KLAR

Richard Wolkomir

        

        “Higher!”

        Burkoo taunted me from the branches above my head.

        “You moonlings, are you Halar fraidies?”

        I climbed. Higher up, the redberry blossoms smelled stronger. Sniffing them made your ears ring. And you had to brace yourself for that rush of dizziness.

        “We’re not really from the moons,” I told Burkoo, reaching for a big blossom.

        I had to lean far out for it. I tried to look relaxed. I didn’t look down.

        “Yeah, yeah,” Burkoo said. “From far away. Sniff it!”

        I sniffed.

        It was still lavender light, before the nighttime violet. Catbats swooped and called. A western breeze carried a scent of smolder, from Halars burning last autumn’s stubble, readying their fields to plow. On the eastern horizon, the two blue moons had risen, silhouetting the town’s domes and spires.

        “Spaaa.”

        Rubber legs. Rubber arms. I almost let go of the branch. Who cared? I could soar like a catbat. I could circle over the Dint town, over the Halar farms. Then spiral above our Enclave, higher and higher, into blackness. To the orbiting Seeder…

        “Spaaa.”

        Now the ringing in my ears faded. My legs came back to me, and my arms. Those catbat calls—“Spaaa.” I’d made them.

        Burkoo snickered.

        “Batty Boy,” he said.

        He climbed higher, still snickering. A branch snapped in his four-fingered hand and—abruptly—he plummeted. Falling, he flipped, dove headfirst, grabbed a limb, swung, curled his legs over a branch, and sat. Insouciant.

        “Good trick, huh?” he said. “Want to try, Batty Boy?”

        He knew we Enclave kids lacked the Dints’ athleticism. Their bodies looked almost like ours, only shorter and blockier, and they had no external ears, just openings.  A lot of us tried combing our hair to hide our ears. But we never looked like Dints. Parallel evolution, my father said. This planet had an Earthlike atmosphere, Earthlike topography, gravity, chemistry. And, long ago, the Dints’ and Halars’ mutual ancestors occupied an ecological niche similar to our own ancestors’. So they turned out like us, only different. Musculature, for one thing. Burkoo could do all sorts of stunts that I couldn’t.

        Deep-violet night came on as we sniffed blossoms, Burkoo and I in our tree, his gang and a few Enclave kids, delinquents like me, in the next tree. The Dints joked about their school in town. We made lame jokes about our Enclave schooling, trying to sound like them. We weren’t supposed to tell them much, and we didn’t. But that was mainly because we knew they would not understand things like holographic teachers or consciousness physics or quantum-entanglement technology or Earth history. And what they did not understand made them irritable.

        “Shhh!”

        Burkoo had heard something. Off in the darkness, a rustling. Again, closer.

        We were at the town’s western edge, past the last houses. Beyond lay the Halars’ fields. We could just see the nearest farmhouse through the foliage, its round windows lit yellow. Beyond the farmlands, dark-umber forests undulated off to high jagged mountains. Dint kids told scare stories about night stalkers, down from those mountains. But my mother, before the Landing, had been a bioscout. She said the instruments detected nothing big or fierce up there. So the Dints scared themselves with handed-down stories from primitive times, when danger maybe did come down from the mountains. Even Burkoo seemed spooked. We all sat motionless on our branches in the darkness, peering down.

        Below we made out a tall figure, shadowy, head down. Methodically, it kicked the earth. It carried a pail. It knelt, dug with its hands, then clunked something into its pail. It stood, exposing its face to a patch of blue moonlight shining through the branches.

        “It’s Klar,” I whispered.

        Burkoo chortled.

        And, precisely then, the world changed.

         I did not know it yet.

        I knew Burkoo had frightened himself with his mythical monsters. A flicker of weakness. Now he would be choosing someone to humiliate. It could be me. It could be the Enclave girl in the next tree, with the blonde hair and chocolate skin and dark-green eyes.

        I jumped.

        I crashed through branches, screaming, a pretend nightstalker. I thudded at Klar’s feet.

        He stared, eyes widened, mouth open. I’d knocked my breath out. My nightstalker scream dwindled to a moan.

        It was enough. Klar dropped his pail and lunged away. Struggling to my feet, I lifted his dropped pail in triumph. Spoils of war. Then I hobbled whooping after Klar, a nightstalker with a limp.

        At the grove’s edge, Klar stopped, peering back. I held his pail. Behind me, the Dints and the Enclave kids dropped from the redberry trees, laughing. Klar took us in. He knew me. In the blue moonlight, his long face looked blank. He turned, strode away across the stubbly field, disappeared into darkness. This redberry grove, it occurred to me, belonged to Klar’s family.

        Burkoo chortled.

        “You scared him, Batty Boy,” he pronounced. He thumped my back with a four-fingered hand.

        I felt depressed.

        

        

        Late the next morning, I awoke to gutters gurgling. Rain spattered against my window. I felt dull, a redberry-blossom hangover. Chin on folded arms, I gazed outside at the Enclave’s fabricator-spun walls, the gray stones rain-darkened. Gusts roiled puddles on the stone street. After the Agreement Ceremony—it was a year before my birth—Dints awakened to discover this Enclave had appeared overnight, adjacent to their own town and looking just as old. Moss already grew between its weathered stones. It mimicked the Dint town, except for the virochips and muonics in the walls.

         From the tiled corridor outside my room, I heard an approaching clack. My mother’s sandals.

        “You have a visitor,” she said.

        “Who?” I asked.

        She scrutinized me, lips pursed.

        The night before, I had limped home late, fearing an interrogation. But nobody noticed me. From our front room, I heard voices murmuring in our own language. A meeting.

        “…so they’re not ready...”

        “No, they seem at stasis, and to give them technologies, ideas…” My father’s voice.

        “Couldn’t predict their direction?”

        “Exactly, not that you ever can, for sure, but the Dints…”

        “And the Halars, anything new?”

        “We’re still focused on the Dints—clearly more energetic, townsfolk versus peasantry—but we do need to...” My mother.

        It was another Assessment Team meeting. I climbed the stairs to bed. In the night I tossed and dreamed strangely, a redberry-blossom sleep.

        “You’d better come,” my mother told me now.

        I remembered. A visitor.

        My mother left and I pulled on clothes. Padding down the corridor, I realized I had forgotten shoes.

        In the foyer, a Halar gently argued with my mother. “No, please, I must not be coming inside—wetness of boots, dripping of coat,” he said in Dintish, ducking his head placatingly, holding his cap in both four-fingered hands.

        “But let me bring you a chair,” my mother said.

        “Please, just one moment’s stopping,” he said.

        He towered over us, angular and bony. I knew him. Sometimes he knocked at our door peddling fatplant eggs. It was Klar’s father.

        “A possibility for talking alone with the boy?” he asked my mother. “Just a question, a little embarrassing...”

        I hoped my mother would not ask, “Embarrassing for whom?” She gave me a quizzical look. Then she left us.

        Mr. Jag-Nurth crouched, so as not to tower. His amber eyes searched my face. After a while, he sighed.

        “Would you return to Klar his pail?” he asked. “It is time-costly, the making of pails, for there is ore to dig, smelting…”

        Again he looked at me. What did he see, or hope to see?

        “Also, in the pail, the chamath root, if it could be returned?” he said. “It requires much looking and digging, always in the night, when it wriggles near the surface, and it is important for the planting, to dry and sprinkle, to keep away the buzzy crop eaters…”

        Lying seemed pointless. Klar knew me.

        “It’s in the weeds at the edge of the Dint town,” I said, looking at my bare feet. I wondered if it was an insult, appearing barefooted. “I’ll get it, bring it…”

        Mr. Jag-Nurth stood upright, with another sigh. Again he looked at me, as if searching for something.

        “Thanking you,” he finally said. He backed towards the door. “Thanking you.”

        I was thinking how to get the bucket to Klar without Burkoo finding out. In Dintish, the word for Halar means something like “brute.” I had no idea what the Halar word for Dint was. I did not speak Halar. They all spoke Dintish well enough.

        Of course, my parents interrogated me.

        I told them what I had done. My father shook his head.

        “You must transcend yourself,” he said.

        Sullen silence from me.

        “Every word matters,” my mother said. “Every gesture. You know that. If we’re to continue here…and when the Seeder moves on…”

        I thought, I’ve never even seen it.

        “You’re part of this, really more than we are,” my father said. “We’re from the Seeder, you’re from here.”

        I wanted to tell them how excellent the Dints were. At kneeball, for instance, making wild shots, even while flipping backwards. And the Dints had that attitude—Who Cares? For us Enclavers, it was more like Take Care. Every verb, every eyebrow raising. Like right now. I called it the EP, the Enclave Prison.

        “What are you going to do about the Jag-Nurths?” my father asked.

        “Take back the stupid pail,” I said.

        My parents exchanged a look. My mother shrugged.

        “Good,” she said.

        

        

        I found the pail, the chamath root still weakly wriggling inside. If Burkoo saw me, I’d tell him the EP wardens made me do it. But I avoided the wagon road out from town, where Dint kids might spot me. Instead, I walked a footpath through the Jag-Nurth’s fields, toting the offending pail.

        This morning’s rain had made the air smell of loam, and of charcoal, from the burned-over breadseed stubble. Far off, silhouetted on a low hill, a Halar farmer, tiny in the distance, trudged behind the bulk of his wingless groundbat, its six legs straining to pull the plow. This was the farthest I’d been from town. Dints pretty much stayed put, running little factories, minding their stores. It was Halar teamsters who hauled goods between the towns, along what roads there were, or boated them along the river. And we Enclavers went nowhere. Protocol required us to stick to one small isolated population, initially.

        When I reached the Jag-Nurth house, I saw Klar in the yard, hitching up a groundbat. He looked at me, but merely nodded.

        “Hello,” I said, in Dintish.

        He nodded again, and continued hitching the groundbat, running reins through its halter rings. It stamped a huge foot, shaking the ground. But Klar worked methodically on his ton of beast. It smelled acrid.

        “He’s big,” I said.

        Klar grunted and continued to work. Irritated, oafishly holding his pail, I pointedly looked away, studying the farmhouse.

        In the Dint town, houses stood shoulder to shoulder, their windowless backs toward the surrounding farmlands, forming a rectangular fortress around a central square. The main gate opened on the river docks. In the square’s booths and shops, venders sold groundbat meat and breadseed cakes and crackers, and writing paper, and woven river-reed chairs, all sorts of things. Over centuries, houses and work buildings had gone up beyond the confining inner fortress, so the town straggled into the countryside, a warren of gray stone walls and streets. This farmhouse, by comparison, seemed lightweight:  white-painted stucco, the underlying greenish brick showing here and there. Its gray-stone roof probably came from the Dints’ slate quarries. I had seen other Halar farmhouses, in the distance, roofed with thick breadseed thatch.

        “Holding these?”  Klar asked, handing me the reins.

        I put down the pail to take them. Their leather felt stiffly thick in my hands. Slowly, the groundbat turned its massive head to peer at me through a red eye. Klar hitched chains from a muddy plow to the harness.

        “Plowing season, to be done now,” Klar told me.

        “I’ll help,” I announced.

        I surprised myself. Atonement.

        Klar regarded me, his amber eyes seeming blank.

        “Plowing, planting, before the spore-eating buzzers come,” he said.

        He took back the reins and shook them. With a surge, the groundbat started forward, hardly slowing when it reached the chains’ ends and took the plow’s weight. Klar walked behind, holding the plow on its wheels, blade slanting up so that it did not dig into the yard. I followed. Klar’s father wheeled a pushcart of manure out of the stuccoed barn attached to the house. He stopped to solemnly watch us. As we passed the farmhouse, I saw another intently watching face in a window, Mrs. Jag-Nurth. I thought about Burkoo finding out I’d visited Halars.

        When we reached the field, Klar turned the plow blade down, digging it in. Chains jangled as the groundbat strained forward, the plow cleaving open the black earth, releasing a loamy smell. I helped as best I could, trying to lead the groundbat by its halter into the turn at the field’s edge, trying to steady the plow, mostly getting in Klar’s way. Even this early in spring the sun felt hot. Around noon Klar drove the beast back to the farmyard. I staggered behind, muddy to my knees, exhausted.

        As he unhitched the animal, Klar looked at me with that blank amber stare. I found the scrutiny annoying. I lay on my back, almost dozing in the sun.

        “Coming from far away?” Klar asked, unhitching the animal.

        Why ask that, I thought? We’ve lived beside your fields sixteen years. An old Dint riddle: who’s stupider, a Halar or his groundbat? The answer—his groundbat, because it never thinks to harness the Halar. Dints chuckled at that one. Lying on my back, I answered Klar’s question with a lazy shrug.

        “We are seeing your skyboat, at night, a moving yellow star,” he said. “So large it must be.”

        I sat up. “Yes, huge,” I said. It surprised me that he had noticed the Seeder orbiting overhead. It was the first time any of the host kids had asked. “It began as a planetoid, and they hollowed it and fitted it with tachyon drives and…”

        “Why are you coming here?”

        I sat up. Dints never asked that. I tried to remember my Basic Protocol catechism.

        “We went exploring,” I said.

        Be honest. Be terse. Omission is not lying.

        Klar worked on, silently.

        “Beyond the moons, beyond the sun, so stars are being other suns?” he asked.

        “Yes,” I said. “And around many of them are worlds like this one, and some of those worlds have…beings.”

        “Halars? And Dints?” Klar asked.

        “No,” I said. “Different beings.”

        “Yes,” he said. He now had the harness off. He disappeared into the barn. Four-winged flitters dotted the sky, hovering, darting. Klar returned with a barrow of breadseed straw, for the groundbat. It noisily slurped off the tiny flying mites stuck to the straw’s sappy surface.

        “Yes, different beings,” Klar said finally, echoing me. He piled the straw on the ground and the beast fed, a munching sound. “You are not being Dint, not Halar,” he said. “A different being.”

        “Yes,” I said.

        “But you are wanting to be Dint?”

        

        

        Later, I had breadseed cakes and greenflower tea with the Jag-Nurths, in their farmhouse kitchen. Bunches of herbs hung from cords in front of the windows, drying. They exuded aromas new to me.

         I learned that Klar’s older sister had gone on a “bundertasp” to “Juboozott,” which seemed to be a religious pilgrimage to a far-away mountain shrine. Her ultimate goal, a learning center of some sort, lay even farther off.  She traveled first to the mountains by groundbat cart, then back to the river. From there, she would go by boat. Then back to the mountains. She aimed to become a “plansa,” which I gathered was a scholar.

        “And you, becoming grown, planning for yourself?” Mrs. Jag-Nurth asked.

        Dangerous question. We weren’t supposed to say, “We’re here to evaluate you Dints and Halars, to see if we might permanently seed ourselves here, and later around the planet, and subtly nudge your primitive consciousness…”

        Finally, I said, “Maybe I’ll be a teacher.”

        “And your skyboat, so far up there, you are having…words…with them in the skyboat, across so far?”

        Mr. Jag-Nurth asked that. I turned it over, looking for pitfalls. Even a delinquent knows we Enclavers are few and our hosts many. We must take care. Give a little, judiciously, truthfully. That was in the Protocol catechism. But not much. Above all, do not dazzle them with our technological power, and our knowledge. They might fear us. Resent us. So you live among them as they live, so that seeing us they see themselves. Almost. And you study them, understand. Over decades, centuries, perhaps. Building trust. And—softly—as best you can, you help them grow.

        “Yes, we can…signal…to the skyboat,” I finally said.

        Our hosts need not know about the constant talking back and forth, or that data continually flew between Enclave and Seeder. Or that instruments constantly monitored their world, collecting information, processing it. Nor that, by learning about the Dints and Halars, by fitting ourselves into their world, we aimed to seed ourselves here, one new place among many for us, now that Earth was gone. We aimed to make a home.

        “Signals, yes,” Mr. Jag-Nurth said, looking at me intently. “We would learn such signaling.”

        “May I have more tea?” I asked.

        “Our girl, long away,” Mrs. Jag-Nurth said. “To be signaling…”

        Her face looked blank. Halar faces always looked blank.

        “I’ll come back tomorrow, to help Klar.”

        Had I actually said that?

        I walked back through the fields, toward the Enclave, angry. It had taken so long, getting in with Burkoo and the Dint kids. What was I doing with Halars?

         I suspected I might be bored.

        

        

        As it turned out, I did visit the Jag-Nurths the next day. And the next. I became a regular at the farm, slinking along the footpath, worried that Dint kids would see me. But I liked escaping the Enclave and the little town, even a small distance. And this farm life was nothing my parents knew much about, or any of the Enclavers. Their research, at least so far, focused on the Dints. I had the Halars to myself.

        After the plowing, we seeded. We walked the furrows with leather pouches of breadseed slung over our backs, strewing, smelling loam. We sprinkled powdered chamath root. And, within a week, the plowed black soil sprouted green fuzz.

        “Must today be stopping early,” Mr. Jag-Nurth announced one afternoon.

        Klar and I were pulling weeds from between the breadseed sprouts.  Mr. Jag-Nurth worked a five-tined rake, spreading the pulled weeds as mulch. I knew some things by now. For instance, I knew that some of these weeds repelled the tiny winged seedling eaters. So you pulled the weeds to prevent their competing with the crops, but kept them in the fields as a pesticide. Klar glanced to the west, where the sun still stood a hand’s breadth above the jagged mountain crest.

        “It is Tramuth,” he told me, using a Halar word. “We must be performing the Muthmer, just when the sun is touching the mountains.”

        We continued weeding and working. Finally, Mr. Jag-Nurth leaned on his rake and squinted at the sun, checking its height above the mountains. He looked down at me, assessing. His face and amber eyes seemed blank, as always.

        “Liking to see?” he said. “Our ceremony…”

         He ducked his head deprecatingly.

        I knew Halars better now. They had elaborate tact. One rule—never hint at superiority. And you must never impose your will on a non-Halar.

          “My clothes?” I asked, spreading my arms to indicate work clothes, soiled and sweaty.

        “Not mattering,” Klar said. “A guest—only to respectfully removing shoes during ceremony.”

        As we walked back, Mr. Jag-Nurth told me that most of the local Halars would be gathering for the rite at a meeting house not far off. But the Jag-Nurths would perform the ritual at home. Not until later did I realize they had made that decision hoping I would attend.

        We gathered in the Jag-Nurth’s main room. On a table, growing in a crockery bowl, stood a small gnarled tree, black trunked and limbed, with round leaves so deeply brown they seemed black, too.

        “Coming from the mountains,” Mr. Jag-Nurth explained.

        We all stood barefoot. Mr. Jag-Nurth brought out a long spear, with an oxidized and battered metal point, ancient. But the wooden shaft, still white, looked newly carved. Mr. Jag-Nurth held the spear in his two hands over the mountain tree and spoke in Halar. Mrs. Jag-Nurth and Klar responded. Mr. Jag-Nurth then handed the spear to his son. The two elder Halars stepped back, watching, expressionless. Klar held the spear over the tree, intoning in Halar. Abruptly, he brought it down across his raised knee and cracked the shaft into two pieces.

        He muttered something in Halar. Then he tossed the broken spear onto the floor. It clattered. For a moment, everyone stood still. Then all three Jag-Nurths slowly turned, facing away from the broken spear on the floorboards. They intoned something in unison. And it was over.

        Klar stooped to pick up the pieces of spear. He carried them and the little mountain tree out of the room, presumably to storage.

        “To bless the crops?” I asked.

        “Not for blessing,” Mr. Jag-Nurth said. “It is for being sorry.”

        

        

        “Where you been?” Burkoo asked.

        I shrugged.

        “School,” I said. “Chores in the Enclave.”

        We had been playing kneeball in the scrubby lot behind the store where Burkoo’s parents sold the flour and vegetables that Halars brought in. I had just elbowed a good pass to one of my teammates, the blonde Enclave girl with chocolate skin and green eyes. I had run forward, feinted around Burkoo, who was playing guard, caught her return pass on the inside of my right knee, then left-kneed it, a rocket into the old despoked wagon wheel the Dint kids had hung from a limb. I’d made the winning goal. Just luck. But it had raised my stock with Burkoo.

        It felt good, getting back with the gang after so many weeks playing farmer. And I was relieved. Apparently, none of the Dints had seen me plodding off to the Jag-Nurths’. Sometimes I had gone in the morning, depending on my studies in the holobooth, which my parents closely monitored. Sometimes I had gone in the afternoon. I was not sure I would be going any more.

        Too many probing questions. Polite, of course. Diffident.

        Klar and I are honing an axe: “At your Enclave, we are seeing no firewood and no cutting of trees, and no digging from the ground of, how is it to say in Dintish? Stones-that-burn? So you have, for cooking, for heating of water, other ways?”

        Mrs. Jag-Nurth is handing me a slice of redberry pie: “You are staying on your Seeder, is all living inside, and how are they getting light for seeing?”

        Better the Dint kids. No questions to answer with parceled words. Just kneeball, played hard.

        Burkoo’s father called from the store’s stone back porch. Burkoo ambled over, and I tagged along. Mr. Blanxala mimed my right knee catch and left knee rocket into the goal, grinning at his son. Burkoo snorted.

        “Practice, Burkoo! Learn, learn, learn,” Mr. Blanxala chided, grinning. Burkoo clamped his hands over his ear orifices and made a nauseated face. “Won’t listen to good advice, huh?” Mr. Blanxala said. “Penalty, then—we’ve got Klar Jag-Nurth, bringing a cartload from the Halar farms later, so you clear shelves, Burkoo.”

        “I’ll help,” I said.

        We climbed down the stone stairs, slightly concave from so many years of shoe scuffing, into the store’s basement, where the paving stones also seemed foot-worn. In one of my holobooth lessons, on data analysis, I had worked with sensor reports on the Dint village. Buildings like this one dated back at least 21,400 years. For millennia, Burkoo’s ancestors must have worked in this basement, just as we worked now, pushing together old wooden barrels and groundbat-leather bags on the shelves to make room for new stock. Kids played kneeball. They told Halar jokes. Told them and retold them. No changes.

        We knew the climate had been stable. No volcanic eruptions. No earthquakes. And, apparently, no inner impetus for change, either. That meant no super-destructive weapons. No grand-scale biospheric toxification. But it meant stagnation. And we could not live in stagnation. We were human. But did we have a right to change them?

        In the beginning, we had set out to find advanced beings. Teachers. But those few worlds the Seeder had so far visited, and our own, suggested a propensity—civilizations progress to some technological point, then end as smoking ruins or poisoned deserts. So now the Seeder pilgrims expected to find only civilizations more primitive than ours. “Offer gentle guidance,” the Protocol said. Of course, we hoped to keep our own chastened race going, and to improve.

        I had my own moral code. I believed in kneeball. I believed in sniffing redberry blossoms.

        “Look, a big kneeball coming,” Burkoo cried, and pitched a bag of flour at me. I jumped, caught it between my clamped knees and one-handed it to the shelf. I threw a bag at Burkoo. He caught it between his knees, then backflipped. Airborne, upside down, he dropped the bag into his hands, then alit on the floor and lightly tossed the bag onto a shelf.

        “Now you do it, Goal-Boy,” he said.

        I actually tried. Of course, I landed on my back on the floor, with a bag of flour half emptied across my shirt. Burkoo collapsed on the floor himself, laughing. I lay looking at the cellar ceiling’s blackened wood rafters, at peace. If my whole life could be like this moment, I thought.

        “We’ll play a trick on Klar when he comes,” Burkoo said, looking sidewise at me.

        So he had known I visited the Jag-Nurths. Now I would be tested. A loyalty test.

        “What?” I asked.

        “You’ll see, Goal-Boy,” he said.

        

        

        Later that afternoon, we heard the rumble of Klar’s cart and his groundbat’s footpads slap-slapping on the street’s paving stones. Finally he rounded the corner by the pastry-and-pies shop. I huddled in one of the narrow alleys with Burkoo and his gang, wondering what they planned to do. My stomach felt knotted.

        Klar’s cart came abreast of our alley. From the seat, he guided the groundbat with imperceptible tugs on the reins. His amber eyes looked expressionless, as always.

        “Now,” Burkoo said.

        They ran into the street, the Dint kids. Whooping. Waving their arms. Rushing at the groundbat. I saw the plan—startle the beast, make it buck, throw over the cart, spill everything. Then run, leaving Klar to pick up the goods. A Halar fool. And later, when their parents asked, they would deny it, snickering. And the parents would laugh, too.

         Halars! They’ll trip over their own big feet if you don’t tell them how to walk!

        “Come on, Goal-Boy,” Burkoo yelled over his shoulder.

        Klar had stood up on the cart, startled, pulling the reins. His groundbat had a crazed look in its red eye. I saw that, as I stepped from the alley. I could see its haunch muscles clench.

         Klar looked at me.

        “Goal-Boy, come on!” Burkoo cried.

        I rushed at the cart with the others.

        Klar towered over us all, on the cart, so tall. I could feel his amber eyes on me. Something different in them. And I felt Burkoo’s eyes, dark and sharp. And it seemed to me Burkoo looked at Klar, and saw that difference in those amber eyes. And, momentarily, Burkoo froze.

        “Easy,” I said.

        I had grabbed the groundbat’s halter. I pulled down on it, speaking to the beast, calming it. Its haunch muscles unclenched. Burkoo stood at my shoulder, staring at me.

         “You did it, Burkoo,” I shouted, for the gang to hear. “You scared him—good plan.”

        Burkoo continued to stare.

        “You guys take off,” I said. “I’ll make sure this stuff gets to your father’s store—don’t worry.”

        For a long moment, Burkoo stood, frozen. Everything would be different now.

        “Hah!” he finally shouted. He gave his gang a triumphant smirk. “Let’s go—we got him good!”

        And the Dints ran off, whooping, following Burkoo. And I walked beside the cart to Mr. Blanxala’s store. And I helped Klar unload the goods. And then I walked beside the cart, back through town, toward the wagon road past his farm. By now it was lavender light. Soon it would be nighttime violet. I climbed onto the wagon seat beside Klar and rode.

        “What is the Halar word for Dint?” I asked.

        “It is Gaffning,” he said.

        “What does it mean?” I asked.

        “It is like catbats, up in the sky, what they eat,” he said.

        “Little flying buzzers?” I asked.

        “Yes,” he said. “But, it’s more like how the buzzers are being to the catbats.”

        I thought for a while as we rode.

        I told him our word for that—“prey.”

        

        

        It was violet night when I finally got back to the Enclave. Both moons were up. I felt sleepy.

        Voices murmured in our house’s front room, in our own language. Another Assessment Team meeting.

        “…so it’s the stasis problem…”

        “And if we give the Dints one technology—electricity, say—to see the direction…”

        “No, we should hold off, until we better understand, no changes yet…”

        I walked into the room. They sat sprawled on their chairs, frowning over reports and data sheets. They had more spread on the table. Everyone looked at me.

        “Too late,” I said. “It’s started.”

        Everyone looked startled. I was not sure if it was what I had said that nonplussed them, or if it was just that I had said anything at all.

        “What do you mean?” my father finally said. “We track the Dints closely and…”

        “It’s the Halars,” I said.

        Everyone looked at me blankly.

        “We’re a perturbation,” I said.

        I told them what I had gleaned and guessed. That maybe 25,000 years ago the Halars had lived in the mountains, probably as hunters. And the Dints farmed these plains. And the Halars must finally have over-hunted their food animals. At least, the bioscout analyses showed nothing large living up there now. And the Halars must have looked down at these food-rich plains.  Halars were huge, used to weapons. Maybe they came out of the hills at violet light, raiding for food. Nightstalkers. More came, over decades, centuries. Dints retreated to fortress towns; Halars took the farmlands. Over time, they forgot their slaughtering. But their guilt lingered.  After all, they were not human.

        Dints forgot, too. But the trauma stayed. It came out in compulsive Halar belittling. And they hardly dared leave their fortress towns, even after the Halars had long turned pacifist.

        And so everything froze.

        “Halars have shrines out in the mountains, and learning centers, and even far away they must be hearing about us…”

         I looked at them all.

         “Good night,” I said.

         There it began, our new world.

 

Copyright 2008, Richard Wolkomir

Cover: "The Appeal"

A memory is a haunting refrain that time cannot erase.

Copyright 2008, Marge Simon

Marge Ballif Simon freelances as a writer-poet-illustrator for genre and mainstream publications such as Strange Horizons, Flashquake, Story House, Vestal Review, Flash Me Magazine, The Pedestal Magazine, Dreams & Nightmares, The Fortean Bureau, Flesh & Blood, Tales of the Unanticipated, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, and the anthologies, High Fantastic and Nebula Anthology 32. She edits a column for the HWA Newsletter, "Blood & Spades: Poets of the Dark Side." She is the editor of Star*Line, Digest of the SF Poetry Association.