“If you think that the foreign policy of my country is very restricted,” Malin explained, “that of the Eddanians is extreme. They are so jealous of their land and their culture that to visit them you must request permission months in advance. Ridiculous.”
Adam shrugged. “Fine by me. Nor was I gonna insist on meeting them,” he said. “That thing about Tau radiation and nosebleeds… Let’s just say I wouldn’t sell it as a tourist attraction.”
“Easy, dear. Except for their eccentricities, most Eddanians are as normal as you and me,” she clarified. “A little pushy when it comes to wanting to trick you with poor quality trinkets at a high price, but nothing more supernatural than that.”
“Merchants? Ha!” Adam hadn’t expected that answer. “I’ve heard of merchants bleeding you dry, but never like this.”
Malin smiled. “You know that in this world there are only two ways to live,” she said, “either you trade with whatever you have at hand, as they do or the people of your continent do, or you exploit others to do it for you, as the Empire does.” She cast her eyes to the horizon, beyond the little cabin, as if her sight could cross miles and miles of meadows and valleys and could see a city in the distance. “The Eddanians were nomads who settled on this peninsula centuries ago, never to leave it,” she told him. “At that time, our Empire was in the process of expansion; we tried to absorb them, declaring them invaders, but—Well, the Eddanians were always very cunning and knew how to earn their sovereignty. They are mysterious people; have a very different culture from ours.” Turning in the opposite direction, she pointed west. “My family comes from the Middle Ecuadorian region, from the territory that ends right here. As a child, I used to hear stories about the Eddanians, about them being sorcerers, or how they stole children and offered them to their strange gods. I never saw any of that.” Her gaze got lost, this time not on the horizon but in memories of a bygone age, and another smile, one prompted by memories, appeared on her face. “I used to see them when they visited my city to do their business. It was easy to recognize them because they were, y’know, tall and with grayish skin, most of them at least, and rode in horse-drawn carriages even though they wore robes embroidered with silver and gold and necklaces of diamonds and precious gems that were worth as much as any of our limousines. I doubt they’ll keep doing it the way they used to, but for decades they’ve rejected our technology; so much so some of them didn’t know what a telephone was. It didn’t seem to arouse much interest in them, though.”
“Near Proxima, there is a town of cultists who live in the same way and with the same traditions as they did centuries ago,” Adam added, “and lemme tell you that none of those cultists would dare step into a club wearing a miniskirt as that bald Eddanian woman did. There was not much rejection of our customs on her part, I’d say. And well, I know the grandson—excuse me, the great-grandson of some Eddanian immigrants, and he also had no problem modeling half-naked on the catwalks.”
Malin shrugged. “Damn, dear! Dissenters from a culture looking for a better place to live are everywhere, y’know? If not, tell it to those who have died trying to escape this island.”
“I know, I know. I have cargo ships that can attest to it. It seems that no matter which side of this continent you’re on, Pannotia doesn’t want to let you go, right? Hey, and about those bald Eddanians with gray, bluish skin? What do you have to tell me about them?”
“Bald, blue-skinned Eddanians,” Malin repeated and heaved a long sigh. “A rarity even within their own race.”
“Are they the ones that emit that Tau radiation?”
“Well, here comes the interesting part,” she said. “A few years ago, a young Eddanian man with those features—I mean the lack of hair, eyebrows, y’know—worked in Markabia, and was found dead in the room he rented with erosions on his skin very similar to radiation burns. The autopsy revealed that death had been caused by the ingestion of an unknown chemical with a high metallic concentration, that according to the spectrometer, contained traces of Kappa radiation. Yes, the same one that arises from these invisible Points.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
“There were conflicts with the Eddanian rulers because they refused to cooperate with the investigation for religious reasons, and conflicts with the deceased’s family because the Criminal Division of the Empire had kept the boy’s diary as part of the evidence. It turned out that the boy was part of an extremist cult operating in Markabia, testing new laboratory drugs on his own followers, seeking to achieve enlightenment or something like that. No one could verify that the Eddanian people were directly linked to the cult, as perhaps my adorable rulers would have loved it just to have an excuse and enter into a war with their neighbors and wrest control of the peninsula.
“The cult was busted before it all got out of hand and the case was shelved. But—you remember that Criminal Division had kept the dead man’s diary? Well, in his notes, he mentioned that the cult members chosen for sacrifice had something they called the charm, and he didn’t refer to it as a personality trait, but more akin to something biological. Coincidentally, those who had the charm were only the Eddanian members who came from the south of the peninsula, most of them with such peculiar physical characteristics, the dead boy among them.
“His body was exhumed; tests were carried out again, but nothing abnormal was found. Until they decided to use the spectrometer, this time not only on radiation injuries but also on unaffected tissue, and discovered that the body, even when dead, continued to emit a type of electromagnetic radiation with a frequency very similar to Kappa. They thought that it could be a side effect of the ingested drug, however, when analyzing it with the Quantum Particle Reactor, they learned that there was a second type of unknown energy that, unlike Kappa radiation, didn’t use heavy metals as conductors, but minerals that were more friendly to the human organism. They called it Tau, and even today we have little information about it. We don’t know if they are irradiations of energy that, instead of channeling through geographical sites as Kappa does, do so through people. We just know that it’s detectable in about one in ten Eddanians, and that, like the other quantum radiation we know, its side effect is irritating blood vessels, in this case, not here.” Malin taped her ears; “but here, in the mucosa,” and she put her finger to her nose. “That the only known source of the charm is people from a culture that doesn’t lend themselves willingly to this kind of research… Well, that makes it pretty difficult to study it, y’know?”
“The charm,” Adam repeated. “Maybe what you heard as a child, that the Eddanians were sorcerers, was not so farfetched.”
“Are you saying the stories my nana told were true?” said Malin and smiled again. In the moonlight, her face shone like porcelain. “Some speculate that such marked physical features and the emission of Tau radiation could be the result that an Eddanian lineage carries in their genetic code after centuries of having been in contact with the minerals that abound in this peninsula and the heavy metals that you find from of this soil. After all, those diamonds and precious gems they wear are thanks to entire generations of Eddanians who exploited the mining.”
“Well, that’s no secret. Most millionaires I know have raised their fortunes that way,” he said. “I mean through mining, not through weird radiations.”
Another smile from Malin. “Okay. I think that’s enough exposition for today. What do you say we go back?”
Adam took one last look at that lonely cabin, swallowed up by night, covered by the wind, and nodded.
A spark, a jolt, an awful sensation, a lot of ozone smell, a loud ringing in the eardrums, a little blood in the ears, and a pounding heartbeat, and they were back in the alley, to the side of Dana’s. It no longer smelled of wet grass but of city smog and garbage.
Adam put his hand to his chest, waiting for his heartbeat to return to its normal rhythm. “How many of these jumps can one endure before having a heart attack?”
“Easy. There will be no more jumps for today,” she said with a kind smile as she cleaned her ears.
“Not for today or tomorrow,” he hastened to say, doing the same. “And, at least as far as I’m concerned, there will be no jumps for the rest of the week.”
Malin raised her hands in peace.
Already a little more relaxed, Adam looked up. There was no moon there, not yet, although the sky had turned orange; dusk had begun to fall.
He fixed his static-shaken hair, and between sighs, looked at the bracelets on his wrists. And to think that the first time he saw them, he’d thought it was just a new wrist phone manufactured by Homam Enterprises’ competition!
He couldn’t believe what he had just experienced. How many more in that gigantic metropolis could afford to say they had been transported to the other side of the world in the blink of an eye? Without going any further, though, how many people in that metropolis could afford—or feel the curse—of producing spontaneous combustions of white fire and levitate? Surely not many. Perhaps no one but him.