller color that sparkled on his rather extensive, she assumed, upper torso, and his tail looked completely black.  A couple black garments overlaid, and wrapped loosely about his waist on each other clothed his the joining of his lower legs rather like a trio of thin kilts not quite aligned rightly over each other.  This was his only clothing, unless the color changing scales on his neck and upper torso were not his natural scales which seemed to be the case.

He looked to be dark green on the legs (all four of them), arms and face while a deep nutty brown on his stomach, and his lips, and the back edges of his wedge-shaped skull on the right and left.  Now that she looked longer, she thought his skull was actually more of a flattened oval, and the rear most  wide tips of the wedge looked formed of cartilage.

“They correspond to ears in most species.”  The Takhierna said calmly, enduring her inspection with good grace.  “We also trim them to make certain shapes so as to impress the females of our species.”

Kara shivered, and then thought of her insistence on getting pierced earrings while still twelve.  This lizard-like creature was not the only one in this dessert who mutilated their body.  But Kara had grown out of the desire for “holes in her head” as her older brother had mockingly termed them.  Which probably just showed how much she had secretly idolized him, allowing him to manipulate her that way.

Looking back at the Takhierna, she decided that overall, it looked to be ten feet from snout to tail, even though the creature stood less than her height of five foot three.  An abundance of bends and curves in his spine made her eyes goggle for a long moment as she coped with warring fear and delight while she absorbed the sight of her first extraterrestial.  If only…about a dozen people that she would like to share this moment with ran through her mind.  Chief among them was her brother, and Mom and Dad.

"Welcome to my humble abode."

He, she thought, said with a strange twinge of dishonesty that she just caught at the tail end of his greeting.  She deciphered it after a second.  The subtext of a proud homeowner deprecating their home led to the dutiful guest complimenting the house, and cheerfully going on a grand tour.  Feeling more at ease, she smiled.  Just like visiting a new neighbor back home, she decided.

"It is lovely.  The black fabrics on the walls have a very restful effect."  She said walking forward as he directed with a lazy and graceful claw.

She realized she had said something wrong when he slopped upward past her without a word, and closed the hatch.  Then he paused and gave her a thoughtful look, and she felt a faint touch in her brain.

"Ah, yes, of course, well why do I not get you that drink?"

He turned to go further down the stairs, and she did some consideration of her own.  Somehow she had offended the "Lizard man?", and she held back a bit in following him, not ready to drink anything he prepared, or to get to close to those suddenly malignant claws.  He might be planning to avenge a mortal insult by poisoning her.

She kept these thoughts buried deep in her mind behind other masses of thoughts she held ready to throw up in the face of any telepathic probe like the one she had just felt.  But Kara knew she had not felt him sort through her speech center; maybe she would feel nothing as he crawled around inside her head for secrets?   Shuddering slightly she saw she had paused, and he looked back up at her questioningly, she looked around as if in admiration at the further expanses of hanging black cloth on both sides of the descending stairway, and then restarted down the steps.

At the bottom of nearly forty steps, she paused, a bit winded, and looked out over a small secondary stair intended to give one a view of a multi-sectioned stone walled room  of about four thousand square feet, and lit by unusually effective candles.

“Now I’m warmer.”

"Yes, it is cold near the door.  I do apologize, at one time a Ninth House member would never let standards fall so low.  Why I can remember the great glass front walls of our house on Jubial the Second World.  And they were always warm to the touch, even on the coldest night."

The Takhierna rambled on telling charming anecdotes of a life of ease and relaxation among the landed estates on the second world his people had colonized a millennia ago while it led her past a large basin of rock, and a space devoted to benches with a table that she thought comprised an eating nook, and past a stately and massive room divider.   The stone ray shape with more air than rock rays of a sun warmed the soul with its kind benevolence so that she remembered to breathe a prayer of gratitude to the Mother Goddess for the gift of light and warmth.

Around, the edge of the divider, she saw the fireplace room which he took her down into, and gave her a bench hard by the fire.  The metal bench adjusted quite easily to her form, and a bit of squirming and adjustment got the Takhiernan’s  bench to his liking.  As the morning wore on, she found that the Takhiernan’s moved every ten to thirty minutes, changing their benches to suit, or getting up to pace around.  ‘Warming the blood’ he called it.

Despite her resolution not to drink before she found out what had displeased her host, she could not find a break of enough length to pose a simple question.  He made talking a fine art,  and after a while she concluded that his conversation did not require much beyond a willing listener.  Now thoroughly convinced he was male, for the men she had known had loved to hear themselves talk, although not to this extent, she played the part of the attentive female while she absorbed useful information, and thought about her problem.

Lunch was served, a delicate slab of wind-blown stone topped by strange, but tart fruits, and some starchy baked leaf with a dip of moldy insect guts on the right side of the stone.  She ate small samples of everything but the dip, and then hoped that she had not poisoned herself.  But really, what was there to do, she rationalized.
“Tell me, where am I?”  She finally interrupted her host with a question.  So far, he had not offered his name, and she had not asked thinking that it might well be some form of a taboo.
“Ah, well, on the Refugee Planet.”  He replied with an elegant shrug that rippled his shoulders, and upper torso in an enchanting gesture as he leaned against the fireplace.  The Takhiernans seemed to have “cool” down pat.
“Refuge from what?”
“Ah, well, that is indeed the question.  And will it be true safety, or merely a pause before Moloch devours us as well?”
Kara paused.  Moloch? That was the name of an Earthly pagan deity, one that Stephanie had expressly forbidden her coven which had then included Kara from beseeching.  He had been known as the receiver of sacrifices of infants who were rolled into a fire.  Curiouser, and curiouser.
The Takhiernan seemed to feel he had answered the question, and perhaps if she had known more that would be so.  It had surprised her how much of communication required a common data base.  Despite her long listening to him, and the telepathy he used on occasion to help him understand her, she still felt unsure of many points he had made.  What precisely had he meant, for example, when he referred to “wandering doom boxes” and “hydrofoods”?
Finally judging that her guestly duties were finished, and that her brain could handle no more, she began to let the yawns slip out since she needed her doctor ordered nap.  It took several hints, but when the Takhierna finally noticed her tiredness, he behaved well.
He showed her up a ramp, and down a twisting hall to a sleeping room with a great domed ceiling and circular walls that altogether enchanted.

"I like this." She spoke with soft definitiveness.  It felt whole, natural, strong, and secure.

"Yes,  well, the dome, it is superstition.  An ancient thing that we do not believe in anymore."

The Takhierna showed embarrassment by flicking his tongue around his shining fangs striving unconsciously to clean the already spotless long incisors.

"I met someone who believed in sorcery."  Kara said looking over at him as he used both sides of the doorway to lean against.

"Then you met a fool.  There is no magic."

The Takierna retorted flipping its wedge-shaped head up in prompt, and almost rude denial.  Kara thought back to the ghost-like figure, the 'memory' and wondered.  Perhaps the Shade was not magic, but it was not anything she had a ready explanation for either.

  Without direction from her host, she clambered up onto a platform that nearly brushed the ceiling, and resolved to mentally lay out her problem undisturbed by the relentless chatter of her host.  The Takierna nodded at seeing her to bed properly, and abruptly left her.  The lack of a parting greeting, she just chalked up to one more bit of alien weirdness which it was for Takiernans do not speak partings before sleep as such just seemed silly to them since you are still there.  And indeed modern Takiernans do not believe in their spirits walking free at night or in a nap, but the maker of the dome had believed in such centuries ago.

"And they said monkeys loved  to talk."

  Kara murmured and began to fall asleep despite her plans. She resolved to take more medicine when she woke, but her limbs felt too heavy right now to get up, and the bed was incredibly soft.

As she dreamed she asked a question of an ancient Chinese emperor who stood by the Great Wall with his face tight with secrets.

“Where on Earth am I?”

And her question baffled him a bit, so that he ruffled his jewel-laden quilted silk robes in exasperation.  But her query was quite appropriate, because she had landed not on Earth,  and not even in her Home Galaxy.  He, a representation of her intuition, did not answer in words because even though she suspected such an answer, the girl lacked the nerve to face her fears full-on right now, even in a dream.

"I am lost in time and space?"

She said slowly as she understood that to be what the Emperor thought at her.

"And what does that make you?"  She snapped back at the Emperor, and drifted deeper into slumber.

  But no answer came to her and she floated off into peaceful dreams, because the Man of Bones had not yet crossed to where her body lay her subconscious judged. Or perhaps the dome protected her from him. So she had a single afternoon’s respite.

Meanwhile, the shade strived to reach her, but under a dome of silence she lay shielded and impossible for his magic to touch her mind, and influence her.

“Some people just cannot take a hint. “

  The shade groused to himself.

“Doesn’t this minor Takhiernan lordling know that magic does not work?  Why keep the useless relics of the dead past like this dome room?”

The shade said as it prepared to cast another spell.

End  of  Chapter Six.

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Chapter Seven: Great Balls of Fire  ABCD--Sat start



Awakening to  the sound of multiple booms worried Jackson. Just awakening by itself caused nerves in this situation, he reminded himself sardonically, using humor to get his mind more collected.  The continuing steady shower that hissed outside his hollowed-out tree trunk, a just bearable shelter, converted to menace by the backdrop of those thunderous reports.
Thinking of storm surges, Jackson shook himself the rest of the way awake while still laying down, wobbling his broad shoulders and jogging his head in something more closely resembling epilepsy than an approved stretching exercise.  But that was what he had learned to do as a database creator when sitting and staring for long sessions at the monitor.  Here and now, wherever that was, it worked just as well.
His hollow trunk canted up at a thirty-degree angle to be held by other trees and the vines draped as dependencies.  It shook as he rattled himself, and red dust and chunks of wall drifted down on him.  He assumed the chunks and dust were red in color because the curving wall of the tree had vaguely been so when he had checked it out in the light of his Bic ®, before getting to sleep a few hours ago.  He checked his water and impact resistant sports watch for the time.
Four hours of sleep.  He groaned under his breath to himself.  He sat up, but he had to arch his back in order to make his head fit under the roof of his abode.  His body moved slowly because he had accepted the programmer’s credo that coffee powered the universe.  Jackson remained used to getting up with a promise of a caffeinated kick in the pants.  He hoped that he would not have to kick that habit.  In addition, it sounded like a frying pan making bacon what with the continual sizzle out there.  If he went out, he would get wet, but then he would find out about the booming noises which did not sound like thunder to him.
He remembered reading that the patient and calm approach was the best way to survive in the wilderness.  Also, his curiosity and fear would not let him skate on past those booms, and Jackson swished some saliva around his mouth to wet it after re-considering that he could be in the path of a storm surge right now, and not know until too late.
A storm surge, or a huge wave driven by, quelle surprise, a storm could be on its way now.  He could be sitting dry and comfy one minute, and then under water fighting for his life the next moment.  The wave would flood inland, and shoot up his tree trunk to smash salt water into his face.  He lectured himself on the need to move trying to work up some energy by contemplating a catastrophe he did not believe in.
After a bit of increasingly energetic squirming, he got himself turned about.  His head now faced down toward the entrance.   Raindrops plopped the sandy beach
nearest him like heavenly artillery since trees and not-ferns shielded them from the heavier downpour further out on the ten feet of sand discovered by the receding high tide.  Before he started low crawling out, he put his hand on his katana scabbard.
Never leave home without it.  The new wherever-he-existed resolution comforted him with the notion that he progressed toward competence with surviving in his surroundings.  Awkwardly he shimmied down to the base and out onto the sand.  His now reversed arched back threatened revolt.

“Dad could do this easily.”

    He muttered.  He can roll himself up, and stuff himself in a bowling bag.  Why not me?  Jackson thought irritably as he dragged himself to his elbows to look at the storm-tossed sea.  Of course, Dad was shorter, and kept active with his woodworking prototype creation, while Jackson plunked his increasingly large bottom in a chair in front of a computer.  But my fingers are in really good tone, Jackson groused some more.
The night and sea held indistinguishable dark until a monstrous wave like a thing out of shadow flung itself toward him.  He circled his head with his hands, and closed his eyes. He waited.
A sound of a hundred cymbals, pure white noise, shattered his calm.  The wave crashed to the beach, and surged back out.  A few tinkles of spray landed on the left side of his face and neck.  Embarrassed, he raised his head to see the wave receding.
Rapidly getting damp from the waist up,  despite being shaded by the supporting towers about him, he scrambled out into the night filled with a steady rain.   Jackson finished the job of getting soaked by walking out from under the not-ferns to the hard-packed sand recently wetted, but short of the incoming waves.
Then he looked skyward for the booming noises.  It did not seem a night for thunder; instead a steady pound-pound of rain fell.  The sky was filled with heavy, low-hanging clouds, tumultuous in their struggling shapes.  Undistinguishable clumps hung here and there from beneath the black canopy, like explosives slung under a WWII bomber, waiting to be dropped on him.
His shirt clung to him, and his pants would be the next to go.  Luckily, they were made of heavy twill that might resist for a few more minutes.  Maybe he could get this done in time to get back, and be sort-of dry.  A miscalculated wave-let, the last bolt of its quarrel with the land, splashed over his shoes, and he groaned.
Wet feet were bad in a tropical environment if not dried off.  He could catch some nasty fungus or something.  According to his reading of the Pacific Campaign, that had been a major issue for the G.I. Joes.
“This stinks.”  He already had dried his feet once this night.
A shattering boom distracted him from his mixture of self-pity and self-mockery.  He turned his head upward from his shoes, and methodically searched the sky while waiting for another.  The noises had seemed to come in groups.
A ball of fire fell through the low, black clouds backlighting the overcast sky.  Boom! It exploded with noise and little light.  Jackson estimated that it had to be at least twenty feet across before it had dissipated into sound.  Then another and another fell marking a line that pointed to a glinting arrow of silver racing downward from the fire and the clouds.
The arrow unveiled itself to be a sleek spaceship of a metal that glittered like stainless steel in the minimal and strobe-light flashes from the explosions.  The great distance, and the faint illumination worked against Jackson, but then a real lightning strike revealed more.  It had multiple protrusions, swept-back, but bulbous fins on each of its four sides.   Jackson assumed these were engines, ringed around its tail ward side.
It looked to be designed for air flight being a contorted tear-drop shape.  Add the tilted back fins, and Jackson was pretty sure someone had made sure it was aerodynamic.  The only flaw in the design that he could see was that the belly fin would block a landing on its stomach, unless, of course, it meant to land on its tail?  That implied a huge amount of power, but then any sort of functioning spaceship did as much.
The storm took a turn for the worse, but Jackson hardly noticed because of his awe-struck happiness at seeing a true-to-life flying spaceship.  The ship wobbled in the light of one last near booming fireball that seemed to leer down at Jackson.  The metal teardrop curved to its left, which was toward Jackson.  But the flight path held at a great altitude above him.
He finally let go of his denial, and admitted to himself that he could not be on his Earth.  Now that he had gained another rescue cord that he could mentally lean on, he let go of his increasingly flimsy first cord.  No predatory giantish bird-dinosaurs suitable for chasing but not flying, and who hunted in packs existed on his Earth, he finally admitted to himself.
Aliens have abducted me, and these are the good guy aliens come to take me back.  He began wildly waving his arms as the ship tore by overhead.  A long pause afterward, and he began to doubt that they had seen him when the edge of the sonic boom hammered his ears and slapped his skull.  The vast noise in comparison to the usual silence of the wild lands, or the rhythm of the storm left him bereft of thought for several seconds.
No further booms attended its flight, for which he and his ears were grateful.  What had that been?  Some type of weird engine effect, or an attack?  True that there had been no sign of engine flame from the ship, and so it could have been energy release from some bizarre engine, but still, Jackson felt chilled in the warm rain.
When the spaceship, he assumed although it could have been an aircraft, did not circle back immediately he looked around for a good tree to climb.  Upon finding a low-branched, and wide-spreading ancient after winding his way between stems and trunks thirty feet deeper into the jungle, he climbed the giant’s lower extensions.  The storm plagued him with attendant winds, a dark cloudless night, and wet branches caused.  But, the width of the branches aided his slow and determined ascent, and the overhanging and broad leafs to soak up the tropical sun kept the initial footfalls only damp.
He walked and stepped up twenty or so feet above the jungle floor clambering up easily managed branches and noticed that the steady and louder hum of rain falling that had turned from a downpour to a drenching interspersed itself with a sighing, asthmatic cough.  Another cough followed in quick succession, and he heard several more.  Too quickly the coughs ran for one creature alone to create all the noise, even a four pack a day smoker would not have sounded so rapid.
Jackson paused.  Foolishness urged him to proceed, and he knew it.  A wet and slippery tree, with rain falling intermittently into his eyes now that he had gotten above the thickest mass of sheltering leaves should be avoided.  Really, continuing was insane, to venture onwards the act of a child, but he did it anyways.  Trekking his not so terrible now that he could not bear it path; he hungered to see something of the alien starship.  His decision made, Jackson paused for a quick prayer for protection, although freely acknowledging that he knew stupidity when it nipped him on the nose.  He would not be angry with God, if he fell he thought as he climbed up to the next branch.
And reaching, he grasped another branch further up.  A cough sounded.  Warily, Jackson looked out and up to find that the branch he held in his hand stretched out horizontally roughly thirty feet.  At the twenty feet mark, like a collection of free-range chickens in his neighbor’s yard there rested four dinosaur-birds, or raptors.  Jackson did not know if they were the same creatures he had fought the day before, but they were the same general type.
A wind slipped through the branches, and blew past him, and toward the creatures.  Already, Jackson could see one raise its nose to sniff and snuffle at the air, and shake its head as rain got in its nose.  The sleeping act chilled him in the warm, but very wet night; it could be innocent, but it remained ominous all the same.
The others ruffled, and the branch swayed a tiny bit which got them more excited.   Jackson could see a horrific cycle of events playing itself out unless he did something.  They were going to get more and more startled, and end up waking themselves up like an avalanche started by a tiny pebble.  And then he would be in the position of a skier caught unprepared by an onrushing and overtopping wave of snow.
Not knowing where the courage came from, but feeling remarkably light-headed he scooted up the tree with his face held close to the tree to peer for his handholds in the rough bark.  Jackson stopped ten feet and four branches up.  Looking down, he saw that the raptors had snuggled back down to sleep.  Their beaks made little soothing noises as the pack sank deeper into sleep.  His gamble had worked as one moment of high risk proved less dangerous than many minutes of steady and mild alarm.
Jackson shook his head in amazement at his success, and the raptors’ behavior. Simply that he had done it was a fact that would live long in his memory.  He had nerve to try it at all.  Climbing higher, Jackson exulted with a fierce grin breaking forth on his rain-spattered face.
Forced by the lack of a better path to walk down a long limb with loose, peeling sheaves of bark (made so by some sort of insect infestation) that pierced the space of another tree, he found a choice between slipping down off the limb he walked upon and trying another route, or reaching up to another above him to haul himself up.  Not trusting that he could stay stable on the other, wet branch with water dripping on it from a hole in the canopy above it, despite the nearly two feet wide at the far end tree limb, he chose instead to reach up to a more protected and drier branch.
Preparing, he found a quick slip of his feet, and bobbled back and forth with his throat squeezed shut in terror.  But he caught himself with outstretched fingers cagily clasping the branch above.  The long stem of wood hung horizontally like most of the surrounding branches.  Unlike them, it was a mere hand span in width.  His feet dangled and jerked as they instinctively sought solid support.  Suddenly, he weakened, and he was not sure he could pull himself up with the vigor draining from his arms.  So he began to tediously move hand over hand down the branch.
A continual slip and scrape of his hands as he worked hand over hand made him nervous.  His feet dangled over a forty to sixty foot hole in the branches.  His breath came hard as he plodded forward finding enough new strength to continue with his plan, but never sufficient to pull himself up.  Dangling by his hands might not have been the best choice he thought as he approached the halfway mark, and as his hands found small wet spots on the branch where the overarching canopy of leaves on this new tree failed to protect him and more importantly the branch from the majority of the rain.  Continuing on, he noted that his arms began a slow burn which rapidly accelerated into a constant ache.  And the ache of his right index finger started again.  It pulsed in time with his heartbeat.  A distant thwoom caught him in mid-motion as he moved hand over hand, and he nearly fell before he could get his grip reestablished.  He clung, as the tree shook gently, praying for strength.
His prayers were answered in that he received courage to continue.  Renewed, he passed the two-thirds mark with ease.  Then strength failed him again.  He wondered if he had gone far enough for him to be close enough to the next tree for there to be a branch for him to catch as he plunged.  The certainty that such a maneuver would hurt more than he ached now; that the stab of pain would be worse than the burn of abused muscles and the ache of despair for his lost home and his lost sister did not seem to matter.
He prayed again, but it did not cut deep, and the request remained a trivial thing.  Going on seemed the least worst of all options.  His muscles had not been tested like this since he passed through a phase named “young teenager“.  I need to get into shape. Jackson moaned sadly to himself.  Despite his natural brawniness, his lack of regular exercise, other than a few times a week with a sword, burdened him now.
Upon finally reaching the base of the limb, a nearby branch that he had planned to stretch out a leg to reach rested a bit further in reality than it had been in his plans.  The bark of the new tree floated out an attention-catching cinnamon-scented aroma, and he breathed it in to give himself something to do while he recovered strength for an attempt to stretch a leg out and up to brace his leg on the new branch.
His stomach twitched like wet noodles flopping uncontrollably back into a pasta pot on the stove like he had made for Kara only two days ago and instead of gaining strength, his arms were trembling bags from which the power kept pouring away, faster and faster.
A long stretch while maintaining his current position only touched the far branch to his right with an un-leveraged leg.  He must throw himself into it in order to have a chance to succeed.  To win, he must chance losing all.  And now that he was on the verge of really letting go, and not just whining to himself, he felt stark terror thunder through his body, and the adrenalin surge strengthened him, even as he clasped the branch above him like a drowning man would a mast.   But, he knew it had to be done.
With his heart pounding, and sweat stinging his eyes, he flung out his lower body to the right, and missed.  He scraped his shin against the lower side of the branch, as his fingertips began their final non-recoverable slip.    Weeping suited him in this moment, but he ferociously pushed the impulse aside as a waste of desperately needed energy.
The gross unfairness of it to have come this far only to fail made his time hanging on the tree most miserable.  But still, he felt proud of himself for having given his best.  With his heart restored, and his hands about to be relieved of their duty he resolved to fight it out until the bitter end.
He would slide down the trunk, and maybe he could catch a limb on his way down.  Or, maybe, he reasoned, he could slide down in a purposed path, and catch a limb with his feet rather than with his legs outstretched.
Looking down, he saw no limb close enough until he looked around the curve of the trunk to his left.  Twelve feet down, a good, thick limb waited for him.
Jackson swung himself around the tree, and his hands came free before he planned.  He slid down, scrabbling at the trunk increasingly desperate until he flung his arms just in time around the trunk.  The stunning shock of hitting with his right foot, the front part of it, sprained his ankle.  He cried out an advertisement to all the nearby creatures that a wounded animal waited in the trees.
The foot slipped free, and his arms that partially enwrapped the trunk saved him as he pumped his other leg back onto the limb.
Exhausted, he lay there with arms wrapped up against the wet trunk, and tears for lost home, and pain, and weariness coursed down his cheeks.  He felt it unmanly because his ankle did not hurt that bad that he had to cry.  But, here in the primeval jungle who would know, and so he let the pain flow out.  The aliens could wait a few minutes.
Finally, with his ankle extraordinarily tender, and wanting to go down, but needing to see the aliens, he ascended into the heights of his new tree.  The trip would have been easy-going if he had been uninjured on a dry summer day.   With a sprained ankle, and at night,  he questioned his decision.  But at least, this tree had huge leaves in abundance even to its very heights to ward off most of the rain.  When he could, he hopped on his good leg from branch to branch.  That remained about half the time.
Near the top, and above most other trees, and all of the ferns, he looked out to spot the alien spaceship.  A plume of smoke, a darker shape rising to heaven, outlined itself against the dark mass of the land and some familiar stars on the horizon, and marked the spaceship’s landing spot.
Probably had to burn a hole in the jungle to clear a spot to land, he rationalized uneasily, distantly aware that it might have been a forced landing.
He studied the terrain of the local area by the moonlight, which had steadily increased as he climbed.  Not much could be seen, but he judged from the dark mass of the land, and the glint of the sea that he resided on a barrier island.  A long, thin island closely paralleled the shoreline and held him prisoner.
Not wanting to trek across the jungle, Jackson peered into the night and weighed evidences.  It seemed like he could reach the landing site from the beach on the other side.  Content with his preliminary plan, he looked down at his long trip below him to the jungle floor, and wished for a rope elevator like Robinson Crusoe might have built.
Slowly, sitting down for much of his trip, he eased himself out of the tree, like an invalid going thumpety-thump.  A transfer to his original tree at a more auspicious level, Jackson effected with ease.  Paying the price of nearly dying and extreme physical effort to save himself from his mental laziness forced him to reconsider his core nature.
Why did I not look a little further for a better path?  One answer rose quickly into his conscious mind; he was unused to life in the wild.  Nobody engineered the wilderness for human ease and comfort.  He had to change his assumptions.  But, he knew more secrets remained buried in his heart that he would have to unearth at some other time.  Right now, he needed to get to the landed spaceship.
But as soon as he touched down, and started walking, his ankle reminded him of his need to recuperate.  Making his way back to the tree trunk awkwardly, and just painfully enough to disrupt his concentration without consuming his entire mind, he saw his fears of being laid up in the wilderness fulfilled.

End of Chapter Seven.

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Chapter Eight: Awakening in an Alien Bed



Kara woke in the middle of the “night” or so it felt.  As her nap had been driven to deeper sleep by the hidden price of the spell upon her life force.  Her tongue stiffened by thirst, and the air near the  ceiling hung hot and still, she cautiously swung her long, ungarmented legs over the edge of the sleeping platform.  Slipping, and half-climbing down the pole with the half her foot width notches inset for the climber to use, she remembered the Takhierna‘s last comment.  The Human showed herself not capable of climbing as an adult should by using this child‘s ladder to get up the ten feet to her nook, according to her host who seemed to regard her as some sort of inferior but pleasant species.
An irritating snob, he could be.
Nearer the center of the room, the air drifted lazily against her high cheekbones, and she breathed out in and out in relief.  Her long fine feet with their red toenails felt cool on the packed dirt of the floor.  Sleeping on the floor might provoke another burst of condescension from her unnamed Takhierna host.  But her need for sleeping more easefully came before impressing the lizard, so she planned on how to use the floor. Some blankets and pads for the night would do, if there was a night in this place, and she would deal with the disdain later.
He seemed a fine fellow otherwise, except this bit of Takhiernas-are-the-superior-species idiocy he trotted out for a walk occasionally.  Besides she thought that her species, human was probably better than his, and then she grinned to herself as she pulled the first of her blankets down, caught out by her own competitive species arrogance blooming.
She did not know where to get water in this underground lair, and not desperate yet, she firmed her lip in resolve to live with the dry mouth.  Her mouth would be parched in a few hours in the arid air the Takiernans evidently liked, but she‘d survive.
“I’ll be fine.”
Kara reassured herself. The noise of her voice resounded oddly in the spherically roofed chamber, and she glanced around looking for any others. No one appeared, although she still had a feeling of a watching presence, not altogether friendly.
Kara leapt up to snag a corner of the second blanket, and then again even higher to grab a third folded blanket that served as an under pillow.  She remembered her conversation from earlier.  Laying down the dark red, solid color blanket she fumed a bit to herself.  Her burnished bronze blanket "pillow" she dropped at the chosen head of her bed on top of the dark crimson blanket, and then gingerly she lay down.  She reached  over with her left hand, and folded another solid black blanket on top of her.  At least the Takhiernas made huge blankets, and they were quite warm for all their relative thinness.  She guessed they liked to stretch out at night, and a blanket suited for a ten foot long Takhiernan was luxury for a five foot tall human.  And since they were cold-blooded, they must need warm shelters at night.
Then her thoughts trailed back to an earlier conversation with her oddly fascinating host.
"Pillow.  What is that?"
She had explained.
"Oh, a Darvisnus thing." He flicked his tongue out to the left in a long lazy gesture that she began to see signified contempt.
"Also, a human thing."
He rippled his tail in response to her statement.  At that moment she turned away; he had been starting to really irritate her, and she needed his help for now. Kara noted that she needed to do something about the increasingly common ‘humans are not as good as Takhiernans’ attitude, the lizard owned.  And then she fell asleep with a dry tongue.
In her dreams she ran from  large crowd of apes with the faces of her junior high  and high school boyfriends, Todd, Jeremy, Mick, Connell, and Darien (who had rejected her) repeated endlessly among the crowd.  They were exiling her from the ape tribe.  She would never more return they shouted, and then they beat their chests in a thunderous roar that sounded like a large  truck or something.
Her curiosity pricked, Kara swam back to the surface of her mind in a deliberate effort, and nearby a shade watched with some worry.


Such strength of will and self-control he/she considered admirable, and even eventually useful, but what to do with her now? The visitor’s force of mind lay encased in its own foolishness that cloaked it from her very self; she thought herself weak, the shade concluded.  For now, that could be a good thing, but later, he needed her strong so as to be a good tool.  Still, world travelling was a very good means of stripping illusions.
His target lay unprotected by the dome of the stars now, but he had spent much of his/its faded strength trying to beat the inferior protection offered by a modern faithless dome.  With her surprising strength of mind that he had earlier misjudged, he might not have the strength to finish her at this time.
  He considered the Takhiernan’s host.  His mind stood both less subtle and more oppressed by fear and regret.  Haszikip clung to his belief in Takhiernan’s superiority out of the same need that drove a drowning man to cling to a straw in a hurricane.  The shade grinned as a plan occurred to him, but then his ’face’ sagged as he saw the probable effects.  He hardened his will.  He had done worse, far worse in service of the Emperor.


Kara woke.  Her tongue scraped over a mouth dreadfully dry, caused by the low humidity in the room and by her medicines.  She looked at the odd ladder on the side of a high mound she had climbed down in the middle of the night.  The mound went ten feet of solid clay up to almost the domed ceiling.  At the head of the bed a post continued upward to support the dome.  The post looked a crude addition; tacked on later by an amateur handyman, she supposed.
The doorway leading out of the room, a low arch, she had to duck her head slightly to get through.  Large yellow bricks outlined the arch, and stood out against the baked red clay of the wall.  Through the archway she could hear the roaring noise that had awakened her.  Curious and a little fearful she continued to investigate.
Plus see if I can find any water!
A short walk in bare feet out the door and up a ramp to the next half-level let her ascertain rather easily that the noise came from her left.  She had not been in that part of the underground house before, and curiosity touched her.  The emotion, spurred on by the shade‘s invisible fingers which reached inside her skull to rearrange thoughts, pushed her toward the noise. He/she/it stopped moral qualms, and pushed curiosity forward as well as it could.
Ordinarily, Kara would not have opened a drawer that she passed, in order, to peek inside, but a Shade insinuated the suggestion into her head.  And then it suppressed the judgment of her conscience, and the cautions of her survival instincts.  The glossy blackwood drawer slid noiselessly open under her five-fingered hand even though the handle seemed more suited for three, small talons.
She saw an obvious hand weapon, and several other items on top of a pile of laminated papers.  The papers were the first such she had seen here, and that caught her attention as noteworthy.  The lacquer black and slightly bulbous weapon, like an outsized wasp no larger than an outsized key chain chilled her stomach.
Kara stared  with mixed fear and wonder at the ominous weapon, and since she felt sure that all the items were weapons, she shoved the door to the drawer shut quietly.  But at the last second she stopped the drawer door.
No need to slam the door, and alert the Takierna to her snooping, was there?
So she let the drawer door halt, and slid it forward gently the last few inches.  Kara moved on, not aware that the drawer had snagged on a burr in its railing.
"I needed to understand this alien."   She justified her action to her awakening conscience.
Ordinarily, if she had spied on someone, she would certainly have covered up evidence of her action.  But, the shade exerted himself mightily to blur her perceptions.  So she thought a burr felt like a full stop, and she did not look to check that the drawer door fully closed.
Her path, across a wide, but short hall with natural sunlight piped in from the surface, and beaming down on some lounging rocks by a fountain in the corner of the room, brought her to a dead-end, and to the first closed door, or any sort of a door, she had met in the house other than the front door.  Yes, she decided after a minute of study, this one was a gull-wing as well.  From inside, a vast roaring worried her, and when it rose to a shriek she jerked the door open by the handle low to the ground.  In the midst of a swirling cloud of sand she saw her unclothed host in vague outline being buffeted by the wind and the fine particles.
Then the miniature sandstorm slashed outward and caught Kara full in the body driving air out of her already opened mouth, and filling that mouth with sand.  Picked up and slung across the room a good eight feet, and against a solid earthen dividing wall, Kara just lay there.  The first yells and screeching hisses of the Takhiernan did not penetrate the ringing in her head.
"...You made a terrible mess, Human."
  Kara looked up and down the short hall and saw several inches of sand covering everything.  Feeling guilty and horrible, Kara tried to get to her feet.  She had to stop to cough out her mouthful first.  Several coughs later, she raised her head to face her prosecutor who  quivered in indignation, and stood low and almost coiled, but now clothed in only one of the black torso shrouding cloths of earlier in their visit.
"And have you heard of privacy? Do humans have any concept of privacy?  Let me explain; the sand cleaner door is off-limits while I am cleaning.  You can use it after I'm finished."
"I thought you were in trouble.  Such noise."
"I almost believe you, but I see my gun drawer open.  Get out of my house and hall at once.  You humans are nothing but voyeurs. Disgusting perverts."
Kara gulped and wanted to hit herself in the head when she saw the slightly open drawer.  It rested an incriminating quarter-inch ajar.
How could she have been so stupid?  She cried, railing at herself.  Embarrassment colored her cheeks in a flush that would have ordinarily been becoming, but the look of pain on her face destroyed that.
The Shade felt itself moved against its will to comfort her, by the male half of the merge.  He stroked her mind, and let her see how very unlike her such behavior was.  Then he shunted that thought to the side before it got too far.
With partially restored dignity, Kara turned to face her temporary judge.  He stood but five feet from her, and hardly reached her shoulder, but yet he managed to loom over her by sheer attitude.  The disdain hurt Kara, and the worse was that it was well earned.
  She started to speak, and he raised a peremptory hand with claws extended point-up and shushed her.
"I care not for your excuses, Human.  Child of a faithless, and treacherous race be gone."
For a moment she bit her lip to fight down a snicker.  He really overdid it.
"No excuses, Haszkip.  I apologize.  I had no right to snoop."
She looked him straight in the eye as she said this, and hoped after doing so that such did not represent some sort of a challenge.  Who knew with an alien?  She had avoided any such displays last night as she sat and listened to endless tales.  Now she wished she had offended him in some small way so that she would know what the Takhiernans do with their squabbles and serious fights.
But she resolved to not change in mid-course her action.  Such would make her seem weak and indecisive she guessed, even if it true, especially if true, she realized.  Not a good enough reason to go spoiling a protective illusion, right now, she told herself in her brother‘s voice.  The internal voice reminded her of Jackson’s desire to make sure she protected herself against an undependable world.
"Your actions are a child's actions.  A child meddles in adult matters at the peril of the child, and all who are nearby.  You could have blown a hole in a wall."
  He proceeded to lecture her on basic behavior, and she submitted knowing that as punishments went she merited far worse.  But all the while a certainty grew in her, that that something odd had happened, perhaps to her for she would not act like that.   What strange monstrous thing had crawled up out of her subconscious when faced with a living, breathing, and melodramatic alien?  Maybe, she went off-kilter without seeing it?  That did not convince her, and she bit her lip in thought trying to understand, and replay the events in her memory.
Nothing came to her, for the Shade had hidden its tracks well, but her inborn tenacity led her to put it aside for now with a determination to come back later, and study it more.
Why do I know his name?
Haszikip took her to the door, and said that she should come back toward the day's end.  He would grant her refuge against the bitter night cold, even though he should not, but no Takhiernan would leave a guest, even a bad guest such as her without basic needs.   That grated further at her pride.
Then she had to refuse for the forth time an offer of a sweater scarf.  Shivering, he let her out into the sixty-degree afternoon weather.  Even if the lizard man was a bit high-handed, he had a soft heart underneath all the incessant blather.  And suddenly Kara leaned over, and hugged him.
“I’m really, really sorry, Haszkip.  I’m not sure what came over me.  But I promise to do better.”  A tear in the corner of her eye trickled down her cheek.  The Takhiernan reached out a claw-bedecked finger, and with gentle precision swept the tear free of her face.  She rocked as the touch convinced her on the most basic level, which had been skeptical in silence, that this was real.
Aliens!  Now befuddled at the touch, she went out not paying more than the minimal attention required to move upright to her surroundings.  An alien, or she supposed she was the alien, and she had made first contact.  If only there was some way to get home, to ask someone who knew what to do.
And who would that be, girl?  Right now, you are the number one expert on meeting aliens, unless all those Roswell stories are true.  Kara laughed a little bit to herself, and then accepted that it was on her shoulders to make a good impression for Humanity.  However, it had not gone at all like she would have expected from reading her science-fiction stories of her teenager hood.  No offers to join the Galactic Alliance, or inquiries as to how she tasted with ketchup.
Most of her stuff remained still in the domed sleeping room, which fell quite some distance away.  Haszikip had an extensive warren.  It seemed in truth more space than he felt comfortable with; which went with his general attitude of nobility in decline.  But going back to get it, despite the lizard’s inherent kindness would be awkward right now.  Besides, she did plan to come back “tonight”.  Haszkip’s warren could serve as a base for her exploration of the planet.
Kara walked further out into the “morning” and the light did seem warmer if hardly brighter than last evening.  Looking up into the sky, she wondered how it managed that.  The planet she stood on, if it was a planet, seemed to face the wall of light in the sky, and unless that massive thing altered which seemed improbable then the light should be steady, as also the heat.  Still, the sky seemed faintly different, but not in any way she could isolate.  And with the light covering the sky, any oddness in the atmosphere would be near impossible to see.
But no question, the “day” had grown warmer and perspiring she climbed a rise beyond the alien’s underground lair to get a better view of the surroundings.  A slick spot caught her, and dropped Kara to her knees.  Getting back up, she wiped her hands clean of a red film.  The dust seemed heavier on the ground than last night Kara noted as she walked and obscuring dust clouds rose around her, causing her to wheeze a bit.
Inspiration slipped into her mind, and she had a revelation.  The dust floated high in the day, probably given energy from winds caused by heat, and the presence of that much dust in the sky dimmed the light until it felt like evening.  But no, that did not explain it all.  There should be winds as the planet cooled as well.  Still, she grinned a little proud of herself for figuring out a little bit about this place.
“Perhaps something about the nightly winds made them different, or they stopped after a while?”  She muttered to herself, going up the last bit to the top of what counted as a hill around here.  The elevation rose less than from the sliding doors at the back of the Arizona house to the furthest edge of the property about an acre distant.  So despite her weakness, Kara was not winded.  In fact, she felt better than yesterday when she had suffered the most amazing energy crash.
“If the light in the sky is in one direction, and we face it all the time, we can’t be rotating can we?”  She went back to theorizing.

  In her mind, Kara asked a long-gone high school science teacher who had done his best to enliven a boring textbook with the wonders of science.  Kara had caught some interest in it then, but she had been more into Drama Club, and had little curiosity to spare.  She still loved science, but it stood behind her more personal concerns, that is the bone cancer eating her life, and drama, and the Path of Wisdom as Stephanie High Priestess called it.
Kara shook her head; it seemed she almost remembered reasons why a planet had to rotate.  This place made no sense, no, a very little sense, she told herself with rising gloom as she hiked in a random direction uphill letting her feet take her where they will as long as it resulted in the top of the rise.  There finally at the top on a slender rock, she rested.
The too-thin girl made the top just beginning to pant.  Looking about, for as far as she could see lay a dessert with shallow hollows and stretches of flatland, and the occasional hill of a few hundred feet to give some variety to the unending sameness.  She could easily identify the Shade’s residence from here, despite the numerous black piles of rock off in that direction.
She named that direction south, just because.  And to the north she saw some more hollows and hills.  A bit more variety in the land until at the very furthest extent of her vision Kara saw mountains.
Perhaps, I could see further at evening when the dust is high in the sky?  Ruefully, Kara nodded to herself.  Still, the effort had not been wasted.  This was a start, and the morning was a good time for a devotion.
Kara sat down on the rock, and raised her hands to the north, the south, the west, and finally the east.  She began a song of worship, glorifying the power of the Goddess who had made all things.  It stuck in her throat for the dust, but she persevered knowing that the Lady was not so interested in beauty of voice, as in a sincere heart.  Another stick, and she coughed, and got to the end.  Next morning, she would bring water.
Bringing her hands down to rest them, for they were trembling from fatigue, she decided to just rest her hands palms up on her knees.  Then she began her prayer.  She requested protection, and wisdom, and found herself stumbling back and asking for protection again.  A faint mutter in the ground came to her ear, and she looked up with sharpened and re-balanced senses.
  And then she saw a green line in the far distance.  Something of it separated, and came toward her, and the pit suddenly opened in her stomach told her that bit of line meant no good.  Pursing her lips to draw more saliva into a suddenly desperately dry mouth, she forced herself up, and her legs betrayed her.  Kara fell onto her knees, skinning one.
Which was just great for one of her medicines expressly forbad getting skin cuts.  She would have to visit a doctor, if she could find one. If she survived to find one, her paranoia whispered.
Her fatigued from worship arms did little more than hold her, as she levered herself back to her feet.  And standing she saw a half-dozen ragged machines with legs holding metallically gleaming box-like cabins off the ground crest another hill just a quarter-mile from her.  They were brilliant green, on the exterior, where a veneer had not flaked off to reveal a dull green cabin wall.
The sextet waited.  Each was about the size of a modern main battle tank.  They had three sets of robotic arms, and four legs.  The arms each held some sort of multi-barreled gun which began to spin so that she could hear a faint whine.  It looked like a mini-gun on a helicopter which shot some insane amount of bullets like a thousand or ten thousand per minute.
See brother, I do pay attention to your war game stories!  She silently shrieked in near hysteria in her head.
"Hello."  She said nervously wondering if they could hear her with some sort of sensor, like a long-range microphone.  That seemed to be a trigger.  The group lurched forward fast enough that they would have burnt rubber on any street in Mendoza, and kept on accelerating toward her.
Kara gave up studying what looked like gun ports and guns, and turned about to run.  She leapt over the sitting rock, and vaulted several more steps.  If only she could get down to Haszkip…
But then she realized that he almost certainly was not ready for this incursion, and without consciously deciding it, she slowed.   The ravenous pursuers opened fire shattering the place of worship.  Instinct tugged and she bent to dive down the hill, but it had been too late since before she had seen them for they were ferociously competent.  Twenty-gram micro crystals magnetized by gigawatt electromagnets were flung by their thousands bearing their sharp-edged Death at the outsider.  Enough hit the desert floor to create a bloom of dust surrounding Kara.  Simultaneously, the micro crystals shredded her body, and Kara, and her body was gone from that world to the mystification of the Darvinus gravimetric scan techs who had been locked on the moving target.

The Shade congratulated himself.  The Darvinus tactical mech group had been easily led to attack a Takhierna guest by their hatreds.  Now he had to convince them to go back into the pleasantly appointed cage of their compound.  Not a big problem for now, Darvinus manipulate easily, she smiled and told herself while in the back of her mind wondering how long she/he/it could keep the Darvinus on their chain.  And why did the term “Bosnia” keep floating up out of his/her’s memory?

End of Chapter Eight.

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Chapter Nine: Duel of the Giants


Jackson slipped and slid and dragged himself by his elbows into the hollow tree trunk.  Once inside its shelter, he lay blind, but protected from view as well.  Laying his naked katana by his right side in case anything tried to join him in the night gave him some measure of protection he decided as he drifted back and forth across the borders of sleep.  Finally, he succumbed to a deeper, but still fitful rest.
Screams, oddly twisted by his enclosure came to wake him from nightmares of cutting his sister’s throat at the instruction of Roswell Grays which the big-eyed aliens had beamed into his mind.  Opening his bleary and crusted eyes let him see the faint light shining in from the mouth of the trunk cave.  Jackson rubbed his dirty face with a sand covered right hand, and only succeeded in making himself aware of how sleepy he remained.
The sand dropping from his hand onto his shirt told him of his own dirtiness.  A quick sniff brought the smells of sea and salt, faintly rotting wood, and the stink of a male human.  He brushed his hands off on his pants, and tried to wake up.
“Coffee.”
  He moaned, as he slowly sat up.  What had woken him up? The idea of making a joke to himself of being a zombie motivated him into dragging himself forward so that he could begin to lower himself onto his chest to get head-first to the hole while flipping his legs behind him.  The shriek from his ankle stopped him.
Pulling up his pant leg let him inspect the damage.  It hurt worse than in the midst of the night before, and it had begun to change colors to blue and purple.  But it did not look as bad as he had feared.  He might be able to limp on tip-toe, a little, on it.
Now fully awake, he remembered that he did have a can of Folgers® in his backpack, and even a small two-cup coffee maker.  Unfortunately, no electrical power to be found awaited his craving cells, at least not that he remembered.  But maybe he would see something useable he decided, once he got back outside and in the clear light of another day.
His supposition that he had departed from Earth somehow had faded in the night.  The nightmarish thought receded under his awake mind’s preconceptions as just too ridiculous to be entertained.  He told this story to himself several times as he wormed his way back out onto the beach feet-first, but he never could get enthused about the notion.  And when he saw the clear waves, and the giant ferns he gave it up.  It felt deeply uncomfortable for him like a stick twisting in his stomach, as he did not know the world anymore.
So he prayed because he felt reasonably certain that one thing had not changed.  A deep certainty filled him as he sat by that tree trunk.  The order of the waves, and the beauty of the trees strange though they were spoke to his soul.  His faith still made sense to him, and he relaxed, gladdened enough to continue hanging on.
He determined to find the order to this world.  A flame rose up in his ash-filled heart and glimmered alone but present, all the same.  Ambition and commitment fed the flame, but it remained still a weak thing, which he might by accident stifle.
“I’m better off than those guys in the Renaissance who started science.  I know the Universe makes sense; well I am pretty sure it does.  I just have some new data I need to fit into the structure of guesses we call science.”
He talked to himself, and found that he craved the sound of a human voice a bit more than he expected.  The courses in Windows applications had taught him logic and precision, but they had never dealt with the need for fellow contact.  So he had unconsciously begun to use the first to deal with the lack of the second.  Now he had neither.
“Besides, as soon as I can get my ankle in order, I am going to go meet some aliens.”
The concept thrilled him at a deeper level than it scared him.  He broke out into a wide, but nervous grin at the prospect of meeting a real extraterrestrial.  Jackson Wellington, the first human to ever meet a real live alien!  Once he got back home, if anyone believed him, he would be famous, so famous.
He leaned back against the exterior of his hollow trunk home, and wondered what he would do or say when he met Them.  His occasional reading of science fiction had convinced him of one thing.  They would be alien, as in, unknown and totally bizarre.  What should he be paranoid about he wondered?  They might have no concept of war, and he might kill them with a casual shocking concept.  Or they might have no concept of peace, and he did not try to believe that a space faring species had to be kindly and good-hearted.
The roar of a creature from the jungle ripped him from the pleasant speculation, and back to his more immediate problems.  Those were water, food, and protection against the hostile creatures.  And he needed to rest and recuperate.
Jackson desired a kludge; he did not want an elegant and durable solution, but something that would hold together for a few days with minimal effort required.  All too familiar with such efforts in his computer programming, Jackson gave himself a pep talk to get himself into the right frame of mind.  Usually, when facing such a problem, he pulled together a kludge to solve an immediate problem, and then he would run off work on something else while trying to come up with a more long-term solution.  But, in the doing of it, he needed to put such thoughts of a long-term solution from his mind, and not waste energy wondering what it would look like.
Remembering something he had read about in a survival in the wild story in a magazine, he took his katana by the blade end, and used the hilt to reach back into the trunk cave.  Hooking the backpack took five tries, but he had plenty of time.  Dragging it out felt like a sweet victory.
The tempered glass coffee maker’s jar would do to hold water.  A clear plastic display case from the game store on Saleras and Martin, Imagination Express, that held miniatures would just barely fit inside the mouth of the jar.  I’m in business, he thought.  Another smaller plastic box, with its cardboard backing removed, plus the gray foam, and the miniature pewter figurines of an Amazon priestess-cyberpunk, and a ninja cyberpunk would hold the initial ocean water inside the jar.
Lying on his side, he reached in and grabbed his rattan sword.  Using it to stand up took a bit of doing since it pressed into the not completely packed sand up beyond the high tide point.  And his body weighed him down, since he was weaker than expected.  Last night’s encounters and experiences had taken more out of him than he realized.
First he must get water, and so he began the trek across the increasingly fluffy sand.  But his leg warmed up a bit, and so the difficulty remained about the same.  Ten minutes by his watch brought him down to the hard-packed sand continually rewetted by the waves.
The need to think and plan out his actions so that he did not just choose stupidly like he had in the tree last night gripped him strongly.  His vulnerability blatantly advertised itself out here on the wide-open beach.  No doubt, any predator knew by instinct his status of lame and wounded.  Predators would be lured by that almost as well as flowing blood.
If the raptors came back, he was in dire trouble.  He had left his bottle rockets back at the trunk cave.  Anything could see him from the safety of the jungle edge or from a roost in a tree.  But then he remembered that many predators specialized in hunting at dawn and twilight.  That counted in his favor, which buoyed him because he had so many negatives weighing him down.  The raptors had come after him in the early night, which argued, for his current safety from them.
But if they showed up, what plan awaited use in his empty brain?  His feet covered in water from a breaking wave, and he looked out to sea.  He narrowed his eyes, and looked into the water, seeking to pierce its secrets.  That failed, but he still planned to go deep into the water with his floatable rattan wood practice sword.  He should be able to swim out far enough to avoid a raptor unless the creature could swim as well.  If so, he was dead, he realized somberly.
Sticking the glass jar into the path of the next wave reaped him a three-quarters full jar.  Satisfied, he studied it while waves cleansed his feet, and then he thought about getting food.  Mollusks, crabs, shallow water fish, buried eggs, and other foods of more normal provenance such as pizza and hamburgers danced in his head.
He looked up and down the beach.  Little crabs similar in size to a stone crab, but a pale green all over, ran up and down the beach.   Drawing his blade, he waited for one to come by, and then a little half-dollar sized morsel wandered by.  Master Yoshida’s voice resounded in his head from harsh, but loving memory.
“You will take care of your sword.  If you are a fool, and leave it about for a child to cut off their own hand with, I will visit you in prison and perform an undetectable Dim Mak on you so that you die a lingering death. If you ever have cause to use it, and you forget to clean it, I will come and spank you with your own blade, as you are a child.  Water and blood can rust your blade; sand will dull it with remarkable speed.  Remember this…”
The lecture had gone on for a while, but the new students needed the orientation because always some idiot who wanted to surprise his wife with a demonstration of a new sword technique, or other thoughtlessness incarnate wandered into class like a lemming intent on self-destruction. Unfortunately, such morons usually ended up injuring innocent bystanders, rather than themselves.
He pulled back his sword at the last second, and watched as the startled crab ran free.  Quickly, he sheathed the katana, and used the sheathe as his cane, while switching to the rattan sword as a crab-smacker.  But for a long while breakfast stayed wary.
Finally, he managed to spot one looping in a long trek down the beach.
“Sorry, guy.  Its not your lucky day.”  He murmured, and then smacked the crab twice to crush its shell, and kill it.
Another hour of daylight passed, increasingly painful to his already sunburned neck, and he had collected five crabs and three mollusks as well as something reminiscent of seaweed that did not smell altogether bad.  With his new treasures he made his slow way back up to the cave.  A quick searching look inside established it as free of occupants.  Then he put his meal down by a tree that overlooked the small clearing his tree had created when it fell.
Welcoming the shade fervently, he scooped up from the edge of the jungle, big handfuls of large ferns, browned and fragile, to provide an easy start to a fire.  He flared his Bic® lighter, and the browned ferns caught immediately.  Soon, with the addition of some nearby fallen branches, he had it built up enough to call it a campfire.
Jackson crawled about retrieving further downed branches.  The storm’s bounty made this easier, and the hot morning sun had dried things up well as if clouds and sun conspired to give him an easily made campfire. He placed several more stacks of branches around him, before leaning up against a thick-stemmed fern near his shading tree.  The sticks would serve as a firebrand if he needed a weapon to back up his katana.
In the meantime, he began to be seriously hungry.  Reaching into the backpack brought out a Snickers® bar, but in an effort of will he shoved it back.  He might need it later, and quite desperately.
The coffee jug poured readily into a plastic square display shield.  But that left him considerable excess. Nearly half a pot of water which he had to get out of the jug.
He thought about it for a bit, and then made an indentation about half the size of a basketball by scooping away sand, and then pressing it solid with his hand.  He inspected several of his larger leaves for lack of holes, and anything attached to them.  Satisfied that he had found a clean and whole leaf, he laid it down into the hole, and pushed until it matched the hemisphere.  Into that he poured the rest of his water.  Not sure how clean it was, but then evaporation would certainly clean the water of almost anything except for certain bacterium.  And he could not do much about those.
Turning back to his original project, he then placed the display shield inside the jug, and the case served as a roof.  After this, he stirred himself to lie the contraption out in the sun.  When the heat of the sun hit the water, it would evaporate and rise to the roof  which would cause the water vapor to condense to little droplets which should drip down and fall just past the edge of the lower case into the now empty jug.  Or at least so taught the theory in a magazine article.  He knew that he probably ended up doing it sort-of wrong, but he would see, nevertheless, how it was supposed to work.  He decided it was as good as he could do while he limped back to the fire.
It took him about twenty minutes of desultory work to set up a spit above the fire.  Then he tossed on another branch that got the fire going more enthusiastically.
That should discourage any predators looking for a snack.  Jackson thought hopefully.
Shucking the shells from the big mollusks took a few moments for each.  The simple matter of banging them on a rock until they split served him well.  Seeing one fall and end up lying on what amounted to a plate of a leaf made him change his half-formed plan to stick them on a spit.  After a bit of gathering, he shoved a bunch of “little plates” near the fire.
Shattering the crab shells, and picking out the meat took a great deal of time.  However he did not worry.  On the contrary, he welcomed time consuming tasks since it seemingly sped the way to his getting back up on his feet.
The new meats were placed on the spit, and he had just started this when the delicious smell of cooking mollusk interfered with his current endeavour.  He spun the little plates about, and studied the still raw mollusks.  The outer edge near the fire cooked, but the interior of the mollusks remained raw.
So, he trimmed off the outer edge and ate that first.  Later he ate more of it until only a raw smidgeon remained which he then cooked.  No doubt his technique would horrify any cook, or government health inspector, but as soon as they showed up to criticize him he would put them to work.
Night fell with suddenness, but not as quickly as he expected.  Last night he had been too distracted to notice. The speed plunged faster than his home in Arizona, but not the sudden drop that he had heard of from books describing the Equatorial regions.  This led him to believe that he rested somewhat north of the equator, which meant the whole planet might be warmer than Earth.  Or it could mean that he had landed, quite simply near some sort of Gulf Stream, which heated the local climate.
He put learning about it on the list of things to do when he got the chance.  Keeping active mentally would be useful as well, although he still hoped that the aliens would rescue him.  Perhaps he could quiz them about this world.
Building up the fire in the early night reminded him to do it earlier the next day.  Then he crawled back into his trunk cave and prayed himself to sleep.  His dreams were restful and sweet.  Carla, his first serious girlfriend, and he were going on a picnic with the rest of his family.  It had been a perfect day, and three months before he found she was two-timing him with a former friend of his.  But in the dream of the dark and curly-haired beauty he had somehow known his fate was not going to happen this time.  Because he had been changed by the trip to this jungle, a steadfast apathy toward commitment had deserted him.  Now he stood where he knew not, and so his dream showed a different fate than last time.
He woke with a smile on his face, and an old wound healed in his heart.  His faith in his romantic chances restored even if there was no one anywhere near her to practice on, and for that alone he had to be grateful to the aliens who had brought him here.  But he would see about the rest.  If they could bring him and Kara back to Earth, then he might well give them a quitclaim.
The day passed with the sighting of something large in the trees, and he hid in the water to escape its notice.  That night after a more skillfully, even if with the same essential technique, cooked meal of crab and mollusk he put up a bigger fire nearer the mouth of his trunk cave.  It drove him out into the dark in the middle of the night because the fire burned down due to a poor choice of firewood.  Near the outer edges of his campfire, a sappy and greenwood stick smoked abominably with a tar-like smell.
Coughing, he worked and snaked out the trunk and past the fire.  During the transit, Jackson got close enough to feel hairs on his arm blackening.  And then something smacked him in the back with stunning force, and he rolled into the darkness.  He came to rest upon some fallen fronds with a crackling sound.
Only a further crackle got him focused, and back to his feet with almost supernatural speed.  A large beast, not clearly seen, but a small elephant in size, with a heavy neck stood next to his fire.  Little drops of water fell off its hide and sizzled in the fire.  It opened its wide, and gaping mouth into which a whole buck deer could have fit, and its dull pair of columnar teeth shone a foot-long and gleamed a sickly white in the firelight.  No roar to intimidate him came forth, but rather a soft hissing noise.
Jackson thought he faced a water-living, yet amphibious predator.  Its lack of fear next to a fire, and the water dripping from its slick hide told him that.  And since it made no noise that might mean that it did not want any competition for a whole Jackson burger.  So he yelled suddenly and loudly as he could.
The amphibian drew back, and this plus the yelling sparked his training.  He charged forward two steps, and leaned down to grasp his katana’s hilt.  Drawing his sword from its scabbard resting atop the stack of gear near the fire in a smooth slice, Jackson arced the blade harmlessly from right to left past the giant skull.   That might frighten the beast off.  Surprising him, the dinosaur’s head came back after an instinctive jerk backwards to come down on him, and bite him from the top.  Flubbering forward on its flippers, the multi-ton beast shook the ground, and a thud like a repeatedly struck bass drum thrilled Jackson’s nerves.  The amphibian must not have seen, or at least, respected his sword in the dim, and flickering light.
Breathing in, the toxic smell of the tree limb, and resolutely ignoring it, he took a wide stance, and calmly reversed his blade and its direction, and awkwardly and without looking slit a long cut in the nose of the creature as he brought the katana downward back to a vertical rest position by his right hip.  Most of the damage had been done by the dinosaur to itself as it stupidly impaled its face on the point held above Jackson’s head.
It wuffled in soft anguish, and Jackson trying to keep track of all the multidinuous variables of the fight, spared a microsecond to rotate his eyeballs up, and see it raise itself up on its forward flippers, and stretch its head to the sky.
Continuing his earlier charge brought him face to blubberous chest, and he whaled into the creature with all his strength.  It trumpeted in shock as the razor-sharp and yard long blade made a four-foot long gash across its chest and left shoulder.  The amphibian rose up on its hind flippers still bugling in outrage and surprise, and Jackson could see that it could easily fall on him with its multi-ton weight.  He flicked his blade out and slashed a front flipper leg.  It backed off, and then ka-thumpety-thumped its way straight back to the water.
Jackson hollered loudly in triumph until the roar of something much larger from in the jungle depths silenced him.  Then he became aware of the pain in his ankle, and he fell to his knees to crawl back to the cave.
Quickly grabbing of the non-burning end of the smoking branch which had originally drew him out of his refuge, he retrieved it from the campfire with a scattering of sparks falling across his trousers and the sand.  Then he lofted the offensive stick out onto the beach toward the giant amphibian which was still retreating.  Out there in the midst of yards of sand, the branch  could burn and smoke safely.  Most importantly it do so, far away from him.
“Back to bed, Jackson.  Still early morning.”  Above him, the clouds still covered the sky, but the evidence of the mostly clear beach with the tide receded convinced him of the time.  So still shaking in the aftermath of the impossible conflict, but knowing that sleep would be the best thing to set him right, he toddled over to his new home, and bowed before entering.  That reminded him, and he took a quick, but heartfelt moment to express his gratitude for still being alive, wherever he was.  And then into his trunk he went.
He woke the next morning, a few hours later, and came out to study the scene of the battle.  The deep flipper prints of the amphibian impressed him, especially since one of them went knee-deep on him.  More aware than ever of the dangers of living here, Jackson kept a tense-fingered grip on his katana‘s hilt.  Still the sight of red slashes of dinosaur blood decorating plants all about the small clearing cheered him immensely.  The sword that he cleaned last night remained a most useful tool.
Feeling rusty despite last night‘s impromptu session he resolved to practice after breakfast, and so he began his morning with a prayer of gratitude, some food, and an hour of Kenjutsu practice.  Master Yoshi had taught him, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the battle art of samurai sword-fighting or Kenjutsu.  The Way of the Blade, naturally enough, is principally focused on the use of a katana.  His sensei always drove home the point that Kenjutsu was designed by ancient warriors to be a very lethal technique, a way of killing armed enemies in honorable combat.
Tenshin Ryu, Master Yoshi’s sect, had differed from the other dojos of this specific sort of skill, this bujutsu of Kenjutsu in that he openly accepted newcomers, and was quite Americanized.  In fact, Jackson had first been drawn into it when he worked up a database for Master Yoshi.  The deceptively keen trader had bartered lessons for computer skill.  Both had made out well in the exchange, Jackson thought, missing his old teacher’s small smile and clever eyes, and the way he seemed to float across a mat.
Jackson walked out onto the sand barefooted rubbing his left eye for moisture, and took a horse stance, with his sword already drawn.  While he had begun to practice iajutsu, the famed, fast draw, and single killing stroke of the samurai, which was not actually part of Kenjutsu, he thought he was not very good at it yet, despite his success against the monster in the night.  He blamed that on adrenaline.  Besides, the Way of the Blade as taught by Master Yoshi, was a practical method of killing, and so it avoided too firm a reliance on gimmickry which could be useful in specialized circumstances, but not generally.
He breathed out and recited a verse from memory.

In sword, no sword - sword becomes one with the body
In body, no body - body becomes one with nature.
Like a firefly circling, shining with natural brilliance
No hesitation, no deception, no thought, no barrier...

*Taken and modified from Muso-ken.

Focusing on his blade, a razor sharp instrument of death held before him, he waited for a change to signal his beginning.  A wave crashed, and suddenly he burst into action.  A slash high and down to the right, and a quick stamping advance while continuing into a disemboweling cut to the left, was brought up into a high defensive stance before he spun about and began hacking up the imaginary assailant behind him.  Soaked with sweat in minutes, he continued until his legs and arms got wobbly and rubbery.  Playing  with a  live blade which a student might drop from clumsiness was one more stupidity Master Yoshi tried to drum out of his students.
The morning katas knocked some rust off his skill set, and loosened up his body as he struggled up and down in the loose sand against invisible foes.  And he found that his ankle remained ginger, but usable, at least for the length of the practice.  Jackson resolved to do as much, or more every morning.  If he met any more monsters in the night, he had to be ready.
He got hyper for a while wondering where Kara had gotten too, and if the aliens knew he stayed here.  Why had they not rescued him already? Maybe they had misplaced him? To distract himself, he went out and bashed up some more lunch.
At lunch he tried a little of the tiny ferns to see how they tasted, and to see if he got sick off of eating them.  Nothing bad happened, and so he ate more for supper.  That night he went to bed sore, but more confident.
The next day he seemed ready to walk in a serious way, or so he told himself as he tested the slightly bruised leg. Boredom made his decision for him.  He had been starting to talk to himself a lot, and the only topics that were not talked out were the horrifying.
Like what if I’m in a coma and dreaming this whole thing?  Where is Kara?  Is she alive?  Have I failed again to protect my sister?
The long trek toward the right-hand end of the island gave him more time to plumb his heart.  Kara is dead, or gone and soon dead, and other than my parents no one needs me.  I am alone in the universe.  My games amuse, and my job is nice.  But, he knew that he would not be missed for very long in either circle.  He had kept others at a distance.  Now that he walked on some distant place; possibly lost in time and certainly in space, he very much wanted a friend.  Funny, how last week, he would have said he had mostly the perfect life.  And a month ago, he would have definitely agreed.
Several days passed, and he learned better to dodge the dinosaurs wherever they showed by keeping an eye out for them, and making for the trees.  His pattern of watching and evading started to come with increasing sureness.   Feeling certain that now he could not be snuck up on so easily, like back in the day when he could zone out into deep concentration on a computer problem, and unnoticed five hours would slip by, he relaxed just a bit.
Jackson drove off another attack with bottle rocket and his sword.  His skill with his sword art seemed to be radically improving, and he supposed the improvement came because he invested himself into his martial art at a much deeper level than ever before.  Kenjutsu had passed from a hobby and a way to keep fit to a matter of life and death.  And his woodland stealth and observational techniques were coming easier as well.  The forced low-carbohydrate diet with no soda or coffee actually had him bouncing up off the sand in the morning.  Fried ferns and crab meat agreed with him, although there would have to be long-term vitamin deficiencies to worry about.
The morning of the fourth day after he had set out hiking from his tree trunk camp found him at the start of the end of the island.  It had been nine or ten days that he had lived here, all told. With a wary grin, and an easeful look around him to scan for predators, he allowed himself to begin to think he might be able to survive here.
His clothes were more tattered at the fringes and hems, and he had a cut in his left thigh and the covering pant leg where some razor sharp plant had whipped out and nicked him with what felt like the mother of all paper cuts.  Worse, it had begun the process of disintegrating his pants.  Where he would get more was currently inconceivable.
A quick breakfast of ferns and mollusks that he kebabed on last night’s fire spit got him going, and he almost did not desire his usual two cups of coffee that he had been used to before this enforced trip to the beach.  Despite his greater energy, he still craved the bitter beverage.  And this trip had been far longer than he thought it would be when he had chosen his path from the top of a rain-touched tree in the dark.  Getting up, he kicked sand over the fire until it was thoroughly quenched for he had no desire to burn down his refuge.  At one time, he would have been more high-minded about protecting the wilderness, but here and now the untouched jungle was looking more and more like an exploitable resource to him.
Walking around the beginning of the curve at the end of the barrier island let him sink into depression because the area seemed safe and unpopulated with no tracks of large creatures or nearby roars in the last hour and a half.  The thin strand of beach gleamed wider than on the unprotected oceanic side.   It grew to perhaps forty feet in width, and from examining the sand he thought high tide only came up to within five feet of the jungle.
In the far distance across the waves he could see a green smudge.   And to his right and forward, but closer, he could make out a yellow line below a green fringe. No distractions loomed near enough to keep his mind focused on other things than his losses.
  In several ways, he welcomed the presence of the dinosaurs.  They let him test his newly developing skills of wilderness survival and his judgment.  The danger kept him from dark thoughts.  And he occasionally felt himself slipping back into thinking this world unreal.  Nothing quite like the bull-throated roar of a lust for lunch maddened and  screaming dinosaur to solve those emotional issues, at least temporarily.   But each day, he wavered between hope and the darkness in his own mind.
But thinking that he could do better than use danger as an anti-depressant, he meditated on the problem.  One solution seemed clear if hard.  He had to improve the situation he fell into; his identity need not remain as it did.  Granted that he had a bad board position for his armies, but he had come back from worse starts than this.  Besides, he told himself truthfully, he had a great deal of strengths to build upon.  Jackson wanted to change his life even if the how eluded his grasp at the moment.
Lost in his thoughts, he did not notice the sunset as he trudged further around the end of the isle.  A brilliant, yellow and orange fire blazed off the channel between this and the next island about four hundred feet in the distance, and the overcast began breaking up which it infrequently did, although most commonly about sunset.  The brilliance struck him in the eyes so that his first notice of the approach of something very large echoed from the subdued thud, and thump that his ears heard and his feet felt.  The sun that blasted his vision to his left had betrayed him, and so Jackson saw, at close range, looming like a mountain the King of Dinosaurs.

Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Squinting around, Rex strode down to the water’s edge for a drink.  His strikingly quick movements were wrong to the theories, perhaps, but the proportions were right, and so was his stink of confidence.  Darting and bird-like his two-ton head snapped back and forth effortlessly, and a rumble passed between the King’s lips.  Arrogance oozed off the tight-knit, yet flappy scales and showed in the swaggering walk and in the long shadow that bounced as if a flaunted tail.  Rex feared no one, although he did keep a weather eye out for intruders.  His presence explained why there were no other dinosaurs around to trouble Jackson.
Rex strode into the shallow water, or shallow for him as the waves cresting about his thighs  would have been over Jackson’s head.  The monstrous beast bent over to drink.   And a vision struck Jackson so that he giggled which mortified him in embarrassment of rudeness, and in curses at his own stupidity.  But Rex reminded him of nothing so much as watching a chicken peck at a field, looking for a worm.  How he moved was not the slow ponderous way that a Komodo dragon showed, but instead he jerked at every stimulus, and flicked his head to the right at any noise.
His car-sized head snapped back up allowing Rex’s glance  to spear Jackson’s way.  A long-drawn out shudder of astonishment rippled the temporarily still water about the dinosaur, and fragged Rex’s plan to nip down for a quiet drink.  He just looked, tilted his head so as to try to make the vision sensible, and in the end gave up and gaped at Jackson.
Nonplussed himself, Jackson stared back.  Not moving at all, but it seemed the dinosaur could see him just fine despite his lack of movement.  Another theory bit the dust.  The tableaux held except for the surge of waves coming into the beach, and washing over the monstrous creature’s the curled back tip of the monstrous creature‘s tail.
Obviously curious, which broke another icon of the beast’s myth-that it was a dumb brute, Rex stepped delicately up out of the water, and toward the oddity on two gigantic hind legs.  If legs as thick as tree trunks, and talons capable of bending a steel I-beam could be precise and soft, these were.  The pale sand still shuddered under the mass of the creature’s approach with its two tiny arms held out in front of it wiggling distractedly.
Crying out inside, Jackson screamed in his soul to the Heavens.
Its not fair! Its not fair.  I was trying so hard.  And then like a sudden bolt of inspiration came the knowledge that yes, it was not fair.  And that yes, he could fight this.  It was not an immutable fate.  And even if in the end he lost, all that was expected was that he fight.  This freed him from an incipient paralysis. ABCD
Jackson knew he stood on two legs like the dinosaur did, but to the gargantuan creature, he no doubt looked improbably short with no foot-long spikes of teeth, or ripping hindlegs to protect his soft underbelly.  But while Jackson definitely preferred an investigation to a hopeless run from the dinosaur, he also remembered how cats “investigated” mice.  No doubt at some point, he would be bitten and tossed skyward in a spirit of scientific study.  He held himself still except for a hand that slid along his pants to the hilt of the katana.  The head of Rex canted off to the left just slightly, and in those great lantern eyes, Jackson saw a knowing look backed up by amusement.  Feeling chills racing up and down his body, Jackson tried to summon the state of no mind where he could strike without thinking at the first sign of an attack.
The moments of pure curiosity cost Rex.  He might have been king of his realm, but there were other realms.  A long, and intermittently scaled neck lunged from the water, and lashed out at the tyrannosaur.  Lunging backwards away from Jackson and shuffling to the side, the tyrannosaur’s attempted to evade the plesiosaur’s ambush.  The much smaller, and streamlined head of the sea lord lashed out like a gigantic cobra, a stone at the end of a whip crack, and a dozen needle-like teeth raked the tyrannosaur’s neck sending iridescent scales flying.  The glimmering bits raked away and flat spun into the waves that steadily hit the beach.  A stretch of skin, a yard long, dangled ripped from Rex’s neck.  Drops of water, strange to the taste, fell about Jackson.  But the jugular of the tyrannosaur remained whole and unsevered.
And the plesiosaur did not succeed in getting a death grip on the land creature’s windpipe either. And now Jackson recalled seeing a small, log-like something floating in the water.   It must have been the head of the plesiosaur lurking for prey.  It had stung and frightened its prey, but not crippled it.
Would it fall back now?
Rex did not give the sea snake a choice, but bit back in a feint with a twirling of the neck and fled, plunging haphazardly toward the shore not watching where he placed his taloned feet.  The plesiosaur flinched from the false attack, and then vanished sulkily amidst the flying spray.  Rex sprinted out of the water, and down the beach toward Jackson.
In a trice, the dinosaur raced down the beach and past Jackson who felt a continuous vibrato under his feet, and smelt wet chicken,  and just behind the terrified  human the dinosaur stopped to roar challenge toward the sea.  The deafening noise, and the drifting stench of carrion let Jackson know that Rex, as he had come to call the tyrannosaurus, had halted, standing just behind him.  Jackson dared not turn around and hardly breathed.
The plesiosaur did not reappear, and Jackson could not stop himself from craning his neck around to look up at the great beast that stood close enough for Jackson’s shadow to cover a long, taloned toe.  In that moment, Jackson very much wanted to live.  He trembled like a taut string thumped.  A tiny, but continuous shiver ran up and down his body.
Rex looked out at the sea from which he had ran, and up and out further to find his assailant.  Jackson did likewise.  Baffled they turned to look at each other in a perfect union of questioning non-comprehension.  Where had the monster gone?
Feigning calm and sympathy, Jackson slipped his hand again over to his hilt to ready the katana for a quick draw.  Iajeutsu received little practice in his personal repertoire of martial arts skills.  But he hoped he could get the sword out in time even as he knew just how unlikely that was.
Two-handed or one-handed, Jackson pondered for a second the veritable hill of granite muscle with its sharp edges that tensed and untensed visibly with rippling waves as the tyrannosaur flitted its head sideways back and fourth, slightly.  Two-handed, Jackson decided with firm decision.  He did not even know if the blade could even hurt this humongous creature.  His objective would be to get it out as quickly as possible, and clobber the dinosaur without attempt at finesse, if it snapped at him.  If he could turn it aside, then he would run for a tree which probably would not save him, but it was all he had right now.  His mouth dry, and his hands shivering on the hilt.  Jackson heard a noise to the right.
As a juggernaut, the plesiosaur exploded from the sea directly across from Rex and Jackson.  Rex bolted right over the top of Jackson flattening the human who had barely the time to recognize his danger, before being smashed into the beach by the tyrannosaurus’ tail.  The tail scraped over the human’s far more tender body, and Jackson wanted to scream as shattering damage hammered into him, and as the rough tail ripped patches of his skin loose.  But he could not make his mouth obey him he found, as he lay face-down on the beach.  ABCD
Dazed, he lay there until the plesiosaur breathed down on him.  Trying to stop himself, but not able to, he flipped over before he could countermand the decision.

“Hi, I’m a human.  Basic top of the food chain model.”

Jackson said wanting desperately to giggle, but that would hurt far too much.  The plesiosaur bent down to snuffle him, and then it lovingly took the time to get a good bite, and Rex attacked interrupting the massacre.  The tyrannosaur had evaded the initial rush, and then wheeled about to come in on the flank of the plesiosaur.   And the too simple brain of the massive amphibian (in mass several times the size of the one Jackson had drive off at his original campsite) made him forget the essential element of the situation.   Instead of hoisting Jackson into the air by its abundant teeth, the plesiosaur heard its death.  The teeth of the tyrannosaur clacked shut onto the long, and flexible plesiosaur‘s neck in a death grip.--Portray this more clearly, and have Bonna read this section,a nd show the plesiosaur’s head flopping back and forth, and describe Jackson’s internal world more, and more details of the beasts.  Keep on re-writing this section.

Rolling desperately away as the futile struggles of the plesiosaur thrashed up clouds of sand, and drove it back and forth on the beach in great thumps that Jackson felt through his soles after he stood up, the human took one quick look at the combat of the giants, and ran straight into the jungle.

End of Chapter Nine.






Chapter Ten: The Slums of London--need to point out that Kara is considering giving up until she sees the boy


Kara woke in a pile of icy slush dirty from the day’s travelers.  The stink of strange hydrocarbons assailed her nose as her eyes studied the smoke-encrusted wall of brown brick that sat in front of her eyes with a worrisome solidity because it hardly fit in with the last place she had been.
The tramp of boots nearby in a brisk cadence reassured her that these people here are human.  Or that she knew the indigenous population was at the least, bipedal. Kara wondered what to call the indigenous population.  Natives seemed out of the question, even if she did not strive for political correctness; she did maintain a little sensitivity.
Pulling herself out of the slush left a sheet of water on the front of her jeans (that she had changed to this morning from her parachute pants) and her chambray shirt that she had changed into back in the Takiernan‘s guest room.  Almost black speckles of ice bobbled about like glaciers in the sheet of water.  A chill wind whistled down the four-foot wide alley, and shocked her with its fierceness.  It held her stiff until it paused.  For the space of a ten count she huddled in the face of the wind, and tried to be so still as to keep the misery localized to one message to her body.
Inevitably she twitched, and new paths for the air were found.  The fresh new agony tore at her resistance.  Shortly shivering would set in, and then hypothermia.  Kara knew her resources were still thin despite a largish, for her, meal last night, and the new-found bounty of courage to try to live that she had found in the last, ah, place she had been.
She distracted herself from the wind that rattled down the unhealthy alley and over piles of mostly melted ice, and then this bone-cutting gust chased some ice particles it had flung around the corner some thirty feet away.  In the other direction came another wind, and the sound of footsteps and unclear voices.  It sounded like a run to safety to Kara.
The wind stopped, and Kara started gathering her items.  She moved briskly to save herself from cooling down too much.  The laudable goal made sense, but shortly proved to be ultimately silly.

Kara sighed a breath of cloud.   She never saw such a vast plume even in the harshest Arizona winters.  And the weather had been mild in her last world or place as well.  Maybe she lost energy as she slowly died?  Each place being lower on some cosmic energy scale?  Until she landed in some dread limbo?
  The dreadful wind had stopped raking her with its massive handful of claws.  Relief at the passing of the wind lived shortly however, for soon the stillness stole heat from her.  The heat fell away like a penny into a vast wishing fountain that would never be full.  It could swallow her body whole.

“First things first, I have to get out of this wet blouse.”

She lectured herself kindly not knowing how much like her mother she sounded in that phrase.  The wind puffed and showed signs of starting back up.  This lent speed to her decision-making process.
Somehow, knowing that certain of her stuff waited deeper into the alley; she proceeded slogging in her light shoes through calf-high slush in that direction.  The wind battered her back.  At first, gentle and ignorable as new strength from her plan infused her, but soon that strength ran thin.  Hunching her shoulders and loosing her long hair from its strap-held ponytail helped enough to get her to the corner.
She rested in the lee of the corner with her back against the iced brick and her arms clasped under her breasts.  Clumsily due to cold and inexperience, she stuck her hands into the opposite sleeves of her long-sleeved blouse.  The chill of the brick and its thin rivulets of ice that covered small parts of the brick wall drew heat from her body with a painful intensity.  Her slumping against the wall stopped.  She just stood in the lee absorbing the feeling of being protected until the cold seemed to find her anyways.
Massive shivers followed that spread from neck to ankle.  The shaking made it difficult to walk.  Stumbling and slipping forward she distantly noted that her feet felt fine in the less trampled and almost dry snow of this section of alley.  That worried her.  They should be complaining of walking through freezing slush.
The surface of this new section of alley rested a few inches higher than around the corner.  Thus the slush was kept at bay.  The first, downward stroke of the “L” shaped alley wiggled in a variously narrow path five feet wide at most.  This constricted even tighter.  Two to three feet separated each dirty brown wall.
Oh, Haszikip, you Takhiernan cold phobic, I wish you could see me now.  You would probably pass out in sheer fright.  As her wont, Kara tried to ignore the fact that the last thing she remembered of that red and dusty and warm, yes, warm planet concerned very large guns firing at her.
The notion of her somehow surviving having a gun barrel as big as her small hand pointed at her and fired at her while set on full automatic seemed blatantly impossible.  Not a survivor type; not the sort of person who lived through becoming a bank hostage defined her self-image as ineffective in violent situations.  Definitely, she did not rescue the other hostages.
She recalled at least five machines pointing at her, but somehow only one would fire.  Maybe it had been a trick of memory, but she had been sure they all had fired at her.  They had had train car-sized fuselages, and metallic legs, and several twin, long guns mounted in front, which reminded her of ant’s pincers.
Her clothing, and her laptop lie atop the snow.  She rushed to them.  In the near distance she saw a couple strolling in the snow.  They were arguing fiercely.  But she soared internally with  happiness to see that they looked human.
They even spoke some form of English.  She happily recognized the dialect as working class English.  Not that she could speak it, but she had heard a little used in a drama class.
Grabbing her shirt up from the snow led her to consider where to change.  She lacked Superman‘s abilities that made him able to change faster than the eye could see in a handy telephone booth.  This morning, when she got up she had not put on a bra because she figured that details of human anatomy were wasted on a sentient lizard.  Now she regretted that decision.  But who knew her destiny included getting to be blown up or riddled with bullets or vaped or however those aliens did it before lunch?
A tentative step toward the more sheltered corner crashed to a full stop by a breeze straight out of the Artic whistling around the corner of the building.
Forget modesty, woman.  She started to unbutton the shirt, and then paused as still as mouse while interested eyes from the passersby queried her.  A quick breath for courage, and she started again.  By this time, the shirt had begun to freeze to her flat stomach.  Even to the invisible watcher, if there had been one, the scene lacked much detail for the eyes.  The sky ran overcast from horizon to horizon with not a break anywhere to be seen even if you ascended to a high roof, and looked south across the miles of brown buildings.
The same watcher saw small breasts, pert, but damaged by a too small diet, and far too prominent bones.  He also saw the rot in those bones. Her back stood straight, and her hair hung long, and overall she appeared fair to the eyes even if dreadfully thin.
Her upper body exposed to the killing cold, she dove upon the drier shirt with animalistic enthusiasm.  Shrugging it on she made the work of moments.  Even the coldness of it welcomed her because it came from a dry and gentler cold.  Her jeans had enough density of weave that they kept the water mostly on the outside, unlike her shirt which has just soaked it up.

Bright-eyed and smiling a bit tentatively again she scooped up her laptop.

It fell open in her hands, but no amount of prodding or pleading would revive the “creature”.  She had named her laptop, ‘Igor’.  It appeared Igor had taken a permanent leave of absence for better places, for a Heavenly Programmer who would not mistreat such a poor machine like she had.  She checked it for bullet marks and other wounds.  The outer casing appeared undented or scraped except for the white spot where her Dad had tagged it with a circular saw.

“I told you as a kid to put up your stuff.  As an adult, I’m merely going to highly recommend it.  You left it in the shed, and I nearly cut it in two.”

 Dad had said in his ponderous lecture mode.

 The laptop had survived that mistreatment, but apparently whatever happened this time had been too much.  The lack confused Kara.  No visible reason for the computer not to work showed itself.  Not for the first time, she wished her brother here; this time so he could do his magic on a recalcitrant machine.
The worse part, the total non-working status of the laptop, concerned her.  What did this mean? Not a single part did anything.  No lights flashed, no screens glowed, and no drive whined.  The laptop stayed dead.


Frustrated she reached out to her left for her backpack.  Holding it loosely in her left hand, she saw that it had shaded from her view the face of a child.  The laptop slipped from her sleeve-draped hand.  The hand had pinned it to her muscled but scrawny leg.  The laptop thumped in the powdery snow.
Oh please God, let it be a doll.  She prayed and dove down reckless with despair to dig the child free from the confining two-foot high snow-bank.  The face had a bluish-white tinge that she associated with an expensive doll.  A full-sized mannequin such as a rich child might have could look thus.  A poke of her index finger gave back rubber-like, gel-like, and her mouth opened to scream in horror.  Whether or not she yelled she did not notice for her hands were desperately trying to scrape away the snow.
Her very desperation worked against her in that it left her not the time to take a measured draft of snow.  But soon she came to ice, and here only brutal determination would save the day.  She had that in plenty.
Blood and fingernails were left in the ice, but she determined not to notice.  If I have to die, then this is a good way to do it, she knew in a shining moment as she freed the child from his cocoon of ice.

“Here now.”

 She heard a calming voice say from the roadway edge about ten feet away.  She ignored it, and bent her head to the rag-covered chest to listen for a heartbeat since she remained unsure which of the surrounding things that she knew were hers that would help.  And specifically, which one was her purse with its mirror case inside to check for breath by holding it in front of a mouth, and spotting the fog on the mirror.  A steady, but slow beat reassured her, and she looked up with a radiant smile.
The gentleman in his knee-high boots, and double-thickness of pants, and felt jacket, and calfskin gloves looked quite dazzled.  He also looked warm and toasty.

“He’s alive.”

“Well then, let’s get him to your house.  I can walk you there.”

 The gentleman gingerly stepped into the alley with his hand slipping into a pocket.  He assessed her in a strangely proprietarial way.  She was somewhat put off by his manner, but deemed it unimportant in light of both of their urgent needs for heat.

“I-I have no house.”

  She said slowly as the horror of being out in the cold without shelter sank in to her bones to mingle with her other fears.

“Well, then I suppose, I could install you in my gatehouse, could I not?”

 He said as if that suited him well.

 “Probably better than an old, rat-infested, and draft-ridden house in the City, anyways, don’t you think?”

She realized from his politely condescending tone that the man talked down to her.  He thinks I am stupid, she decided with growing irritation which she controlled even as she instinctively hid her bloodied fingernails.

“That would depend on if you have been properly keeping up your gatehouse, Mr. --”

  She left the title to dangle at the end as a question.

“Ah, an educated woman.  That will make our conversations so much more enjoyable.  Tell me what you think of the latest …”

“We have a child freezing here.”

 She interrupted acidly.  He stared in irritation.  He paused and considered how to deal with her insolence.  By his lights, he saw himself as a moderate man.

“Yes, so we do.  Well then we are off to my gatehouse, are we not?”

 He looked at her, and she became aware of how his eyes were studying the curves of her face and her collarbone.  He licked his lips a bit.

“Well?”

 He demanded as his desire drove him to impatience.

“Have you the space for the child, but not for me?  I can find other lodging.”

 She said seeking to clarify the terms of a bad bargain.

“Oh, I have the space, but no helpers suited for the task.  It would be better to just leave him here to end his and our misery.  See he is unconscious.  He will know nothing, and then be in Heaven with our sweet Lord.”

  The cant phrases burned Kara’s ears even more than the wind as she huddled over the boy to protect him.  Now she knew the terms.  If she became this pompous and cold gentleman’s mistress the boy would live.

“I hope you have a carriage, and warm clothes, and some hot liquid.  I fear he would not survive a trip there else wise.  And, I would be much the worse for the trip as well.”

 She said as she began to test the limits of her patron’s patience.

“Of course, beautiful one. What’s your name?”

 He said and he cradled her head to his shoulder for a brief embrace.  He smelled of pork.  He drew them to the road edge, and pointed out a carriage.  She had to carry the child not that she would have trusted him to do so.
He stood tall and muscular with big-boned broad shoulders, and he stepped easily in the crackling, firm-packed snow of the roadway.  The face showed calm and almost boring in its lack of passion.  The only commitment the face ever made was to do something everyone expected him to do, or to further his own desires.  He reminded her of her brother she realized disquietedly.
 But then, she remembered her brother weeping, and she knew he cared.  His sense of honor too stood him apart from this civilized beast.  Even if he hated entanglements he had rescued the drunken lady from her car in the ditch despite her screaming at him to let her get back in; she could drive it out of the narrow cleft, and he did not need to drag her away.  Her brother had done it even as he hated being the object of other’s attention drawn by the shouting madwoman.  Thankfully the car had stayed quiescent, and not burned, but you did not know what would happen in such situations.

“So who is this Jackson, you name?”

 The civilized beast said with keenness.  Evidently, he had heard her mutter a name.

“My brother.”

 She replied shortly while mentally adding who could kick your head in.

“Hugh.”

  An older man’s voice said sternly from the window of a passing carriage.

“What is this?  Amelia shuns you, and you go run off to pick up a street woman in indecent attire even for their kind?”

At first, she had been hopeful for another, and finer rescuer, but his twisted lip, and scornful words while he readily eyed her wet blue jeans made her want to cringe.  She got mad instead.  But she waited for ‘Hugh’, her new boyfriend to defend himself, if not her.  She waited in vain.
The pelting of feet away from her, and towards the carriage that had been pulling up toward them caused her to incredulously turn around.  Hugh ashamedly scrambled in to the carriage while yelling for the driver to use the whip.

“Yes, get them young, and use the whip well, on their face, if need be, and you will always have them at your feet.”

  The accuser said from her left.  She ignored him as best as she could.

Kara’s jaw dropped slowly, meditatively as she considered Hugh.  She thought herself familiar with some of the worst samples of wormhood around from her dates, but she did not accept this insult, this went far past that.  She knew a curse or two from her studies in the Craft, and she felt more than willing to risk the three-fold vengeance back on her if the Universe felt that she had wronged someone unjustly.  Besides, it would do little to him.  She had never seen anything that you could put a finger on when she had participated.

“Let thy ways come to nought, evil doer.”

She muttered, and the horse and carriage bobbled as she said it.  A potential accident only averted by the skill of the driver.  Kara felt tired and dirty for this miserable worm had been the first person she ever cursed.

“What you be working magic on a fine gentleman?  No doubt that is how you got him to be hot after you.”

The older, but still frighteningly hale man said, half-hanging from the window.

“Look, sir, I know you think this looks bad, but this child needs heat and warm clothes or he will die.”

Pessimistically, Kara made her plea to the hard-faced man as he clambered out of his stopped carriage.

“He’s your bastard.  You provide for him.”

  The man said, and made to move past aiming for a shop.  Kara stepped in his path.  He loomed over her.  Her arms were tired from the near fifty-pound weight, and a chill wind kept blowing all the while.  Her adrenaline wore off, and the cold crept in more now than ever.

  “No, he’s not mine.  Somebody abandoned him.”

He stared at her incredulously.  He looked at her again re-evaluating her clothes, and coming to a new conclusion.

“You are not one of Princess Vicky’s messengers are you?”

A blank stare from her met his question.  Too late, she cursed her tired slowness.  She would have happily lied and claimed to be the Emperor of the West if it got her little boy a safe haven.

“Good, the Princess has these silly ideas about saving the useless, about the responsibility of the more fortunate, about raising the morality of the common.  Christian ideas misapplied; Darwin saw clear and right.   Hah, and hah, I say to all these new-fangled Victorians.”

“Listen you.”

  She began in a threatening tone, but with his head too lost in his own cleverness, he failed to notice it.

“People, good people.  This street urchin is near frozen.  Will anyone please help?”

He drawled out the last question mockingly.  The others on the street hunched up, and looked away, and hurried on except for one man who cursed the filthy beggar who would probably rob him next summer and cost the public a hanging unless he left the world now.

“So, it goes.  The street is violent, immoral, and irresponsible.  They burn, and loot, and they die like flies, but not enough, not enough.”   He summoned his brass-gilded wagon with a snap of his fingers while breathing heavily with his egg-like face red.

The face of her opposition towered above her in self-righteous indignation.  Then inspiration seized him.  He reached out to grab the child from her arms.

“I’m going to save your father from your Bible mummery, child.  We will put this urchin back where he belongs, and you will go home to a good whipping.  And you will stay within your class, and get married like you should have long ago.”

“Goddess protect me.”

  Kara whispered in a prayer as she frantically tried to hang onto the child as her ‘helper’ tried to tug him from her arms.  Kara, vastly outmatched in mass and energy, did not know what to do.  Then the man was flung backwards with a slapping sound.  Kara saw green bits of leaves smeared on the man’s cheek.  Enraged by the attack, the man started to his feet in the snow, and so Kara prayed again.  A second thwap sounded, and bowled the man over in the slippery snow.  Kara breathed like a racehorse shuddering from sudden exertion, and she smelled a faintness of flowers all about her.
Thank you, Goddess.  She thought with wonder and joy.

“A dozen impossible things before breakfast, right.”

The man lay unmoving, and then she saw a door open and two youngsters run over with obvious intent to rob him.  Turning away to let them lift his wallet provoked a quick, crooked grin on the face of the older child.

“Thankye’ witch lady.”

He said as Kara looked down at the face of the child she held in her arms.  The boy seemed less blue, and he murmured a bit.  She bent down to hear his words.

“Mommy, mommy.”

His voice croaked and he cried faintly in his sleep.  Her heart tore again, and tears filled her eyes as she wondered how anyone could stand aside from such a little one.  At the same time she wanted to jump up and down for joy that the little one lived.  With shining face, wet with tears but brightened by a blazing smile, she looked back at the street urchin who called her a witch.  The street children would know where to get warm in this cold, cruel place, if anyone did.  But before she could speak, a rustling wind came down the street.

“Well done, you are tired, Kara, let me protect the child.”

She heard from all around her.  The two feral children left off from stealing his boots to run wildly away.

“Who are you?”

“Ah, I am a good friend.  Let me have the child.  I will keep him safe and warm.”

The feathery voice sounded kind, and the air seemed markedly warmer, but Kara could see no one as she spun around.  The street had become deserted.

“Who are you?”

  Kara forced the words out one at a time.

“Well, if you must, then I am the North Wind.  Now …”

“No and never!”

Kara howled savagely at Death while she clutched the chill boy to her breast.  For she knew that story, and she had not liked it in the seventh grade.

“No need to get hysterical.”

The North Wind said with deliberate menace as the temperature fell to its normal frigid level, and then lower still.

“You know I will have the boy tonight.  You cannot defeat me.  This is his destiny.”

The North Wind whispered as it flew to the end of the street in preparation.  Meanwhile, Kara thought furiously.

End of Chapter Ten.

[10 blank lines suppressed]

Chapter Eleven: Running Through the Jungle


Bulling past giant ferns in his mad scramble into the jungle and away from the struggling tyrannosaur and plesiosaur, Jackson spent no time to think, but the back of his brain repetitiously urged him to run faster.  Face and upraised arms slapped on wet leaves that stung distractingly, and one sharp-edged leaf smacked him directly on his eyeball.   Sickened to nausea and panting he came to a barrier too fast.  The three- foot thick, draped in vines, and covered by recently wetted moss, log  hung against other, still upright trees across his path.   He spotted the barrier with his good eye, tried to skid to a stop in the thick, sticky mud.  But he plowed into this obstruction with his recently minimized pot belly, anyways.
Slowed slightly, and powered by terror, he took a step back, and looked over his shoulder.  Only forty feet away, he could see the head of the tyrannosaur bobbing up and down savagely.   Jackson vaulted the log without another thought, his weight balanced on his left hand while his shoes slung creamy bits of mud across innocent, young ferns.

  Continuing with his eyes ricocheting from a clotheslining vine he ducked, to a spear-like branch set to impale his liver until he lurched left and into deep shadows behind thick plants, and to the floor of the jungle, and then back all over again as he deliberately picked up the pace again after hearing something that might be a dinosaur smashing into the woods.   Wobbling in the mud and slick vegetation, he flailed his way through it, until he tumbled over an edge.

His right foot went to land on a low-lying leaf only to find that it and the unusually thick bushes ahead of him screened empty air.  He fell in belly-buster fashion toward an animal trail barely the width of his body, and he went cross-wise to it.  Without thinking, his martial arts training kicked in as it was supposed to do, and he curled into a ball, and slapped the ground with his arms after touching down in a rolling tumble with his shoulder first.  A bit dazed, he looked up in a clear spot at the sky, and breathed in and out.  His body reported in ‘all clear‘, but he was not sure.

Jackson had a choice to make.  Keep on trying, or trust to the aliens that had brought him here from Arizona to save him.  He dearly wanted to have their explanation, but he was not sure they would rescue him a second time.  In fact, that may have been their ship that got shot down by those strangely anthromorphically head-shaped balls of flame.

He would have wondered why he had not noted the flame-balls similarity to heads before, but right now he did not care.   The truth was simple.  He had been tired and emotionally shocked.  Just like now, he noted savagely.

Escape was his first priority, and so he slipped to his feet, and without hesitation plunged down the path.  Jackson did recognize that he needed to go slower, or risk killing himself by accident.  It was very hard, but he kept a governor on his speed, and limited it to a lope.

His path kept heading downward in a gentle slope surrounded by sun-craving luxuriance on both sides rising above his head, like running down a supermarket aisle tilted fifteen degrees lower toward the back of the store.  Slim shoots in great bunches competed with a species of singleton fern with overshadowing leaves designed to steal sunlight from their competitors.

Wondering whether he headed into a swamp, and decided that he would press on anyways if so.  He had a vague impression that the giant plant-eaters were peaceable, and that the carnivores left the swamp alone.  But, instead, as he ran down onto a more level patch of ground, he saw a brackish pool of water about fifteen feet across emerge from behind lacy and strangely short ferns.  A pond waited in the middle of a meadow.

  Slowing, and glad of it, since a mile run, even downhill, put him a bit out of sorts  Puffing, he came to a halt remembering all the stories about watering holes being places of ambush for animals.  Studying the clearing with its short grasses that looked markedly different from the jungle, he decided that the water was the only variable that he could see.  It was clear of danger.

Jackson turned about and looked up the sloping hill to see if the tyrannosaur followed him, but nothing disturbed the primeval jungle, not even a pyre of smoke from a campfire near their spaceship.  He was safe for the moment.  Taking a minute, he drew his katana, and cleaned it with some nearby ferns since his regular cleaning equipment was back up on the beach with the dueling giants.

The blade seemed to get clean with the dry fern, although he was sure he needed to oil his blade.  He ran his eyes over the shining length of the katana, and wished again for his supplies.  It would hurt him in his heart, and in his chances for survival if it started to rust.  And if, no when he got home, Mother would tease him about not taking care of the gift she had bought for him on her second business trip to Tokyo.

He took a dry part of his sweaty shirt, and polished the blade some more.

With a sudden thrust of hurt, he realized that it seemed hard to visualize Tokyo which he had seen many pictures of, and even his own multi-purpose room seemed farther away, a bit foggy.   How he longed to be back in little Mendoza, Arizona right now.  A comfy chair, a Coke® can just retrieved from his miniature fridge, a computer game, and a problem with some Visual Basic code to be resolved as soon as he got a good score on his game sounded like Heaven right now.  But then he remembered Kara’s illness that threatened her life, and his parents’ pain, and his own fumbling on what to do, and what he felt in response to all the madness.  And finally, the true insanity of seeing a duplicate of Kara stand above his little sister’s inbuilt bed, and drop a stiletto into Kara while he cut the duplicate’s head off with this katana.

“I did not cut her head off.”  He hissed defensively.

*No?  Then I suppose it just fell off on its own?*  His conscience answered back rapid-fire.  The blasted thing did not like to play fair, and give him time to think, or a clear-cut question to grapple with unless it was sure of a prosecutorial victory.

“She pushed herself onto the blade.”

*Are you sure?*

And there was no response to that because in the chaos of the moment, he could not know exactly what he had or had not done.  Wrung out, and wondering if what had happened to him since then was some sort of divine punishment, a la the Twilight Zone, for not properly taking care of his sister, he just shook his head, letting sweat drops resting on his hair fly everywhere.  Trying to pull himself further back into the present moment, and to flee bad memories,  he raised his head and looked about.



The plants next to and leading up to the pond stood clearly shorter and scrawnier than the ones up the hill behind him.  And they were different species than the ones he had raced recklessly among just minutes ago.  Pushing back his sweaty hair, and wiping his face from water which was like wiping the water and soap from a windshield at a gas station, it was so heavy, Jackson cautiously peered at the fine, dry traceries of the grain-bearing splotch of plants to his right.  They barely reached his shoulder making them incredibly small compared to the other plants he had seen and climbed in this monstrous jungle.

And the ferns were of like size, or smaller.  Since there was ready water in the pond, and no towering plants competing for sunlight, then these of rights ought to be taller and more vibrant, and the same species as the plants in the jungle.  Jackson turned to study the water, and crept closer.

Dried salt lines paralleled the water’s edge.  Curious, he dropped a branch into the water.  It floated readily, in fact, it barely dipped into the water at all.  He had heard of such in the Dead Sea in Israel.  So many minerals in the water that anyone, even total non-swimmers could float.

But, while that could explain the plants, it left him with a question.  They had to struggle to sieve salt from their water, and had not strength to grow to the sky like their brethren.  And their kindred were even more unsuited to dealing with salt water, so they left this vale to the smaller ferns and other plants.  The question was whether the water was toxic to humans?

Then he laughed, for he stood on an animal trail that led down to the pond, and probably across it.  Right now, he could not decipher the trail on the opposite bank, but here in the relaxing sunlight it did not seem to matter.  Jackson determined to ford the pond like so many animals had done before him.


He set out, and the warm water, and soft, slick mud billowed up in underwater clouds around his legs for the first few feet.  The massaging heat, and the prickling minerals, and the water itself felt good, and even refreshing as he waded past his knees and up to his waist in the center of the pond.   Not quite sure how many days had passed since he had a shower, Jackson dipped to his neck in the water, and let out a low whoop of joy pitched to not carry far.  It felt so good to rinse some of the abundant sweat, and accumulated grime from his chest and long arms.

Having to keep one hand out of the water to hold his katana bothered him, and after a bit his arm upheld above his head began to ache. So he sat the sword by a clear spot between some rushes on the far side of the pond.  Then he began to scrub his skin with his hands.  Regrettably, he passed on cleaning his face or hair since he feared what organisms might be growing in the water, or subtle poisons that might trickle into his mouth or eyes.

Wiggling about in the shallower end of the pool like a happy dog shaking off water, he saw that his pond was actually a straight place with an inflow and an outflow.  Checking upstream which was the direction he had been traveling on the beach, and thus could not be very far since he was near one end of the barrier island, he slipped around a corner between overhanging greenery.

Twenty feet upstream he walked while holding himself low in the water, and enjoying the exploration as evidenced by the grin on his face.  Bubbling waters, and a smell of a faint stink of sulphur attracted his attention and wrinkled his nose.  The water began to feel markedly warmer, and so he paused.  Carefully checking, for he knew he had found a spring since there was no upstream from the pool in front of him, and he looked for a sign, a jet of water perhaps to mark the spring.  A faint disturbance in the water to caught his perplexed eye, and he wanted to test it to see if that was his spring. But, if it was, it had to be a hot water spring, and he feared to go closer since it might well burn him.

Once he had traveled on vacation to Hot Springs, Arizona, and so he had stuffed his curiosity with an introductory book to chew on.   To Jackson’s satisfaction, this explained why his pond, or his river ran so salty, and heavy in minerals.

This brought up a point with him.  What to name this place?  A pond did not require a name, but a small river, truly a creek did.  And so did an island.

“Landing Island, and Peaceful Time Creek. I dub thee both, two dubs with one smack of an invisible sword.”  He waved an arm, and then realized his foolishness.  Jackson had wandered far from his katana, his fang, to protect him from the dinosaurs that preyed upon the weak on Landing Island.

He rushed back, trying to gain maximum speed while minimizing noise and waves.  On the way, he spooked when he felt a gush of cold against his left calf, but then he realized it was only water.  Indeed, it had to be another spring.  Probably a cold-water spring that helped make the river bearably warm further downstream.


Upon coming back around the corner, he paused mid-step as water sloshed forward past his legs since he stood near the bank of the creek, and panicking he saw it was gone.  Not thinking, he ran over to where he had put it down.  Not there, and the cold breath of doom breathed on his back in that sticky jungle.

Fighting back the panic, Jackson tried to review where he had placed it, and what he might do in the long term to fix the problem such as to make a fire-hardened spear.  And then he wondered if he should go get a club, right now.  With guilt and shame hammering him, along with fear, Jackson fell down into the water, and considered whether he should just drown himself.

It would hurt less than being eaten by a dinosaur.  One point in that plan’s favor, Jackson noted with morbid humor.  And then in the peacefulness of the water, he remembered finding his sword under the sand.  That had been blatantly impossible, but it happened.

Jackson pulled his face and shoulders out of the water, and asked himself where was his katana.  Suddenly he knew in what direction everything he had carried to this jungle lay.  Trembling, and exhilarated, he ignored the backpack on the beach, and turned about to see his katana not four feet from where he had been searching.

It lay undisturbed except a leaf had fallen over it, covering the most visible markings of its scabbard.    He had mistaken a dent in the pond’s edge for the animal track on the far side of the pond where he had lain his sword.  So easy to loose track of things in the wood, he told himself while trying to push the dark thoughts away.

Still they came back, and as he picked up his sword and stories he had read of hari-kari, ritual suicide reminded him.   And he remembered resolving that his younger sister was going to fight the bone cancer, she could not give up.  Well, being eaten by a dinosaur was less painful than bone cancer, and so he was sentenced and under the mallet on his own judgment.

Just being here, so alone in the woods, and it let thoughts sneak up on a man.  His whole family had a depressive streak, indeed Mother’s morbid sense of humor had been the first attractant for his father, or so he claimed.  Instead, it probably had been her long, black hair, and dark eyes, but a son knows better than to correct his father when said father tells mother “I love you for your mind.”

Shame-facedness fading into amusement and beginning a healing in his soul, he began pushing downriver.  Since his face was already wet from his partial dunking, he took the time to rinse his hair, but he kept hold of his sword above his head the whole time.   He needed to keep the sword to hand, at all times, he lectured himself.  Remember rule number one, always take the sword with you wherever you go.

The creek passed under his feet as he walked, and he spotted no signs of  animals using it for drink.  Probably too salty, he theorized.  Something bothered him about that, but he could not nail it down, and after a while he gave it up confident that it would eventually bubble to the surface of his mind.

Merging with another, the creek and its sister joined to make a wider and deeper path.  Also, he spotted a probable spring by the swirling of dirt in the water near a river bank.  No doubt, that added to the flow, and soon he was wading hip deep no matter where he walked.  Still he liked the smooth road of the creek, or small river now.  It lacked many slick stones in its bed for him to slide on being mostly mud, and it provided coolness in the jungle heat which he could tell would be oppressive otherwise.       Best, the dinosaurs seemed to cross it, but not linger, and he had dealt with more than enough ’saur-saur’s’ or ’rarrs!’ as the two-year-old next door to his home in Mendoza called them.

The creek, a watery dessert, the equivalent of the sidewalk that his father termed a ’dead zone’ made his way easier.  Cities were massive desserts with life kept very carefully in bounds, and Jackson began to see why.  Unconfined and untamed wilderness was messy, and unpredictable, and made doing things hard.  Worse than the Vbasic code by a fresh Mouse (MCSE) graduate he grumped as the steady push against the weight of water began to tire him.

Further traveling for another hour, and he began to singsong the Ancient Mariner’s Lament in his mind, not wanting to lose water by opening his mouth.

“Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink.” The Lament’s most famous line ran.

Jackson plugged on aware that he needed to find water, but not willing to stop walking, and not sure what to do.  He just kept placing his heavy wet feet one after the other, and hoping for a solution.  His plan, such as it was, was to wait until the thirst got really annoying, and then start searching for water.  Maybe it would rain, or he could find some water on a leaf.  Unfortunately his water distilling unit waited upon the beach.


A gray-skinned head about the size  and roughly the shape of a Volkswagon Beetle, and attached to a ten foot thick neck skylined itself over the sickly thin growths of ferns and trees and other greenery on the river‘s edge.  Jackson paused in mid-step, and then came down unmoving on both feet as he stared up at a big problem.

End of Chapter Eleven.

[14 blank lines suppressed]

Chapter Twelve: The War of Northern Aggression



The North Wind howled down the slushy London street toward Kara and the near-frozen child clutched in her arms.  Ice, fresh from the sky, and chased by the wind collided with her.  The brief and bitter foretaste of what the North Wind would do to her promised untold unpleasantness.

“Goddess protect us!  Make a wall of your will to save us, O Mother.”

She cried into the teeth of the wind while she visualized as Stephanie had taught her.  And a barrier of will shaped and sized much like the four by eight foot pieces of drywall she had hung with father and brother in their house stood firm protecting her.  The reason for the size was that her mental template for her request had been such a piece of construction material.  Joyously, she grinned at her easy victory, and reminded herself to give a thank offering to the Goddess.
The wind bounced and then held its pent up force,  baffled for a second, and then another.  Kara recovered her breath from the assault of the wind.  Then the wind laughed at her, and it spun around her wall.

“You can only protect one side with that spell.”

The North Wind laughed as it shattered the calm she suddenly needed to think of another spell.  The wind insinuated itself into her clothing, and mockingly as if a friend, tousled her hair.
The wind blew against the heavy child in her arms, and made him heavier, or so it seemed.

“You shall not have him.”

Kara announced.  The wind sighed in disappointment at her hard-headedness.

“Do I have to take you as well?”

  The North Wind asked with a perfect gentle brutality.  Kara shivered, and not just from the cold.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of Death.  I shall fear no evil.”

  The fragment from Psalms Twenty-Three held the warring parties entranced, and she tried to remember more.

“Your shield is only a shield around your left hand and side.  Hardly an impediment to a knowing wind.”

The North Wind laughed, and then it slung itself into the pit of her stomach.  Kara bent over as she flew backwards to crash into a dirty yellow brick house.  The child slipped from her arms, and lay face down in slush beside her right thigh.
As the wind whistled back away from her gathering speed and momentum for another attack, she tried to flip the child over.  Grasping his ice-slick coat with her numb and weakened fingers only jostled him so that he moaned a bit.
 The sweet beauty of the side view of his sleeping face struck her heart. Love blossomed deeper in her heart.  Kara fluttered her hands, and wished for someone else who knew what they were doing to have this responsibility.  No knight on horseback, or gentleman in a shiny and warm car appeared in response to her vague wish.
Kara willfully drove her hands underneath the child’s chest as the North Wind slid up the street gathering mass into itself.  She flipped the boy over.  The North Wind squealed with pleasure, and caught the child as he rested on his left shoulder in passing on his way to lying face up.  The full force of the wind caught the flat surface of the child’s back, and he drifted down the street and skyward like a kite in a fitful and weak breeze while an astonished and appalled Kara futilely grasped at air.
Meanwhile,  Londoners heard a great roaring noise in their beds.  The rich and the poor were alike whether those beds were warm with plentiful firebricks or cool; all that listened felt the urge to pull the covers over their heads.
Winds from all over London converged on a point above the North Wind’s precious cargo. Despite their translucency and gaseous nature, not enough room waited between the buildings.  Although “room” is not quite the right word for such amphibian beings of gas and spirit, it will do.  Not enough room for these foul and ill winds to join in alliance with the North Wind, and so they waited for the child to be brought above the rooftops where they could play their sadistic games with a castaway child.
Kara did not know what to do. For a long moment, she stared at her empty hands, and then turned to look down the street.  Old habits of giving up threatened resurgence.  None of her spells, the few that she had bothered to learn were of the kind to compel the wind.  The defense against ill fortune, the invocation of the Goddess’s protection, the revealing of hidden paths, and the calming of the spirit and the like were the spells that Louisa and Stephanie had taught her.  And she had not really believed in them then.  Frankly, she felt embarrassed to be using them now.
Everyone knew that magic and the power of the Gods was not real; at least not real in the same sense that traffic jams and bone cancer formed real.  But, then “everyone” is not watching a child being lofted into the air on a night without a hurricane by a wind with a translucent face and a voice that sears the bones with its chill she reasoned.  Perhaps like most things, the crowd is a fool.

“Take me, instead.”

 She yelled getting to her knees, and the North Wind looked down at her with suddenly compassionate eyes.  It looked beyond her after a moment.

  “He cannot, you belong to me.”

 A gravelly, and scratchy voice to her left set goose bumps upon her arms, and brought tears to her eyes.  She refused to look up.  It, the Man of Bones from her dreams had no existence; “not real“; he would go away if she ignored him. She promised herself.

“I was not real. At least not incarnate. Not until you came here.  Thank you for the gift of body.”

 The clacking of jawbones let her know that the Man was laughing.  “Thank you for the gift of your life.”  The Man of Bones continued to taunt her.

“You will never save the child.  You are the one that needs rescuing.  Cry for deliverance; your pathetic magics mean nothing to me.”

 The horrid truth of what the Man said crushed down on Kara.  She leaned over with her head between her too skinny thighs, and wept.  Slipping to her knees, the cold of the wet slush drifted through her blue jean covered knees, and she started to shiver.  And her hair fell into the street’s slush to be dirtied and wetted as well.

“There, there it will soon be all over.”

 The Man of Bones said in a comforting tone with an undertone of avaricious hunger.  It patted her shoulder with its splintered and bony hand, and that sent nausea creeping up her throat.  Hypothermia would soon set in she realized distantly.  Not that she cared; she would be grateful to leave this world of horrors.
But who would care for the boy?  She asked herself with fresh tears dripping down her frozen cheeks.  In those warm tears, she found courage again.

“Do not go gentle into the good night.”

 She hissed between her clenched teeth.  A quick thrust of her left leg, and she lurched half to her feet.  The Man of Bones clung to her, but he had no weight to slow her down.  Another thrust, and she stood rocking mildly in the soft wind.  All the harsh winds of London had fled to play with the child.

“Get away from me.”

  She hollered giving vent to her rage at the injustice of the Universe.  She flung the Man of Bones back.  He fell against the wall with a clack and a look of worry, and a memory of burning warmth that radiated from his prey.  It had not felt good, not good at all.

“Powers Above! I pledge you service.”

 She yelled at the top of her lungs with her eyes fixed forward and her right hand outstretched to the sky.

“Only give me the life of this child.”

She paused in her desperate plea, for even as mad as she could be, she did not look forward to appealing to the Powers Below.  But she would, if she had too.
I die soon, so I can do whatever.
A whisper in her mind almost went unnoticed in her joyous fury.  The recklessness of being past the fear of death intoxicated her.

His true name is The Death That Steals Away.

But she noticed, and she considered her actions.  There seemed only one course.  She could stand aside, and not fight until the bitter end.  But she no longer wanted to make things easy for Death.

“Quiet and peaceful winds, please bear my words to the Mighty North Wind.”

  She entreated, bowing in respect to the winds in the street.  The Man of Bones began to climb to his metatarsals watching carefully.  The winds paused and seemed to listen.
Kara took this as an assent.

“North Wind, North Wind, North Wind, by thy name thrice spoken and by thy true name, Oh The Death That Steals Away, I command you appear before me with the child you stole.  Fiat!  Let it be so.”

 Her voice cracked out with merciless clarity like the breaking of ice.  The Man of Bones studied her, and after a brief time the skull face smiled.  The greater she became, the greater her fall could be, and she would not surpass him, he told himself confidently as he deliberately faded to be unnoticed while blurring Kara‘s memories so that she would think his coming another dream.
Kara crossed her fingers, and then thought better as everyone knew  and called it a silly superstition.  Is this the same everyone who dares to stand in a cold street in wet clothes and compel Death to serve them?  She asked herself sardonically, and re-crossed her fingers.

“You dare?”

The words slammed into her soul, as wild winds grabbed her and slung her skywards.  She did not know down from up, and there seemed hardly enough air to breathe.  A mind-shattering nimbus of fury thrashed around her.  The only words that could come to mind seemed somewhat unsuited.

“Let no man despise thy youth.”

 She mumbled and then realized her goal.  Insisting that the North Wind respect her even if she was just a mortal, and the plan succeeded to a degree.  The air stilled around her.  A translucent gauze of faces melding into other faces surrounded her.  All of London lay beneath her. In that first fury, she had been flung into the sky without her noticing so great the intensity of the North Wind’s rage that it overwhelmed her senses.
 The view soothed her with its beauty and peace, at least from up here.  She took a moment to enjoy the sight of the London Bridge and the tower that held Big Ben.  She had never thought she should see London.  Her father and mother in their too frequent world travels had seen it twice.  She had envied them.
Upon seeing fright at the thousand feet of height beneath her shoes did not overcome her, the North Wind changed tactics.

“I am not a man.”

 He said with an ominous slither in his voice.

“No, you are not.”

 Kara snapped back, and added in a frost-laden voice.

“You are a disobedient sprite.  Where is the child I commanded you to bring?”

For a moment, the North Wind stared speechless at this impudent mortal who dared his strength.
Then he unleashed his fury into her mind.  Images of vast storm systems marching across the globe like faithful servants to assail humanity with heavy falls of snow and sudden freezings whipped her mind.  But the sight of these storms in their vastness sweeping down across the globe only reminded her of the Weather Channel®.

“You overstate your importance, North Wind.  You are the Death That Steals Away.  You take the weak and the defenseless, those alone in the night without a good coat.”

She sent back an image of a crackling campfire.

“This defeats you.”  She said tilting her chin up just a half-inch.

“So and so.”

 The North Wind said pondering his options.  This woman could not be frightened, and she held his true name.  Already, he found the cords of her will tightening around him.  He must act quickly, or he would kneel before her as a slave.  As a side issue, he vowed vengeance upon whoever had betrayed his name to this witch.
The North Wind let her go.  She fell feet first out of the sky.

“Disobedient sprite, I command you by your true name.  Release the boy into safety, and set me down easy.”

The North Wind howled but it felt the tug of her word  begin to bend its own core of hate to heel like a well-trained dog.  The Wind fled upwards while she fell down and down.  At the least it decided, it could be far enough away that it would not have time to save her even if she broke his will.  That will forged in many a long battle over the Irish Sea received a severe test as he struggled to escape.

“I take your name from you, disobedient sprite.  You are no longer the Death That Steals Away.  You are merely a nameless sprite who I command.”

  In so doing, Kara had helped and hurt her cause.  Now the North Wind moaned in  weakness, but she had no strong lever to hold him.

“I am a Child of Adam who named all things.  Please, let me,… I name you.  Be ‘My Helper‘.”

 She begged, rushing over the words, to the soft winds that skirled about her while she plunged downward.  Her lips were blue and stiff, and the ground came ever closer.

“We will, in thanks for the name.”

 The tiny winds around her promised.  They flung themselves across the sky to where the child floated.  They made this move in response to her deepest desire.

“He lives, he is safe; we will guard him.”

 They shouted back.  Their message arrived just in time for Kara to crash into the exact spot a street over from where she had been lofted into the air. Her last sight was of her duffle bag, and the other stuff she had left in the domed room on the red dust planet.   She died to this world.
The North Wind drifted down to the spot wondering why this feeling of terrible weakness and bootless anger drew it here, and it hardly remembered what it had been doing this night.  The Man of Bones swooped over to the former North Wind who fumbled in shocked helplessness and ate him.

“Kara, you are such a sweet thing leaving me tidbits of power.”

 The Man of Bones laughed with his jaw clacking loosely.  Then he vanished from that world.

End of Chapter Twelve.

[11 blank lines suppressed]

Chapter Thirteen: Meeting the Neighbors


The giant head with its mouthful of large, blunt teeth the size of a man’s fist, sank down below the grasses and anemic ferns at the river’s edge.  The bend of the river to the right shielded it from view.

Jackson lowered himself down into the water to hide.  Water flowed slowly by him as the minutes slipped by, and finally he decided it must be safe, since he had seen no further sign of the great dinosaur.  The ferns did sway a bit, but he talked himself  into believing that was the wind.

A slow walk that became faster as he stepped downriver, and he saw the beast laying in the water, and nibbling on grasses.   It measured at least fifty feet from the front of its blunt-faced head down the long flexible, but thick neck to a four-legged body which was covered by smooth skin, and green and blue fungi, and held up on four stout legs when it stood, to a ten foot tail that tapered to a point. Gulping, Jackson stopped.   The creature ignored him, and then used its surprisingly prehensile tail to snap off a six-inch thick fern with insolent ease.

While it dragged the ten foot long fern into reach of its mouth,  Jackson silently berated his impatience.  He had looked at the data, and forced it to say what he wanted to hear.  Now recalling more clearly, as he stood frozen in the midst of the river, about five feet from the left edge, he noted that the ferns had moved in opposite directions which would not be likely caused by wind.

This living in the jungle thing had more tricks than he could easily fathom.

  Evidently, from its rounded molars, and its current diet, the dinosaur was a vegetarian.  But, was it completely vegetarian?  And even then a bull cow only eats grass, but it can easily be moved to kill a man.

Why was it eating from next to the river?  Perhaps, these ferns had minerals stored in their tissues that the dinosaur needed for its health, or perhaps something larger had driven it from its customary feeding grounds?  Jackson speculated for a moment, and then decided that was not producing fruit, and moved on to other ideas.



Breathing shallowly, Jackson began to edge toward the left side of the river, and he thought himself lucky the dinosaur, only seventy or so feet further down the small river was on the opposite side from his intended docking point.   He had chosen this side because, the other side of the creek had steepened for a while now, and he thought that a dinosaur might have more difficulty climbing even a shallow hill that galumphing across a river plain.

It showed no sign of noticing him, and Jackson paused.  An idea occurred to him, a very appealing one.  And grinning a bit, he considered it.

He could try to slip past it.  Bold as brass, and twice as slick, he could just walk past it.  Dinosaurs were known to be dumber than bricks.

And who told you that, idiot?  Jackson suddenly snarled at himself.  A bunch of academics in a safe office high on an ivy-lined campus who never had to put their theories to the best test of all.  Harsh reality put paid to a lot of inflated claims of insight and competence.  He had seen it plenty of times in the computer field where some guy came along with all the answers until you actually plunked him down in front of a computer to solve the problems he so blithely unscrambled when it was theory.

The creature looked to weigh five to ten tons, and it served as an impromptu dam or sandbar pushing the river another ten feet to the left.  That meant he would have to walk fairly close to the dinosaur to find a clear channel.  Well within range of those jaws that could snap that six inch thick fern in splintered pieces with ease he saw as the fern offered by the tail was reduced to chunks to be eaten separately.  Still, maybe it would work.

Jackson felt weak, and looked at the bank of the river and beyond.  He did not want to challenge the jungle that covered the hill on that side.  A quick walk, and he would be past this or dead, but he knew his desire rose from the same source as his ill-judged hand-over-hand passage in the trees.  This time he would be better, and force himself to think things through.


The waterway hung quiet and still except for the ripples when the great vegetarian shifted his weight.  Jackson thought he could just feel the thud of mass turning from resting on the left two legs to the right, through his feet.  And calmly and coolly he thought things out, rather than rushing to the most fun choice like a toddler heading toward a candy bar.

Another plan occurred to him, and it seemed sound after he examined it from several angles.  His best ploy would have been to climb into the jungle, but he needed water pretty badly, and so he backed himself into a corner with the only choice to press on.  If only, he had gotten water earlier.

Jackson stepped backwards and upstream, looking to the right and left for what he needed.  In a few minutes he had gathered his supplies while the great ruminant continued to munch.  Grateful that reality had not punished him for his stupidity so far, he found a tree amidst some low-growing ferns on the river‘s edge.

He slipped into the fern patch, and judged that he was forty feet from the dinosaur.  Then, Jackson emptied out his shirt of the rocks he had scooped up by the riverside.  Chunking them took a lot of nerve, but he was soon not worried that he would attract the dinosaur’s attention, he was worried he would not.

The beast ignored the rocks slapping its skin, and continued to eat.  Jackson rared back and aimed for the head.  His chosen rock arced hurtlingly close to the head, and splashed water on the face of the dinosaur.  It reacted by trampling that section of the river until satisfied nothing lived in ambush down there.
Aggravated, Jackson studied his problem.  The head kept moving, and an
on-target shot  would, at this range, have to be based on a prediction into the future.  And he had only two rocks left; he did not favor going out to get more.

For a minute, Jackson studied it, and thought he had a pattern.  So he let fly, and the dinosaur chose to pick a particular fern in the opposite direction since it had finished the branch it had been working on.  And the beast did not even notice the thunk of his rock on the mud bank of the river.

Angry, Jackson thought that this plan was impossible.  There were too many variables for him to control.  But, instead, he heard the teachings of Master Yoshi explaining that humans have great freedom, but they have a nature as well, and even better for this purpose, a spirit.  If one could attune oneself to the spirit of another, one could predict their moves since you would encompass them in your own mind.

Warily, he decided to give his sensei’s teachings a try.  The stone fit comfortably in his hand, and he leaned out from behind his tree to focus most closely on the giant vegetarian.

Jackson felt his eyelids droop as he entered a mild trance.  He began to try to move in rhythm with the creature, especially his head, and soon found it easy.  He even found himself gumming on leaves near his face.

Jackson stood back up behind the giant fern which dripped moisture upon his sweaty locks, and slung his last stone at the giant vegetarian dinosaur who cupped dripping ferns between his massive jaws.  Those teeth were easily the size of his stone, or even better the size of a coffee mug, and the brain inside the Volkwagon beetle sized head was probably about the same size he thought as the projectile arced downward.

And then in something that felt like communion, his arm flashed down to his side in a victory strike, and the stone landed on his target’s eyebrow.  Jackson felt a sting of terror as if it came from the beast, but that was impossible.


The river over which it flew was about ten feet wide and four feet deep.

He had not wanted to toss that stone for some reason.  His intuition feared it, but unless he wanted to slip past it, or scale the rough jungle and valley wall of the opposite side of the river from which he had come, and upon which he now hid, this was his only card to play.  Unfortunately, he had no great rifle  or Napoleonic cannon to launch shot and grapeshot at the beast.

“Success!”  Jackson whispered exultantly.

The drug of his effort and possible victory shot into his veins, and it was all he could do to not jump up and down screaming in joy.  But he forced himself to wait for the slow-thinking creature to realize it was supposed to run away.   An odd thing had happened, it should run away any moment now.

Instead, it seemed to be swinging that great head around, and sniffing like a rat.  Then it grumbled like a train revving up, and whistled like a train braking.  It started to spin around, and suddenly it was all around, and moving toward him.

The great beast’s breath chuffed in and out, and it roared in anger.  The direct line between the dinosaur and Jackson could not be an accident, but still Jackson stood fixed in place with hopefulness and near fatally shock at this sudden turn of events.  His plans were dashed, and no way out appeared to him.

If he dove to either side, there was water to his right which would slow him down as he thrashed in it.  And to his left there was jungle which would entangle him, and hardly slow the dino at all.  Doomed, Jackson decided, I am doomed, as vomit crawled bitterly up his throat.

He swallowed, forcing it down, and perfunctorily drew his katana, and determined to make his last stand as best as he could.  The  thundering monstrosity filled his world, and made all the rest of nature except for his thundering heart, his roaring breath, his sweaty palms on the rough cordage of the hilt, and his quietly singing faith that assured him that even in this final match with Death that all would be well, and all else became a distant thing.  Holding his katana by his side, and pointed skyward, he tried to decide how best to slash the nose, or pierce the eye in order to make it draw back.  He would only get one strike in, if he swung true; if not, then nothing, not even a feeble revenge.

And then circumstances changed throwing his careful if hurried plan out the window.  The dinosaur swooped its head low to get at him rather than come down on him like the amphibian, and he saw his opening, and took it before he could think to say or scream “No!” to his legs.  His heart desired the road his legs took, and his fears were not quick enough to stop him.

He slashed the katana in front of him to clear the fern from his path, and before it fell, he leapt into the air from his perch on the bank.  With sword and arms flailing, and legs being tightly disciplined and yet totally natural, he landed upon the tip of the dinosaur’s nose.  Then he proceeded over the fern which hung between his legs with scrambling fervor up the head of the dinosaur.

Knowing he raced for his life, he ran the ten steps across the head as it drastically slowed and raised up, and for the last four steps raised his sword high over his head hoping that this did not slow him past salvation.  Then he spun, and drove the katana point-first which it was not really designed for into the notch at the back of the head.

The hardest thing he had ever done was to let go of his sword.  If he hung on, it would snap.  Or he would work it free.  He just hoped that he had planted it solidly and true.  Jackson thought he had.  Only one chance, and he had done the best he could.

Letting go, and turning back to try to race down the narrower neck might well have flummoxed him anyways, but the dinosaur snapped back its head, and rippled its neck in terrible agony.  Jackson felt a long pause in which he accelerated, tumbled, noted the color green, and then for a fraction of a second saw the river with piercing clarity in a way he never had before as he fell skull-down and canted sideways toward the water.  A quick splash of water, and nothing afterwards.

End of Chapter Thirteen.

[16 blank lines suppressed]

Chapter Fourteen: Stoning Birds in the Wasteland

Mad dreams beset her, but Kara pushed them away, and staggered to her feet.  She felt whole despite having fallen a thousand feet on to a hard cobblestoned London street.  Impossibly, she survived yet again.  Maybe the Shade had spoken the truth.

She had died from carbon monoxide poisoning and a stiletto blade in a murder by a madwoman with her face.  And then walking tanks had gunned her down on a planet with a sun that stretched from horizon to horizon, and despite that her sapient lizard-like host had found it too cold.  And then London and a boy freezing in pre-Victorian streets and a malicious wind spirit she fought and beat by the grace of the Goddess to save the child even if it cost her …life.

Or maybe it only cost her that world since she seemed to be alive again?

Looking down past her feet to what had been cobblestones and now was long, brown grass, she accepted the Shade’s story for now.  She was a multi-dimensional entity.  Maybe, she really was immortal, but feeling tenderly at her right arm for the sore spot that still plagued her, she knew that she still had bone cancer.

Maybe she could find some place to fix it?

Kara looked up at last, and saw extending to the horizon familiar mountains and shapes of fields.  Mendoza, Arizona was just like this, except it did not have such grasslands.  Her homeworld was more known for scrub brush, and spots of dessert growth like cactus and Joshua trees, and hardy pine trees in the cooler mountains.  Plants that could survive the harsh near-dessert conditions thrived or at least survived.  No great swathes of long grasses covering hills and valleys in a thorough-going blanket only occasionally dotted by a tree or a waterway bedecked her memory of home.

Worried, Kara looked around for her items in the grass, and finding it difficult forced herself to try to use that odd sense of hers.  After a moment, she found the trick of it.  You needed to relax, and wonder where your things were.

And startling her, she felt another ‘something is there’ which felt different.  She scurried about grabbing her stuff, and still it persisted.  Like all her stuff hummed in her mind at “A”, and this warbled along at “C” is how she described it to herself.

Fascinated, Kara looked out across the long prairie toward the source, and saw nothing for miles but hills of grass, and an occasional irregularity that she could not define at such a long distance.  The sun began to climb further she noted, and that set her thinking.

She placed her silver bell in the grass, and walked away from it.  And then she walked in a fifty foot circle around it.  The vector to the bell kept changing as she moved, but walking away from it or toward it did not alter the feeling in the slightest.  Laughing, she walked back up to her bell, and rang it loud and clear.

As the sweet silver chimes died away across the grassland, she put up her bell back into her backpack, and began to walk in a straight line toward a tree.  A good thing that the tree was over a mile away, because she felt little discernible change until she had gone somewhere between a quarter and a half of a mile.  At her start she decided she was pointed straight up to noon, and at a quarter, maybe eleven O’clock, and by a half, maybe ten O’clock.

“So whatever that is out there, its many miles away, and its not hiding in the grass in my view.”

Kara looked out toward the distant mountains, and wondered if she was going to reach them in order to find this thing out.  Surprisingly, she found herself willing to do so if need be.  Curiousity and a zest for life, and a willingness to try things kept growing in her heart.  Frankly, she was amazed at herself, but then she recalled the do-or-die fight with the North Wind.

Not only had that woken her fighting spirit, and given her more faith in the Goddess, but it had tired her in a good way.  A nice stroll in the country seemed just the thing.  Besides, it would build her strength up which if every world was as violent as the ones she had been to seemed a good thing, indeed.

The long walk across the prairie  took several hours, but it was accompanied by the birdsong of  one brown-feathered species she did not recognize.  They seemed quite common, and also peacefully beautiful to her.  But toward the end of the walk, she started to look at them as more a possible source of lunch.

Maybe, magic would work, Kara thought.  She did not know any spells for summoning food, so she just shrugged her shoulders, and prepared to improvise.  After taking off her backpack, she poured an imaginary cup of water across her sweaty face and down her too-lean back to cleanse herself.  Then she walked a circle while trying to descend into a properly reverential state of mind, but it seemed rather silly.

Kara sat down in the center of the circle facing north as best as she could guess, and crossed her fingers for luck, and began to pray for food.  Minutes passed, and no table laden appeared in front of her carried by dryads, and not even a bird landed on her hand to obligingly die so she would not have to do the icky thing of actually killing it.  But after removing a rock from under her right buttock, she realized that it was smooth and round, and that combined with her sock it might do as a sling.

Maybe this was her answer to prayer?  Magic did seem to vary.  At home, she had never seen anything more creepy or obvious than an uncanny Tarot reading by her best friend Stephanie.  In the lizard alien world, she had seen a “memory” created by sorcery or so the Shade claimed, but Haszikip had laughed at sorcery even though he had an ancient dome of spirit protection built by his ancestors in his lair.  Maybe, there had once been magic in the world or worlds, and then it went away?

But that did not explain her fight in an almost modern world with the North Wind, where she personally had cast a number of spells.  But it seemed as if magic that existed here might not be very obvious or powerful, if it existed at all.  Kara wondered why a god or a goddess would do that?  Why not just announce their presence from the highest mountain, and have done with this raging debate over belief in the gods?

But then she considered that if she had seen a giant figure of light on the far mountains that she might not believe it a god either.  In fact, her brother Jackson did not believe in her deity, the Goddess.  He thought it a joke, even though he tried to be polite about it, still for her, he was easily read.

Kara tramped on musing about the nature of miracles and magic and gods to take her mind off her cancer in her arm, and her hollow stomach.  She found that she could withstand the pain in her stomach easily enough since she had much experience due to her anorexic bout in her younger years.  The hills went up and down beneath her feet, and now that she was prepared to eat a bird, none showed themselves for nearly an hour.

Finally, she saw one about a quarter-mile ahead on the rolling prairie which in her remembrance should be semi-dessert.

Huh.  Guess whatever happened was good for the land anyways.

Remembering her botany class, she decided that cooler weather and more water might have produced this effect.  And then she abandoned herself to the hunt.

The bird sung forth while resting on a sapling’s branches as she approached. She circled wide to get behind it, and loaded her stone, or tried to.  Her fingers seemed unaccountably uncooperative, and her eyes welled up in tears, but she got the stone in place, and it did not flop off to rejoin the ground, this time.

The spiral wind-up on her side went smoothly to over her head, and it faintly whirred as she advanced on the sapling and its unaware passenger bobbing slightly in the breeze.   She felt the near perfect moment, and released with only a tiny hesitation.  It flew breath-taxingly close to the bird, so that she thought for sure for half the flight she had hit it, but her bobble cost her, and the fact that the ground lowered itself toward the bird did as well.  The stone flew a width of its passage to the left, and a foot high over its target.

The target did not even notice until after the missile passed it, and it rose squawking in protest to berate her, and then swoop away out of sight.  And Kara felt relieved, and shaken.  She had nearly murdered the poor thing she crooned to herself, even as her more practical side woke up and demanded her to go find another bird for she hungered.

It took her another half-hour, but she did just that, and this time the rock struck home.  After a bit of searching in the long grass, Kara came upon the surprisingly tiny and flattened specimen.  Thankfully, the stone had nearly torn off the head, and it was easy to finish the rip, but that left her needing to remove the feathers and the feet.

Tomato-killer, her knife removed the legs, and awkwardly she tried to use it to scrape off the feathers.  Eventually, she gave in and just plucked most of the feathers loose.  The poor half-naked thing lay under her fingers, and deliberately forcing herself not to think about it, she crammed the thing into her mouth.

The first reponse from her body surprised her.  The blood tasted good.  And she used this moment of startlement to swallow the bird whole.  And thus Kara triumphed over her civilized instincts.  Still, she felt ill to have done so.

Another hour or so travel, and she came to a wide river that corresponded to an irrigation ditch in her memory.  Chillingly enough, the river was straight with broken down edges, that led like small beaches down to the water edge.  If she had cared to look, she might have seen rusted metal ladders going up the edge of the river in either direction, but Kara did not want to see this, if it was there.

Instead, she pushed forward, and walked into the cool, but not cold water which came up to her neck within a startling two feet.  She jerked her backpack up and out of the water hoping that the laptop inside had not had time to get wet, and walked forward with the thing above her.  The river, thankfully did not get any deeper, and its strong current was resistable.

Grunting in exertion, and losing a bit of footage to the river’s current, she passed her landing spot, and had to walk downriver about fifteen feet to find the next one.  As she did this, her thoughts returned to Jackson and wondering how he was doing.

The backpack got tossed upon the miniature beach, and Kara gratefully scrambled out after it.  Limbs felt leaden, and she gasped for breath, and she was soaked, so even though it was only late afternoon, she decided to call it in for the day.  Besides, she had exercised more today than for months.

The red, clammy mud covered her fingers, and stained her backpack where she picked it up to hurl it to the top of the bank after removing her laptop.  Clutching the precious computer in her left hand, and shaking off a few heavy droplets of water, she stepped deliberately up the bank and onto the grassland above the river.

A smeared handprint on her laptop was mostly removed with the bottom edge of her shirt after she wiped her hands mostly clean on the tall grasses of the plain.

Depressed, at the potential damage to her gear, Kara looked about with faint hope for a good camping spot.  A hollow against a mild hill about a hundred feet ahead looked possible, and coming closer it looked like the beginning of a cave.  A few inches of overhang at the crest of the hill provided protection against the wind, and beating down the grass by walking all over it got her a resting spot.

Not sure how to start a fire,  Kara lay down to think about it after stripping out of her clothes and changing into her others, and get a bit of rest before challenging the lack of fire.  Within a minute, she was asleep.





Kara woke in the morning with her limbs awkward and pained.  A thick sheen of water with random dewlets soaked her chambray shirt, even if not as badly as the distant ice water of the North Wind’s London.  Shivering and stiff, she struggled unhappily to her feet, and mournfully stared at her non-started attempt at a campfire.

For a few minutes, she tried with a branch she retrieved from her backpack already broken in half, but nothing.  Possibly because it was a green stick, or maybe she was doing something else wrong, but not even a whiff of smoke attended her “morning work-out”.

She had held such hopes, and instead of flame she raised a blister.  Meditatively,  she sucked the last knuckle and tip of her index finger on her right hand.  It soothed the blister, and gave her something to do while she stood around and waited for her brain to kick on.

Not being a coffee fanatic like her brother, she still liked the stuff, and she wanted something to get her going other than her empty stomach.  Looking around the little clearing on the far side of the river, she spotted the top of a small willow tree, and climbed over the crest of the hill to reach it.     The moss interwoven between the tree’s roots and under girded by  rock supported a small clearing free from the omnipresent grass which would have been far nicer on her back last night.

“Unless I rolled onto a root.”  Kara said in the early morning stillness.  The vista beyond spoke peace to her soul, and for a long moment she revelled in it.  As far as the eye could see to the north, the land rolled away from her without more incident than mild hills.  In front of her, the mountains rose up, and closest, and to her left were the eastern hills surrounding Mendoza.  And it seemed in the night, as if that strange thing she followed, that feeling had moved closer to Mendoza.  For now her internal compass pointed toward the north end of the city.

Kara grinned.  She had wanted to get home, but she had been frightened of it as well since this was obviously not her world.  In her universe or reality, where she stood was Joshua trees, and sand and rocks; not an occasional willow and endless prairies.

She stripped a spaghetti  strand thick tree limb off the tiny willow, and started to gnaw on it.  Kara had heard that willow bark could be used for the same things as aspirin, so she figured it would not be too toxic.  Feeling like a genuine hick in a movie, she chewed on the stick as she gathered her stuff, and headed out toward the mountains, and that feeling.

About noon, she began to try to eat the grass heads that looked especially ripe and absent odd colors which hopefully meant disease-free.  Surprisingly, it seemed that much of the grasses looked deformed.  She avoided those as well.

“Odd.”  She pondered the problem as a way to keep her mind occupied while her legs churned up and down hills.  The few good-looking grains rested harshly in her stomach, and provided fuel for her efforts even if not enough.

Her stomach kept up its occasional rumbles, and she started to look at the passing birds with a sort of longing that wiped away her shame at eating an innocent member of Creation yesterday.  With less regret, she slipped out her sock, and found a stone.  And then she killed and plucked a small brown bird with a single throw.

She felt evil.  A  murderer all over again.  But forcing the bird down her throat nearly made her vomit, and she put her emotions from her and forced herself to swallow the tiny creature whole.  It went down her throat in an extended slither.

But her need to live pushed her to keep on swallowing until the whole thing went down in a throat scratching rush that plunked into her stomach.  The expected nausea surged, but then faded, and she cautiously set out again.  After a bit, she even felt good which disgusted her, in part.  But another part, the uncivilized instincts of her body made her want to grin.

The day passed, and night fell again, and she stayed up late enough to note the Big Dipper before plummeting into deep sleep which was undisturbed by any creature.  The week crept by, and she learned how to eat insects, and earth worms, and to catch minnows in another stream.  Overall, she felt stronger by the day.

Fresh air, lots of exercise with plentiful breaks, freely sweating under the sun, and then taking baths in cold rivers, and basic foods.  However she learned to pay attention to the deformed grains after thoughtlessly trying some, and spending nearly half an hour puking afterwards.

This plus the lack of any large animals worried her.  She heard no wolves, or coyotes, and saw no sign of cats, or mountain goats.  She was not sure she should see them, but overall it worried her.

And then as she drew close to Mendoza, and saw a hill in the near distance maybe ten miles off, night fell.  Kara found she could see the outline of the hill by a blue radiance shining from behind it.  Worried, but still expecting some odd electric light source, she walked to her left about two miles through the night to get a look around the giant hill, or small mountain of maybe a thousand feet in height.

Mendoza lay before her, or what was left of it.  Towers were mostly fallen, except for the First National building which had been ‘built with the finest in safety measures’, and it was snapped off halfway up.  She was still a great ways off, but she could not see the clear lines of streets; instead lines like straws laid across dust and litter the city appeared to her in the moonlight and in the sickening blue glaze that leaked from everything in the city.

End of Chapter Fourteen.

[7 blank lines suppressed]

Chapter Fifteen: Taking Command


With a giant headache, Jackson woke to the sound of people talking.   He found he could hardly pay attention to their words without worsening his headache for they sounded so strange with a mixture of deep vibratos, and slithering “s“’, and fluting notes all rendering out passable American English.

“The entity seems to be altering its mental state.  Perhaps, it recovers?”  The high, almost chirping voice disturbed him enough to make him open his eyes to the dimly lit room.

The room was fifteen feet by eight feet with a padded ceiling and walls of light blue, and bright yellow lines with arrows of orange on its padding that followed the curved roof, and a solitary black dot about six inches across.  Such he could tell from opening his eyes and looking up.

He lay on his back on a table with a faint light coming from below him to glow up around his body.    Running his tongue around all his teeth, he was surprised to find them all there.  Overall, he felt better than he had any right to feel after such a stunt, and his headache was retreating to bearable levels.

A two foot tall avian creature with dark, wise eyes, a short bill of glossy black, ruffled black feathers with an odd white one, and spindly legs was covered in a dark green vest with a belt of orange plastic for an abundant array of tools.  It stood next to him on the bed, perched on the very edge with a kind of professional indifference that bespoke long practice.

Another alien leaned over him from near the doorway, and its huge mass and length shadowed the whole of his body until its medicine ball sized face leaned down to within six inches of his own.

“I think it is awake, Academician Arkad.  Its eyes follow my movement.”  The huge furred mass spoke with subsonic vibrations thudding the air, and disquieting Jackson.  The giant, double-bladed axe on its back was of especial interest to Jackson, as were its black plastic, studded wrist guards.

“Well, then, who has the checklist?”  A female, undoubtedly, stepped from behind him, and looked at the other two who he instantly decided had to be males.  Her skin was a glowing hue of blue, as were her vest, and loose trousers.  Jackson noted her fingernails were pale, an almost white-blue, and her forearms had long diamond scale shapes on them.
And she stood disturbingly close to him on his left side, and moved with a sinuous grace fascinating him with ease.  Thoughts of his illness, or of making Humanites first contact with aliens were chased to the fringes of his mind by the thought of making contact with Her.

“Well, of course, I am awake.”  Jackson said crossly, and with forceful emphasis trying to sound strong and in command.  Then his head felt like coming off, and he regretted very much his exertion.  He reached up to pat his head, and felt a sticky spot near his temple.  Shaken by how close he had come to dying, Jackson let his arm fall nerveless back down by his side.

“So do we have a checklist?”  The blue female asked again.  “Arkad? Vin? Any checklist at all?”

“I’m working on it, Lucretia.”  Arkad the avian whistled out the English words with asperity.

“Well, he’s awake…”

“Are you sure it’s a ‘he’?”  Vin, the giant-sized gorrillaman, asked trying calmly to verify things.

“Yes, I can tell. Now move it, we’re messing this up.” Said the female.


The massive Vin shoved himself back into a corner as the avian Arkad fluted a command, and then told Lucretia to look out in the corridor where whatever they desired turned out to be hiding to judge by her sharp hiss of pleasure from outside the room.

“Blikten.  So excitable.”  Vin rumbled to Arkad undercover of the creaking of wheels and the whirring of fans.  And Arkad nodded its beak back in a way that made Jackson want to hunch up, and curl his skin around himself.  The pure oddness of these three aliens stamped heavily on his “letmeouttahere“ button.

But then an elegant blue hand that Jackson traced to a totally blue-skinned female who awoke disturbing fantasies in his mind pushed a cart into the room.  Her sinuous movements entranced him, and he studied her face with care noting that she had three nostrils, and “eww gross” something moved inside her nose.  He jerked up an arm for uncertain reasons, and the blue female lurched, or sagged slowly back away from him, and out of his view.

“Are you sentient?  I say, can you understand us?  Was that comment just a learned behavior, or can you show us true intelligence?”  The piccolo like notes of the avian’s voice drew his attention away from her which cringed at his feet, and back to the right where the avian stood on his bedside.

“What proof would you like?”  Jackson asked, and the avian stuttered and fumbled as the giant mass pulls itself back upright after lurching out of the way of the Blikten.

“An excellent question.  How would I prove I was intelligent?”  The avian muttered to himself while the other two aliens’ began to babble at him such that only a warbling buzz came to his right ear.  And meanwhile, to his left ear, came a rapid-fire discourse that was mostly questions.

Jackson tried to ask them a question, but they kept on talking.

“Be quiet!  Please.” Jackson yelled imperatively from his position on his back, with his neck craned up, and then continued with a plea.  It worked.  The three aliens stopped what they were doing, and stared at him.

Jackson stared back noting with a nod, the attractive humanoid female, a fifteen foot tall ape-man armed with an axe, and a tiny bird about two feet tall.

“I want to go home.  Please take me there.”  Jackson enunciated precisely.

The aliens turned toward each other, and paused.  The ape-man rumbled, the avian ruffled his feathers, and the blue girl rippled her arms in a way that let him know she had no solid bones in those arms which he found more disturbing than the others‘ oddities.

“We’ve not seen your species before.  Where on this planet do you want us to take you?  I hope it is close.”  The avian said.

“Aren’t we supposed to do the Protocol first?”  The gorrillaman asked with a calm heaviness of manner.

“Quite right, Vin.”  Arkad whistled as Lucretia nodded vigorously.

Lucretia picked up a sheet of plastic, and handed it to Arkad.

“First time I’ve ever done this.” Arkad said looking at Lucretia and Vin.  The gorrillaman nodded back with calm assurance.

“You’ll do the Emperor and his League proud.”

“Right then. Let’s get to it.”

Meanwhile Jackson stared with increasing incredulousness as they began this ceremony.

“Honored being, we would like to ask if you are sapient and of good will?  If so, we would like to extend to you, a personal invitation from our leader, the Emperor or his lineal representatives, and from all the varied species of the League of Free Peoples to join in respectful conversation.

If not, we accept your decision as we are a liberty loving coalition.”

Arkad paused and took a deep breath.

“I’m supposed to pause here for a little while.  It does not say how long.”

“Probably supposed to use your best judgment.”  Vin said to which Lucretia sputtered.

“Starflock and ‘best judgment’ are not words that go in the same sentence.”

“Now, see here, young lady…”  Arkad replied in majestic voice with a swelling of his football shaped body which got Jackson to bite his lip to keep from laughing out loud.  With Arkad’s attention distracted, Jackson reached up, and pried the plastic sheet from the feather covered fingers of his host.

He scanned down it.  It was a long, drawn-out, very polite, list of things to do when you make First Contact with an alien.  The kindness behind the list reassured him that these were good people, but as far as he was concerned the fact that they were using such a list made him question their sense.

The most important point he saw was the highlighted in red phrase at the bottom.

“Alien means unpredictable.  Always use your best judgment.”

Whoever wrote the list was aware of how useless it had to be.

He handed it back.

“I’ve read it, lets just move past that and assume we got it done, and maybe we can get some of my questions answered.”  He said as he slowly sat up taking care not to frighten the lady in her loose trousers and almost revealing vest.

They stared at him in shock.

“You can read Galactic?”  Arkad asked.

“You mean this is not a first contact?”  Lucretia asked pouting.

“I don’t know about Galactic, but I can read English, sure.  And as far as I know, no humans have met aliens, unless you guys know the Greys?”

“Greys?”  Vin asked leaning forward intently, and hitching his harness around so that the axe was more ready to his basketball-sized hands.

“Uh, yeah.  About  Arkad’s height here.  Real big eyes in a big head, bulbous head, black eyes, solid black, and a skinny body like Lucretia’s over there.”  He favored her with an admiring glance, and she stared back at him in interest.

They all appeared to sink deep in thought.  Arkad groomed himself, and Lucretia swayed like a willow, completely boneless, and Vin put his chin in his hand and grunted.  Then they all came back to him, and identically shook their heads in negation.

“Okay, well then, this is first contact then.  I’m glad to make your acquaintance, and I’m sure that my people will be too, once they get over the shock.  So when can you take me back to Earth?”

“What is this Earth the being talks of?”  Vin asked in a well-bottom voice after another long pause.

  “Don’t give me this garbage.  You guys took me from Earth, and brought me here.  I want to go back.”  Jackson slipped off the side of the raised bed, expecting a splitting headache but only a twinge of dizziness and a spike of pain attended him.  He raised his hands as if to strangle the lot of them, and then realized what he was doing, and put his hands down.

“We could check the database.”  Lucretia said doubtfully.

“No need, I would know.  There is no Earth on the star charts, or in the planetary lists.  And we’ve never picked up your kind before.  Never seen them before.  What are you, anyways?”  Arkad replied puffing his chest out in what seemed a sign of power or knowledge.

“I’m Human,”  Jackson said almost crying as he let go of the table to stand unsteadily but freely upon the metallic deck.  He heard the blue female hiss as he waited for the ape-man to get out of the way as he stepped toward the doorway.

“Well, the healing lamps worked.”  The blue female said.

Jackson slipped past the tree trunk leg of the ape-man, and out into the corridors of the ship.  Now that he was outside the room, he felt calmer, less agitated, less driven to move.  Those large yellow lights shining on him had been ‘healing lamps’ which maybe pushed his body to speed things up.  They could very well make someone nervous and aggravated.  Whatever, it felt better in the cool air of the eighteen foot wide and circular-shaped hallway.

Given a choice of right or left, after leaving the room, he went right.  The corridor flattened a bit becoming slightly taller and narrower.  It was very large, now about twenty feet tall he judged, and still more than double his armspan width wide.  Naturally enough, since they had to carry those giant apes.

He turned left, and after a short jag of five more feet to the right, he found himself in a main corridor which was even larger.  Probably about four times the volume, and well populated with the three species he had seen.  Behind him he could hear the soft rubbery footsteps of the girl, the clicking of the avian’s talons, and the thud of the gorrillaman’s massive footfalls.

“Please rest, Human.  You are likely not still recovered.”  Arkad the Starflockian asked him with a precise anxiousness.

“He’s right, you know.”  Vin rumbled from behind and near the ceiling.

A new obsession had gripped Jackson, and he ignored them.  He had to find his feet in this world, and doing so required looking around to ascertain the true nature of things before he relaxed.  So, he first studied the crowd that filled the main passageway.

They were chatting with each other about school, and the delay in their trip.  He picked up species names from their conversation since they tended to use such names as generic person names.

The Kringsta were the ape-men, Imperial Marines armed with double-bladed, no quadruple bladed axes with the third and fourth blade flattened for carrying against the other two.  Their height ranged from eleven to twenty feet in height, and their thighs were almost as large as Jackson’s chest despite his exercises.  They had dark, dense fur,  vests that were more modest than the Bliktens’ sort, a combat harness of either black leather or an odd, light green camo pattern over the vest, and either long knickerbockers like pants, or genuine trousers of the kind favored by martial artists who might need to do a high kick in street clothes.

Jackson recognized the extra bunches of fabric on the trousers and the looseness of the long shorts were for the same purpose.   The wearer needed to avoid binding when wild gymnastic maneuvers were required such as high kicks, and flips, and floor work.   A couple times, he had seen similar designs in catalogs he perused in Master Yoshi’s outer office at the dojo.

The terribly small and light avians were of the Starflock, and were evidently from their inquiries to each other about research papers, academicians in training.    Plus,  the other two species seemed to turn to them for tutoring requests, or to settle an argument of fact.

Two feet tall, with half of that a double thickness of a soda straw for each leg which rested on a very complicated claws which looked to have two opposable “thumbs”,  and some wickedly sharp talons.  The body was an oversized football, colored in black with anywhere from five to fifteen brightly colored feathers scattered amidst the crow raiment.  A flexible neck, six inches in length ended with a toppled over egg-shaped head with a large and rather sturdy beak above a pair of inquisitive and calm eyes.

The slow-moving, and yet awful and enchanting blue people were the Blikten who seemed to have not one solid long bone in their body.  They looked almost human, until they  twisted their neck around twice while wrapping their legs around a pole to a lower level, and stretching with a thunderous report of vertebrae popping before sliding down a tiny basketball sized hole in the floor shared with a fireman’s type pole.

They seemed to be easily startled by other’s movements, and yet oddly aware of each other, and of the other aliens.   Several times as he stared at the emptying passageway, he saw one of them turn around and smile at another one like they were sharing a joke.  And no words had been spoken.

“Ah, Lucretia, “ He said awkwardly aware that he was starting his first conversation with an attractive woman, and hoping not to put his foot wrong.  “Are your people telepathic?”

“Telepathic?  What is this?”  She replied a bit uneasy herself.

“Mind to mind communication.  The exchange of thoughts without words.”  Jackson amplified.

“Um, Arkad, do something.”  She snapped out her request for help.

“The Blikten are attuned to each other by pheromones, and there is less differentiation among them.”  Arkad said.  “But I’m not sure that is what you mean.”

“No its not, but what is ‘less differentiation’?”

“In my species, and the Kringsta’s and most others, there are geniuses and people with great gifts as the species sees it.  Then there is the mass of people, and then there are those who are less gifted by the Creator.  Is it likewise with your species?”

“And the Blikten have no geniuses and no mentally handicapped?  If so, that’s not like my species at all.”

“We find it helps more stability of society and government, but it is also makes us slow to get into space.”  Lucretia spoke awkwardly about her own people.

“How do you compare to your species, Human?”  Arkad asked with an obvious false nonchalance.

Jackson rubbed his head.  That was a hard question.  He thought he was better than most, but didn’t most people think that?  And maybe it would be a good idea to tell them he was a little slow so they would think Humanity was demi-godlike.

Internally he shook his head.  Lying without a very good reason was wrong and stupid.  ; Besides, they seemed like nice people, even if a little or a lot bizarre.

“I’m smarter than most, but not all that smart.  Tall, and strong, but still not exceptional.”

Lucretia breathed out a half-muttered question as to what would an exceptional human look like, and two other Blikten gave her odd looks before heading out a hatchway.

Understanding them seemed no bother until he paused before a door blocking the end of the corridor where the great volume of the central corridor oozed away into capillary hallways that had carried most of the crowd away.  He felt a thickness in his ear canal, and so he nudged at it wondering if he had some wax in the ear.  Instead he felt a hard, smooth, and light object he jabbed with a finger.  A spike of pain like a poker rammed by a madman lanced through his skull, and dropped him to his knees.

“You must not do that, ah Human.”  The Starflock academician who had awakened him spoke from behind him.  With his face twisted in pain, Jackson turned about to see the concerned other three still following him at a discrete distance.  “You risk damage to your mental processes.”

Wincing, Jackson nodded, and then regretted that.  He leaned back with his right arm against whatever was behind him.  And then the door slid under his hand forcing him to lurch back to his own feet.  Stomach whirling, but overall feeling better, he looked back to see a large, and mostly empty white room with lines on the floor, engraved, he thought, in the floor leading to a pedestal with a small pigeon’s egg ruby on it.

Fascinated, he walked toward the ruby which garnered a great increase in low chattering from his hosts.  Upon entering the room, he saw oddly familiar symbols engraved in gold contacting the inch-thick bands of inlaid metal that starred out from the ruby and its throne.

The ruby glimmered as he approached it.

“You know how to run it?”  The contrabass voice of the Kringsta Marine was accompanied by subsonic rumbles that raised the hair on Jackson’s neck with a premonition of danger and mystery.  Spinning around, he looked for a threat, but found none except the aliens.  And the Blikten female sagged back from him in a most inhuman way, more like a snake mortally wounded.

“No.”

“That has torn it, then.  We are stuck here.”  The Kringsta spoke dejectedly, and Jackson noted the same paranoia spurt up like a geyser in his own mind, and he made the connection to subsonics especially since his face felt vibrations when the Kringsta talked.  Jackson decided he did not want to be around when one roared with that fanged, and volleyball sized mouth.

“What’s going on?”  Jackson asked with his own immediate worries placated, or procrastinated.

“Human, if you do not move so fast, I will explain.”  The Blikten said resuming an appearance of being a simple bipedal humanoid of quite elegant and beautiful body and face.  Her clothes, with their overlapping pattern, more like dense leaves sewn to a springy net that formed a vest and loose trousers were all in blue of various shades.

Nodding slowly, Jackson waited on the Blikten’s explanation.

“We are the surviving passengers aboard the Imperium Descendant.  The captain fell ill, and the navigator died in making our landing after we were attacked by a Sun Cannon.  Woe to us, mere cadets from the Second Imperia University newbie classes, but this simple cruise has turned tragic and unexpectedly difficult.”

Jackson opened his mouth and closed it several times.  He tried to focus on what was important.  And he started once, stopped, and went on another course.

“Who attacked you?”

“Pirate scum.  The second sons of  the once-conquered barbarian races, all hail the Shining Emperor who delivered my people from their bondage to such, and made us civilized marines rather than slaves, are in these dark days snaking out the back doors of their posts of honor and choosing piracy rather than honest work.”  The Kringsta said with enough volume to hurt Jackson’s ears.

“What my friend, Vin the Kringsta, has said is true, even if he rendered it with an understandable excess of enthusiasm, for you …”  The Starflock avian nattered on with its chirpy voice, and Jackson interrupted even though he found listening to the creature to be fascinating.  He seemed so intelligent, but time was a-wasting.


“You have weapons to fight them?  Can they come here?  I mean do they have atmospheric craft?”  Jackson barged onward with his abrasive questions.

The aliens looked at each other, and with a sinking feeling Jackson remembered a mentor in the computer service business, and his description of a business plan by some clients.   The plan had some gaping holes in it with nothing to bridge over those holes.  People had needed training on new equipment, but the plan assumed full bore production from Day One.  And it allocated no money for hiring trainers.

After he had asked the client some obvious questions, and had no luck in getting any response that made even as much sense as “We’re working on that.”, his mentor had taken him aside, and over a cup of coffee in the brand, spanking new break room explained it to him.

“That’s where the magic happens, me lad.  Pure faerie luck.”  And then the older man added in a low voice.   “Make sure you cash your check the same day you get it.”

With a sinking feeling that exceeded his then, he thought these aliens were relying on Liam’s imaginary leprechaun friend he used to plead with to chase the gremlins out of the computer system.  Pure faerie luck would save them seemed to be the idea he got from their faces despite the alien bone structure.  Evidently certain things like wishful thinking and stupidity were universal constants.

“If you cannot fight them off, and you cannot hide here with this great big marker showing where you landed…”

“Crashed.”  The Kringsta named Vin said sadly like a dolorous foghorn.

“Right, crashed.”  Jackson accepted.

“Navigator died, right over there.  Still can smell the blood.”  The Kringsta added pointing to a greenish-brown stain on the wall.

Jackson clenched his fists, driving his short fingernails into his palms, but it was not enough.

“Will you please, just shut up!”  Jackson roared, and was immediately horrified by his mistake.  You never yelled at a client no matter how boneheaded they were.  But he felt like he could not have taken another second of weird alienness, and crushing negativity.  It still irked him.

Then the three snapped into a rigid stance and held it.

“Permission to speak, sir?”  The Starflock member asked.  A bit wide-eyed, Jackson nodded.

“The Kringsta, in moments of trauma, are what some other species might call ‘overly expressive’ about their doubts.  The Marine handbook, which I wrote a review on for this semester, says that such vocalizing is beneficial to the Kringstan, and should be overlooked if possible.  I’m sure my squad mate is unhappy to have displeased you.”

The Starflock might be a bit of a barracks lawyer, but he no doubt had a point.  These were aliens, and their ways would be different from his.

Evidently  they were also space cadets in both senses of the term, and he had just assumed command of the trio.

“Understood.  Who is in charge of this?”  He waved a hand around vaguely, and then Jackson slipped his hand into his shirt at the mid-point and let it rest there, trying the posture on for size to distract himself from the screaming meemies running around at the base of his skull.


“We are, sir.  We three are the highest ranking cadets in the senior class of each of our races.“  Arkad said.

Jackson paused a moment to visualize beating the ship to pieces with his lost samurai sword, and then he started toward the three expecting them to scramble out of the way which they did.  He remembered from studying Napoleon that an expectation of victory was important to its actuality.  So he put on that persona, and assumed he would win through.

“I wish I had my sword.”  He muttered a bit dejectedly despite his attempt at being commanding.

“We have it, sir.”  Arkad said.  “Vin insisted we retrieve it from the dead creature.  He said a warrior would want his weapon.”

Jackson turned, and faced the gorrilla-man with an approving smile leaking onto his face.  They shared a look of mutual appreciation.
“Well done, Vin, very well done.”  He spoke with great sincerity.

The Kringsta snapped fully upright, and incongruously delivered a military salute of the Terran variety.  Jackson began to believe that maybe he could do this after all, although he was not sure what “this” was right at the moment.  And ignoring the rising number of anomalies that screamed of Earthly contact, he pressed on.  For he feared they lacked the time to fully explore that issue.

Lucretia grumbled, but went to the skimmer to get the blade since getting into the skimmer was a major operation for a Kringsta and the Starflock was really too small to carry the weapon.  Meanwhile, Jackson asked the other two of his lieutenants where everyone was.

“In class, sir.”  Arkad said with a ruffle of his feathers that seemed to signify bafflement.  His feathers were more boldly colored than any of the others that Jackson had seen.  It was not a greater number, but a deeper, more iridescent look.  Compared to the common Starflockian, he almost shone.  Jackson mused that Arkad was probably considered a sexy bird by the rest of his species.

“Why?”  Jackson said after using his musing to force himself to wait so as to emphasize his point.  “Why are they still in the ship, and not out doing something to help them survive?”

“B-because its class time, sir.”  Arkad blubbered a bit, and Jackson instinctively reached out and petted him on the back of the neck.  It seemed to work, but Jackson resolved not to mention the Human habit of petting dogs since that might be taken the wrong way.

“Class is over.  Follow me.”  He said, and over the next hour, they rounded up twenty-four aliens.  Five were Kringsta with the heavy axes, fifteen were Starflock, and four were Blikten.  He set them to gathering needed supplies and to finding out about the capacities of the pirates.  And he asked a few of the prospects for rescue.

Happily, he found they had set down on Landing Isle because an Imperial Ranger station rested on the other end of it.  They had tried to land there, but not made it that far after a lurch killed the navigator by cracking his skull against the wall, the other latent novitiates (he wondered if he heard that right) could not hold the ship up.  Knowing he needed to understand more, but realizing he needed to get this crew gone even more, he passed over details in exchange for a broad outline.

Unhappily, he heard that they would likely be greatly out-numbered, and the pirates would have heavy ranged weapons which they had already demonstrated by damaging the ship with those balls of flame.  The best he had was small pistols used by the Starflock that could shoot a variety of damaging effects, and the axes of the Marines.  The Blikten seemed to carry nothing in the way of personal weaponry.

The only encouraging things were that pirates were also not used to the ‘primeval wilds’ as his new crew called it, and of course, the Imperial Ranger station down the coast that he had been heading too.  If he had gone the other way when he started, he might be halfway there by now, but then he would not be able to help these people.

A cold question occurred to him.  Did he really want to help these aliens?  They were obvious city slickers, total greenhorns in the jungle even to someone like him who was not exactly swamped with qualifications as to living in the great outdoors.

He might be better off alone?  Jackson shrugged, and relieved countered that question with another point.  He felt happy because he did not want to abandon these people to the tender mercies of the raptors and tyrannosaurus rex, and whatever that vegetarian was that he had killed in the river.   Their help would have been nice when he was wounded, and if it happened again they might well save his life.

Standing in the midst of a supply chamber, he surveyed the bustling crowd going in and out of the room with armloads of anonymous supplies.  He only hoped they were picking wisely, although he really doubted they were.  And they seemed determined to carry everything possible which he thought was a bad idea, but he had not a clue as to what was what, and it would waste time to familiarize himself.

So he kept on muttering like a magic charm to all he met,  “Only take what you need.”  And then a Starflockian with dull green highlight feathers amidst its black pointed to a sheaf-like bag of flattened bags, and he picked it up to tote it out.

What else could he do?  Being the Captain seemed like power from the outside, but here, it seemed more like getting in front of where the parade was already going.  But then he consoled himself with the knowledge that if not for him, they would still be sitting in classes learning about the art of the Militant Period, whatever that was.

Taking the bag out the corridor from the left storage chamber to the main hall, and then to the cargo exit ramp, he stumbled.  A strange twinge in his leg worried him, but it passed, and he stood there wobbling his leg a bit just to check it out.  It seemed fine, he decided as he stood on the edge of the broad, skid-resistant ramp while aliens passed him going both ways.

And then he wondered what would happen if he disabled himself out here.  Of course, if he broke his leg out here, he hoped they would help him, although who knew?  Maybe as aliens they would ceremonially eat him after he was wounded, but he rather doubted it.  Passing up the ramp with an empty basket that had held a load of supplies, a Starflockian had carried out to the main ship’s landing boat, a anti-gravity skitter if he understood correctly, a blue feather highlighted Starflockian came and got discreetly corralled by Jackson.

“Say, what is the treatment for someone who is wounded?”  Jackson asked quietly using his near ten foot long bag to shield the conversation from the passing others.

“We use the healing lamps or the ointments on them.  Of course, a real ship would have a healer on it, but we were just a short cruise, supposedly less than three days, although I begin to think this may take a while longer.”  The Starflock avian, with its keen eyes, and black mixed with blue feathers in an individual color pattern, answered with either a pedant’s way, or a dry sense of humor.  Jackson was not sure which, but he kept hearing the refrain from “Gilligan’s Isle” running through his mind, and he kept trying to squash that.  He deeply did not want to be stuck with these guys for twenty years.

“But seriously, not so much…”  Jackson began again figuring that how a society treats its wounded and vulnerable was a pretty good clue to the true nature of an organization.  And then a Kringsta gorrillaman came up to him, and offered to help with the bag, so Jackson was forced to get back to work.

They overfilled the skitter which sat a hundred feet from the downed interstellar spaceship, and Jackson had the unpleasant and bewildering task of deciding between carrying two different items whose loaders both proclaimed were essential, and whose use was obscure, over and over again.  Finally they had it weeded down enough to fit on the skitter, and then the people started to want to get on.  At that point, Jackson stifled a scream by straining his jaw as he realized the problem, and then cursed himself for missing the obvious, but all these voices and weird body smells were getting on his nerves.  He found it hard to think, and he bent over putting his hands to his head.

Suddenly, all the raucous sounds faded, and only the noise of the jungle touched his ears and the smells of the muck filled his lungs.  He luxuriated in this for a long two minutes until he was able to look back up at the others with something like composure.  The aliens were standing back from his a good twenty feet in a quiet and unmoving circle.

He felt a flush of embarrassment burn his cheeks.  What must they think of him?  He had been ready to scream, to run, to lash out; how intolerant was the human race?

“Are you fine, now, Human?”  A Starflock avian asked him. Its red and black feathers identified it as a sociologist.  He nodded quickly hoping to get past his shame.

“We figure off-claw that your adaptability quotient is slightly less than the Kringsta, and more than the Starflock.  Our broad experience masks our lower adaptation skills.”  The spokes bird said, and Jackson nodded as he deciphered the meaning.  It seemed from further listening that his “Aargh, I cannot take any more of this alien stuff” reaction was completely normal.  In fact, humans were in the high range of this normality; they thought although they could not be sure without extensive testing.

Then the Starflock gathered about and started discussing things related to him and his species.  At first, he could make out nothing in the rapid mix of high-pitched voices, and then straining he made out certain phrases.

“Meta-extension of consciousness paradigm.”
“Involuntary stifle reflex negated by …”
“Partial scent analogies carries over to visual cortex…”

From studying the others faces, Jackson thought this flocking behavior and conferencing was usual, and a particular tedium for the other races.  Clapping his hands decisively so that it echoed and re-echoed up and down the section of the river, and between the hills a bit back from the river on either side,; he got a squawk and then startled silence.

“I do not know about you, but we need to be gone.  There are pirates on the way.  They could arrive any minute.  Now get into your assigned marching positions.”

Jackson spoke clearly, if softly trying to show he was in command.  The Starflock spoiled it by holding a quick vote to see if they would “accept the Captain’s suggestion.”  And the Kringsta amiably went along with it with what seemed a military discipline that also shared a good humored contempt of leaders.  They lined up except for those tasked to specific jobs.  Only the Blikten seemed deeply impressed by his stature as a captain, and it seemed more tinged with fear than respect.

Jackson pulled one Kringsta aside, and asked a few questions.   As a result, the skitter would fly robotically up the coast, dump its load while still moving, and then continue on to crashland in the center of the island near the first  tyrannosaurus which might get a pirate as a snack if Jackson was lucky.




Forming up the column of aliens took time that had him desperately scanning the innocent sky looking for pirate ships to swoop out of the omnipresent clouds and began strafing runs with some kind of energy weapon.  And each alien seemed determined to carry at least its body weight in gear, if not double that.  The motley crowd dappled by boxes, and shaded by plastic bags rather like really tough garbage bags formed up, and then began to disintegrate as “one last things” drew the cadets back into the ship.

Finally, he set the greater majority on their way, and then set out to find the rest and hustle them along too.  A half-hour later and he was chasing a protesting Starflockian down the ramp with an absurd amount of gear draped over its back like saddlebags with a springy net between them that draped on the horizontal back of the Starflockian.

Once he got that fellow to the edge of the river, and into it, he began striding down river in great steps that slung water up to his shoulders.  Around the bend he saw the whole group clustered up, and fury bit into him.

“Move, move!”  He yelled flinging his arms right and left with no sensible meaning other than anger.  Taking a post past them, he studied them, and decided they had been afraid of going on without him.  Sighing, he calmed down, and started to more sedately gesture them past the point where he waited in the river.

The column of aliens began to march past Jackson who had decided not to burden the Kringsta for this stretch by pulling the rest of the gear left in the ship which they theoretically could pull according to the Starflockian who had showed him a sheet of incomprehensible figures and symbols.  But everything looks easy to the man who does not have to do it.  He had denied the request despite being assured that the Kringsta were willing.

Now, he nodded approvingly while biting his lip so as not to wince at the extraordinary amount of  gear they still carried.  Reality was still not setting in yet, but it would.   He hoped to be several miles away before they began dropping stuff, and not picking them up.   That should be an adequate break in the trail, he told himself trying to believe it.  A simple aerial search by the pirates would likely spot the bread crumbs of dropped possessions pointing to him and his “people” like an arrow with your name on it.

After a third of the line passed him by of this straggling beast, several aliens, that is two Starflock, and one sinuous Blikten started to squabble, and then they paused to stare at him.  Not knowing what to do, Jackson looked back at them hoping someone would tell him if he was supposed to intervene.  But he feared that such a move on his part would grind the line to a halt, and so with rising panic he watched his team start to spin out of control.   The argument continued for a few more seconds, and then under his gaze died down.

After dodging that bullet, Jackson paid especial close attention to any further such situations, but nothing more developed.  Soon he had to decide whether to leave the tail end here and hope they, the most incompetent or lazy or over ambitious with carrying stuff would keep on coming, and go find out what the head of the beast he had set into motion was up to.

He dithered a bit, and then rapidly set out to get to the front by racing down the river.  It took him a while since the column had gotten remarkably strung out with the leaders near five hundred feet down, and around three curves in the swamp.  Jackson got them halted.

“Just when we were really getting going.”  The leader complained.  “Its just like the walks.”

“Walks?”  Jackson’s eyes pivoted to track on the Starflockian with green highlighted feathers amongst its black.  “You were part of a wilderness walking program, Boy Scouts…”  Jackson stopped when he realized his referent would be useless.

“Hunh, do not be silly, Human.  We walked around the outer edge of the space station.  It was a big wheel orbiting Jubial.”

“No dangers then?  Wildlife?”  Jackson asked with a smile as he looked at the overhanging greenery while his ears listened for the tread of a predator.

“Sure there was.  I think.”  This started a bit of rapid conversation between the three Starflock at the front.  The leader prevailed over his comrades.

“My two friends were not with me, but we came upon a diabolical and very dangerous creature.  It got the whole station into an uproar for nearly an hour.”

Jackson nodded, glad that someone knew something about wild animals.  Then he walked back to the end of the line, but paused about ten feet behind the leaders to ask them to please halt until half the crew got up to them.


They nodded in agreement, dropping their loads on the river bank, but Jackson was already out of ear shot and checking on a tired Kringsta before the first leader told his comrades that it had been a member of Order Rodentia which had been chewing on wires, and threatening to open airlocks which had upset his community orbiting around the Takiernas colony world.

By dint of much herding, Jackson got his troop all the way to the beach by late afternoon.  The Kringsta were hurting, literally.   They moaned as they sat in a big square on the sloping sand of the beach.  Occasionally, one would take a half-hearted swipe at anothers shoulder or leg trying to massage it before giving up.

The Blikten curled up in a large clump with full body contact, and intertwined in such a way as to suggest an orgy or a pile of dead bodies, or, and Jackson gulped, a pile of snakes trying to keep warm.  He could not decide in the deathlike stillness of the pile which was the girl he found himself interested in, and as acrid odors rose from the pile, he did not want to know.

Turning away, he saw the Starflock who were standing about, most of them quite listless, and a few looking ill, but his council member and the three who had led the walking were fine.   Gathering them to him with a gesture, he querried them about the health of the individuals.

The Blikten were fine; just ran out of calories he was told.  To them standing was about as strenuous as walking; it made little difference to them.

Their own members of the ’Flock needed rest and food since they had not been members of a Walking Club and were now paying for their lack of conditioning, and a few, like Red-gold Feathers, had a previous medical condition that this hike could not have helped.  It translated out to something like arthritis, and Jackson winced once he understood.  The poor avian had never complained even though it must have hurt terribly.

“Would warm water that moves and surges help?”

The Starflock quad nodded thoughtfully, and one pointed out that Red-gold might be worse tomorrow if they could not walk in the river.

Then Jackson asked about the Kringsta while rubbing his own face, and feeling the energy fade in his own body.  He had walked at least twice as far as everyone else going up and down the column multiple times every hour.

In so doing, he finally heard from the Blikten themselves why they looked afraid of him, or at least part of the reason.  To them, he moved dreadfully fast.   Their bodies were pure backbone type material, and so to stand upright took the most precise control of muscalature imaginable.  And this took time, their reflexes unless they ‘set themselves’ were nearly a third as fast as his.  So every time, he moved a hand within a few feet of them, they cringed, or so one of them explained after he patted the Blikten male on the back trying to encourage, and succeeding in scaring the poor fellow.

Walking over to the Kringsta with the four avians, he heard how tired they were, and how their hearts beat hard, and their hunger knotted their stomachs, and they were hot, and their muscles were knotted up.  It seemed the Kringsta had little endurance.  They were easily strong enough to  snap him in half with the fingers of their giant sized fingers, but he could outlast any of them with ease.

Keeping an eye out for predators, Jackson herded the Red-gold and the Kringsta into the waves, and made the Kringsta sit in them with Red-gold sitting on a Kringsta thigh.  Hopefully, the massaging effect of the waves would heal them of the knots in their muscles, and the joint pain.  The five aliens sat uncomfortably in the surf, but after a few minutes they asked permission, which he granted to go deeper.

Happy that one plan worked out, Jackson looked about for what his tribe needed.  Food, water, shelter, dry feet were the traditional list of human necessities in wilderness survival.  Fortunately, Blikten and Starflock seemed unbothered by wet feet, and the Kringsta were bathing at the present.  That left food and water.

He looked about in their supplies and found about a hundred fifty small containers of soft plastic of various sizes and color schemes.  His advisors separated out the forty that actually contained drinkable liquids.  Food was similarly handled.

Knowing that he was eating up their emergency rations, but still Jackson could not make his brain come up with a better plan.  He seemed much more enduring, or possibly in better shape than these aliens, but still he felt like collapsing, and his brain felt like it spun in mud without traction, only returning to the same needs over and over.  Finally, he gave up and ordered the food and drink containers distributed, but as few as possible.

Still, he kept wandering about trying to do something, but not accomplishing anything, until he was dragged to a patch of sand by a partially recovered Kringsta and given food and drink.  He plopped down on the small hillock of sand overlooking his people, and wearily ate the unidentifiable and odd tasting food as the clouds cleared enough as they usually did to let it be seen that the local Sun dipped toward the horizon.

End of Chapter Fifteen.

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Chapter Sixteen: Walking with a Double


Horrified, Kara collapsed to her knees amidst the tall grass while looking toward the blue, glowing ruins of Mendoza.  Her city, home, her whole life had been nuked.  That was the only explanation for the light in the darkness, and the obvious damage all over the city.

Sobbing, she thought of her parents and her brother, and all her friends.  The ice cream shoppe on Cooper Avenue, and the tattoo parlor on Jaquinta Avenue.   One of her boyfriends, Kas, had dragged her into the place past the chrome-laden motorcycles out front, and asked her to tattoo a heart with “Kas” inscribed inside it on her left arm.

She had refused, and they had broken up soon afterwards.  His explanation was that the tattoo symbolized commitment, and she was not ready for that.  Not ready to stick to something and go the whole way.  At the time, she had thought him a nitwit, but now separated from her whole life, she saw that maybe he had a point.

Now his only point was wherever he had ended up, and a pile of dust for his body, and her memories of Ken “the Kas-man“.  She found that she wept most for Ken because the other was just too much.  Knowing her parents were dead, her brother ashes, her dog, Stephanie (who might have seen it coming in the cards and fled), and her home all gone from the land of the living was too much for her to take in and absorb.  It was manageable to weep for the Kas-man.

But her thoughts turned further to her other losses, and jerking at her hair, she scrambled loosely with her legs telling them to get up.  So after a bit, she got up to her feet, and started to stumble blindly forward.  She knew that going into the city was foolishness of a high order since such glowing energy signified that the area was still “hot“ or radioactive, but she found that she hardly cared.  Let death come and claim her, and get this whole thing over with she thought while elsewhere in an odd space with odder rules her nemesis the Man of Bones reveled in her despair and disintegration.  It tasted so sweet.

And then something odd happened which he had not predicted, nor did he see the cause, but he suspected, oh he suspected Their influence, and it drove him to grind his mandibles together in helpless fury.   A girl and ten retainers had walked out into the night hours past; they were hunting to capture an owl for a breeding program.  And they chose for no apparent reason, an unlikely place to continue searching.

Kara ran on toward the city crying and gasping for breath, and falling shockingly to her face in the grass.  Her physical agony only accentuated the mental suffering.   Tears blinding her, she rose again to her feet, and was running before she found her balance.

Her whole family vaped away in a moment, and she was not there to protect them, or at least go with them.  Sobs shook her too thin body, and for a long moment the Man of Bones studied her weakening body hoping against hope that she might be weak enough to die from the strain, or even better yet kill herself.  That would be sweet, and the best part about these versers is you could torture them forever.  They were far more durable than the typical sentient he drove to an early grave.

But no such luck attended the evil spirit this day.  It sighed as the lady and her retainers approached, and retreated as burning lights in his space bade him leave or suffer consequences.   Sulking, he went to other spaces to find some random soul to torture for its lunch.  Kara’s pain had been brunch, but such as he were always hungry, and lunchtime was coming soon, and with it a ravenous need for sustenance.

The crowd of soldier bodyguards and their charge came over a hill with several woven baskets as possible cages, small hoods, and some uncooked strings of wild cow meat to serve as bait.  They saw a sobbing and hysterical woman staggering on to her doom in the Old City.  With a nod, the expedition’s leader sent a soldier-retainer to go capture the woman.

“Uh, Miss, it will be all right, there, there, its okay.”  Kara heard an awkward voice and felt strong hands grasp her shoulders.  She tried to wrench free, but it was like slamming a shoulder against a brick wall, utterly futile.   Kara only hurt her muscles by trying.

“Let me go!”  She yelled not seeing the man who held her with his leather armor vest, short sword, and armbands because the outside world hardly mattered to her now.  He begged her in a sympathetic voice to stop, but this only enraged her further.  She flung herself down on the grass, and this move surprised the soldier enough that she broke free, and thumped to the ground driving air from her lungs shockingly.

And then she heard a familiar voice that she could not quite place.  The girl now stood next to her as Kara lay face down in the grass, and a smell of male sweat hung in the air along with a clank of metal as the  troop gathered about.

“Lady, please calm down.  We will, we’ll make it alright.”  The promise only showed her an even deeper abyss inside her soul for nothing and no one could make this all right.  At the other end of that hole, the Man of Bones perked up smelling true and unconditional despair.  It tasted like chicken.

“It won’t, you can’t, my family is dead, I should be dead.”  Kara sobbed, and strong but gentle hands cupped her under her arms while keen, even if sympathetic eyes searched her for hidden weapons such as an assassin might carry.  But Kara did not notice that, she only felt a hug around her neck, and a gruff voice in her ear trying to comfort her.

There were a number of male voices doing likewise, but they suddenly halted leaving only the commander holding her, and speaking kindly to her as she nestled on his leather-armored shoulder.

“There now, kid, we have all lost someone.  I lost my first wife in the vaping of Dallas, and my grandfather in the food riots the year later, but we’ve pulled together.  It hurts like you want to die, but you’ll get past that, I know you don’t believe me.  It will always hurt, but one day you will smile again.”  The slow voice continued to comfort her, and as much as anything it was the remembered pain in his voice that stilled her tears.

She straightened up, and with slight embarrassment disentangled herself from this strange man’s arms.  He was a bit taller than she, with a vertical scar on his left cheek, and a watchful stance, and thick arms more like a farmer’s arms than a weightlifter’s but obviously strong.

His armor was leather, and held together by a belt around his thick chest by a deliberately dulled belt buckle with the insignia “Don’t Mess With Texas.”, and his shoes were trail boots held together with duct tape.  A cavalry sword hung at his waist, and some sort of handgun balanced it on the other side.

And then she saw his mouth fall open in shock as he looked at her in the near-dark of the quarter-moon.

“Are you a ghost?”  He asked with the kind of involuntary loss of control over one’s tongue that great shock brings.

She stared at him perplexed, and then looked around at the others who stood an unnecessary few feet back from her.   They all wore  leather armor, and some looked similar, but much was highly individualized.  Guns and swords were in plenty, and so were small baskets for their were four of them between the ten men.

But she did not see the girl.  So she looked about, and the girl stepped out from downhill of the commander and behind him, and walked up to her to stop about a foot from her face.

“What’s your name? Mine is Kara Wellington.”  The shocked eyes of the eerie fifteen-year-old said with an intent seriousness from a face that Kara well remembered from before her first bout of cancer.   The cancer had marked her in a tightness of her mouth, and a hard look in her eyes.  Although, there was a greater seriousness in this other girl’s eyes than had been in her own before her life began to go off its rails.

“Ah, ah, aagh.”  Kara yelled, and backed up, and turned to run.  Stumbling on a tuft in the grass, her arms were again caught and upheld by two of the soldiers, although not quite so gently as the first time.

Screaming and kicking did her little good, and then a hard hand was clamped over her mouth.

“I don’t know who or what you are, but too much noise means bandits.  So stop it now!”  The low whispered command of the captain of these soldiers got through to her, and she shuddered and nodded agreement.

Still shaking, she stood, and the troops let her go, although they kept close in case she tried to run, or fall over which seemed equally likely possibilities to them.  Trembling like a leaf, Kara turned and half-looked at the younger girl who was remarkably pale even in the moonlight.  And then her eyes darted away to look at the grass.

But she saw the other staring at her with a kind of dread fascination that could not be turned aside.

The commander looked at the two of them, and made a decision.  Right now, expecting either to talk or make sense of this was useless.  He made some hand gestures, and shortly the whole troop was moving out after a brief comment to the younger girl.

“With your permission, lady, I believe this owl-hunting expedition is over.”

With a touch of disgust, Kara turned to her younger self, and asked.

“You’re killing owls?”

“No, we are capturing young ones, and hoping to set them to hunt mice in the fort.  Its one of Mom’s plans.”  The clear voice spoke like in an underwater dream, and they both stared at each other after the shared words with a narrow focus almost ignoring the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, the troop got them moving, and the miles went by with helpful hands on elbows and knowledgeable minds choosing the best terrain for swift and easy walking.  And finally, the younger one’s comment resonated long enough in the tired spaces of Kara’s mind.

“Its one of Mom’s plans.”  Mom her soul cried out, and she dared not hope that Dad was there as well, until she came into sight of the wooden fort on a thousand foot hill near Mendoza, and saw under the electric lights that were obviously new strung by the survivors, many cunning bits of woodwork repeated in the gates and the walls of the fort.  Dad had survived as well, for only a master woodworker could make such fine statues and gates and smooth outer walls to make the invaders’ attack more difficult and to beautify it at the same time.


The fort stood high above them on its low mountaintop, and access was from across a wooden slatted and rope bridge crossing over from a hill situated on the slope of the mount.  The winding trail that lay before them and climbed up the mountain, and through the rocky and dark forests with their young cedars and mature aspens had passed from prairie at the foot of the hill, and turned to timber regrowing itself.  The undergrowth hung thick, and occasionally dragged across the trail.  She could hear men grumbling about catching poison ivy again, and about yelling at the trail crew to keep up with their job.

In the deep dark of the post-atomic forest, only her right hand hooked in the leather belt about the small of the back of the trooper in front of her, kept her going up the steep hill trail.   Her legs burned, and she fought the wheeze in her breath for her body had little reserves for emergencies due to her anorexia.  Odd shapes in the night vexed her with their similarities to dearly beloved’s faces, and then she startled to see a burnt-out mansion their trail took them past the front porch.

“Yep, we use the old Cullen’s driveway as part of our trail.  Bet they never thought their ‘peaceful, rest away from running the factory’ would come to this.  Me, neither, and I worked one summer before the bombs in the cargo crates on the Death Ships on their assembly-line floor making cheap knock-off perfumes.”  The soldier in front of her, to whom she was directly connected turned his head to explain.

“How?”  Kara asked meaning ‘How did this happen?’

“The Pakis and a lot of their other chums cooperated to make a nice simple bomb that any idiot could make, and then the Pakis sold the plans to every scum-for-brains terrorist group in the world.  Made a lot of money.  Hope they enjoy spending it in hell.  Because after the third ship exploded in five days in an American harbor, we nuked them until the bedrock glowed.  But the Chicoms panicked, we think seeing all those missiles coming so near to them, nobody is sure, and they launched on us.  Bye, bye five hundred channels anytime you want, hello to Community Theatre behind the fort on Friday night if its not raining.  Where you been that you don‘t know this?  Back in a deep mountains survival hidey?”

“Simmons, shut yer yap.  You can flirt with the girl on your own time.  Begging your pardon, Miss.”  A harsh whisper from further up the line modulated into respectfulness as the sergeant addressed her.  Simmons and her shared a quick smile, and then got back to hiking.

After passing through the old Cullen property which was mostly flat, and a nice break, the line moved back onto the incline.   Kara saw the other one, the younger one who called herself Kara as well, turn to look back down the line, and for a second her face shone in the light of the moon, and you could see the questions about where this older self had come from glow through.  Then the younger Kara turned and climbed rapidly to catch up to the commander in front of her.

Wearily, Kara continued upward her attention turning from this other Kara back to keeping her footing on the increasingly steep hill.  She started having to use her left hand to grapple with roots in order to not topple over backwards down the hill.  Worries about other things faded as the hill took all her attention.  Simmons helped her as much as he could by reaching back a strong hand to pull her up over the worst difficulties.

He seemed wonderfully strong, and sadly Kara wished she could be like that.  It must be nice to be able to leap up a mountainside with a backpack load, and towing a girl, and make it seem simple.  And every time his hand caught on her wrist, she felt his innate kindness flow through the skin.

They took another break at the sergeant’s suggestion to his captain.  Too tuckered out to be proud, Kara gratefully accepted what had to be a special dispensation for her weakness.  The men chatted murmuring in the dark while maintaining a lookout in all directions with the kind of unconscious ease that comes from long practice.

“I wish,…”  And suddenly Kara wanted to cry for their were so many things she wished for.  Her throat felt strangled and painful, and her shoulders shuddered.

“What do you wish for, Miss?”  Simmons asked her.

Composing herself took a swallow and a moment while she looked down at the dense, dark clay of the trail, but she replied.

“I’d like to be strong like you.  Healthy.”

“Hunh.  You should have seen me when I joined up to this militia.  A good thirty pound overweight, and not able to run a mile without stopping to catch my breath, I was.  Totally pitiful.  We’ll feed you up, and in no time, a month at most you’ll be practically running up this slope.”

She stared at him wondering if this was the right one to take into her life, but she put that thought aside as the sergeant tapped on shoulders and hustled everyone forward again.  They kept on climbing, and now she could see that the troops were beginning to feel the strain a little bit  Still, no one complained, and they kept on pushing forward.  Of course, it should not surprise her that with her father up there in the fort, in charge, or something that the trooper would turn out well.

And then, with her fingers stinging from being scraped on rocks, and roots and the smell of pine trees strong in her nose, gunfire opened up from the front of the line.  It was the quick rattle of shots that even so non-military person as Kara knew meant automatic fire.  She froze in position trying instinctively to shrink her body to make it a smaller target.

And as she stood there trying to figure out what was going on, a hard hand slammed into her back, and pressed her face down into the trail.  Yells and shrieks competed with returning fire, until the bellow of the Captain got everyone to halt.

“Cease fire, I said cease fire!  The next goon who shoots gets fifty lashes!”  A few more shots went on, and tapered off quickly after some scuffling which probably involved a clout to the head.  Silence reigned in the woods.

After checking, no one seemed injured.

Kara could hear the Captain and the others urgently talking.  They wondered if it had been a mistake.  It happened.  A sentry on guard duty got startled and opened fire on a returning column.

After being ordered to, Simmons yelled out the night code that would get them back into the lines, but no countersign came back, and with a convulsive ripple, the whole line tightened up, and made itself ready for mortal combat.

Then a clear, and intense female voice that Kara thought she recognized came drifting down the hill.   The voice of the nightmare girl, her own voice stripped of the resonances that a person’s skull gives to their own voice, came to Kara‘s ears like a personal message of doom.  Shivering in fear, Kara turned back to listen.

“Captain, I have your whole group pinned down.  And I have an automatic weapon with a lot of ammunition unlike your forces which no doubt ration out your bullets, and I have the high ground, and before you poison this little talk with a bullet, I have excellent cover.”

“I have more soldiers, proven veterans of the Bandit Wars and repelling the Colorado Army led by that nutter, Michael Rall.  And we have plentiful reloaders so we’re not as limited as you think. But, just to be reasonable, tell me what do you want?”  The Captain yelled back with his voice sounding troubled despite his attempt at insouciance.

“I want money, my Captain, oh Captain.  Ransom.  Kidnap.  Give me the Princess, and she gets a week’s meals on me, and then goes home not hurt, and I’m richer, a lot richer.”  The nightmare girl said, and Kara could hear the falseness in her voice.  It was a lie.  Kara looked up and about wondering what to do, and who to tell.  She wondered if it was as obvious and clear to the others as it was to her.

A whispered command told her to keep her head down.

“Can’t do that.”  The Captain said laconically as he made some arm motions to prepare everyone for the fight.  Certain troopers got ready to try to rush, and others to flank the attacker.

“Well that would be unfortunate.  See, there’s a log up here just perched over your trail.  A good yank, and down it comes.  I’m guessing about half of you will be swept down the mountainside, and your Princess as well, and then I open up with my gun, cap a few of you, and make my escape scot-free.”

The cool voice chilled everyone, and Kara looked up toward wherever it hid in the shadows with revulsion.  Wiping out so many lives just for money, or whatever reason struck her as terrible.  And for some reason, it felt especially personal to her, like it was somehow her own fault.

And suddenly Kara needed to know what was going on in that other’s head.  She needed to talk directly to the enemy, and not through a proxy method of letting the Captain speak for her.   Aware that she no doubt was getting into deep trouble, she raised her head, and looked for some sign of a body in the dense shadows up the hill.

“Who are you?”  She hollered from the ground.

“None of your concern.  Are you the Princess?”  The nightmare girl answered back with a note of curiosity in her voice.
================abcd  77922
Hands tried to grab her and pull her down, and shut her up, but Kara squirmed and fought free of the constraints.  Those hand were limited by not being willing to stand upright, or make much noise.  Kara had no such compunctions.  She got to her feet, at last, after sliding off the track to the vine drowned, but flat shoulder of the path, and clambered up the left bank of the trail amidst the tangled vines.

“It is too my concern.  You threaten to kill me.  My name is Kara.  What’s yours?”

“K-k, don’t move any further, I’ve got you in my gunsight.”  Strangely the voice sounded fearful.

End of Chapter Sixteen.

Chapter Seventeen: Just a Walk on the Beach

The night passed although disturbed by some honking calls in the distance, and shortly before morning a rustling in the jungle near the campsite set Jackson to his feet with his sword in hand.  He was indeed grateful that the Kringsta had thought to retrieve it from the dinosaur he had killed.  Whether his move, or the size of the “herd”, or the gleam of his fang in the campfire light discouraged the beast out there, he never knew.  It padded off, and after a bit Jackson laid down again with his sword in hand.  The blade lay across his chest as he went to sleep.

Something disturbed him, and terror spun him awake faster than he could think.  Wildly leaping to his feet, he swung the blade unseeing toward Arkad’s head.

“Kiaaa!”  He screamed from deep in his throat.  The whole camp was already up, and everybody froze just looking at him.  He stood in his bare feet on the sand next to a feebly flickering campfire, in a wide stance that his master would have chided him for, and made him hold it until the master came over and dumped him on his bottom with a five pound push to the chest.

Horrified, he looked at his extended blade, and to his great relief saw no blood on it.  Then he looked down to see who had awoken him.  Arkad stood frozen, trembling in front of him.

Getting down on his knees, he tried to beg forgiveness while laying down his sword.

“My friend, I would never hurt you, if I could help it.  It was a mistake.”  Surprised by his own words, he saw that he really did consider this alien avian, a scholar of most esoteric topics, his friend.  And that made it possible for him to add some more.  “I’d rather cut off my own arm than do so to you.”

Arkad breathed in and out for the first time in over a minute, and then rubbed his beak alongside the top of Jackson’s head and spoke quietly.

“My mistake too; I should have known that Humans have reflexes like the Takhiernas.  You never want to wake a Tak from right next to them.  Always better to splash them with water from across the room.”

Jackson nodded in rueful agreement.  And seeing that a potential breach was mended, the group relaxed and start chatting with each other until a Kringsta spoke to another a bit loudly.

“I’m glad it was the Starflock that woke our guide.  He’d have chopped me off at the knees.”  A general outburst of laughter tinged with the acknowledgement of how dangerously tricky the path they were on erupted, and healed the last of the awkwardness.

That day went smoother because everyone had dropped a lot of stuff along the way, but it was harder going, especially the first hour as abused muscles protested the walk.  After all, the second day after hard exercise is when you really feel it.  So Jackson just kept them to a slow, but steady pace, making sure to check several times during the day on the Starflockian with Red-Gold feathers, Hugh, as to how his knees were holding up.

And at the end of the day they had made a surprisingly good distance.  Feeling pleased because the group was getting wielded together, and functioning more effectively, Jackson smiled a lot at his people as they set up camp that night.  But he smiled most of all at Lucretia, and he thrilled to see her smile tentatively back as she bent over the campfire to receive a leaf-plate of half-cooked crab.

Feeling like he was starting a custom, and one that suited him well, Jackson took himself up to a high point on the beach nearer the jungle from which he could survey the whole tribe.  Instead of a shepherd’s rod, he brought a katana, but it was really the same thing.

Feeling like David the Psalmist who had herded sheep, and killed a lion and a bear to protect them, he tried to run some poetry through his mind as he stared at the waves coming crashing in to the shoreline.  A line here and there suggested itself to him, but no cohesive whole.  Resignedly, but with gentle good humor, he told himself he was no poet.

Arkad and Vin made their way up to him.  Once they arrived, and Vin sat down to shade Jackson in deeper shadow; Arkad jumped off the giant being’s shoulder and carefully stepped over to Jackson.

They passed some pleasantries, and Jackson asked how the day had went.  He sought another opinion to make sure of his own judgment.  There were more problems than he expected which just reminded him that these people really were aliens, and his limited people-reading skills were even worse off here.  But overall, it had gone well today.

They all looked up to see one lone female walking toward him with a handful of twigs held out in her joined hands.  Lucretia swayed across the sands in an enticing fashion like a flame made of shadow.  He gulped; this was obviously something important from the solemnity of her walk, and from the reactions of his two other lieutenants and the Blikten crowd by the fire who were watching very closely.

“It is a symbol.  Means a lot of different things.  Everything from ‘I have wronged you, and I give you my house.’ to ‘Join me in mating.’”  The Starflockian leaned over on the Kringsta’s shoulder and whispered into  Jackson’s ear.

Jackson turned full forward, and then clambered to his feet out of respect as he watched the almost human looking, Lucretia walking toward him with her big, blue eyes looking exotic and seductive in one package, and he found himself forgetting all the strange relatives of hers.  The thought that Lucretia had been in on their incomprehensible whistling games, and flocking runs as they suddenly were spooked, hardly crossed his mind which was lost in waves of hormonal energy.

He took her hands in between his, and a sigh rustled out from all the Blikten.

“You accept my gift?”  Lucretia asked to make sure he understood what he was doing.

“Ah, yes.  Um, what is it?”  Jackson floundered with his eyes focused on Lucretia’s downcast face, and the birth of a slight smile.

Meanwhile the Kringsta was pressing his own stomach to keep in a bellow of laughter, and the Starflockian was muttering to himself.

“Whatever you want it to be.”  Lucretia said, and looked warily but expectantly up into Jackson’s eyes.

“That’s torn it.”  The Starflockian murmured hopelessly to himself.  “I should have paid attention to my astrologer.  This is all going to end in tears.”

An elated and sappily grinning Jackson took Lucretia by the arm to lead her off into the woods.  The ferns parted with almost magical ease as they slid between them slowly, and Jackson greatly enjoyed seeing the sway and bob of the Blikten girl.  She, her whole species, were natural woodsmen.  With a bit of training, they could outdo Daniel Boone and all those other guys.  Why hadn’t he seen it?

He cursed himself for being a prejudiced and blind human, but it hardly stung, he was so happy.

They found a nice spot, a clearing about  five foot wide with a trickle of water coming up from under the leaves of a fern, and a nice bed of moss, and a large rock to sit on as he slipped off his shoes shyly.  And she dropped her clothing into a neat pile.

She looked odd, having hardly any breasts at all, and a line of dark points running up and down on each side of her very well-muscled stomach, but other than that smooth and sleek and quite wonderful.  And then she lay down on the rock and motioned for him to join her.  A little bit skittish, he laid down beside her on the rough rock and wished for that nice bed of moss across the clearing.

Her arms drifted sensuously around him, and he giggled glad to have her be the aggressor since he realized he had hardly a clue what would please an alien female.  He shrugged, and started to rub her in the same way he would a girl of his own species.  On the back first, and then other spots as well.

She hissed in what he supposed was pleasure, but her face seemed elongated and strange, and he found her even more perplexing in that moment than ever before.  This bothered him, although he did not understand why.  In his mind he fumbled toward an explanation that he wanted to be known, seen for who he was in this most intimate of moments while his hands mechanically kept up their caressing.

He found it a bit difficult to breathe with her arms and legs about his chest, and so he mentioned this to her.  She nodded, and loosened up.

“So then we shall go to the finale.”  She spoke softly, almost clinically.  And her lips plunged down on his mouth with a shocking passion that he returned with interest.  But it felt cold, and not just physically although there was that.  In truth she was like an icicle to lay next to.  And the rock behind his back was gouging holes in his shirt and his skin.

He began to try to push her off after a bit, since he needed some breath, and her mouth covered his nose and his mouth while her long, thin tongue played around his teeth, and slid down his throat to make him cough.  Instead, she wrapped her body, not just her legs around his neck, and held on.

  They rolled and thrashed, and fell off the rock, and Jackson found that his greater speed was no benefit in this case.   And indeed, she captured his hands and forcefully tried to wind them about his own neck.   Finally, in desperation, he rolled the two of them back into the stone with a painful thump shared by both that added whirling lights to the incipient blackness.

Lucretia uncurled from his neck, and lay down.  Jackson gasped for breath, and gradually felt good enough to worry about his would-be lover.

He raised himself next to her on his elbow and saw her laying there, almost completely flat, deflated even, and stretched out.

The thought occurred to him that she looked like a snake run over on a highway.  Sickened, and worried, he spoke to her.

“Are you okay?”

“Okay? What is okay?”  She sniffed back, and Jackson breathed a sigh of relief for his first worry had been that she had cracked her head on the rock and been killed.

“How could I be okay after you treated me that way?”  And then like a scroll of map paper recoiling itself with  a slither and a rush she was to her feet, and running away from him back to her people.  This left Jackson to stare and then feel at his sore throat, and wonder what he had done wrong.

He knew he had done wrong by his girlfriends.  Trying for the unattainable like Stephanie who really did not fit his life, and ignoring Laura and Dani both.  The first had been a good friend who showed signs of wanting to make it more, and the second had been his first serious girlfriend.  But his work, or dreams of Stephanie, or fears of being tied down had turned him into a liability in their life.

Now he had been tied down, and near throttled, and he saw it went back to his sister.  Not in a romantic sense, but a deep fear of commitment.  He was afraid that if he tied his life to another that they would end up being like his sister and dying or near-dying on him.  But now that he had nearly died, he saw that as a great foolishness.

He had played games with those who would  have given him the well-guarded treasures of their heart to the last measure, and instead of repaying them with loyalty and love, they had lost because he had been trying for something he did not need to have.

Still, the question remained to him, what to do about Lucretia?  Was she a Stephanie, beautiful but wrong, or a Laura filled with fun jokes and an equal interest in the same geeky things he liked?  He shook his head, she was definitely not a Laura.  He hardly began to understand her.

Dani, with her long sleek hair, and her quiet ways, and her honor had not been at all a geek, but she had enough of a flexible mind to understand his ways.  She only had wanted him to try to understand hers as well.  And to put her needs above Stephanie’s, he recalled with shame.

Lucretia was not Dani either.  Which left Stephanie, or she could be something else altogether which would leave Jackson even further at sea.  Rubbing his sore neck, and checking to see if the bloody gouges on his back were bleeding, Jackson unsteadily got to his feet from his sitting position on the rock.

Then he had to slump down again to put on his shoes.  Wryly, he counted it not a very successful sexual encounter.  He had not even taken off his shirt, much less his pants.  Walking slowly back to camp through the jungle, he grumbled to himself at his sore muscles and aching bones.

The creature’s leapt out from behind a fern, just a tiny one at the edge of the jungle where it had hid, by wrapping itself into a ball not even a foot tall.  Then as planned and rehearsed over the last several minutes, it leapt out uncoiling itself, and arms wrapped around Jackson’s chest, and before he collapsed to the ground he heard his ribs creaking.


He tried to free himself, but the Blikten’s arms were alternately immovable or all too fluid for him to focus his strength on.  Then he remembered the speed that had frightened them before, and he held back for a long moment trying to ask for peace, or even to offer surrender, but the savage mien of the Blikten changed not a whit.

So Jackson began to strike in the chest, and then when no lessening of damage occurred, he brutally aimed for the eyes of his foe.  The alien was not able to dodge the slashing speed of his attacks despite twisting his head left and right.    A squishing sensation on his fingertips, and the Blikten recoiled back screeching in pain.

Beginning to sit up, while the other collapsed back on the sand, Jackson felt awful.  Mere breathing hurt, let alone sitting up.  And then he looked out onto the beach and saw the herd of the Blikten staring hard at him with barbarous miens.

To his fright, the other Blikten lurched toward him to attack, and he tried to frantically back up in the sand into the jungle.  A thunderous roar to his right stopped them all in their tracks as a Kringsta padded over  to stand hulking to the right of him.  A low grumbling noise wandered out of the giant face with its contemptuous eyes.

“Control yourself.  You ought to be ashamed.”  A Starflock member on the Vin’s shoulder scolded the suddenly shame-faced and cringing crowd of Blikten who collapsed away from Jackson and Vin in a crescent moon-like arc.

Then, the Blikten crawled away from them on their bellies, and Jackson struggled mightily to control his stomach.  They looked more inhuman now than ever, and he could hardly believe he had hugged one of them, and entertained notions of a “conjugal visit“. The thought gave him the shivers of revulsion up and down his arms, shoulders and stomach.

After they had crawled away, he turned to see the sympathetic eyes of the Kringsta and the Starflock upon him.

“How can you stand them?  Why do you space with them?”  He asked his voice shaking.

The Starflock, Arkad, and the Kringsta, Vin, both looked at each other helplessly for a bit.  Then the avian started to speak, but the Kringsta hushed him, and sat down on the beach next to Jackson so that his massive head was only a foot higher than Jackson when the human was standing.

“You’ve seen them at their worst, just about.  They tend to be panicky, and they amplify each other’s emotions in small groups like this one.   I could make a long list of their benefits they bring to Imperial Society, long live the Emperor.  They are the best engineer and mechanics in the galaxy able to precisely focus on a problem to a degree that would be pscyhotic in another race, and able to squirm into the tightest spots inside machines.

In fact without Blikten, Navy ships are basically useless because they would break down, and no one else is capable of getting at the parts that need fixed unless you want to dismantle the ship every time.  They are incredibly strong for their size, they are stronger than the Kringsta if we were their size.

Each of us has our strengths and weaknesses.  Do not think we did not notice that you worked harder than any of us yesterday, and yet were still capable of more at day’s end?  Fact is, I suspect if it had been just you , you would not have stopped.”

“Probably gone on to near sunset, within a half hour of it anyways.”  Jackson said slowly in a kind of automatic response, and not noticing the astonished looks shared between his two friends.

“Humans are most enduring then.”  The Starflockian said, and in response Jackson talked a bit about running marathons and the like which extended the shock.  Feeling a bit more in control, Jackson went on to mention some of the weaknesses of humanity, at least compared to his new acquaintances.  Not as strong as Kringsta, or as generally resistant to environmental insults as the Starflock, and not even as strong as the Blikten.

“I thought he was going to crack my ribs.  In that fight.”  Jackson explained with a shortened laugh as he touched his still sore chest.  “I feel like an idiot for wanting to jump on all the Blikten.”

Jackson looked down at the sand with remembrances of all the television commercials promoting tolerance and the diversity ringing in his ears.  His face burned with embarrassment, and he wished he could take his hateful words back, but he did not know what to replace them with.

“Nonsense, my friend.  You are new to this Great Dance of the Sentient Species and stumbles are to be expected, and they did behave very badly as a group.  Your life was threatened.  You just need to try to see the whole picture.”  The Starflockian soothed him.

“And I hope this will cure you of any desire to make time with Lucretia.”  Vin said with an attempt at gentle reproof which fell a little heavy on Jackson’s ears.   Also, strange for it sounded of American slang for courtship.

“Indeed,” Arkad added, “We have many stories of such encounters between our various species.  They come from the early days when we warred on one another.  Love between our kinds is not meant to be.  Friendship, loyalty, trade, and so forth can work, but on the deepest most intimate levels, Jackson, I am not a Human.  I will never truly understand your deepest fears and loves.  I cannot.  Over and over we found this out. “

“Believe it or not, there’s Tragedies of Alien Love, as they call them, about Kringstas and Starflockians.”  Vin spoke.

The thought of the tiny Arkad and Vin being in love (and he realized he did not know Arkad’s gender for certain (he assumed he was male, but he had never actually asked), although Vin was obviously male since the male Kringsta tended to be about forty percent bigger than their female counterparts) twigged his lips, and he smiled.

“I guess the Kringsta would have to avoid rolling over in bed.”  He spoke trying to stifle a chuckle, and then failing.

The other two twittered and slapped the sand thumpily, respectively.

The whole tribe, riven by bad feelings, and misunderstandings, and ill-turned passions went to bed that night with Jackson praying from his watch post that he had not messed things up too badly.  When they got back up the next morning, he rounded up everybody, and set them moving.  It was a distrustful bunch, but no one was ready to challenge his leadership, at least quite yet.  The aliens required even more breaks than the day before, and Jackson, with his sore body, was willing to grant them.  On the whole, though, he felt physically better.  His pot belly stomach had disappeared, and his arms looked a little more muscular.

Half-burnt crab meat seemed to agree with him as a meal.  They stopped for a long lunch, and used the consequent fire to distill water which was greedily drank even while it was still hot.  Midway through a several hours of cooking, they had filled everyone up with fresh water, and begun to lay in a small supply of water for the afternoon travel.

Standing near the fire to get his water container filled by the Starflock and the Blikten who seemed amused by the Kringsta and the single Human who complained about the fire’s heat, Jackson heard a clattering cry down the beach.  Curious, he turned his head, but others were in his way, and so he shrugged, tired.  Then he heard the cry in a different vector, although still down the beach.

Worried, just a bit, he regretfully took himself out of line, and found an angle to look that bypassed the huge Kringsta in his sightline.  What he saw chilled his blood.

The aliens were scattered around the beach in loose harmony, and stalking inquisitively up the beach toward them and Jackson was a pod of raptors.  He spun, and ran for his katana as he remembered his vow to keep the weapon with him at all times.  Thankfully, the aliens who picked him up in the skitter had also retrieved his sword from the neck of the large vegetarian dinosaur.

The sword came to hand, and he took out down the beach summoning Vin with a look, or trying too.  Hopefully, the big galoot would follow him.  He did not know how he would take on five raptors, but he needed to try.

The crowd, impossibly to all good sense, thickened in front of him nightmarishly, and Jackson had to resort to pushes and knocking Starflock down to get through.  Thus he burst out into a new formed circle of the passengers on the sandy beach who  gawked at the five raptors in the midst of the circle who in turn were looking interestedly about.

Their was an edge of nervousness to the raptors, but also of eagerness.  They did not fully understand the situation, but they thought they liked it, which put them one up on Jackson who did not understand and did not approve.

The raptors were five feet tall at the point of their spine above the long, springy legs sheathed in smooth golden scales so tiny as to be almost skin like the rest of their bony yet sudden and strong body.  Their necks, about as long as the back half of their body, minus the curling tail completed the balance beam effect by supporting a head that hung a few inches lower than the top of the hips.  Their front arms were tiny in comparison, but still functional with tiny slicing razor-like claws on the end of each of their three fingers.  Their teeth glittered bright, and their eyes studied and weighed options while they talked amongst themselves with glances and snorts.

And then Lucretia walked out to them with a nest in her hands.

“We are the Sentient Representatives of the Imperium.  We bring you good greetings from the stars.”  Lucretia spoke with a sideways and reproachful glance at him before focusing on her mission to make a good impression on some hungry carnivores.  Jackson had little doubt she did make such an impression.  Her thin body, and short height made her look weak, like lunch.  And lunch was always a wonderful sight to a bunch of hungry carnivores.

Jackson tried to call out to her to turn back, but even a syllable got angry glances from the crowd, especially the Blikten.  They were not going to listen he saw as his throat closed in on him.

I t drove him batty, for a long second as his brain spun between offending the crowd and seeing a slaughter, and then his rational brain pointed out that he did not much care what the crowd thought so …, and he walked out toward the raptor with his hand on the hilt of his katana.  The beast, a full two feet taller than Jackson when it stood fully up turned a too wise eye toward Jackson, and then enchanted turned back toward Lucretia.

While hisses and cutting comments rained down around him, none of the Blikten seemed anxious to break the line of their circle and come out to get him.  A bittersweet amusement, rather like dark chocolate for the mind, ran through his head as his feet portentously thudded one at a time to the ground, and as the raptor slowly filled his vision and his world.

Even now, he could see Lucretia staring at him from the corners of her eyes while trying to maintain a good impression, and look toward the person she labeled the Ambassador, and Jackson thought of as the Pack Leader.  A wolf in pale, green skin with two legs suited for jumping and eviscerating its prey with one bounce and strike.

His hand, and then his arm began to tremble as he saw what he was doing like looking down on it from high in the sky.  He stood but ten feet from the raptor, probably within striking range for the creature, and Lucretia stood directly in front of the bobbing and swaying menace, the blue girl confronting the green reptile, while a ring of blue people dotted with tiny long-legged and mostly black-feather avians, and the huge blots of dark brown Kringsta, although most of them stayed back.  Probably the Kringsta had been well-schooled that their gigantic appearance might frighten new aliens the Imperium’s representatives were trying to welcome.

Very civilized of the Kringsta it was, but civilization is best used with the civilized, and not with rampant predators.

The raptor turned and looked at him with an insolent smile, and turned back to Lucretia again with its mouth open getting ready to finally bite that smooth skin.  And Jackson found his mind was already made up.  He walked forward three firm steps, bowed very slightly, and drew his katana while slicing with it as well.  It was the single-cut draw he had been taught by his master in the martial arts back in Mendoza, Arizona, and the blade went cleanly through the neck of the raptor severing its head before it could move, or even think to move.  The head of the beast fell down spouting blood, tumbling one and a half times like Kara’s head had tumbled, and a long, obscene splatter went across Lucretia’s face, her right forearm, and her gift nest.

A great shout of horror went up from the mouths of all the aliens, and the remaining raptors took it to be a war-cry, and they turned about and fled.  Jackson watched them flee with his sword drooping by his side in a one-handed hold, and then he turned to face the advancing aliens because he could not bear to look at a sobbing Lucretia.  She wept and hiccupped like her heart had been crazed into a dozen pieces, and she murmured over and over again strange words.

“The Curse of the Other is upon me.  Doomed.  I am doomed.”  Jackson noted these strange words, and moved on for the moment because the Blikten were once again closing in on him.  But this time, he had a sword in his hand, and he did not mean to be pummeled to the ground and eaten.

He flourished the blade back and forth in front of him so that light flashed off the blade.

“Who wants to be first?”  He asked, and they backed up with apparent terror.  Jackson had forgotten the effect of human speed on the Blikten. It terrified them that someone could move that fast.  Suddenly, Jackson saw things in another light.  He might well be able to kill all the Blikten by himself.

He straightened up standing more arrogantly which only scared the Blikten more.  Then he turned to Lucretia, and coolly asked her what her problem was.
“Its like the old stories.  We all learn them as children.  We are not meant to be together, and if you try it always ends in tragedy.”

“Who is we?”

“We is the different species, Jackson.  There is a curse on the joining of different species.”

“A curse?”  Jackson snorted.  And she nodded quite enthusiastically.

“Release me, and then maybe we can avert it.”

“Uh, sure, you’re released.”  Jackson said with a contemptuous snort.  This was the same stuff Arkad and Vin had been telling him the other night of the Tragedies of Alien Love.   Even if he wanted to now, it looked like his chance with Lucretia was gone.  Not that he had really wanted to, after she nearly strangled him, but still at the closing of that door he felt a sting of loss.  Worse, for his pride was that it was someone else doing the dumping, and not him.

More happily she ran off.  And then Jackson looked up to see a pair of Kringsta framing him, and the Starflock friend of his in front of him.

Everyone looked at each other for a long moment.

“He is not dangerous.  You are not dangerous, right?”  The Starflockian Arkad whistled hopefully.

The Kringsta both grumped.  It was like being slapped by air as their near subsonic voices expressed skepticism without a word.

“As long as no one is attacking me, yeah, I’m cool.”

A pause filled the air, and then Jackson started to clean his blade, and the two Kringsta lowered their axes from their shoulders.

“I know you don’t believe me, but look in that thing’s mouth.  Look at its head size.  Its just got carnivore’s teeth, I’d bet, and it has a too small brain for it to be sentient.”

“Ah, I have a very small brain.”  The Starflock avian said, and Jackson gaped as he suddenly grasped the obvious that the avian had a head about the size of a lemon.

“How?”

“We have a very tortured brain surface.  The amount of bends and twists in the brain’s surface is part of what make people sentient.  I have a hundred fold more than the Kringsta or the Blikten.  But they have larger brains to compensate.”

“So let’s check him.”  Jackson pointed at the head, and everybody paused because no one wanted to be first.  The Starflock avian ended up holding it while Jackson used his sword to  crack open the skull.

Inside, a blandly smooth, and tiny brain proclaimed lack of intelligence.

The Starflock studied it for a long time.  He passed it around to others of his species, and they chattered back and forth, but it was a foregone conclusion after ten seconds.  They were only exploring all the possibilities.

Jackson had been right.  Meanwhile, the Kringsta marine who was Jackson’s friend of sorts asked to examine his weapon.  After explaining it to the curious creature, Jackson was asked to hold in its place the axe of the marine.  Befuddled, Jackson agreed, and with a bit of worry watched the Kringsta lumber off with his sword.

But having the axe as security reassured him.

The crowd gathered again, and while the Blikten did not apologize this time, a new steadiness in the relationship assured him that they finally trusted him.   Jackson was grateful to Arkad and the others of the Starflock.  They must have spoke up for him.   So on the surface things looked rockier, but down deep where it counted, things were actually stronger.

End of Chapter Seventeen.

[9 blank lines suppressed]

Chapter Eighteen: Princess in Peril

Everybody breathed for a moment in the dark as the men realized that this strange duplicate of the one they were supposed to protect was not going to be dead immediately.  They had not looked forward to explaining such to their boss, who might be the girls’ father.  But their own consciences would have been clear since what she was doing had been obviously insane.

Their job was not to stop Kara, err little Kara, as they now thought of her, from committing suicide, and especially not this bizarre older version of their charge.  After all, they did have families to get back to themselves.  Dying was part of their job, but not totally stupid dying.  Still, those closest to “little” Kara gripped her with renewed strength in case this madness was contagious.

“F-Fine, you’ve got me covered?”  Kara said with her voice nerved and questioning although there was not the least bit of doubt that the situation was as described.  She breathed in an out once, twice, forcing herself to say the next words.

“I’m not afraid to die.”  She started to walk forward uphill past the men hiding on the trail below her to her right.

“You lie.”  The voice came from out of the dark with the exact same words that Kara’s conscience was prodding her with.

“Alright, I am afraid, but I cannot let you kill this Kara.”

“How are you going to stop me?”  And then the voice jerked in the woods, and the men on the trail tightened in their determination while the fifteen year-old girl found herself chilled down deep for the voice had just given the game away.  Now all knew what Kara had surmised.  This was no kidnapping, but an execution.

Kara nodded down at her younger self as she passed by in the night.

“We all know what you want now.   You cannot fool us now.  So I offer you Curiosity.  You want to meet me again.  You know you do.”  Kara sold with all her heart while a bubbling over fury she was startled to recognize in her own self fought for control of her tongue and her shaking be-clawed fingers.

Kara knew down to her bones, even as she did not want to, even as her rational, skeptical side insisted that it was impossible, still the side of her that saw truth, and did not care where it came from as long as it was true spoke with mountain-shaking softness.  The woman in the dark was her last nightmare come to life.

But then bafflement reigned over the rest for her and the nightmare.

“I, I’ve never met you.  You keep acting like I know you.  I don‘t.”  The other woman’s voice had such certainty that Kara almost stopped her slow hike up the hill which had brought her to the head of the column.  But she resisted, and turned without thinking to the lead scout who watched her with a kind of awe.

“Tell Mom and Dad, I love them.”  She whispered, and he nodded as he accepted the sacred charge.  Angels and demons were loose in the night, the column of ten felt, and they had no doubt who was the angel. Forces not of this earth moved indeed, and Kara felt the guidance of the Goddess on her feet as she kept moving upward.

“Sure you have, you killed me, didn’t you, and then I died again in London fighting a wind spirit with magic.  What is going on?”  Kara cried lurching forward finding strangely that she wanted understanding more than life, even maybe more than vengeance.

“Oh.”  The voice said, and then more brightly. “Oh.”  And Kara could now see the outlines of the nightmare girl’s face behind a fallen tree trunk on her side of the trail.  Vines wrapped about the trunk blurred the stooping girl’s chin, but Kara could still see over the top of the vine-shrouded tree rampart the hated black leather of her assailant but fifteen feet uphill in front of her.

Gritting her teeth, Kara stopped and waited for a response that illuminated more than the Other.

“You, you, it works.  I knew it should, but to actually see it.  This is great.  I had thought to stop, but this restores my faith.”  Strangely, Kara felt the Other was trying to share a moment of joy.

Kara jabbed out with a hard question to puncture the bizarre giddiness.  Behind her, she could hear troops stepping closer with stealth.  And the Other fired off a burst past Kara and down the trail.

“I have my mission to accomplish, and no band of soldier boys is going to stop me.  You can die where you lay, or live, makes no difference to me.”  The hard ugly words snapped down the hill, and they answered back with jeers that tightened the nightmare girl’s face.

“Mission, what mission?”  Kara asked desperately trying to get back to a more peaceful solution, and to find her answers.

The Other breathed out, and relaxed.

“Tell your friends they don’t move, and we can talk.  They move, you, they, the Kara from here and now, all dies.”

“Then you will die too.”  Kara said speaking what to her was the plain truth.

“So?  We are immortal, Kara of whatever universe you come from.   My gift to you. Die in one, and land in another.   I’ve died dozens of times.  Seen all sorts of wonders, but that doesn’t matter.  I’ve got my mission.”

“Mission.  What mission?”  Kara spoke trying to stifle the raging shout in her throat.

“So, Miss Calm and Poised is not so sweet after all.” The other mocked her and paused while Kara said nothing.

  “There is a Doom that stalks us, Keila, Karen, Kara, whatever your name is.  We die young and painful,  all across the Multiverse.  I don’t know why, but I have a cure for it.  A drop of my blood may make you a verser so that when you die, you live again.”

“That’s impossible.”  Kara said, and heard it repeated several times behind her, including by her younger self even as she remembered crashing into the cobblestoned streets of an earlier London from the height of a thousand feet.

The Other said nothing, not needing too.  Merely waiting in the heavy darkness.

“Okay.”  Kara said conceding the point, and then adding for the others who listened.  “All right, I’ve survived death.   I think at least twice.  Once from falling and once you killed me.”

“That’s what so amazing.  Its like a message from God, you are to me.  I’ve never met, and I was thinking of giving up my mission, but now I know it is just, and I shall press onward.”

Kara studied the statement, and understood her counterpart’s point.  The Other in her own personal timeline had not yet met Kara, and yet for Kara it was her past.  The paradoxical possibilities whirled her mind.

“Paradox.”  She gasped.

“Not a problem when traveling from world to world.  What year do you think it is here and now?”

Kara looked about, and considered the nuclear devastation.

“2010?”  She hazarded a guess.

Tell her, soldier boys.”

“We are not sure, but its before the Millenium. The War was in ‘95.”  The Captain’s voice rang out supportively.

Kara felt like he was offering her help, support, options.  He would follow her lead.

“Does the blood drop kill? Is it poisonous?”

“No.”  The Other replied with a mystified tone.

“Then why kill me?  Why kill?’  Kara burst out with while all her homsickness and fears making her throat thick with tears.

A long pause during which a night bird chirped.

“Ever had radiation poisoning?  Let me tell you, its not a good way to go.  That was my door out.  And it creaked open so slowly.  I’m going to spare the others the pain.  Dose them, and a quick cut, and they are on their way.”

“But you are not sure that it works.”

“Better a quick death than that horror.”  The Other replied.

“But what about me, about what I want?”  Kara cried.

“You, we were too much the coward to do the right thing.  A nice overdose, and all the pain would have been over, but no I had to fight to the bitter end.  Like a fool, I was.”

Kara paused suddenly perplexed.  She did not know whether denying final surcease to the terminally ill was right.  Some called it murder, and some called it torture, and she did not know if she herself would have had the courage to fight on this second time.

She prayed, and that settled something in her mind.

Her other younger self would have at least one chance at the fight of her life.  Kara had fought it, and looking back she found the years lived since then to be more than worth the pain and suffering.  She still was not sure if she would have kept on fighting this second time, but, that was not really the question was it?

And besides, even if she had ended it, she did not want someone to murder her.  It would have to be made of her own free will.

Kara turned and looked down the hill.

“My, my cancer, bone cancer, started in my index finger.  Swelling and aches attended it for much of the year before the diagnoses.  I don’t know what you can do, but don’t wait, get help as soon as you can. Tell Mom, she knows biology.”

The younger Kara stood up, and held out a hand.  It was missing a finger end as it had been snipped off, and smoothly grown over a long time ago.

“Playing with Dad’s circular saw when I was eight years old.  I always wondered why God let it happen.  Now, maybe I know.  Maybe I won’t get cancer now.”

“Maybe God knew you deserved it for being stupid, like you are doing now.”  The Other grated out from uphill, as the younger self hurriedly sat back down.

“Even if you dodge cancer, another Doom will come for you.”

“Do you know that, for a fact?”  Kara asked shrewdly, and receiving no reply, she shrugged.  “You can’t just shoot them all.  You’ll kill your other self, before you can ‘rescue’ her. And I‘m not moving.”

Kara crossed her arms, and suddenly the Other shrieked, and leapt down the trail with a blurring speed that showed Kara how truly outclassed she was.  But the soldiers leapt up alongside Kara, and as Kara raised her hands to futilely try to block the oncoming blows, the soldiers caught the Other’s wrists in their hands, and for a second the two stared into each other’s eyes.

“I’m going to save us.”  The Other hissed.

“I’m going to save us from you.”  Kara snapped back, and raised a hand to slap the other across the face.

And then the Other leap upward while still being held by the arms, and rotated so that her feet faced Kara’ belly.  Then she struck with a brilliant double foot strike into Kara’s stomach, and sent the surprised verser to be flung backwards, and airborne, and head-over heels she went down the slope.

The soldiers tried to grab her, as did her younger self, but she tumbled in an oddly rotating spin, length for length, and  fell down half of the column before impacting on her head on a root which produced a sickening double snap.  The root was obviously broken, and so was her neck.

Screaming, the younger Kara slid in the muddy trail downward to the verser.

And there she leaned over to see the dying woman mouthing a command.

“Fight, you fight for your life, you hear me!”  They both said at the same time, with the same imperative tone, although one voice was darker with knowledge of pain.

“I will.”  Kara said with some difficulty into the silence that followed that moment.  “I love you, and you fight on as well.  Tell Mom and Dad, and our brother…”

“Brother?”  The younger one interrupted.

“Yes, Jackson’s quite a nice fellow, but I guess you don’t have one.  Your loss.  His life lighted mine.”

A faint shiver like of light flared inside the body of  Kara, and then only a pile of dust remained while around her soldiers and her other, her younger ‘sister’ wept.  The younger one turned to vent her fury on the madwoman, and found only baffled soldiers.

Keila von Wellington had bitten down on a pill that caused foam to slide out of her mouth.  And then she versed out as well.

Karen Wellington bent over and prayed for lost souls wandering strange universes, for an angel, and for a demon, and then she got up to continue her task so that she could get back home to tell it all to her parents.

End of Chapter Eighteen.

[11 blank lines suppressed]

Chapter Nineteen: Along the Beach


Vin and Atur, two Kringsta Marines, came back with his sword.  They handled it reverently, and he nodded in acceptance of their courtesy. Jackson took the blade, and slipped it in his scabbard, and tightened the thin belt circling his waist, and then turned to go.

“Human, the Kringsta would speak with you tonight.  We shall have a separate campfire.  You are invited to come and join us for a while.”  Atur spoke, and then bowed his great head a little bit.  Jackson looked over at his friend Vin, and received a blank glance in return.  Vin, his lieutenant was not going to help him out with a clue, Jackson realized with mild irritation.  Defeated, he shrugged his shoulders.

“Yes, I’ll be there.”  And then he took a deep breath, and shouted out over the beach.  “All right, people, let’s head ‘em up, and move ‘em out.”

He waved his arm in a big circle, and then set out.  Pretty soon, the rest of his people got the idea, and started grabbing up their stuff, and following him down the beach toward the Ranger station which was getting ever closer.

The day passed with no disturbances greater than a lone  yellowish four-legged predator with a sailfin amidst its rounded and pebbled back.  The thing was small, with a mouth that seemed more fit for a bird than for a dinosaur; but still it was the size of three adult cows back home.  Jackson flanked by two roaring Kringsta, ran full-tilt at it; the frightened creature beat a hasty retreat back into the jungle.


That night, with everyone settled in around their campfires, and the Starflock entertaining themselves and the Blikten with a fluting choral song that stunned the heart with its beauty, and made Jackson loathe to leave for the distant campfire down the beach where half the Kringsta waited for him, Jackson set out on foot alone.  Each footfall in the loose sand came down more thoughtfully so that by the time he went the full two hundred yards forward into tomorrow’s travel for the Blikten and the Starflock, he was unusually contemplative.  His sword banged at his side, and his palms were faintly wet for he knew this to be some sort of ritual.

Upon reaching the giant bonfire with its two foot thick logs around which the ring of the Kringsta sat, he saw them turn to study him.  To judge him, he realized.  Suddenly, he wanted to turn back.  He needed not to have come.  Why had he?  Politeness at first, and curiosity for the second reason, but also for the third, he wanted to have the respect of these great warriors.

So he stepped up into the light of the campfire after a quick jerk on his shirt to straighten it up a bit.

“Hello, Jackson, Rog is the oldest of us.  He will conduct this meeting in the manner of the tribal elders.”  Vin spoke, and then bowed his head, pointing toward another Kringsta who was only slightly older than Vin who was the Marine leader.  But evidently this was not the sort of thing done by a political leader or an officer.

“I am Rog, and this night I take up the place taken before me by a hundred generations of the Kringsta.  I am the Old Judge.  Tell me, Human, are you worthy of standing with us as a Marine?”  The put on solemnity of the voice lacked what Jackson felt had to be overwhelming majesty in the typical re-enactment of this ritual.  But then as the pause lengthened, and the pressure of judging minds pelted down on him, that ironic thought faded like snow on a hot beach.

He bent his head, and thought, and began to raise it.

“We offer you this honor if you are worthy.”  Rog spoke a mere half-second before Jackson would have replied.  And Jackson paused again, to feel the magnitude of the gift presented.

Jackson bowed his head again with tears rushing down his face.

“I’m not worthy.”  He said and turned to walk away.

“Please stay.”  Vin spoke softly, for a Kringsta.

Jackson turned back to look at Vin, and began to speak, at first hesitatingly, and then with growing force and anger.  He told of ill choices, and cowardly needs, and blatant stupidities.   The tale of his sister was explained, and his foolishness of chasing Stephanie and then Lucretia was unearthed.

“So that’s the fool you have leading you.  I’ll lead you because that’s the best way for us to survive, but no, I don’t want your group.”  Jackson finished his confession, and then added.  “I am not worthy of this honor.  Good night.  Thank you anyways.”

He paused, reminded himself he was babbling, and decided to try to save what little dignity he had left by shutting up.

“Stay, my friend.  You think that we all do not have our secret shames?  We see two men in front of us.  One is brave and true, a Marine, and the other is less.  Take up this burden, and make the choice between the two men.”  The eldest of the Kringsta spoke.

“But I’m not that man you seek.”  Jackson objected.

“No?”  Vin said and then began to recite the varied acts of bravery done by Jackson.  To which the human merely referenced his own great weaknesses.

“Those are nothing.  I was just doing my job.”  Jackson added not knowing that ‘just doing one’s job’ was a great compliment among the Kringsta.  Now they felt sure they had been right.


“There is no Kringsta who might not break in a moment of combat, but we merely insist that they try again.  If you had it to do over, would you do it, whatever it is, different, young human?”  Rog asked, or more accurately the Old Judge of a Life Well-lived did.

Jackson thought back to the way he had treated Kara, and shuddering he nodded ferociously.  When he saw the nod meant nothing to his hosts, he blurted out.

“Yes, yes, I would. Different.”

“Then ask forgiveness of your gods or your ancestors or however you do it, Human, and take the new day.  Now would you choose to be a Marine now that we have disposed of your foolish objections?”  Rog asked with a sparkle of glee in his eyes.  Jackson nodded once.

“This night you will be baptized in fire then, and be reborn in the morning an Imperial Marine.”

They all took out nearly foot long pipes which they had previously assembled, and began smoking.  In the interests of not killing the Human, they refrained from offering any to him since it could have unpredictable results, no almost certainly would since they did not understand human biology.  Still the Kringsta felt it would be safe to smoke the pipes with their potent mix of drugs, especially since the human was much shorter than them, and the smoke was getting blown out to sea.

But, they made a mistake or two.  First humans turned out to be very sensitive, and secondly humans were about one-fourth the mass of a Kringsta.  The amount of drugs that would barely raise a buzz in a Kringsta would turn a human nearly comatose.

Jackson began to realize there was a problem when he fell to the ground with his legs not working.  But he did not care, for he saw that the stove was glowing in bizarre colors including some he had never seen before.  Colors not accessible by his mortal brain spilled into his mind, or so it seemed.

“Will you be true?  Honest?  Brave?” The questions went on and on, and soon Jackson realized that the same three were being asked by everyone of the Kringsta seated about him.  Jackson answered in the affirmative, and often explained why with differing answers relating various anecdotes from his youth.  The excessive babbling was not only tolerated, but it was encouraged.  And in those words, and the steady regard of the Kringsta he found a new way to see how he could be.  He found courage and honor, and saw that even a short life could be a life well-lived.

Finally the questions came to and end, and the eldest opened the box he had held by his side and a great wave of heat burst over them all.   Using all their axes, the Kringsta lifted the box, and placed it amidst the fire.  The greater heat of the box caused the wood of the campfire to quickly begin to build in intensity.

  Vin, Jackson’s friend, pulled out the samurai sword, and helped Jackson to his feet.  He felt better now, surer, and as if the drugs had been purged from his system, and had cleaned a layer of trash off his soul.

“A fine weapon, as we saw this afternoon.  But it has weaknesses and flaws like all of mortal creation.  Its edge is brittle,…”  Jackson heard them criticize his sword at some length, but every criticism was met by a compliment from some other of the Kringsta.  And he cooled down enough to realize the critiques were also valid, but the larger point was more important.  He had an excellent sword, but it had limits, just like himself, just like any man.

“Now, my friend, we have worked our magic.  Say what is in your heart as we remake the pair.”  Not sure what the Kringsta eldest meant, Jackson leaned his head down, and suddenly found words.

“O Lord of Hosts, you told Joshua not to be afraid.  Make me so, make me a defender of the weak and the helpless.  Only forgive me for my stupidity and sin. Give me also a sword fit to do this job, make my arm strong to save as Yours is.  Let me be more like You.”

The prayer rang out in the dark only lit by the glowing orange of the interior of the box, and somehow Jackson felt sure it had been heard.  Indeed, he felt strong hands, human hands on his shoulders as he stood and took the sword from the eldest and shoved it into the flame.  At the same time, the rest of the wood in the campfire caught fire, and it became a blazing inferno around Jackson.  But somehow the box sucked in the heat of the flames, and he remained unharmed.

Horrified, he watched his sword melt, and the metal glowingly soften toward his hand, but a calmness washed that all away, and so he stood there as the sword melted beneath his hand, and then it hardened with no pain to his hand.  He drew it forth from the deepest part of the fire, and for a long second he could swear he saw a wheel of fire on his left and a man with glowing eyes and black leather jacket on his right.  Then they were gone, and a great thoom echoed down the beach, and across the island.

Jackson turned to face the noise with his sword out and ready while around him the great chunks of wood fell to ashes.  And the Starfire Forge of these cadets, the greatest device of the Kringsta, fell silent once more.

Only a pillar of fire ascending into the cloud-soaked sky answered his questioning eyes.  The pirates had finally dared the ship, and paid the price as it detonated.  Unbeknownst to them, or the refugees, the engine crystal, the ruby flew into orbit so great was the force on her.  And the crystal that had pushed the starship, hung in space and absorbed sunlight, and shivered once as a nub on its side was pushed out, expanding the gem just a little bit.  Over time, the gem would grow like an acorn into an oak.

“You are now a Marine.”  The Kringsta eldest told him, and Jackson carefully nodded back.  At least the Kringsta were real, he decided before collapsing unconscious into the sand.


The next morning, he woke up bundled in a blanket surrounded by the rest of the passengers, and he wondered if it had all been a dream.  But a look toward the rising sun, and he saw a pillar of smoke still ascending into the heavens.  Checking his sword, he saw it looked nearly the same, just different in color.

The ripples and the flexibility was still there, but it weighed slightly more, and there was a metal cap like the top of a pocket watch inset into his hilt.  He flipped it up easily after figuring out the mechanism which was to give it a quick quarter-rotate counter-clockwise, and the clockwise.  Inside he saw a dial.

“Be careful of using that dial.  The mass of your sword is ‘alleviated’, but if you spin that dial your sword will weigh up to hundreds of times its weight.”  Vin the Kringsta Marine said from nearby as he lay on his side studying Jackson familiarizing himself with his sword.

“Anything else I should know about this blade?”  Jackson asked giving it an experimental swish in the early dawn airs that played coolly and cheerfully across his cheekbones.

“It should be unbreakable, unless you do something really stupid.  Its not pure neutronium, but a matrix of it with the old metal filling in the holes.   You have a really complicated sword, it took much thought to figure out how to talk the Forge into keeping your sword’s flexibility.   Now, you cannot fix it without a Starfire Forge, and a great deal of skill.”  Evidently, the box he had seen yesterday night was the “Starfire Forge”.

“So the Forge was prepared for my sword, and it knew what to do when I stuck it into the fire.  How does it work, I mean I stood with my hand on a melting sword which should have killed me, or at least scarred me for life, and I felt nothing.”  Jackson’s head was whirling as he tried to comprehend what physical principles were used in such a device.  Perhaps really precise usage of force fields might do the job?

“It is a test of courage, and you passed splendidly.”

Jackson was not so sure about that.  He had been a good bit surprised by much of it.

“But, how…?”

Vin hung his head.

“We do not know.  The Emperor came and brought peace to the galaxy, drove out the pirates, and ended the slave trade.  But he had his secrets.  The Sun Cannon which fired on us is supposed to be only known to him how to fire it; and likewise the Starfire Forge, and even the Ruby Warp Engines, what he called ‘ruby slippers’.  This is why we really have to warn the Empire.  A pirate has learned how to use one of the long-lost Sun Cannons.  It is a bad business, indeed.”

“And what happened to this Emperor?”  Jackson asked remembering the ‘ruby slippers’, a joke that only an American human born after the filming of the Wizard of Oz would be likely to make or get.

“No one knows.  He came out of nowhere, and then vanished one night in his palace leaving behind a note that said ‘he had to take care of some other business, but he’d keep an eye on us.’  There’s plenty, especially among the Kringsta, who think he is coming back sometime to save us from some awful disaster.”

Jackson got up, paced back and forth, and asked what he figured was his last question about the Emperor for now.

“What race was he?”

“That’s the strange thing.  No one knows, he wore a robe and a mask.  He was not Takhiernas, or Ches-la, or Kringsta, or Blikten, or Starflock, or Darvinus.  Its part of what made him acceptable to all, or so my teachers said.”

Jackson nodded with grim satisfaction to himself at having solved a mental challenge.  He knew what species the Emperor had been.  Human.  Probably American.  The problem with that was that only left more questions with even more inscrutable answers than before.

The two strolled to the water edge to start the breakfast hunt for crabs and edible seaweed.

“I saw strange visions last night.  What about you?”

“It is the drug of the smoke.  It affected you when we thought it would not.  For a while, we were most worried, but everything seems to have worked out.”

“What did you see?”  Jackson asked wondering what alien hallucinations looked like.

“Well, I saw what we usually see.  The Tree, and The Mountain, and The Axeman in the Pathway, and The Gold Pavillion under the Tree and atop the Mountain after you walk the Path.  But, then you must have added something to it, for I saw a Human with glowing eyes, a tough looking customer indeed, and a wheel of fire with human eyes, singleton, at each of the four cardinal points.  Very strange.  I’m not sure what it means.  Perhaps you could explain it to me?  It is a human thing right?”  The Kringsta Marine raised himself stiffly to a cross-legged sitting position while Jackson felt the blood rush out of his face.

It was impossible.  Impossibilities piled up on impossibilities.  The Kringsta described the same vision that Jackson had.  And with Freudian symbols that one would have to assume that the Kringsta did not have.  Wavering on his feet in shock, Jackson walked over to Vin who was beckoning him to go back up to the campfire.

Vin gave him a crude wooden mallet made by chopping a section of a tree, and inserting a branch as a handle.

After instruction, Jackson began to pound the Kringsta’s back to loosen up the stiff muscles that all Kringsta woke up with.  At first, he was afraid to hurt the giant fellow, but he soon realized that with a broad six inch wide surface, there was no way he could actually hurt the Kringsta as long as stayed out certain places where internal organs came near the surface of the back.  It would be humanly speaking the equivalent of a Kidney Punch.

How had the Kringsta Vin, and probably the rest of them shared his vision?  He might have mumbled it, their might be a mental link activated by the drugs, or the vision might have been real.  The last possibility, that two very different angels had shown up to support him in his dedication to becoming an Imperial Marine was unlikely at best, he thought.  Maybe telepathy worked her; after all he had seemed unusually in simpatico with the dinosaur he had thrown rocks at in the river to drive out of his way.

After sheathing the sword, and getting a second helping of breakfast by the beachside, he took them on another day’s trip which was surprisingly calm.  They were falling into a routine, and getting toned physically and mentally, and they finally trusted him.  And no one spotted a single dinosaur.

Finally, about noon, he figured out why.  The huge blast that tore the ship apart and the continuing pillar of smoke had frightened everything into hiding.

The next night he and the Kringsta chased off a pair of flipper-armed one to two ton amphibian dinosaurs who had tried to sneak up on them on the beach.  But the notion of a one-ton ninja did not work at all, and the Marines yelling and screaming frightened the beasts off.

The next morning, he woke blearily to see a small herd of herbivores meander past him at twenty feet and daintily and fussily step into the edge of the water in order to drink.  One stayed on lookout toward the ocean, and another stayed on watch toward the jungle.  The five ton beasts with their great armored plates ignored the aliens.  Jackson nodded to himself in understanding.

They are not the least frightened by a raptor or anything smaller than a raptor.  Any raptor try to eat these phlegmatic beasts would get stepped on, and squished.  They stepped and the earth shuddered under their bulky, armored and seemingly fat legs.

The rest of the aliens were already up, but not moving, and Jackson with hand signals got them slipping down the beach away from the incurious brutes who only raised their heads to study the departing ‘small things’ once before dipping back their heads into the water.

“You know what this means?”  Jackson asked the Starflock leader.

“Yes, this beach is a quick route to travel but it is dangerous since it is exposed on all sides.  We are vulnerable to jungle and aquatic creatures.”  The leader replied.

Jackson paused, impressed.  A few days ago, no member of the Starflock would have considered this trip from a defensive angle.  Now they were starting to think in a survival oriented fashion.  Jackson, as a wargamers, had heard that the first month was the most dangerous for new soldiers in Viet Nam.  Maybe his crew was getting over that hump, and without losing anyone.

“No, I mean. Well watch this.”  Jackson jogged out over to the water’s edge.  His stomach was flat, and an easy spring in his step pushed him along.  Granted, he was not ready to run any great length, but the improvement from his sedentary, pot-bellied geek programmer self was dramatic.  He sucked in a breath, how he missed being able to program.  His fingers craved the flashing contact with the keys of a keyboard, and his eyes wanted to see phosphors glowing and windows opening.  Even an error message would make him laugh rather than rant.

But he turned aside from that, and walked into the edge of the water while keeping an eye out for predators like the herbivores had.  And then he breathed in deeply.  He was right.  So obvious, and so blatantly in front of his nose, but he had expected something which had not been true.

There was no smell of salt in the air. He stood on the edge of an ocean inlet, and no salt smell perked up his nose.  Granted he had been an inland boy, but still, he had been to the beach a couple times.  Right in front of his nose, and he’d been too much of a dullard to notice.

Jackson bent down and scooped up a handful of water to drink. It tasted fresh and clean and good.  He wondered where, or perhaps more accurately when he was; it must be early in Earth’s history before the oceans became salty.

Somehow he had traveled in time.  It was the only explanation.

A quick quiz of some of the Starflock established that above the omnipresent clouds, a singleton moon of rather astonishing size orbited the planet.  Now he was sure.

His head buzzing, Jackson shook it off to consider later, and got the group over to boil some water.  This water did not require distilling, just boiling to kill any microorganisms.  It would make the trip a lot easier, and each day’s trip more productive not to have to spend gallons of time on the distilling.


After refilling, they  prepared to tip the remaining hot water out on the campfires, and then a Starflockian whistled in an ear-aching shrill song.  Jackson spun, and saw three great beasts nosing out of the jungle toward the second campfire and his people loosely scattered about it.

Crocodillus in the forty foot range with rough plated armor that could shred an unprotected hand lumbered forward at a pace greater than a man‘s walk.  Ten feet high behind the shoulders of the front legs, the great crocodiles measured at least fifteen feet across the top of those same shoulders, and massed many times more than a bull elephant.

Water dripped off them, and ferns fell off as well as they oozed menacingly out of the jungle.  The one in the lead became Jackson’s preferred target as his self-preservation instincts grew increasingly panicked, wondering what on Earth he was planning on doing.  They wanted to know why he was not running already as fast as he could.

Instead, he got a good grasp on the bucket of water he had been about to dump on the fire, and double-checked that he had his sword belted on his left side.  Walking with cool confidence toward the horrible beast, except for the voice in his head that kept suggesting “Bravely, Sir Robin ran away!”  He ignored that voice, and instead focused on his enemy.

As he advanced, he studied it as it slid forward across the beach sand in all of its majestic reptilian splendour.    His people backed off slowly while he noted its pie pan sized eyes, and the heavy ridges above the eye protecting the giant crocs’ optics.

“Be calm, keep an eye on it.  If it lunges dive to the right or the left.  Then run away.  Don’t directly try to outrun it.  You won’t succeed.”  He spoke in the calm near-silence with only the movement of nervous feet, the thud of the waves hitting the beach behind him, and the susurrus of noise that came as the crocodiles slid across the sand.

Jackson saw the crocodile led off with its right clawfoot.  The thing looked massive; he could already feel it coming in the vibration of the sand, and smell its whole like a sick nightmare.   That clawfoot or those sickly sticky teeth might be the end for him.  Not a pleasant thought, but he found he could bear up.  God would just have to send someone else to protect his sister if he became a dino snack.

The clawfoot, as thick around as his chest, and etched with scars, and jutting bones under it glimmering scales gave it all the solidity of a thick club, while its handspan length claws would serve much better than nails in a club.  And looking at it coming closer, at a slight, awkward angle to him, he forgot his assurance, and felt terror grip his body so that his left arm which held the bucket trembled and hot water spilled out onto the sand and his shoe and through the shoe to his foot.  Oddly, this calmed him.

Why am I doing this?  His fear wailed inside him.  Because I am a Marine.  An Imperial Marine.  It was not a good enough answer, and his attempt to take a step faltered.  The lead crocodile jerked its head, and turned head and body to face him more directly with a  challenging stare.  Jackson nearly fell on his back, the rampant insanity of this unmanned him so that he began to edge backwards.

“Marine, you can do it.”  He heard a Kringsta yell, maybe to him, maybe to another, and maybe it was that, or maybe it was the realization yet again of why he chose to become an Imperial Marine.  These people needed help.

He stepped up toward the nose of the crocodile, until it waited like a cave mouth about five feet away, and then stood with his arms still trembling.  It sniffed, and waggled its head left to right in preparation for a charge, he felt certain, and when its left side was slightly facing him, Jackson slung the once boiling, and still very hot water a full ten feet and onto the eye of the crocodile.

It screeched in agony, and flinched aside to the right away from the pain, and that was all Jackson had been waiting for.  He sprinted forward the ten feet, and without thought or decision drew his sword, and rammed it down into the eye of the crocodillian.

It flung him about bruisingly, but he hung on bobbing back and forth while trying in the seconds of respite before another shaking fit went on to wiggle the sword deeper into the crocodilian’s brain.  The world went away, he forgot his name, and his species.  The only thing that remained was a need to do the right thing, and that was to slay this monster before it could hurt others.

At the third shaking his face slapped against the side of the crocodiles head, and a ringing in his ears, and a sudden vagueness alarmed him that he might be losing consciousness, and thus his grip on the sword.  So he fought to stay awake, and keep his hands on his katana.  He even tried to shove the blade a little deeper.

The fourth horrendous shaking, and its subsequent  wiggle of the sword, and suddenly the crocodillian  went limp.  Jackson leaned on the side of the crocodiles’ head, with only his grip on the sword keeping him from falling and sliding sideways into the sand.  He lacked the strength to rise for a long second, and finally solved the problem by letting go of his sword, and dropping to the sand.  From there he crawled around the head while in a state of near-shock, and looked upon the battlefield.


He took in a scene of wild carnage.  Blikten and Starflock and even two Kringsta bodies lay still on the beach.  Four Kringsta were on top of one croc, and they swung their axes with the kind of dull booming force that would have snapped off many a tree.  Their blood and the the croc’s blood mixed in the wild melee as the croc tried to roll over and crush his opponents, but they were gorillas and far more agile on climbing than it was on rolling.

The other beast was being stung to death by a circle of  Starflock armed with their tiny needler pistols.  And a few Blikten were firing blue bolts of thunderous destruction into the creature from some oddly shaped devices that Jackson had thought were sorting devices for chemicals.

The blue was intense, deeper and truer than the color of the sky, and wherever it struck, chunks of flesh flew off blackened.  Wanting to help, Jackson scooped up a needler from someone fallen, and ran toward the gun fight.

Coming up behind the circle, he merely raised the gun, and fired it over the head of the Starflock in front of him.

The needle went true, and penetrated the creature’s eye on his right side.  It roared in agony, and spun about to find this new threat.  And that presented another eye to Jackson who felt like he could not miss after his early fight.  In fact now, after the truth of his survival had kicked in, he felt blessed and invincible.  Phiht! And then “Splat!”  The monster was now blind, and the Blikten set to killing it with utter ruthlessness, and a group cohesiveness that left one wondering at the inhuman level of group unity which they wielded with terrifying effectiveness.  It was more like one being than a crowd of them.


They had won, but at what cost? Two Kringsta, five Starflock, and eight Blikten lay motionless on the sands of the beach.

Jackson bowed his head, and spread his fingers wide to rub his face.  Tears leaked from his eyes, and his hands and fingers clenched like claws to rip his face, but he stopped himself.  He hardly knew them, but they would not desire this, his descent into madness.

Yet still, he was afraid to look up into Heaven for fear he would ask God questions that could not be answered.   And then ashamed of himself, for these brave idiots who had trusted him did deserve at least that as a remembrance for their life.  And then looking up into the clear sky, he remembered a dog of his who had not been inclined to obey at all.  He had yelled at the stupid, stubborn, but loveable creature to get off the front lawn and back into the house.

It had been his twelfth birthday, and he saw his dog run out into the traffic, and get hit by a truck.  The distraught driver had said words that now came back to him.

“Its not your fault son, he just would not listen.  He chose his own course. “  The driver had been trying to comfort him, and his own self.  Bad decisions lead to bad places, and these aliens should never have come to this planet.  They were complete greenhorns.  Every last one of them was a native of a city or a space station.  Artificial environments with abundant safety features built in had been their life.  And they should have stayed there.  The fact that any were alive was a blessing from Heaven.  Did that make him a messenger of grace?  Was that why he was here?

Jackson still felt puzzled and grief and horror struck, but reassured at a foundational level since the Universe again made sense, although in the back of his mind he still wondered “Why Kara?  Why twice? What did she do to deserve two attacks of cancer?”.  But he lacked the strength to ask that question.

Eyes bright with tears, Jackson stumbled over to the group of the slain, trying to figure out how they would do this.  Merely burying the Kringsta was going to be a severe challenge.  And that was if they had shovels.

He walked up to a Starflockian’s body; the poor thing looked dreadfully small now that its motion was stilled.  Its black feathers were ruffled, and it had voided itself in its final terror before a monster snapped its neck in an acute angle that was too far for even its thin and hyper-flexible neck to go.

And then two of the surviving Starflockians came up with a black, plastic bag, and twittered at him to get him to stand back.  The bag was the same type as the ones he had carried.

“You were wise to bring these bags, Human Leader.”  One said, and Jackson heard and felt the even deeper acceptance of his rule over the small band of refugees.  Instead of causing rebellion against his chieftainship, this disaster had strengthened his hold on power.

Jackson turned away a half rotation; sickened by the knowledge that this death and destruction would help him.  Feeling like such a fraud, he turned back, and solemnly nodded.  If any of the band were to survive, they had to stick together, and let him guide them.

Without his guidance, despite their improvements, they were just meat on the roam for the nasty vicious predators in the jungle.  At that moment, Jackson would have loved to find an environmentalist.  A whole crew of them like in the Intro to Biology class he had been forced to take rather than a more useful to him computer class (although maybe it would turn out to be useful here and now).  Drop the whole class of Nature worshipping drips into this place with nothing of ‘oppressive Western civilization’ to protect them, like clothes, or hiking boots, or a gun, against a dinosaur and see how long they survived.

He felt terrifically angry, and his hands clenched and unclenched with the need to kill something.  If he had half an excuse, he would have gone into the jungle and started hunting the dinosaurs.  Killed them all to the last creature if he could.  But the refugee band needed him here and now.

They need me, cool and clear-headed, but ready to fight, ready to be angry and kill if it comes to that, but right now, I need to see without distraction.  Jackson reminded himself, and looked up to see that all the fallen were encased in black plastic bags.  The bags were evidently one-size-fits-all with the Starflockian’s bags being thicker, and the Blikten having the material stretched and unfolded a bit more, and the Kringsta, of course, the most.  You could not see a Starflockian’s body, but you could almost see the Kringsta’s through the thinner material.

Jackson gathered the troop together, and then spoke privately to his Kringsta friend, Vin.

“Now what?  Is their a priest or a shaman or a pastor to say a few words over the dead?”

Vin jerked, and looked startled, but then in sad acknowledgement spoke to him.

“Perhaps you are right.”

He, and then a Blikten, and then a Starflockian each spoke briefly mentioning names of the fallen, their accomplishments, and the certainty of Resurrection when the Universe was recreated.  Jackson was struck by the differences and the similarities between his own Christian beliefs and these Imperials and their beliefs.  They even went so far as to invoke a Trinity to watch over their dead which cause Jackson to jerk in shock again.  Then he wondered for a passing moment at the influence of the long-gone Emperor that this culture still revered.  Perhaps, their beliefs sprang from the same source.  It seemed certain that the Emperor had been a human, and an American.  Who knew what religious ideas it had passed on to its people?

The primary difference between their views seemed to be that they thought the  dead waited sleeping in the ground for the Recreation of the Universe while Jackson was of the opinion that death led straight to Glory.

The service ended, and it was a gloomy bunch that hiked away from the funeral toward the Imperial Ranger station that remained their goal.  It was hard, especially because several grief-stricken friends, or mates had to be dragged from their loved one’s bodies.  Jackson participated in hauling away a Kringsta female, by the name of Yanot even though he desperately wanted to be somewhere else, and no one forced him to do so.

But he knew it was his responsibility.

Eventually,  she gave up struggling, and merely leaned on Vin to her right, and Jackson had a massive hand resting on his head to her left.  His support of the fourteen foot tall behemoth was more emotional than physical, but he would have sooner cut off his own head than remove her arm even when it flexed painfully on his skull.

She spoke to both as they walked of her mate’s fine qualities.  His honor, his humor, even the way he grumped when she forgot to take care of making sure the fruit got served before it rotted.

“I was always bad about that.  Only wanting to eat the yrlter fruit, and not the others.  Who is going to make sure I eat a well-balanced meal now?”  It would have been funny, if it had not been so sad.

Then she went on to wonder if her mate would dream, and worry about her.  Puzzled, Jackson spoke a half-sentence before he realized it, and then as the two large heads turned to him, and studied him with compassion, he had to awkwardly finish.

“I thought you believed that your dead sleep dreamlessly.”

“Indeed, they do.  But there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that suggests that those in the storage bags do dream, or at least some of them do.”  Vin enlightened him with a voice that was quiet for a Kringsta.

Jackson planted his feet.

“Storage bags?”

“Yes, my friend.  For the mortally wounded.  But you were right to leave them behind.  We cannot carry them with us.  They would fatally slow us down.”

Jackson’s mouth opened and closed and he felt like his chest was constricting.

“You mean,”  And he pointed back at the black bags in the distant sand of the earlier beach they had trod.  “You mean, they are alive?”

“Of course.  I thought you knew.  The bags generate a temporary stasis field that lasts hopefully until you can get the injured Marine or other crew to a full medical facility.  And none of those had an instantly fatal wound.”

Jackson flung off the hand by stepping back toward the bags.

“We are not leaving wounded behind!”  He sang out, and then joyfully began to run back the few hundred yards they had come.

But even as he ran, he studied the problem for carrying them because it worried him.


Upon getting closer, Jackson saw a trio of three meter tall and yellow fungus laden beasts rise up over the edge of the black bag that held Yanot‘s husband.  Their teeth were small, and all too plentiful which suggested they might be like sharks and rats having continuous teeth growth, even if with differing mechanisms.  They were almost frail compared to other dinosaurs, and without obvious great talent at war, Jackson supposed they must be scavengers.

Still, a hundred feet away, Jackson spared a breath for a hopefully blood-curdling yell.  The beasts, bigger, if less elegant than the raptor’s dully looked up toward him, and then ignored him with a profound indifference.

He was too small to be a threat in their understanding of the world.  So, hopelessly, he saw them raise their fungus laden necks to curl over the fallen Marine, and prepare for a sudden bite.  Jackson pumped his legs faster, but there was no way he was going to get there in time to save the Marine a few bites.  Hopefully, he would survive the indignity to his already wounded body.

And then a buzz like a large bee zipped past his shoulder, and a Kringsta battle-axe raced, tipping end for end to slam into the closest one’s shoulder below its neck.

“I missed!” Roared Yanot.

And another flew over his left shoulder to do the same.  The flung “arrows” were clearly placed so as to avoid the ill chance of hitting the fallen Marine. The lead scavenger wobbled as the axe wounds dripped gallons of blood onto the sand.  It looked confused as it died.

The other two lifted their heads from near the feet of the Kringsta in the storage bag to look at the other who had fallen over the Kringsta’s chest.  And then it looked up to see Jackson bearing down on it, and behind him a roar that sounded loud enough to lift Jackson off the ground came from the mouths of the Kringsta.  The dinosaur stretched his neck over the body, and bellowed back just as loudly.

With his ears ringing, and half-sure that this time would be death, but unwilling to stop, Jackson vaulted up onto the chest of the Marine, and ran across the plastic bag and the chest of the Kringsta with his sword upraised in his right hand.  He thought he screamed, but he did not know.

The scavengers lunged at him, and Jackson went into a forward roll which took him under the mouths with its dozens of pointy teeth, and brought him face to breast of the larger beast.  He found himself too close for a good strike, but he slashed the shoulder anyways.

It backed up, and Jackson lunged for its head which retreated back and upwards out of his reach to his left.  Then with him, out of position, it came around to lunge at his right, but Jackson crouched down and interposed his sword straight toward the lunging monster’s left eye. And then the other tried to spring an ambush by lunging in from the side, but Jackson flicked his blade into the line of attack so that it nearly impaled itself.  The second beast scrambled back gripped by sheer shock.  It did not understand what had almost happened, but it knew it had been bad.

Jackson began to feel cheer.  Granted he was a lot smaller, and these things had incredible range with that foot thick, and disgustingly smelly neck of theirs, but he had a smaller circle of defense to move his sword across.  In other words, for one of them to bite him, it would have to brave his sword, and Jackson thought neither brave enough to do this.  Or perhaps, they were simply smarter than the average dinosouar?

The one still engaged hissed spittle at him that stunk of carrion, and then a thump, and a rocking surface of the chest of the Kringsta let him know the other two had arrived.  Yanot landed behind him, and then leapt up above him to land on the hissing scavenger in a great arcing bounce.  The bone-shattering crunch heralded her landing, and the gleaming arc that flashed again and again against the sky proved that she had taken the time to recover her thrown axe.

And then the slightly slower, because larger, and not quite as well-motivated Vin did the same stunt, but he missed because the last scavenger, the one intimidated by Jackson‘s blade, retreated as Vin flew in a great leaping arc toward it.  It fled bawling out its terror to all and sundry, and Vin let it flee.

And then Yanot came over to hug her husband’s body with blood spattered up and down her body in a dripping sheet of red.  She paused with an incongruously white smile in the midst of the blood to reward Jackson with a tremulous smile.  He hopped out of her way and off the fallen Marine’s chest.  No need to test her restraint, he thought happily as she collapsed weeping next to the storage bag.

And then Vin, the leader of the Marines cast off some of his civilized ways, and turned to face the jungle.  And he bellowed even louder than before since he had now an opportunity to draw breath.  All the others of the Kringsta stopped and joined him.

There was no need for translation for Jackson.  He understood it perfectly well.

You want some of mine?  Well just come and try to take them!

The roars echoed out over the suddenly silenced jungle for a long time.  And many of the beasts in the jungle took note to stay away from this new herd.  And the two running Kringsta took many minutes to recover their breath because running was not a Kringsta specialty, and doing a three hundred yard sprint is a terrible thing for these huge creatures.  Still love had trumped biology, and Yanot was smiling as she gasped for breath.



The first day, they dragged or carried the bodies down the beach, for the rest of the day.  This seemed to work as the bags were slick, but along with the wear and tear on the bags, it simply was taking too long.  The worry arose that the bags were only good for a few days with the continual insult of being dragged on abrasive sand, and while they could change out to new bags, with the nearly a mile per hour pace they were now forced to, that it might not be enough to get them to the ranger station and back home to a proper medical center.

It would be cutting it close anyways.

Jackson considered the problem, and wondered  as he stared into the nightly campfire with his mug of boiled fresh seawater with fragrant tea leaves, if ordering a ‘death march’ was a good idea.  His experience as a wargamers had let him know that humans were capable of truly astounding feats of endurance in travel and war.  The Apache would run for fifty miles in the dessert.  A man could literally walk a horse to death  in a distance race.

But these aliens were not Apaches; they were not in what he thought of as especially good condition.  And fundamentally, humans seemed to have more long-term endurance than any of these other species.   It seemed only fair, the Kringsta were obviously stronger, and the Blikten more flexible, and the Starflockians were more precise thinkers than Humans.

So turning it over and over in his mind, he worried at the problem.  Until, he got up to practice with his remade katana.  It still felt a little strange in his hand, but aside from a slight yellow-orange cast to it, it looked the same.

But, it chopped through two inch thick branches with ease.  It still needed cleaning after bloodshed, but now it was much more apt to shed blood.

His katas eased him into the new feel of his katana, and let his mind roam free.  While he ‘fought’ no idea came to him, but afterwards, as he lay down to go to sleep, he looked at the surging sea with its waves a bare thirty feet from his face.  And the part of his brain that made tools to do things easier with computers powered up.

The next morning, after breakfast, and a general meeting to plan things, the whole crew, per his instructions, dragged the bodies down to the sea, and through the pounding waves.   The waves were getting worse as they got closer to the end of the isle and the open sea.  They pressed through the waves, and got out into the rolling water.  The Blikten and the Starflockian groups proved to be adept at floating, and the slow plodding movement of the Kringsta as they drew the Kringsta fallen who were laden down with the other fallen proved to be easier on them than asking them to move faster which the Kringsta do but poorly.

And the floating was much easier on the bags.  Jackson rejoiced.  It looked like it would work.

The only problem was that it was hardest on him.  He was not tall enough to simply ignore the waves as the Kringsta did, nor was he a natural floater like the other two species.  So he gutted it out.

He could have walked on the beach, and in fact, he did, but he noted that the band of refugees did best when he was among them.  They moved faster, and more cohesively.

The thing he liked least about this travel was that he had to keep his sword bundled up safe from corrosion.  By now, he felt uneasy when parted from his blade.

On the third day, of “rafting”, and probably a half-days travel from the ranger’s station, he took a break on the beach.  Walking alongside the column, and regaining his breath, he used it to occasionally exhort his little band to go faster.

They chided him back with good natured humor of which he only understood some, as alien humor can be excessively weird, but they picked up the pace a little bit which is what he wanted.  But their cohesion was beginning to drift apart without him to focus on as the center of their party.

In fact, he saw one Blikten who had let herself drift out much further from shore, nearly a hundred feet.  Rather than detail someone else, he would go have a visit with her in the warm oceans.  It sounded nice.

By this time, he had borrowed some alien cloth to make himself a pair of shorts which is all he had on, so he ran out, after explaining things to Vin and handing him the katana; Jackson began to forge his way seaward in the shallow water. It did not get deeper as he expected, and in fact it got a bit shallower.  He had found a sandbar.

A great cheer sounded from nearer the shore, and far down the beach, he saw high in the air what could only be a long, triangular banner whipping in the air above the trees.  Still, several miles away, but it was their destination.  Grinning himself, he kept pushing out into the water.

Thankful for everyone‘s continued survival, he charged through the knee-high waves until he got about forty feet from the person he realized was the Blikten girl he had been fantasizing about off and on for since he got here.  Lucretia had so many right moments, and yet it could not work.  She was beautiful too in her definitely exotic way, of that there was no doubt, but at times that beauty seemed so wrong.

A large wave came in, and worried he shouted at her to watch for it.  She wobbled an undulating arm that made his lunch try to crawl up his stomach.  Lucretia seemed unconcerned.

“Face it, Jackson.  Get it all the way through your head.  Vin and the others were right. You don’t belong with a snake shaped like a girl.”  He started to turn away, but then remembered the wave, and so he checked to be sure she was safe as she thought she was.    He watched her slide over it without any problem like a limp piece of seaweed.

He had talked to the others and found that Blikten breathe in part through their skin.  So she had not deliberately tried to strangle him, but this only clarified that they were too different to be together.  He had more in common genetically with his Mom’s house plant.

Turning back, one last time to yell at her, something disturbed his vision but he ignored it trying to get his message out.

“Lucretia, come in to shore, they’ve seen the Station.  You’ve made it.  Come on.”  He shouted over the roll of the water.

And then he saw clearly what had disturbed him.  Beyond Lucretia, a rising horror, a wedge-shaped head about the length of a motorcycle, and mounted on a neck thicker than Jackson’s chest despite his increase in musculature, and this head rose like an engine of destruction from the waves past the Blikten girl.  Stalking her, it came closer, and Jackson began to scream, but then he wondered if alerting her would cause the monster plesiosaur to strike early.

Not knowing what to do, but seemingly having a plan anyway, Jackson noted that it must be deep water where the plesiosaur and the girl swam.  It grew obviously closer while not straining.   Probably the near motionlessness of the Blikten as it flexed with the waves had confused it, but something perhaps scent attracted its attention.

Jackson spun and yelled at Vin who alone waited while the others disappeared down the beach.  Knowing that he would probably get water on his blade if he took it as deep as this, he had entrusted his sword to Vin.

“Sword! Throw it!”  And he raised his hands as if to catch the blade.  The Kringsta hardly paused.  It just dropped the line to the Kringsta ‘raft’ behind it, and retrieved the katana with one massive hand.  And then like a baseball outfieldsman raring up to throw to home plate it went to one foot and threw.

The sheathed and covered blade came down point-first five feet from him, and he dove to grab it before it could finish stirring up enough dust to make it impossible to find.  Feeling its hard surface under his hand, he jerked it loose from the sand, and unwrapped it in one quick jerk as they had designed the wrapping to do.

He began running, actually slogging, toward the plesiosaur, the dragon, to save the damsel in distress who would never wed him, even if he lived which he rather doubted since he fought in its element.  But she needed his help, just like Kara, and he hoped someone, somewhere was helping Kara in a kind of karmic balance for this good deed.

His shrieking attracted the attention of the dinosaur and the Blikten who both dived and swam.  And then he found his feet fall away from under him.

Down into the blue water he fell pushed by the weight of his sword, and below him he saw dimness spread far.   In front of him, a plesiosaur of massive length arrowed its way toward the frantically fleeing girl who swam underwater like an eel on amphetamines, but it still was not enough.

He wanted the beast to come close to him before he fell too far and was forced to drop the sword that was weighing him down, but it was locked onto the rapidly moving Blikten.  So he unsheathed the sword, and tilted it as the little bits of sunlight that reached his depth flashed out into the darkening sea.

She saw it, as did the beast.  Not sure why, but still following his unknown plan, Jackson motioned for her to come, and to swim beneath him, and hide herself in the sand wall that falling away behind him.  Perhaps, they both could hide their once the beast had taken a passing strike, and climb free.

But he knew that he was in dire straights.  Such a thing, for him, was not likely to happen.   Death waited for him.  Somehow he had cheated death once, but not this time.

His fear left him, replaced by a certainty that he did the right thing.  God smiled on him, and would have no matter how he died, but this act of self-sacrifice was especially pleasing.

So with no fear, he waited as the plesiosaur rushed closer, and as he expected it came after the Blikten who had been wildly moving.  Lucretia did as directed, and scrabbled frantically into the soft sand bank behind him.  The beast hardly paused striking for where it thought its prey had gone, but not being very bright, it missed.

Meanwhile, Jackson sank almost motionless, and  when he got close enough to the hunting dinosaur who had taken another fruitless strike, he drove his blade into the things head,  but the katana scraped off doing no appreciable damage.  And it still came for the Blikten.

Third time was the charm for the persistent creature.  Its strike missed, but it knocked loose an avalanche of sand which unburied Lucretia.  Barely fifteen feet away, she turned to look at Jackson with a kind of hopeless look in her eye, while the sinister creature drew back for its final strike.

And then his plan began its final unfolding.  He had to time this just right, but like a few other times, he felt a lethal grace on his actions, and a seeming knowledge of what would happen before it did.  He paused to raise his sword in a knight’s salute to Lucretia.  There were so many things he wanted to tell her, to ease her pain, and to convey to his friends back on the beach who raced joyfully to the completion of their journey.  With only a slight feeling of bitterness, he knew that not one of them, except for Vin was even worried about him right now as he hung in the deep heading down into the darkness slowly but surely.  He smiled at her as the only message he could send.
All was well, that smile tried to say.  And then like an onrushing freight train the plesiosaur uncoiled and lunged for its meal.  With a feeling of calm, Jackson placed the blade straight out and across the back of the too tough neck hide as it whizzed by beneath him by several feet, and flicked the switch that stop the alleviation of mass.  He tried to jerk his hand free before the blade and his hand were slammed into the dinosaur’s neck, but he knew beforehand that he would not be quick enough.

And suddenly all the mass of the sword weighed down the dinosaur.  It was as if someone had tied a main battle tank to its neck, and it and Jackson and the fatal sword plunged downward together into the darkness.  Blood, and cracking noises surrounded Jackson, but he looked up to see a whole Lucretia look down for a long moment, and then swim for the surface.  And then the neck-broken dinosaur’s blood swirled all about him, and the pressure of the deep drove the air from his lungs, and for a long moment he just considered things.

It had been worth it.  See you in Heaven, little sister, he thought which was what he had thought before, when he died the first time.  And this time was as the last; he passed by the river, but did not cross it, and arrived elsewhere to continue his adventures.




The End, for now.  Thanks for journeying with me.

Eric R. Ashley

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For more on the continuing adventures of Jackson and Kara Wellington, read the upcoming “Dimension Dancer.”

But while you wait with bated breath, why not check out “Verse Three, Chapter One”.  It’s in hardcover, written by M.J. Young, and it deals with the adventures of three versers, a housewife, an auto mechanic, and a field medic as they wander the possibly infinite reaches of the Multiverse.

You can order it from Amazon.com, and a number of other sites.  And you can find my review at xxxxxx, A1SFNut’s review at xxxxxxx.

Or you can buy the roleplaying game books, Multiverser: The Game and The First Book of Worlds and the Second Book of Worlds, and vicariously join the adventure yourself.

And for the last advertisement, the author has a dungeon hack on RPG.Net labeled “Temple of the Dying Sun”.  Its in PDF format, and if you’re into kicking down doors and rolling initiative, ingenious and amusing traps, and an occasional riddle, it might be right for you.

If you want to contact the author, leave a message at ericrashley@yahoo.com.

This also brings up that there is a continuing forum game at the Multiverser forum, and we welcome lurkers, commenters, and new players.  Now that really is my last advertisement, except for the excerpts from upcoming novels following this …


Thanks,

Eric R. Ashley

NOTES: Insert 5k on “The Ruling Rod” .