Sunlight! The soldier broke into the open in the last slanting rays of the afternoon, the whole world cast in shades of orange and red. But his first surge of relief was cut short. This wasn’t the plain. It was merely a small clearing, perhaps two hectares total, perfectly round. The clearing boasted a small stone-lined pool directly in its center along with a small shrine of some sort.
Wait! He knew this! The old stories had mentioned such places, hadn’t they? Grandfath—
Pain shot through his head from the center of his brain outward in all directions! He dropped to his knees and then fell flat on his face, curling into a fetal ball. Clawed hands tore at his splitting skull. This new pain made what he’d felt upon awakening on this world seem like a gentle nudge.
The world receded to a small speck of impossibly bright light in the center of a vast blackness. Then the speck split and there were two. Then four. And then they were multiplying too fast to see, filling his vision with a strobing brilliance that made a Tzitoomian rad storm look like children’s fireworks!
The arc-white glare shattered with a thunderclap, stealing his breath away, scattering spinning shards away into a surging kaleidoscopic maelstrom of spinning color that beggared even the previous show, brushing aside the subconscious drill sergeant with pathetic ease.
He gulped in a great breath and screamed!
The horse, reins free, bolted to the far side of the small clearing. Only its great fear of the forest kept it within the ring of sunlight, pacing back and forth as far from the writhing man-thing as the small island of grass would allow.
The swirling storm of light pulled him deeper, buffeting him about like a cork in a cataract. His stomach heaved and would have emptied itself had there been anything left to expel. He writhed wildly, desperate to orient himself, reaching clawed hands out to scratch at the whorls of color and sound.
Faces loomed out of the maelstrom — Nana, his mother, Commandant Blespeau, Gunny OChibi, the blue eyed watcher, Sylvan.... They spoke but he could not hear, they gestured but he could not comprehend. The colors washed him up onto a plain of blackness that rapidly receded into a tiny black speck upon an all-encompassing field of blinding whiteness. Then another pinprick of black popped into being, and another, until he was once more in the darkness. And the thunderclap came again.
Something within his head snapped and he pitched forward into nothingness.
Memories. Faces and events grew from the darkness, flashed before his eyes and faded back again, only to be replaced by other events, other faces. With each passing slide show, the images were brighter, the sounds clearer, the memories more his own. People he had once known, things he had once known, like someone else’s life laid out before him on a table, strange but at once familiar. Faster they came, brighter, closer upon the heels of their predecessors — too fast to take in, too jumbled to comprehend.
His head throbbed with the effort of assimilating decades of knowledge within the span of a few minutes. He continued to writhe upon the ground as the two halves of his life smashed together inside his brain.
Eventually the pain lessened, the kaleidoscopic tumult that was his world slowed, faded, softened. His head still ached as though some madman with a sledgehammer had been using it for a tent peg, but he could sort of think again.
It was amazing. As though he’d fallen through a rotting floor and into a treasure vault where lay his memories — memories that had been blocked off for so long he had difficulty claiming some of them.
The psych-techs! The realization hit him like a mallet. Damn them! They’d done this to him! Viewed from the outside the symptoms of severe cerebro-conditioning were obvious. The headaches, the empty places, the bouts of confusion, the nausea. Looking back, he couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it before. Of course, that was the way with such conditioning, wasn’t it?
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“Lord,” he mumbled softly to himself, tasting bile. “Somehow, some day, ten minutes in a dark room with them and a rusty fork.”
All those years....nearly a third of his life! The memories were a flood. The years in the desert after the relocation. The old man — not Sylvan’s grandfather. A grandfather! An ancient holy man —shunned even by his own people for the terrible weight of his arcane knowledge— who’d taken two misplaced five year old boys under his wing. He’d taught them things... old things. Things the modern world had insisted were impossible.
The soldier —Braedonnal Storm —Brae— sat himself carefully on his aching rump, mouth still tasting of dust and blood, but making no move toward the water. Crossing his legs and resting his elbows on his knees, he watched the holovid of his early life against the backdrop of his inner eye, trying to place the characters. Trying to associate feelings with them.
The surface memories that they’d allowed him to keep seemed a hollow sham. Sylvan! Sylvan must have known! He must have noticed the change! Why hadn’t he said something? For that matter, how had Sylvan escaped — But no, Sylvan was the smarter of the two. There was no way they’d ever have caught him out. He knew better than to let slip to outsiders the tiniest sliver of who he was. Of what he knew. He hadn’t been conditioned because it hadn’t occurred to them that he might need it.
And he would also have known the inevitable result of Brae’s breaking the conditioning. There would have been no way to hide such a thing, and EarthGov didn’t waste that sort of time on anybody twice, no matter how promising.
Scrubbing at his face, he looked back, past the faded skin of what they’d left him. Sylvan hadn’t seemed to converse with horses. He really had conversed with horses. As had young Brae. The grandfather had taught this to them along with many other things. Things that the modern world had forgotten. Things the modern world no doubt wanted forgotten.
Some of those things still hurt his head, even with the conditioning gone. They’d wait for later in any case. He had time, after all, hadn’t he? Better to concentrate on what might prove useful to him in the here and now.
This clearing. There was a ritual, wasn’t there? Yes there was. The grandfather had taught the boys this ritual along with many others, and the reasons behind them even as he’d taught them about the singing glades and the pointing streams and the calling ways.
To the man sitting in the waypoint in Bayel’s Wood, now approaching his fortieth year of life, two thirds of that engaged in war or the preparation for war, the time in the canyons was two whole lives away and forgotten. Or so it had been until this moment. In a flash, it was as though the echos of the grandfather’s voice were only just now dying, the smell of his flat, corn paper cigarette still lingering in the air.
There was tobacco and some salt in the saddlebags, they would at least cover the basics. He caught up the panicky horse, calmed it, and set the picket pin before approaching the pool.
* * *
The sisters watched from within the wood as the whatever had its seizure, feeling the turmoil within its mind wash hard against their wards. What was happening? And why, they wondered, was the pull so strong to race forward and cradle the shaking body within their arms? And why was the feeling of his mind no longer a thing to be feared?
And then the seizure faded. It struggled upright and was still for a bit, the touch of it’s mind retreating back within its own skull, leaving a curious hollowness behind. And when it began to move again, they watched with growing amazement as it retrieved some things from the runner and knelt at the edge of the pool, cupping both hands full of water, filling the small basin of the shrine rather than drinking. Then it stood and gave homage to the cardinal points just as it would if it were a person, tossing a bit of dirt into the air and another pinch into the bowl with the water, following with something else it withdrew from a small pouch it held.
It even knew where to find the colored sands. It spent quite some time with them. Only after the ritual was complete did it lead the runner to drink, not quenching its own thirst until the runner had lifted its muzzle from the water.
Then... then, as though the whole of the day hadn’t already been strange enough, it began to bathe! Did man children really bathe? From the reek that usually surrounded them, one would hardly think so. But then, hadn’t they already decided that this wasn’t a man? The mystery was growing painful, and they could no longer bear it, nor the fluttering within their centers that was growing stronger with each moment they spent following — with each step they drew closer.
“This has gone on for long enough,” Thrush told her sister. “Whatever he is, we’ll find it out here and now.”
“Will it honor the waypoint, do you think?”
“He observes the rituals in the same manner as the people,” she nodded to indicate the creature. On the conviction growing within her breast that he would never harm them no matter what, she kept her own council for fear Swallow would accuse her of being addle-headed.