“Okay so it’s the sun that makes the outsiders have those blisters and the red skin. Those who travel up here, that’s why they die?” She asked.
“It’s a combination of factors.” He considers the best way to reply and then says, “The shade will protect you.”
“How did you learn all of these things?” She asks.
He looks at her and changes the topic, “Now we have to prepare for sleep. As hot as it is now, believe it or not, it gets very cold at night. Save your energy. You’re going to need it while your body shivers to produce enough heat to keep your heart beating.”
“You’re full of instructions.” She said, clearly looking annoyed. “If I get cold, why wouldn’t I just take you up on your offer to take me back down there?”
“You won’t. It’s not in your nature.”
“So are there dangerous things up here? You know? Like alive things?” She asks him.
“Not much left now, but the basic rule is if it rises its tail up at you then avoid it. For some reason things in the desert like to talk trash with their tails.” He heard her thought and points to her butt. “Most creatures actually had something called a tail that protruded from there?” Then he nears her next thought and answers that, “Not from there, above there. Feel where your spine ends.” He realizes she has probably never heard the term and reaches to put a hand on her tailbone to show her.
She smacked his hand away and replies, “I get it. Why do you think, because you know some things, I am stupid?”
“It’s not that. It’s that I don’t know what you don’t know. So I guess that means, in our case, that makes me stupid.” He replies.
She reaches a hand to his. “No, you’re not stupid, you know things. I’ll try to understand you better. It’s what you’re trying to do with me.” Then she lays her head down on her hands.
He does the same, and they both quickly fall asleep. Then he wakes to her pushing her body into his and pulling on him as if he were a blanket. Now partially conscious he feels the familiar cold of the desert night. He scans for things with tails, but seeing nothing in their immediate vicinity, he relaxes his body around hers. His arm pulls her to him, by her waist, just below her breasts. He makes sure to push his feet up under hers to keep her toes warm. The next sensation he feels is completely different.
CHAPTER 4
“He hunted a wraith who was hunting him. He would not heed my mother’s warning, but even my grandmother knew he wouldn’t.” -- from the Book of Destiny
“How does he move faster than I can?” Adam looks at his wife with a confused look on his face.
“You still think about that? It was a long time ago. Let it go, look at all we’ve done.” She replies.
Adam semi-snarls at her response and says, “I think we both know a long time ago could be a second or it could be a millennia. Define time.” He sees her look and adds, “Not so simple is it?”
“Should be for you.” She puts on her gown for the festivities she’s been awaiting and then looks at him knowing his mind is not fully with her on her big day.
He shakes himself out of it and begins to give her advice on the upcoming event.
CHAPTER 5
“I could feel him hanging on my thoughts. I knew he believed he had a way to stop what was happening to me. A way to change the world. I could hear in him that he did not doubt his plans, but he never told me what they were.” -- from the Book of Model KRY-1-CT-A1
As he heard her scolding him he felt the heat of the morning sun, full blast on him. He tried to open his eyes, but the sun was very bright and he quite literally wasn’t ready for it. Nor was he ready to hear the tone and take the abashment she was dealing out to him. He narrowed his eyes to the sun and tried hard to listen to the words she was saying,
“What do you want from me?” She finished. Then calming for half a second to notice he was only beginning to listen. she kicked the sand at his face,
“He grabbed her ankle as it swept upward and stood fast, pulling hard on the ankle as she fell on her back in the sand she was kicking. “Don’t be rude.” He let go of her ankle and looked around. “We’ll need water. Stay here.” He clicked. She looked around and noticed he was simply gone. She started to wonder to herself why she wanted to follow this man, when he’s arrogant, and clearly can come and go as he pleases, leaving her the fool. The he appears next to her on the other side and hands her a canteen. “Drink. Drink more than you think you want.” Then he poured some water from a different container into his hand and begins rubbing it on her skin.
She wonders about that, but assumes it’s his way of washing her. Then she gets a look in her eye as she turns to peer into his eyes.
Then he speaks, “Ironic that a book that has a commandment that says ‘thou shall not kill’ includes so many stories of hundreds of thousands of people being killed. The heroes, the prophets, the angels, even God himself.” He takes a drink of water as he stares at the ground.
She doesn’t know what he means by that. She considers his words, but doesn’t know what he is referring to. “Why do you bring this up? I don’t understand.”
“I’ve been considering a book I’ve read a few times in different languages and versions. It is one of the most taught books in the world, but it isn’t taught straight through. It’s taught in pieces to avoid the gory details. Most of the people, I’ve met, who swear by it have never even read it, yet they are willing to fight for a book they haven’t even read completely.” He laughs to himself at the irony, then he stands and says to her, “When people read just part of a book and not the whole, they make assumptions and via, what I call the ‘game of telephone’, they create huge problems in the world by doing so. I find it strange the overarching point is not taught.” He notes her inquiring thought. “Life isn’t simple. If it were, there would be no point. We work hard to make our lives simple, but the closer we get the more happens.” He realizes she doesn’t understand most of his references.
She looked at him. He confused her at times, but she wanted to stay. Then she gets a desperate look in her eyes and turns away. She starts looking around as if she is trying to find something or some place and then turns back to him and says, “I have to, umm, womany, stuff.”
He already heard her thought and laughs while replying, “Not really a womany thing, we do it too! Go pee. But I will warn you, rats are attracted to the smell of urine, snakes are attracted to rats, birds are attracted to snakes, lizards are attracted to birds. Coyotes are attracted to lizards. So basically…” He looks down at her.
She looks up from her squatting position with a questioning look on her face, “What? I told you I had to go and then you went on about stuff, so I went.”
“Yeah.” He struggles to keep his temper in check. “See the problem is, I was trying to point out that you should have ‘GONE’ somewhere else. So I am not sure the word ‘went’ applies since you didn’t actually go anywhere! You pissed in our camp!” He thinks to himself trying to think of another good location for shade, then he looks up at the sun for timing.
“Don’t you have to go?” She asked.
“Ohhh, don’t tempt me!” Realizing the spot is already marked he turns away from her and uses what he had planned to be their camp in the same manner she had.
“See? You’re doing it! So why is it wrong when I do?” She asked, pointing to the stream shooting out of him into the sand so hard the sand bubbles.
His head swells with frustration as she motions with her hand at his relieving moment. Then he notes she catches that he is angry and turns away. He also hears her look back and that makes him even more frustrated. He realizes most of his anger is about how the heck he is going to find a good spot to teach her the basics she has to get down. It has to provide good shade for the most number of hours of the day. He turns and looks at her and asks, “I assume you’re still here because you want to learn.”
She looks at him and her face falls a bit. “Yeah, I mean, well, that’s part of it.”
He looks at her, stunned. As she let the emotion swell he could hear her thoughts, but she had instinctively learned how to block some of them from him. He also realized she knew perfectly well that if she peed in that spot, they would have to move. He looked at her directly until she looked back at him just as directly. “Okay, the first thing to learn is, don’t get baked.” He chuckles to himself as he adds, “Well, you’re supposed to learn that in college, if you’re smart.” Then seeing her look, he realized that there was no relevance for humor there to her. “What I mean is until your skin begins to adapt to the sun, we need to stay out of it as much as possible. So, let’s do that and on the way, let’s review.” He begins to move quickly to another shadow, but it’s one he knows is only a few minutes long. She follows and picks up on his pattern, but she doesn’t understand his constant moving of positions. He decides to treat it as a game. He turns to her and asks, “So the rabbit. Was it bait?”
“Explain bait.” She asks, now getting used to looking up at the sun the way he does, but still not sure why it is relevant.
“If you have something very small to eat and you want more to eat, you could gamble on using the small thing you have to eat to attract something larger. You place it in such a way that you have advantage over what comes along so you can attack it and have that for dinner instead of the smaller thing.”
“Like how you looked at my butt cheeks, but I was counting on that so I could get to your coin satchel, which was full of gold! So not only did I get caught, by you for that, it was filled with a something that is very hard to use in trade. And then on top of that, now I am here with you trying to not get fried? Do you mean like that?” She looked back at him and said, “How’m I doing so far, mystery man?”
“Well...” His mind wanders but he focuses her and himself back on the point. “So was the rabbit bait and if so who was planning on taking the larger meal?”
“Do you think those two were hunting the bird?” She thinks to herself, reliving the moment and considers there was more to that moment than he is letting on. It was his first thing to do. Why was that?
“No, and it’s better if you refer to it as a hawk. More precise. We could get more precise, but that is descriptive enough.” He continues, “One of them already knew the hawk would end up with that prize. But which of them was baiting whom?”
“How would I know?” Then she got a look on her face. “Now I have a womanly thing again and this time it’s?”
“Doesn’t matter we’re not staying her long.”
She looked at him with a bit more concern than she showed the first time. “How about I catch up with you?”
He heard her internal air pass over what her concern was and said, “Okay, meet me there.” Where he pointed there was a very slim shadow. By the time you’re done that will still be a good spot. Again, that’s not a womanly thing either. Men have to also. Clearly from where you come from you know this.”
“Yeah, but you can just use your magic and do it wherever you want. I have to walk and it’s embarrassing because you can see me from there.”
“I won’t look. Stop being childish. Deal with it, but that means we’re at a point where we are going to need food. So that is the third thing we need to consider. I can click to water easily, but food is something I’m going to have to teach you how to get.”
“Why? Why are you teaching me all of this? Why do you care? Are you all wigged out because I’m a bio or something?” She began unbuttoning her trousers and her eyes gestured for him to go ahead and move.
He wasn’t sure if she meant for him to answer first or consider it after. He moved and answered as she caught up to him. “No, because there are things I know. There are also things I don’t know. I can’t move forward anymore, that is part of what Phillip did. So I have to learn. I learn best from snot nosed brats who are stubborn and seem to need to squat a lot.”
She looked at him. “So I’m just being used?
“No, there’s more to it, but then again, yeah. Like you were using my time up while you waited for an opportunity to reach for my decoy bag.” He noticed her level of caring if he was there or not had gone down. She was already squatting. He realized he still talked too much and clicked to the next shaded area.
He heard her yell after him, “If you can do that why are we walking?”
He yelled back, “Well apparently you had some shit to work out. So the walk did you good.”
She yelled back, “Hey, there’s no…”
He responded to her realization, knowing what was coming next, “No, that is the other thing rabbit fur is good for. But I’ve yet to see you catch one or even look for them. You’ll smell, but you’ll deal with it and learn.”
“Your lessons aren’t funny. Seriously, what do I do?” She yelled over to him very concerned at the predicament she was in.
“Pray for rain.” He pushed his hands out palms up and shrugged at her.
“Can’t you just do that magic thing and get some?” She yelled back. “This really isn’t funny.”
He sighed and clicked. She saw him disappear and then appear in front of her, back turned, holding a roll out to her without looking. “I can’t do that every time. You’re going to have to learn to plan for the eventualities.” He could hear her embarrassment in his mind, but he needed to make his point.
“Speaking of which, why do we have to find animals to eat. Can’t you just do that thing and get us food?” She asked as she pulled up her trousers.
He smiled and asked, “How cool is that?”, then to her question he answered, “No. If you want to stay here with me, you’re going to have to learn and figure things out for yourself. That’s the rules.” He began walking again.
“Who’s rules? Yours?” She asked in a snotty manner and he stopped.
He didn’t turn around he just stood there for a moment and then replied, “Yes.” Then he continued walking. “Some believe in what they call ancient wisdom. However, if they knew then, they’d still be alive now. Some believe in conventional wisdom. If we knew now we wouldn’t have had to learn then. Time is not so complex. Yet few step out of it to learn it from an observatory view.”
She noted he had brought a pack back with him this time. It wasn’t the one he had before. She started to ask what was in it, but decided they were both too irritated at the heat to have much more conversation.
Despite her realization, he said over his shoulder, “Do you know how to make a fire?”
“Yes.” Then she considered her answer and added, “Well, down below I do. What do you use up here, all mighty ruler of the upper world?”
He continued walking as he pulled the pack from his back and reached in and pulled out a ball of string. He tossed it over his shoulder to her. “Keep your eyes open for any dead wood, dried cactus, etc. Don’t pick up any feathers, but note them to me if I don’t see them. We can eat hawks too.”
She looked at the string and then said, “What is a cactus?”
He pointed, “Like that. The green ones have water in them. The brown ones are dead and burn well. Some have a surprise when you burn them. Before you ask, a hawk is the type of bird you saw back there. Very hard to catch, but vultures aren’t good eating. They are also a type of bird, but they eat rotten food and guts, so I’d prefer to find something tastier, but in a pinch they are at least a lot easier to catch than a hawk.”
“Do you like it up here better than below?” She asked.
“This is the world. Down there is, well, I prefer the world to there. Take a deep breath.” He heard her breath in hard. “Note that is not the smell of a bunch of people cordoned together. It’s clean air. Mostly. It’s dry air. One day I will show you a forest and a river and a mountain. One day, even the sea.” He said thinking of each of those things as he spoke them.”
“I’ve seen pictures. A lot of pictures were left behind from the people before they became synths. I used to find them stuffed in odd places.” She started wondering what it was like to be near those places. Then she thought of some of the animals she had seen pictures of and that scared her. Lastly, she noted he said ‘one day’, meaning he planned on them being up here for a while longer than just today. She wasn’t sure what she thought about that, but she also didn’t completely reject the idea, yet. Then she looked around and almost bumped into him as he had stopped.
He reached behind himself and grabbed her wrist. Then he whispered, “Do not move. Breathe normally, but do not move. Stay quiet.”