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The next dawn, the !A!amo camp was gone.
Before light had even come, they had broken down their camp, taking just an hour, and set out through the jungle.
Brooks was with them.
He joined their group just before they left. All of their rope dwellings had been brought down, wrapped around limbs or bodies. Even the children, save for the very young Picky Little One, were carrying packs or skeins of rope.
They truly did not possess much in the way of goods. Much of the food they had gathered had seemed to disappear, though Brooks spied several freshly-dug holes in the ground. Perhaps, he thought, they had cached some of the foods.
They still carried some containers; they had a handful of clay pots, and also a few plastic containers that they had apparently scrounged from Brooks’s own camp.
Their value hadn’t occurred to him, but they clearly appreciated their light weight and great strength, and through their clear sides he could see strips of meat wrapped in leaves and dried berries.
He offered to carry some ropes, and the !A!amo seemed put off by it.
“You are coming?” Tracker asked.
“Yes,” Brooks replied. “I will travel with you.”
Tracker’s ears had gone back, a sign of confusion. “Spirits usually dwell in one place.”
“I never said I was a spirit. Only that I came from the sky.”
Tracker laughed at that. “Maybe you are not a spirit. But you are too strange to be !Xomyi, No Wings.”
“I thought you would be very surprised at how I look different when we first met,” Brooks commented. “I thought you might be afraid.”
Tracker made an approximation of a shrug. “There are many different things in the world. You have a face, so you have a soul. What is there to be afraid of if you have a soul?”
A face equalled a soul, eh? That was worth remembering. His system made a note of it.
Many cultures associated the soul with a certain part of the body – the head, the heart, the eyes, the pineal gland.
It likely varied between different !Xomyi cultures as widely as it did on Earth.
Or, a part of him wondered, was their cultural separation still so recent in times that there would be shared ideas? That concept of ur-culture, a first culture of a people, was a heady idea. No one could truly say if it was even real – not among humanity, Dessei, Sepht, or even Bicet, who recorded everything. An ur-culture, if it ever existed, had existed before the written word had even been dreamed of.
The march through the jungle was a difficult affair, the thick growths of mushrooms, some of them with strange, fleshy webs between them, slowed them to a crawl.
Brooks realized he was the loudest of them all, even carrying nothing.
Part of it was because he was so much larger than the !Xomyi, but even more was his own ineptitude at traversing the jungle. He could not well-judge which was the quietest and surest place to step on the path, he was not used to weaving through the undergrowth.
He set his system to analyzing the environment and the !Xomyi both. It would not give him that muscle-training on its own, but he could garner tips that way at least.
Tracker seemed amused.
“A sky spirit does not know the jungle,” he said.
“It’s true,” Brooks said. “The sky is very open.”
“But full of clouds! I have always wondered; how does a cloud feel?”
“Like nothing at all,” Brooks told him.
He sensed a presence on his other side. Turning quickly, he saw that Knows the World was there.
“You know the clouds?” the being asked, cryptically.
“He says they feel like nothing!” Tracker ventured.
Knows the World did not reply. Brooks had thought the wise man might contradict him, tell some fable of the clouds and how they would feel. But to his credit, Knows the World did not do that.
“How does the sky smell?” the wise man asked.
“It smells of very little,” Brooks said. “The air moves, and takes with it all scents.”
“Mm,” Knows the World grunted, turning and walking ahead.
Brooks watched him, then scanned over the rest of the group.
They were all nervous, he realized. Watching outward, not inward, and those who were armed fingered their weapons, keeping them ready for instant action.
“What is it that your people fear?” Brooks asked. The question was open-ended, but he’d learned that they took as a default that one spoke of the moment, rather than generalities or other times.
“They are nervous because of the Day Stalker,” Tracker told him.
“Day Stalker,” Brooks repeated. His system picked the word out, and he tried to say it with his true voice.
“Keko!un,” he said, trying the actual word. His mask, catching that the word was in the !A!amo language, let it come out unfiltered.
Tracker tilted his head curiously for a moment, perhaps hearing that something was different in his voice.
“You do not know keko!un?” Tracker asked earnestly.
“They do not live in the sky,” Brooks told him. “They are new to me.”
“Oh, that sounds like a very nice place!” Tracker said, making a sound Brooks had come to realize was akin to laughter.
“Would you want to see it?” Brooks asked, feeling his heart rate pick up. Was this an in? A way to at least start putting the idea in their minds?
“Oh no, today is for walking,” Tracker said.
“Well, perhaps tomorrow. Or another day?”
“Haha, tomorrow is for hunting hamomo!” Tracker replied, smiling again.
He began to move away, and Brooks followed him.
“Perhaps another day after that?” Brooks suggested.
Tracker seemed to find the question odd. “Tomorrow I must worry about hunting hamomo,” he insisted. It was a clear dismissal.
“So these keko!un are dangerous?” Brooks asked, changing the topic.
“Oh yes,” Tracker said. “You do not know so I must tell you. But we do not speak of them among ourselves – all know, and to speak of them is bad keotli.”
Brooks noted that word – it did not translate. Luck, perhaps?
Tracker kept talking. “When we stay in one place too long, keko!un appear. Slowly !A!amo disappear. Sometimes just one, sometimes many of us, leaving only memory. We are smart, but keko!un are smart as well. Sometimes they come alone, when the sun is brightest and we see poorly. No other predator is smart enough to attack us in the day, only sometimes big heavy stompers.” Tracker emulated a huge creature walking, making thumping noises and deep cries. “But we hear them and can avoid them. We are small meals to them, anyway. Not worth the trouble we give.” He grinned and held up his spear.
“So they only attack in the day?” Brooks asked.
“They attack when they will. Sometimes they come at night to take us unexpectedly. Sometimes they even come in groups. Groups of Keko!un are much worse, they plan.”
“They plan and hunt in groups?” Brooks asked. “Are they intelligent?”
Again, Tracker reacted oddly. “They plan,” he said. “I must move ahead to keep watch,” he added after a moment.
No Day Stalkers attacked during the trip, Brooks noted. The group made it to their new spot without much difficulty, though two of the children fell in a stream not long before arrival. They were pulled out and yelled at by their mothers.
Brooks found it amusing, until he saw how much real fear there was in the parents.
There was no doctor to summon if they had been hurt. There was no help, no resources beyond the group and what they carried.
Sobered, he stayed at the edge of the camp, trying to be out of their way as the !A!amo set up their small tents and dug a fire pit.
“Kai,” he radioed. “Do you have a fix on my location?”
“Yes,” she called. “Bringing our new camp, found another location a few hundred meters away. Will be set up within the hour.”
“I’ll be staying with the !A!amo in their camp if I can,” he said.
She sounded a little annoyed. “I wish you’d let me walk with you.”
“Someone needed to set up the camp. But we can ingratiate you with them if you really want.”
“Not really,” she replied. “I’m not a people person anymore. I don’t think I’d be a help in making them like us.”
Brooks wondered what Kai’s real reason was; she was just as personable as him if she tried. But she had kept up walls, and that did make her a liability in this endeavor, even though it would be better for them to become comfortable with multiple humans.
After the new camp took shape, Brooks watched in fascination as the !A!amo got to work.
No one need give an order, other than some of the parents to their children.
The men started chipping pieces of rock – flint, he realized. They did not produce a whole head, but instead just flakes which they fitted laboriously into a stick shaft along the side.
The women took these tools and fanned out, cutting down tall bladed grass that grew in the gaps among the trees.
Which were themselves surprising. The jungle in most other places he’d seen had been so dense that there were few gaps for such grass to grow.
The climate was changing, he realized. Just how, or what the cause might be, he did not know. The processes involved would be complex.
But where the trees thinned and grass grew, this made a good spot for the !Xomyi.
That their sickles were still straight sticks, not even the half-circle curves that were more efficient, Brooks surmised that this gathering of grass must be a relatively new innovation.
After they had made their grass cutters, the men began to spread out into the jungle. Off to hunt, perhaps?
As the women brought back the grass, the children quickly began to take it up and weave it into ropes.
“Will you help?” Sweet Child asked him.
“I’ve never done that before,” he said.
“Really? I will show you.”
The child’s fingers were tiny compared to his, far more deft. He watched her work, weaving the blades together quickly.
He tried to do the same, and she laughed without cruelty. “You really haven’t done this before!”
He just smiled. “My skills lay elsewhere.”
Sweet Child looked slightly puzzled, but then went back to focusing on her rope.
Brooks left the children working, observing some of the women in the camp.
They were digging in the ground, and he wasn’t sure why until one pulled something large from the ground.
At first he thought it was some sort of tuber, almost perfectly round, but then he realized that it was a clay pot, sticky with soil.
How had it gotten buried? He came closer, watching.
There was a flat lid, that had been sealed with something that looked like wax mixed with tar. They peeled it open, and a strong smell hit him, even from here.
It was tantalizingly familiar to something he’d smelled before, and despite it being nearly unbearably strong he wasn’t put off by it.
Fermentation, he realized.
It smelled stronger than anything fermented he’d ever had, and in this climate he’d never thought it could be safely done.
But this wasn’t Earth, it was Ko. With its own slightly different organic chemistry set and an entirely different set of microbes.
The women each took some of whatever was in the jar – it reminded him of kimchi – and tasted it, seeming satisfied.
They noticed him watching.
“Taste?” one asked, offering a handful of the food.
He politely declined and they just shrugged.
Walking out of the camp, he looked around for the men, but could not see them.
Squatting in place, he checked the drones. The whole spy group had travelled along with them, and through their eyes he could see the entire area from any angle, choosing to look down from above.
The !Xomyi appeared as red dots superimposed over the map, and his system sorted out the men.
They had spread out in all directions in small groups. Foraging?
One set of two suddenly moved quickly, in a short burst. He switched to a drone view of them on the ground.
It was Brave Hunter and Diver. The latter of them had some small creature, like a lizard but with six limbs, impaled on his spear.
So they were just taking small, easy game to fill their bellies for the night, he realized.
A group of females moved past him. He watched them for a time, but they did not travel far, only digging into the ground. They weren’t digging up any more jars, but sometimes he saw them come up with tubers.
“May I see that?” he asked one. His system identified her as Soon Mother . . . and living up to her name, he realized that she was pregnant. Her stomach was larger than most !Xomyi, though it was subtler than on a human woman.
Soon Mother offered him the tuber.
He took from his pocket a small device. It was just a small control board with a sensor and screen – a chemosensor. He scanned the tuber. After a moment the device beeped.
“Thanks,” he said. Feeding its data into his headset, he looked out.
“There’s three buried together here,” he said, walking over and pointing.
Soon Mother came over, frowning at him, but then digging at the spot. She came up a moment later with a tuber. Two more were visible in the ground.
She raised her head, large eyes going even wider, filled with awe.
“Keotli,” she breathed. “You are a spirit! How did you know?”
That word again, he noticed. But it was a mystery he’d have to solve later.
“It is a tool,” he said, kneeling next to her. He showed her the chemosensor. “It can smell the tubers. Just point and look through the screen. They will appear as a glow.”
Soon Mother seemed shocked, looking from him to the chemosensor. With unsure hands she took the device. “It is keotli,” she said. She held it up, looking around, then let out a yelp as she saw something. Hurrying over, she dug and pulled up a tuber.
“Come!” she cried to the other women. “Come and see No Wings’s keotli!”
The others came, marveling at the device.
Brooks smiled. He had not intended it as a gift, but he was reminded of the old wisdom about teaching a man to fish.
They could keep the chemosensor.
< Ep 12 part 23 | Ep 12 part 25 >
Other Terrestrial 
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