One Small Step, an anthology of discoveries (20 page)

My father didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. He knew.

Behind us, as we walked downstairs, the Shadows followed.

They were always there.

Ever behind me,

the Shadows haunt,

Dark and silver,

fat and gaunt.

Ever behind me,

my only friends,

the Shadows mould me

and I bend.

I lift my foot,

one step I take,

waking to dream,

dreaming to awake.

Ever behind me,

they titter and squeal,

my secrets, my dark things,

Shadows of the real.

In the half-light of the gloaming,

They crouch and they hide.

But I know they’re still with me:

the Devil inside.

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adj.
belonging or relating to the origin or beginning.
 

n.
a primary type or form, from which varieties are derived.
 

T
ek’tek
skidded the last few metres. His hindquarters slid out from under him as he took the turn. All four legs scrabbled for purchase and his claws dug into the floor. He swung his weight back into alignment and wedged himself through the door.
 

“
Sorry I’m late, Professor Xi,” he gasped. He’d been too focussed on football last semester and he had to pass a summer unit to stay on. Being late for the first class was a bad start. Fortunately Professor Xi was busy. He didn’t even look up.

There was one other student in the tute. Sara. He mentally pumped air. Sara was the reason why he’d decided to go with Anthropology 404, despite a daunting reading list. Sara had never looked at him twice, not even when he’d wowed everyone else at the break-up party with his new patch, shoulder-mounted night vision eyeballs.

Sara had spiky white hair, chocolate skin, green eyes and elfin features. Her rangy three metre tall frame meant the top of her head was level with Tek’tek’s chin. Her ancestors had adopted an avian spike to deal with the staggering heights of her home planet. Her breastbone was a ship’s keel, a necessary counterweight to the bronze wings folded shimmering on her back. She was gorgeous and a real brain. Today, she was wearing nothing except spray-on glitter and perfume. Surely if they were studying together he could ask her to go out with him. She might even take pity and have sex with him. Tek’tek was a simple man.

Even Sara’s perfume could not disguise that the room reeked of old dust and mould, with another layer Tek’tek could not identify; eyeview reported rotten cellulose. The tables were piled with boxes filled with thin, flat sheaves of stuff he’d never seen before. Eyeview analysed it: “paper,
n.
substance made from rags, straw, wood or other fibrous material, used in ancient times for writing and printing.”
 

He stepped carefully, focussing on his hind legs to avoid knocking anything over. He was at home on the football field, able to take a ten metre mark with full body slam, but he was too large for this room. He picked up one of the papers.

“
Is it supposed to smell this bad,” he asked.

“
Don’t touch it!” Sarah yelled.

He jumped, startled, and the fragile sheet tore in his hands.

“
Now look what you’ve done!” She snatched it from him.

“
Sorry,” he mumbled, running his hands sheepishly over his chiton-plated scalp. Anthropology 404 was not off to a good start.

Eyeview lit up. “Please only handle these original documents while wearing gloves,” Xi scrolled.

Xi had body-swapped with a magnellan five years ago so he could research on their home planet, where the bone-crushing gravity was too severe for even the most spiked human body to tolerate. They hadn’t got around to swapping back yet, so Xi remained a fifteen metre long, metre high, armoured millipede with curved mandibles. He had no features, no expression and no voice, so he communicated entirely by eyeview. Half his glistening length was coiled on the wall of the tutorial room to keep it out of the way. Xi passed over the gloves. “Have you done the reading?” he asked.

“
Um, I had a look, yeah—” Tek’tek conjured the reading on eyeview as he sprayed his hands and waited for the gel to set. He scrolled rapidly in the hope of bluffing his way through. Genomes, nucleotides and chromosomes, recessive and dominant genes he took in at once, that was all patches and spikes basics, but he stumbled at Mendelian genetics. It was too big a subject to swallow in one gulp.

“
I thought this was anthropology, you know, alien races and stuff,” he protested.

Xi sighed. “For the benefit of those who haven’t done their reading — Sara, you may keep sorting — the purpose of this class is not to study aliens but to study ourselves, our origins, with an anthropological survey of the Originals. The Originals rejected modern technology. The latest they accepted was the steam engine, a contraption so outdated I doubt you’ve heard of it.”

Eyeview was keeping up, even if Tek’tek wasn’t. Hero of Alexandria, James Watt, the Rankine cycle and the Industrial Revolution passed before his bewildered vision.

“
Eventually the Originals were considered so much at risk from superior technologies that they were placed in reservations for their own protection. We have a local Original community. They used to send their young people to university, using the rail line down the mountain, to give them a taste of modern life.”

Tek’tek had seen that ancient line. Around its rusted rail the grass grew long and green. “How old were they when they went to uni?” he asked, intrigued.

“
Eighteen or nineteen years.”

“
My baby brother is that age!” Tek’tek protested. “My parents would never let me loose on the world that young. I was forty before I could even go to the Deepmall with my friends.”

“
My parents didn’t even let me out of the nest until I was thirty,” Sara said, reminiscently. “Mind you, home is all crags, and the breathable atmosphere is five clicks up, so you can understand their reluctance to let go. It’s a long drop. But they used to hover over me and under me, all the time. It drove me mad. They didn’t let me fly solo until I was forty-five.” She rolled her eyes.

“
It’s called extended childhood,” Xi explained. “The more complex our brains become, the longer a child remains dependent on their parents. Conversely, spikes have extended our lifespan. We can expect to at least live three hundred years, whereas the Originals die around seventy.”

“
Seventy,” Tek’tek spluttered. “You mean,
years
?” At seventy, all going well, he would be starting an intergalactic career in professional football. “But why don’t they get spiked? Problem solved.”
 

“
I told you, they reject all modern technology.”

“
Even spikes and patches?” He couldn’t believe it.

“
Especially spikes and patches,” Xi said patiently. “The trains stopped arriving several centuries ago, before my tenure here. The Originals were contacted to see if anything was wrong. They asked us to leave them alone. No one has visited since. I am trying to wangle an ethics request through the committee for a field trip. In the meantime we can study the records, starting with these ancient documents Sara kindly dug out for me in the Old Stacks.” He clicked his mandibles excitedly over the piles of smelly paper.

Sara shivered and hugged her arms to her chest. “I’m not going back there again,” she said. “I like the sun in my hair and air in my wings. Old Stacks is buried two clicks down and I couldn’t get over the feeling there was something watching me all the time. Eugh.”

They spent the rest of the class sorting through boxes.

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Tek’tek was woken early the next morning by ’chat at full blast. He groggily recognised the voice. “Sara?” he muttered.

“
Get down here!”

It was still dark. He stared disbelieving at the time on eyeview. “Five am!” he rolled over and tried to get back to sleep, but he could not ignore Professor Xi’s excited comments scrolling clear across his eye line. “Wonderful news! After all these years!” Xi exulted.

“
Who what where?” Tek’tek mumbled.

“
A train is coming!”

All right, that was exciting. Tek’tek scrambled out of bed and down the elevator.

“
Hurry! You’ll be late.” Sara on ’chat.

It was a wonderful morning. The sun tinged the eastern sky red. The forested mountains to the west were gold. The Three Sisters glowed orange. The grass was springy beneath Tek’tek’s paws and the air was full of the sharp tang of eucalypt. The campus slept around him, tall, graceful towers.

Earth was too far from the galactic core to support a thriving interstellar community and most of the planet had been deserted for centuries. Only students with human heritage, whose parents had a sentimental attachment to their home planet, enrolled here. These students were fewer every year. Even during semester the campus was only half full. Now, in the peace of the pre-dawn holiday, it was silent and still.

Tek’tek bounded along the road in ten metre leaps, out of pure joy at being alive. The station hove in view, a plain ceramic platform with silicon web veranda. High above a winged figure spiralled in the dawn light. Sara was keeping an eye out. He did some mid-air somersaults, hoping she would notice.

She certainly did. “Quit mucking around. I can see the train!” She swooped down as he arrived, landing in a buffeting ten metre wingspan.

The train appeared around the bend of the mountains. It consisted of two grey cylinders, the passenger cabin and the engine, racketing uneasily on the rusty rail. Steam poured from the engine’s funnel, and from various leaks in an archaic boiler.

“
It doesn’t look in great repair. We’ll fix it while it’s here,” Xi said, anxiously. He looped his upper half into the air, rehearsing his welcoming speech. His lower half snaked across the platform. Sara dived in a flurry of wings to stand by Xi’s side. With a self-important steam shriek the train pulled in. The door hissed open. Xi drew his upper body upright. Sara beamed. Tek’tek was puzzled. A long moment passed and nothing happened.

Sara was the first to realise. “Look down!” she said. They dropped their gaze.

An Original stood in the door, small and puny as a child. Eyeview identified a male, eighteen years. Height 150 centimetres. One pair each of arms and legs, no enhancements; trousers, coat and shirt of primitive, organic material. He had an anxious face, with ugly, unmodified features, grey eyes, black hair, and a short beard.

The Original clasped a suitcase and a black, heavy looking, rectangular object that eyeview identified as a “book,
n.
written or printed work.” He blushed as they all stared at him, then stepped cautiously onto the platform.
 

Xi was too excited to stay put. Clicking his mandibles he advanced and launched into his speech. The Original recoiled and raised his book before him. There was a gold cross on the cover.

“
I, uh, don’t think your speech is working, Professor,” Tek’tek warned him.

Xi stopped. “What’s wrong?”

“
He’s scared,” Tek’tek said. He had a seen that look on opponents just before he crushed them.

“
He doesn’t have eyeview,” Sara realised.

“
What, er, of course,” Xi was flummoxed. “I’m terribly sorry, I forgot. We’re so used to—” He had no way of communicating with the Original. “I — uh, yes. I think I had best leave,” Xi said, sadly. He reversed out of the platform.

The Original cautiously lowered his book.

“
Great beard,” Tek’tek said, conversationally. He stroked his own chin ruefully. “I tried to grow one last year you know but could I? No. And I’m sixty.”

The Original flinched as Tek’tek towered over him, gaze travelling from Tek’tek’s hindquarters to his armoured exoskeleton. Wide-eyed he shrank behind his book again.

“
We’re not getting through,” Sara said. She dropped to one knee, wings half open for balance, to make herself more the same height. She smiled, brightly. “Welcome to the university,” she said.

The Original shook his head, and spoke. They couldn’t understand a word. Eyeview was blank.

Sara’s smile became fixed. “Are you getting any of that?”

“
I didn’t know they spoke a whole ’nother language,” Tek’tek protested.

“
If he was speaking a known language eyeview would translate,” Sara said. “There was nothing in the documents about a dialect,” she fretted.

“
Evolution of language,” Xi realised, via eyeview from his hiding place on the veranda roof. “Small communities are conservative. They retain the old forms. In larger communities language evolves rapidly. He’s not speaking another language, but our own language from several centuries ago. He has a different emphasis on the vowels and syllables, and he speaks much slower and deeper than we do.”

With that hint eyeview jerked into life. “Behold, I send an angel before you, to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place which I have prepared,” the Original said.

“
Um, what’s an angel?” Tek’tek asked.

“
They are definitely on your reading list,” Sara snapped, blushing. “Originals believe in a being called God who made the world, and created humans in his image. God’s servants are angels. They have wings.” She dipped her own in explanation.