Stories from the Hearth

Spirit (Fantasy Sci-Fi) - Story #7

Episode Summary

Deep in the jungle interior of the Southern Islands, a species of sentient beings live out their lives at peace and in harmony with the forest, and with the mountain at its heart. The Cónglín yōulíng, however, are not the only sentient species on their world, and as Onyongo is about to find out, there are others out there with less than honest intentions...

Episode Notes

Deep in the jungle interior of the Southern Islands, a species of sentient beings live out their lives at peace and in harmony with the forest, and with the mountain at its heart. The Cónglín yōulíng, however, are not the only sentient species on their world, and as Onyongo is about to find out, there are others out there with less than honest intentions...

CW: misgendering, violence

Stories from the Hearth is an experimental storytelling experience ft. truly original fiction and thoughtfully produced soundscapes. The aim of this podcast is to rekindle its listeners' love for the ancient art of storytelling (and story-listening), and to bring some small escapism to the frantic energies of the modern world. Stories from the Hearth is the brainchild of queer punk poet, environmentalist, and anarchist Cal Bannerman. Vive l'art!

Episode #10 out Sunday 27th June 2021 (27.06.21)

Support the podcast and get early access, bonus content, exclusive extra episodes, an in-episode shout-out, and the chance to become part of a wider community, by visiting our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/storiesfromthehearthpodcast

Instagram: @storiesfromthehearth
Twitter: @Hearth_Podcast
YouTube: Stories from the Hearth
Email: storiesfromthehearthpodcast@gmail.com

Original Artwork by Anna Ferrara
Anna's Instagram: @giallosardina
Anna's Portfolio: https://annaferrara.carbonmade.com/

Thank you for listening. Please consider following, subscribing to, and sharing this episode, and please do tell your friends all about Stories from the Hearth.

'Surreal Forest' is the work of Meydän and is courtesy of Free Music Archive, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. To read more about the license, click here.

Episode Transcription

Welcome to Stories From The Hearth, the podcast for tall tales and fantastical fiction, short stories the likes of which you might once have heard a wandering bard tell, to a group of villagers, gathered around the fire. Explore the history of storytelling in bonus series The Wandering Bard, or escape your surroundings with a brand-new story, written and performed by me, Calum Bannerman, on the last Sunday of every month. Historical, romantic, science fiction, or fantasy; these are tales to transport you, doorways into another world…

Hi, I’m Cal, and if you’re new to Stories from the Hearth, there’s a few things you might like to know. This podcast is an experimental artistic space, kind of like a painter’s studio or a DJ’s headphones – it is a place where I can try new things, make art, and share it with others in the hope that it might bring some comfort, value, and escapism to their lives. It is also a means to an end; after all, it has been my dream ever since I was wee to tell stories for a living; just like the wandering bards of old, who I read about in my history books and fantasy novels. Each episode of Stories from the Hearth features a stand-alone work of fiction, performed to an immersive soundscape, which allows you to lose yourself in the tale. Usually, the stories are short enough to be contained within one episode, but a handful of them are split over two. If this particular episode isn’t your jam, don’t worry – there are heaps of stories to choose from, and no two are the same. This podcast is also a safe and inclusive space for all, which means that its stories actively embrace queerness and otherness, right alongside more mainstream walks of life. If you’re enjoying it, then please do tell your friends and review it on your favourite podcast app, Spotify, or iTunes. If you’re really enjoying it, then you can support Stories from the Hearth on Patreon and help yourself to early access, behind-the-scenes insights, bonus content, physical copies of the stories, shout-outs and much much more. Just head to patreon.com/storiesfromthehearthpodcast or hit the link down below. And speaking of shout-outs, a huge thanks to these fine folks who help make Stories from the Hearth possible: my warmest thanks to Nick, Vivian, Jen, Charlie, Rob, Sandy, Jane, Ruathy and Mully. 

Now, come and gather round the fire, for I’ve got a story to tell. This is Episode Nine: Spirit.

-

It’s the smell I notice first.

            At this altitude, the air becomes quite thin. Breathing is constricted, and it gets so that my head feels both light and leaden. Behind me on the trail, my daughter Pasha jokes light-heartedly with our local guide. Sweat laces her forehead, but other than that she shows no signs of tiring. Her thighs are muscular, her posture assured. As she scrambles on, she stoops to pluck a fallen fruit from the forest floor, the motion singular and smooth.

            It is a xia xia fruit, big and red with a fist-sized stone at its heart. Briefly, I wonder why it’s fallen – xia xia doesn’t usually ripen until late-Summer. At this time of year, even the ochuk, the most voracious and least picky of mountain primates, would have found xia xia fruit too bitter to eat. 

            Soon, however, the thought passes. 

            There’s that smell again.

            Perhaps Pasha and the guide are yet to smell it, otherwise my senses are becoming muddled with the altitude, for to me, this aroma is too intoxicating not to notice. 

            Jungles are, of course, naturally pungent. The jungle is a perfume factory, an olfactory embalming station. Think on it a while. A million undocumented species defecating, vomiting, ejaculating into the canopy, and across the jungle floor. Big cats spraying the borders of their territory, the scent-glands of rodents, reptiles, and worse, working overtime in cyclical attempts to find a mate. The carcases of aging prey mouldering with last year’s foliage. Not to mention the inorganic stench produced by some of the plants in this place. Did you know that the Huó-huā plant actually produces a smell worse than rotting flesh? No, neither did I before coming here. 

            To be sure, however, the smell that just hit me is unlike any I’ve ever encountered here in the jungle, or anywhere else on this Law-forsaken continent, come to think of it. If anything, then the smell reminds me of home.

 

‘Papá? Papácito? Dad?

            He comes back to me from some distant daydream, the optical mist of cataracts more noticeable than usual today. But it’s not the cataracts which give him pause for thought, which stop him from recognising me for a moment.

            ‘Dad, this is Onyongo. They’ve agreed to guide us as far as they can.’

            ‘The path is dangerous, but I will take you,’ Onyongo interjects, their voice wavering. They seem meek in the lengthening shadow of my father.

            Onyongo is four-legged and entirely hairless. On their hind legs, they would stand head-and-shoulders above my father, but to do so would be seen as an open act of aggression in their culture. I wonder all too late whether the upright stances of my father and I are what’s putting Onyongo and the rest of their people on edge. 

            But then I remember the mountain, and the rumours of what lies at its crater.

            ‘Onyongo,’ I continue, noticing dad’s silence, ‘this is my father, Professor Anton Trujillo, resident field-researcher at the Academy of Inter-Species Archaeology in Zembla. I believe you’ve heard of him?’

            I don’t believe. I know. The only reason I was able to convince Onyongo to enrol as our guide was because of his apparent interest in my father’s work. I know the answer to my question, but I have a feeling the only thing going to lure my father into conversation is conversation about himself.

            ‘You follow my work, eh boy?’

            Onyongo shakes their head enthusiastically, which in their culture means yes

            Their species has no concept of gender, let alone the word ‘boy’, and for that I am quietly relieved. This will be something like the hundredth expedition I’ve joined dad on, meaning it’ll be the hundredth time I’ve had to endure his manner of interacting with the locals. And non-sapiens locals, at that.

            ‘And how do you listen to my lecturers then, eh?’ My father chuckles and turns to me. ‘Suppose he must pick up Zemblan radio with those dishes of his, eh?’ He nudges me with an elbow, proud of his joke.

            Cónglín yōulíng[CB1], or Cóngs for short, the species to which Onyongo belongs, are it has to be said, endowed with the most tremendously disproportionate set of ears I’ve ever seen.  And to be fair to my dad, they do bear a striking resemblance to radio receiver dishes. Paler even than Onyongo’s skin, the ears of Cóngs are the size of dinner plates, with auditory canals wide enough to put your fist through. Given the likelihood that detritus falling from the jungle canopy would become lodged in ears this size, the Cóngs have evolved a network of intricate aural muscles. These muscles allow Cóngs like Onyongo to fold their ears closed, kind of like flowers, blooming in reverse. As it happens, this evolutionary quirk also allows Cóngs to acutely extend the effective range of their hearing, similarly to how we extend eyesight with the use of a telescope.

            That being said, my father – though highly educated in the biological, psychological, cultural, and theological behaviours of our world’s various sentient species – is currently exhibiting no more interest in Onyongo and their satellite ears than he might at finding a worm in his shoe. 

            But Onyongo is not deterred. 

            ‘My people commune with the Earth, professor. We hear many things.’ They point back toward the top of a small rise, where perches a rudimentary comms tower. ‘Also, we have radio.’

            My father is barely paying attention. I study the crude shack and wonky receiver pole with a heaviness in my heart. When I’d first encountered the Cóng, they had been a proudly a-technological people; choosing to disregard whatever outsider technology they came into contact with.

            ‘My people don’t like it much,’ continues Onyongo, ‘they say more wisdom comes from the earth than ever could from the mouth of a man.’ I smile, detecting a little attitude from the Cóng. ‘But I have spent many nights listening to the strange voices in the sky, and I have heard of you.’ My father scoffs.

            We’re walking now, after my father, who’s making a big show of packing, unpacking, and repacking his bag, in preparation for our departure tomorrow. He pretends to be surprised to find us still there, to find Onyongo still attempting conversation. He sighs.

            ‘Oh, yes? And what have you heard about me, boy?’

            Onyongo smiles a toothless smile. A lesser scholar might have interpreted this chipper response to feigned interest as a blissful by-product of ignorance, but I know better. Onyongo is not oblivious to my father’s sensibilities. From our earlier conversation, it is clear Onyongo knows enough of Professor Anton Trujillo to be as wary of him as they are excited by the prospect of meeting him. No, I think there’s more to Onyongo than meets the eye. Why else would anyone put up with the old man’s insufferable bullshit?

            ‘I heard your lecture on the Hǎiniú [CB2]of the Tundra.’ The words, though awkward in Onyongo’s heavy accent, are spoken with confidence, despite the fact that the Cóngs have no photographic materials, nor any place within a thousand miles which might even slightly resemble the bone-aching cold of the Tundric regions. They continue. ‘I learned about the Hǎiniú, how they live their entire lives in the water,’ they shiver, ‘how they dive for food. 

            ‘I learned of the machine they found…’

            My father stops mid-movement, his arm jammed in his bag up to the shoulder. Slowly, he withdraws it, rolls down his sleeve and fastens the cuff. He turns to us.

            Holding Onyongo’s gaze with something approaching sincerity, he speaks directly to our newly acquired guide. 

            ‘Then you know why I am here.’

            Onyongo shakes their head solemnly, and I have to remind myself once again that this means yes.

            ‘I think you are here to see what you could not see beneath the water.’ My father clicks his tongue. ‘I think you are here for the same reason my people had to acquire our radio.’

            ‘Which is what?’ My turn to interject, now. 

            The careful way in which Onyongo selects their words, the taught silence of my father, the locked stare held between these two beings, Cóng and Human, all makes me uneasy.

            After a while, deciding that they will not hear anything more from my father on the subject, Onyongo turns to me. But they do not look at me. Instead, they turn an ear to the forest floor, furrowing their brow. 

            ‘If only you could hear the Earth,’ they say, and I sense that this means more than I can comprehend. And now they take my gaze, their eyes shiny, lacquered with tears.

            ‘The forest is failing, Pasha, and my people fail with it.’

 

My headache grows worse by the hour.

            My steps are more laboured, as is my breathing, and twice now I’ve had to prop myself against a trunk, my sight plagued by blackness and whirring electrons of static. We’ve been hiking for days, maybe four at most, though somehow I can’t recall enough to verify the count. I should know how long it takes to reach the crater, I’ve been there before. But then I was a deal younger, and kept constantly amused by the staggering variety of new species to document – twenty-foot flowers and maggots the size of your forearm. Too enthralled to worry much about the length of the journey. 

            I was so idealistic in my youth. 

            I asked the boy Ongo how much farther we had to trek, and he answered with the same superstitious riddles so characteristic of his kind. Yet again, he told Pasha and I that the forest is sick, that the path to the mountain’s summit would be less obvious for it, but that he was confident we would make the crater by day’s close, tomorrow.

            I’d have clapped him round those monstrosities he calls ears, if not for the look from my daughter. She seems close to the creature, perhaps enamoured in the same fashion I once was, with the winged Biānfú of the pueblan cenotes – a species of hairy critters, about two inches by two, from whom we humans extracted the art of flight – or indeed with the Cóng themselves, on my first trip here, when I believed their auditory talents might extend further than the precise location of ripe fruits and nuts, dropping to the forest floor.

            I sense Pasha has not yet come to accept the natural order of things. She still believes the other species are like us: self-aware, inventive, intelligent, sentient in the truest sense of the word. I sense she sees in the boy Ongo’s ramshackle radio tower more than just a cheap parlour trick. If only they were aware of the irony.

            A clamour in the forest distracts me from my thoughts. The shrieks of warring ochuks pierce a night already full of noise. I can’t tell exactly how close they are, but their cries are disconcerting. Somehow warped, somehow painful. Quietly, I unclip the safety fastening on the holster at my waist, secure my grip on the handle of my pistol. Not that a gun will do much good against an angry ochuk – the males can grow to ten feet tall, and can weigh as much as a car; standard practice says to fire above their heads, try and scare, rather than maim them. Any damage you actually inflicted on an ochuk would serve only to enrage them further. And if you’ve never seen an ochuk on the hunt, let me tell you, there would be nothing left of you to identify your body with, once those beasts were through with you. Not even a scrap of clothing. 

            Still, my hold on the pistol helps centre me, and when the noise from the ochuks passes, I am once more cosily enveloped in the thrilling hum of the jungle at night. 

            And now, the rains begin to fall. A soft pitter-patter, decreasing in pitch as the droplets hit and slide, falling from giant leaf to giant leaf, only the most determined of them finding their way to the forest floor, and to me, lolling easily in my hammock. I unfold my tarpaulin and drape it over, leaving just a saucer-sized space for my face, enough to relish the warm dampness of rain against my cheeks. 

            As sleep takes hold, I dream of the crater, as it was all those years ago: denser with flora and fauna than any place I had ever visited, sunlight known only by the lighter hue of the leaves above our heads. I remember the intoxicating feeling of standing there, on ground so untouched, so feral and primal, as to be erroneously designated a spiritual heartland of the Cóng. 

            My eyelids heavy, I feel my ears rise slightly with a smirk. To think I had believed them when they’d told me that. To think I had ever paid such an idea credence. 

            Perhaps dreaming now, I see the crater as it must look today, and it is wondrous. A heartland of science, technology, advancement. The home of the machine. 

            Tomorrow, tomorrow we shall make the summit.

 

‘Your country is so beautiful.’

            Onyongo has just returned from the forest canopy, where they climbed to establish our bearings. Watching them scale the shiny-smooth trunks of the dark qì trees was an awesome spectacle, like studying hummingbirds in flight, or the soaring leap of a whale from the water: pure evolutionary perfection. 

            I watch them shimmy head first back toward the ground, and their face is grave. Could they not hear me?

            ‘Your country is beautiful!’ I repeat, and this time I am sure they hear, but still Onyongo does not acknowledge me. 

            The expedition has been fraught since we left camp. There is a strange, metallic smell in the air, one which cuts clean through the many-layered complexities of the forest’s aroma. The Cóngs’ faculties of smell are limited, but I sense that when Onyongo places those big, dinner plate ears to the mulch at our feet, they hear a disturbance akin to the smell clotting my nostrils. 

            What’s more, my father refuses to talk to them, except in short-tempered outbursts regarding our apparently slow progress. He has been increasingly irritable these past few days, and is beginning to show signs of paranoia: grumbling that we’ve passed this or that landmark before, complaining that the fruit Onyongo finds him is rotten, that they keep the ripe stuff for themselves, for me. Last night I even thought I saw him in his bunk, aiming his pistol at the tree in which Onyongo slept. Of course, it had been a trick of the light. A thin strand of moonlight glancing off my father’s wedding band (which he still wears after all this time). 

            Still, I should not have to worry that he actually might pull such a stunt. 

            Onyongo lifts their head from the ground, and shakes a little bracken from their earlobes, before manipulating them into the shapes of budding flowers. They point their telescoped ears uphill, and listen. 

            Fifteen feet from us, my father sharpens his bowie knife against a rock in abrupt, protracted movements. The sounds grates.

            After a while, I break the silence.

            ‘What do you hear, Onyongo?’

            They look confused. 

            ‘I don’t understand. From the treetops I can see where the mountain levels out, at the lip of the crater. Though we come here only once in our lives, I would not forget the joy I first felt at that sight.’

            ‘But?’ I ask, half-concentrating on Onyongo’s news, half-concerned by my father’s reddening face, caught out the side of my eye. Dusk approaches, and dad looks ready to remind Onyongo yet again that he was promised we’d reach the crater by sundown.

            ‘But’ continues Onyongo, ‘I cannot hear it.’ They catch my gaze, and I am unprepared for the depths of sadness contained within those eyes, as blue-black as the night sky, and shining. ‘Sound is how my people navigate. If we are lost, we ask the Earth to guide us home. If we have something to find, we need only listen. When we reach maturity, well,’ they nod to me and then to my father, but are unperturbed by his returning glare, ‘you both must already know. You have studied us enough. We come to the crater to find our true names, our spirit names. But we are given no direction, we must use our bond with the Earth and its sounds. Only by the song sung at the heart of the mountain can we navigate to it. But today,’ Onyongo lets their head slump, ‘today the mountain is quiet.’

            ‘Right, that’s it. Enough of these fucking riddles, ape-man.’ 

            My father’s face is beetroot. His teeth grinding so furiously that I can hear them above the whoops and shrills of the jungle (though as this crosses my mind, I realise how utterly still the jungle is). 

            ‘Thought you’d take a leaf from the Hǎiniú’s book, did you? Heard from my lectures how they lead me astray in the tundra; thought you’d give me the run around too, did you?’ 

            Father towers over us, the newly-honed edge of his hunting knife flashing, as his hands tremble in the dying light. Slowly, I rise to my feet, step between him and our guide. He seems to look right through me, the will of his anger insurmountable. As I touch his knife arm, he flinches and jerks toward me. It is a split-second before he recognises me and my intent, and his face changes, frustration giving way to guilt. 

            ‘Oh, Pasha,’ he begins, but I cannot look at him. ‘I’m sorry, Pasha, I… it’s just… the smell, I can’t… and he said…’ My father trails off. 

            Behind me, Onyongo has risen onto their two back feet, a perplexing look in their eyes. Though I know they mean me no harm, though I know exactly to whom they mean harm, still I feel the hackles on my neck raise in alarm, feel the drop in temperature as their immense shadow falls over me. 

            Raised to their full height, Onyongo stands nearly three feet taller than my father, their radio dish ears turned perpendicular to their face, to give the shadowy impression that they’ve grown two extra heads. Their arms, lithe and muscular from a lifetime spent scaling trees and running on all fours, hang heavy at their side, and I feel that not-uncommon mixture of fear and arousal at the sight of their shoulders, taught and supple, tendons pulsing between them and a neck as solid as a tree stump.

            I am half-expecting my father to say something stupid. He was the sort of man who would sooner welcome injury than see his masculinity slighted. But apparently, even his machismo had limits. 

            Without needing to turn, I hear him retreat back to the safety of his rock. 

            ‘If you can’t guide us there, you might as well go home,’ grumbles the old man, loud enough for us to hear, but only just. 

            I watch Onyongo watch him go, the breath from their nostrils condensing in the muggy air. Gently, I hold their elbow, smile at them when they turn their head to face me. 

            ‘It’s alright,’ I reassure. ‘I’m sorry. He’s not been himself of late, and he’s just… we’re both tired. We’d both really like to reach what we came here to see.’

            Onyongo nods and, slowly, they lower themselves to the ground. 

            ‘He does not care for the forest. He does not care to hear it.’ The hurt in Onyongo’s voice is palpable, and it occurs to me briefly that no human man I’d ever known had worn their emotions so openly.

            ‘No,’ I disagree, ‘he does care, he just doesn’t show it like you. I promise. We are only here because of the news that your country is suffering. All we want to know is why. It’s why we have to make the mountain summit.’ I let the air settle a little. ‘Do you think you can still guide us? Without the… the mountain’s song?’

            Onyongo walks to the edge of the clearing, plucks a sponge of some skeletal moss from the bark of a leaning xia xia tree, and brings it to their ear. They rub the moss between thumb and the more prominent of their other two fingers. They hold it to the tiny slits of their nose, and inhale. I watch them recoil in revulsion, and drop the moss to the ground. 

            Without turning back to face me, they speak.

            ‘I can guide you. 

            ‘Get some rest, we will leave before sunrise. Tomorrow we will reach the crater.’

            As Onyongo marches off and is lost to the thickening foliage, I hear my father scoff, and spit at the ground.

 

Unsurprisingly, the beast has abandoned us. 

            I woke to sunlight, and Pasha calling its name. It revealed its true colours yesterday – no more than a hybrid ochuk, an ape, an animal who, as I suspected, had grown far too close to my daughter. Became territorial, possessive of her even. I should have acted when I first saw the signs. I should have better remembered how its kind reacted on my first visit, when their spy learned of our plans for the crater. The mountain’s spiritual heart. These animals wouldn’t know a goldmine if one hit them in the face.

            Pasha didn’t want to leave our camp without finding the guide. Law, she near enough accused me of its disappearance, as if I cared. Eventually though, I brought her round. 

            We’ve been marching since breakfast – more of that rancid fruit, which Pasha says tastes fine. The sun is high now, and visible for the first time since we arrived in this Sapiens-forsaken forest, for the trees have thinned out substantially, and the canopy overhead is spidery. 

            I can hear the blood in my ears, pulsing loudly with each laboured beat of my heart. The air is so thin up here, I am unsure whether to call what I’ve got a headache, or a migraine, or a waking-seizure. The girl, however, seems fine. She’s taken point, but checks her pace to allow me to keep up. I don’t doubt if she wanted to, she could march out of sight in seconds. Thankfully, she is still my daughter. 

            We’ve stopped by a spring to refill our hydration packs. Despite the built-in filtration system, I must admit that I’ve wretched back up my first swallow of the liquid. It tastes just like the fruit here tastes. Tangy and sulfuric, cold in an artificially hygienic way. It tastes how biting foil with metal fillings feels. This time, Pasha notices it, too. Worse still, it goes little way to quenching my thirst, or cooling my forehead, red raw under the naked sun.

            We are, I think, nearing the lip of the crater. Pasha pushes on harder, and there are certain characteristics – twists in the path, folds in the terrain, shapes on the peripheries – which register somewhere in my memory. Despite the tight, throbbing excruciation in my brain, the dryness of my throat and eyes, the dizzying disorientation of vertigo, I think that somehow my body recognises its whereabouts all the same.

            Perhaps the brute was right. Perhaps we will make the crater today.

 

Father has been mumbling to himself all day.

            Occasionally I hear him laugh, as if in merry, conspiratorial conversation with another. And he’s burning up. He looks… well, no. I was going to say he looks fit enough, but that would be a lie. He looks thin, and not in the mountain man, stringy yet muscular sort of way; he looks emaciated. His skin has turned pink as raw salmon under the exposed sun, yet he refuses to cover up, and has removed the several hats I forcibly placed on his head. 

            He complains constantly. Most recently it’s that the water – freshly sourced from a mountain spring, for Law’s sake – tastes acrid, or bitter, or metallic or something. Granted, there is something off about it, something reminiscent of the scent, which grows stronger with every mile we trek. Unpleasant and unsettling maybe, but surely not unexpected. We know there’s something wrong with the forest. Onyongo told us so. Plus, it’s not like the water’s undrinkable.

            Onyongo. My heart bleeds. 

            Father said, in one of his few lucid moments, that they must have lied about knowing the way, that they’ve grown embarrassed and defeated by the trail, and have simply turned tail. 

            I don’t believe him. Not after that performance yesterday. Onyongo may well have turned for home, but they’ve done so out of honour, if anything. They bared their chest yesterday, stood up for me – quite literally – in a moment of perceived need. But in doing so, they broke a sacred cultural tryst, and lest they bring this feud between my father and themselves to blows, I think they have decided it better for all involved that they remove themselves from the situation entirely.

            Up ahead, there is a break in the trees, and then nothing. Nothing but the wide, blue expanse of the sky. 

            ‘Father!’ I shout. ‘Up ahead! I think… I think we’ve reached it.’

            My father, his knees shaking with every stride, his jaw churning manically through a whispered conversation, stops dead. He looks past me to the break in the trees, and then turns to meet my gaze. He grins, and in his face I see some semblance of the courage, the intelligence, the passion which won my heart to his cause as a child.

            ‘Well done, Pasha,’ he says, and I am back in my school uniform, presenting him my final year results. ‘Bloody well done. Marvellous.’ And without another word, he pushes past me, up into the dissipating brush.

            Slightly dumbstruck, it takes me a while to find my legs again, but when I do I’m stepping, jogging, running up the last stretch of mountain, hot on the heels of my explorer father, momentarily returned to his former vigour. 

            Perhaps, I think, this was all he needed.

            Looking back, it strikes me as odd that I didn’t notice the silence; or rather, the ceaseless bluebottle-hum which filled the air, smothering all other noise. It seems strange that I did not heed Onyongo’s warnings earlier, or pay closer attention to the forest, dying around us.

            And yet I didn’t, I hadn’t. Too caught up in my father’s expeditionary goal, too enthralled by the stark beauty of even this decaying jungle, to notice what someone familiar with the setting would have been immediately alarmed by.

            None of it hit me, until we reached the lip of the crater, and looked down.

            The heart of the mountain is barren, fetid… ugly. Chewed up, torn out, remorselessly scarred. And at its centre, rises one-hundred feet tall the source of the tinny, unnatural sound, the metallic smell, the poison. Corkscrewed into the earth, stabilised by four sheer silver legs, is a massive human-made drill, a monstrous satellite swivelling mechanically on top.

            ‘Papá? Papácito? Dad?’ My father grunts in response. ‘Dad, what in Law is that?’ I whimper. ‘What in Law is that?

            ‘That? Pasha, that is the culmination of generations’ worth of scientific study. That is what we’ve come all this way to see.’

 

The Zemblan Academy of Inter-Species Archaeology; the name itself our own little joke, alluding to the common fate of the extant species we studied. When I started there, I first learned of the Academy’s founder: another Anton Trujillo, as it happened, one to whom my colleagues and students simply assumed I was related. A great, great, great grandson, perhaps. And who was I to correct them?

            Now, as resident field-researcher, I’m passed the point of being questioned as to my lineage. The matter is, as we archaeologists like to say, written in stone. 

            I was a fiery young buck if I remember correctly. Fresh out of University, my head full of wonderful assumptions and amateur calculations regarding the world around me. I was eager to travel, eager to meet, no, eager to befriend the many so-called ‘sentient species’ I had read so much about in the textbooks of Greater Nørdvig. 

            I still remember my first assignment in the field. Myself, and a handful of other hopeful graduates were tasked with clearing the lands of a Kuàngwù tribe free of land mines, left over from a war with another Kuàngwù tribe. 

            The Kuàngwù were an amphibious species of slimy, cold-blooded animals, genetically gifted with the unique ability to detect almost any mineral or metal, whether natural or artificial, hidden or in plain sight, using only their mind. A sort of psychokinetic sonar if you will.

            We arrived in their lands excited to study our first sentient species, to learn their language, and teach them ours. To converse and to exchange ideas, technology, wisdom. We arrived eager to help them bring about peace between their tribe and their enemies. 

            What we found, however, was a pitiful, strung-out community of little dirty creatures, too afraid of us to listen to our warnings. I remember watching in horror as one Kuàngwù after another was blown to a squelchy green gloop, having hopped onto a mine they had somehow failed to detect. We cleared the minefield all the same, not that their were many survivors of that land left to thank us, and returned to Zembla. 

            It was only years later, when organising a similar assignment for my own batch of graduates, that I learned the truth behind my own inaugural expedition. 

            You see, that tribe of Kuàngwù had never been at war with another. In fact, the Kuàngwù were by their very nature pacifistic. As such, they had no concept of trip mines, nor of war. The fear they greeted us with was a leftover from their only other interaction with humans, when professors from Zembla Academy had first made contact with the species, conducting various tests to determine the usefulness of the Kuàngwù’s powers; including, of course, by sowing their fields with mines for them to detect – or, as happens, not to. 

            Point being, despite their ‘sentient’ status, these miserable, slimy creatures had absolutely no concept of pragmatically applying their biological gift. According to our studies, though their genetic makeup allowed for the psychokinetic detection of just about every known elemental and chemical compound, these things had only ever used their gift to search for the crystals, ochres, paints, and gemstones which they used in their art.

            Here was a species supposedly on the same evolutionary rung as Homo sapiens, endowed with the most incredible of talents, and yet which could not detect their imminent explosive death for want of a sparkly sculpture, or a pretty picture. 

            I am so thankful for that experience, and I reward those students of mine who are similarly thankful for theirs. For the first time one learns of the true order of nature, is the first time one’s mind opens to the true boundlessness, the infinitude of humanity’s potential for evolution and advancement. 

            If a beast cannot harness its own potential, then we must harness it for them.

            Such is the reasoning I wish my daughter could see, as we crest the lip of the Cóng’s precious mountain and look down upon Unit C-4 of the Zemblan Academy’s Research and Development Sector.

            Fifteen years it had been here, secretly mining the mountainside, gathering data on the flora and fauna, discretely observing the maturation rituals of Cóngs like Ongo the missing guide, sapping from the earth and air, the forest and its beastly, hairless people all the materiel and information the Academy will require, to replicate the immense auditory abilities of the native species, and reproduce them in the human genome. 

            Now, with news that their powers are finally weakening, and their forest failing, it is time to cash in on one and a half-decade’s worth of research. 

            Unit C-4 is the key to unlocking the next branch of human evolutionary advancement, and at long last, we’ve made it.

            ‘You hear that, Paula?’ I ask the sky. ‘We’ve made it.’

 

The heart of the mountain has been rendered anaemic. The giant machine at its core seems to act like some sort of syringe, and the disease which it injects is spreading. The stunted growth of plant life, the silence of the forest, all of those small signs which I ignored earlier, here I have found their origin.

            The crater is akin to a bombsite. Its earth, as we begin our descent, is slippery with decay. Tree trunks and animal matter squelching beneath our feet: a black oozing quagmire. Nothing grows, everything is dead, and the air reels with a cold, automated hum. 

            The spriteliness which had fuelled my father at the lip of the crater has waned again. The air at this altitude is thin, certainly, and the heat of unbroken sunlight heavy on our necks, but neither can quite explain how deathly he looks. Though I’d rather we stopped, so that I might get a straight answer from him, he insists we keep on, and so I have spent the last kilometre half-carrying him, his arm around my shoulder. 

            If only he hadn’t pushed away Onyongo.

            Once again, my heart aches. If Onyongo could see what I see. If their people knew the extent of the damage rendered to the spirit of their heartland, I fear I cannot imagine how they might react.

            At my side, father’s coughs descend for the umpteenth time into a debilitating fit. We are forced to stop, though I cannot even set him down to rest, for the sucking decay of the earth has risen to our knees, and I might never pull him back out. Clumsily, he produces a handkerchief from his pocket and hacks into it. I am preparing myself to see it come away bloody, like some industrial-era wife observing the onset of consumption in their loved one. But I am not prepared for what I do see. My father’s lungs expel onto mother’s hand-embroidered hanky a blue-black bile. He tries to hide it from me, but I see it, and I see the similarity between it and the decay all around us. 

            He sups from his hydration pack, but this only turns his stomach, and after regurgitating what little water he was able to take, he looks paler and sicklier than ever. 

            Somehow, still he tries to press on. 

            I stop him. Hold him back.

            ‘Papa.’ He grunts. ‘Papa,’ I say, as forcefully as I can. ‘We’re turning back. Whatever this place is, it’s no good for you, you’re sick Papa.’

            Stubborn, he strains to speak.

            ‘Hnn… I’m fine, Pasha… Can’t turn back… Hnn… Too important.’

   ‘What could be so important, Papa? You always push yourself too hard.’ 

   I can tell he isn’t listening; perhaps he can’t even hear me, the hum of the machinery strong now. Painful even. But I suspect he simply doesn’t want to listen. When he tries to pull away from me again and stumbles, I grab his arm, turn him to me. 

   ‘You’ve always pushed yourself too hard.’ 

   I know where this is going, but I can’t stop myself. 

   ‘Whatever this is, is it really worth risking your life? Are you really going to chance leaving me, like… like you left her?’ 

   As the words tumble from me, I feel the dam burst. Years of unprocessed grief spouting through the cracks, their onslaught unstoppable. 

   ‘You left her, Papa. You were never there for her. You weren’t there for her when she needed you most Papa.’ I’m shouting now, and through my tears I can see my father’s face, puce with anger. He bats away my hand and tries to turn back down the hill, but I am stronger than him, and I grab his arm again. ‘You weren’t the one who found her, Papa. You didn’t even read her note. She said she was ashamed of you. She said you failed her! But you’ll neveraccept responsibility, will you?’ My hands shake, my vision lost behind a veil of tears. 

‘It was you, Papa, you drove her–’

Professor Anton Trujillo slaps me hard across the face.

‘Your mother,’ he wheezes, his chest inflating dramatically with each breath. ‘Your mother was the principal architect of this whole fucking project.’ He gestures weakly at the crater around us, at the giant needle protruding form its heart. ‘Your mother designed Unit C-4. The only thing your mother was ashamed of was you, you ungrateful cunt.’ He hacks up another sticky string of black, but has no energy to catch it in his handkerchief. Instead it dangles grotesquely from his lip. ‘I failed her…’ His face contorts a little, as if unsure whether to go on. ‘I failed her… hnn… because I wouldn’t let them test the genome theory on you, our precious first born.’

My cheek still burning from the slap, I’m too enraged to understand. I refuse to ask him what he means.

‘She wanted to make you the shining example of all the Academy could achieve, she wanted you to be the being at the forefront of evolutionary advancement, and I wouldn’t let her.’ My father, his face grey again, seems to be crying.

‘She resented that. She resented me, hnn… and she resented you. She felt ashamed to call herself Director of Research… Hnn… Development, without applying her work to her own offspring.’ He wails, and I notice the red welts on his finger, where he’s rubbed himself raw against his wedding band like an obsessive monk, blistering himself on his prayer beads. ‘She killed herself because I chose you over her

Everything I do, Pasha. Everything I do, I do for your mother. If I could do things over… Hnn… I would have chosen her.’ 

   I’m sobbing now, though still I cannot process this. 

   ‘This,’ my father gestures again to the machine, ‘this was her pride and joy! I accompanied her on our first expedition here.’ He turns his head to face the sky, and says: ‘And I will see our mission through.’

‘Papa… Please, Papa, no.’ My words are choked. ‘You don’t mean… Please Papa.’ I’m speaking on impulse, I can’t think. The humming is loud and I can’t think. ‘Whatever this is, Papa. It’s bad. You can’t… she wouldn’t have…’

   ‘BAD!?’ My father shouts through his rasping lungs. He clutches his temples and squints, his eyes eventually settling just over my shoulder. ‘Are you so stupid, child? Everything we have, we have because of machines like this. We harnessed flight from the Biānfú, we learned how to pressurise our submersibles by studying those wretched Tundric fucks the Hǎiniú. We developed sonar from the Kuàngwù, a race of useless amphibians too wrapped up in their art to detect the death beneath their pads. Law be damned. How do you think we discovered radio, eh?’

I’m really weeping, now, my brain a throbbing soup of horror, humming, and a sluggish realisation. I shake my head.

‘Oh, come on,’ chastises Professor Trujillo, ‘must you be so wilfully blind?’ He tugs at his ears, a twisted look on his face, and my mind is filled with a picture of Onyongo, as powerful and lithe as a jaguar, ascending the xia xia trees to listen for the mountain’s song.

My face must reflect my dawning understanding, for my father relaxes his posture a little.

‘You can’t believe,’ continued my father, ‘how I had to keep from laughing, to hear your feral husband speak of building his own radio. The stupidity of these species! Truly it knows no bounds.’ He spits blackness to the mire, sucking at our legs. 

The heat of the sun is beginning to relent, and already back in the direction we came from the upper rim of the crater is turned to shadow. Still, sweat mingles with my tears, stings my eyes.

‘Pasha,’ my father sees my mind wondering, pulls it back, his face suddenly serious again. ‘These beasts, they have no concept of their power. They horde it, but to what end? To differentiate the sound of a fallen xia xia fruit from an acacian nut? In just a decade of study we understood enough of their biology to replicate it in radio, to receive and transmit messages using the same frequencies their oversized ears can only detect. Now, this machine has harvested all the materiel we need to replicate it in our genes. Can you imagine? This is your mother’s life’s work. Right here! And we can help bring it to conclusion. You and me! Pasha! Together we can bring human evolution to its fullest potential. This is evolution manifest. This is survival of the fittest in action.’ Anton Trujillo breaks into a fit of cancerous coughs.

   ‘Will you do it? Will you take my hand?’

            But before my father can hear my answer, the humming of the giant drill suddenly ceases. The satellite dish, which had been swivelling relentlessly since I’d set eyes on it, creaks, and then it too stops, and from the base of the crater comes a blood-curdling cry.

 

I’m half-dead by the time I reach Unit C-4. The pull of the oily muck our machine’s turned the jungle into has sapped the last of my strength, and though the hum is gone and silence reigns, my head still feels split apart. That homey, clinical smell which scorched my nostrils on the mountainside is here, at the bottom of the crater, indescribably powerful. It seems to crawl over everything in a dense mist, though I cannot be sure that I’m actually seeing this, my senses are so muddled.

            Unit C-4 should not have stopped like that. It has not stopped operating – mining the jungle, collecting biological samples, studying its inhabitants, broadcasting us the results – for fifteen years. Why should it stop now? 

            Pasha, of course, ran on ahead of me. After our screaming match, it was no great surprise. I try not to think of what will happen if she continues contradicting the Academy. I try not to think of what the Academy will be forced to do.

            Reaching the first of the giant, arachnid, metal legs, I think I can hear conversation. But then, I can hear the valves of my heart opening and closing like the flapping of loose leather sandals. And I can see almost nothing for the fog, for the shadowy depths of the crater now that the sun has sank; nothing for the tight pulsing circles of black which haunt and constrict my vision, for the stars which wheel across what little picture is relayed to my brain.

            I move closer, each step tearing at my calves as if my boots are lined with rusted nails. The stinking swamp mud is up to my crotch.

            I’m in sight of the ladder now, which extends from the ground to a platform around the base of the drill, and though I can see no-one, I am certain now of the voices. Familiar voices, too. 

            At the foot of the steps, I begin achingly to remove myself from the mire. Two steps, three steps, four, each a bare-knuckle duel with nature. When finally I am free of the mud I cannot help but collapse, wearier than I have ever felt.

            Get up, Anton, you must get up. It is not my own voice I hear. You must go on. That voice; soothing me, scolding me, rending my heart asunder.

            Whimpering with pain, I pull myself upright on the platform’s handrails. The voices are close now, and unmistakable. How stupid could I have been, to think the brute had returned home? How could I not see his betrayal? And my daughter… I realise only now that I had known of hers for a long time.

            You don’t have the heart for this, Anton. It’s her voice again – only a memory, but I have to stop myself from crying out. 

            She’s not yours to give! I hear myself plead, in a migraine-bright hospital ward a lifetime ago. And I smell the smell of that ward, replicated here in this crater.

            Through the folds of time comes my wife’s response, hissed through the gritted teeth of converging contractions. 

            Neither is she yours, Anton.

            Suddenly, I hear that frightful yell again, the same which preceded the halting of the machine. It is pained and full of sorrow, yet there is a lyricalness to it also; a lilting, singsong quality to it, and I am reminded of the flippered Hǎiniú, communicating underwater, and of the Kuàngwù, wailing in the night. 

            This cry, however, is breath-takingly loud. Loud as if… amplified. It echoes through the tower, the sound crackling over the emergency broadcast system of Unit C-4.

            ‘No!’ I roar. For I have heard this cry before, back when we first surveyed the area for landscaping, when the Cóng spy discovered our plans. There were more of us then, though: enough to defend ourselves, to stop the word spreading. And back then, the cry had carried only as far as one voice could send it. 

            ‘Pasha! Don’t let… Stop him, Pasha!’

 

Onyongo was already half-way to rerouting the machine when I arrived, my father still a hundred yards up the hill, and stuck fast in the mud. 

            Somehow, I think I knew that I was going to find Onyongo here. In more than just the physical sense. I feel a connection with them, and when I heard the machine stop humming, I think I just knew. I asked myself what I’d have done, if my home in Greater Nørdvig – though already one great machine-like city – had been destroyed like this. Certainly, I would not have turned my back on it. Like Onyongo, I’d have sought out the source of the disease.

            But they were not glad to see me. Unsurprised, maybe, but not glad. 

            Wordlessly, I approached, and soon saw what it was they were attempting. A simple rerouting of whatever auditory systems the machine had, ready to be broadcast over just like a radio tower. Except Onyongo had been missing one crucial element – there was no transducer built into the machine: no way to turn their voice into soundwaves for the tower to transmit. 

            Of course, I could not know what they wished to broadcast, nor what would happen when they did, but it hardly mattered anymore. My father… no, not just him. My mother and my father, I had learned, were responsible for all of this. For the utter destruction of the mountain’s core, and for all that came with that: the loss of its song, the weakening of the Cóngs, the rotting of the fruit, the poisoning of the water. My parents were responsible, and more than that, they were proud. Whatever their justifications, whatever their studies, their teachings, whatever they had done before now – which could not be stopped, which had already torn whole species to shreds for the benefit of Homo sapiens – all that mattered to me in that moment was that it should not happen again here, to the Cónglín yōulíng, nor to the mountain.

            And so, gently I sidle up to Onyongo, and though they grunt harshly at me, I persist, holding out my walkie-talkie – the same I had carried on expeditions with my father since I was a child. 

            I try not to think about all I must have ignored, been blind to through all those years.

            When Onyongo cottons-on to my intentions, they bow slightly and accept my gift. Then, pulling the case off the carbon fibre comms device as if it were a nutshell, they join its wiring to that of the machine. 

            Onyongo rears up onto their two back feet, the paleness of their skin a living moon in the dusk of evening; and backed by the light of early stars reflecting off cold metal, they hold down the transmission panel of the transducer and let loose their primal song. Across the wretched, barren wasteland of the mountain’s core, it carries, echoes, and returns, layering into one perfect choral note, in which I hear all of the sorrow a heart can hear, and more anger even than that.

            Onyongo lets the sound travel and dissipate, before calling out again. But before their call can build to its funereal crescendo, they are stopped suddenly short.

            From around the corner of the walkway, I hear my father cry a warning.

            ‘Pasha! Don’t let… Stop him, Pasha!’

            He emerges a second later into the wavering half-light, the very picture of death, and I am forced to watch helplessly as the great Professor Anton Trujillo raises his revolver, glinting wicked in the moonlight; cocks it, and fires.

            The ring of the shot meets the returning echoes of Onyongo’s song. The sound warps, and slips away into the night. A long minute passes before the mountain settles once more into uneasy quietude.

            Beside me, the massive, muscular body of my friend and guide Onyongo slumps. Their blood, as vivid and verdant green as a spring sapling, glugs from a hole in their chest, and spills across the gangway to fall dripping through the mesh-patterned steel. Wordlessly, I fall by Onyongo’s side. I take their head in my lap, those big, majestic ears now limp and lifeless. Slowly, their eyes fix mine, and I can see their spirit waning, I can actually see it waning: the magic of those lustrous pupils growing dull.

            Some part of me rarely indulged is tugged at. I think I might vomit, but on my lips taste tears, not bile. I realise I am wailing. 

            ‘Papa! Papa why!?’

            My father dead-eyes me, his pistol still smoking in the thickening night, its tentacle whisps of gunpowder sinking toward the fog of the decayed jungle floor. His face is sheet white, and I am unsure he has heard me. Nor am I sure that he sees me, or even the death he has brought to my friend, for the very last of his dwindling energies are focused elsewhere entirely. And as I watch his face – wondering if it can possibly be the same face which peered down at me in my cot as a babe, which congratulated me on the day of my graduation – I see him strain his ears – so small, so inadequate – trying desperately to detect something amidst the silence. As I watch him, his eyes shine stark with terror.

            Onyongo hears it first, of course. They smile then, and somehow I know their call has been answered.

            Then, from the depths of the jungle which rings this mountain, up and over the lip of the crater and spilling down towards us, comes a low murmur. Slowly, it rises, keeping time with the steady beat of a thousand bared chests. As I listen, it becomes a glorious, riotous crescendo of whoops and shrieks, of triumphant hoots and hungry snarls. 

            Onyongo’s muscles relax a little, and I hear my father whimper.

            ‘Ochuks,’ he says. 

            I look at him then, and in the place of the man I’d once known – soldier of science, pioneer of intellect and understanding, mountain-man – is a scared little boy, cowering against the railings of his precious instrument. 

            ‘Ochuks,’ he says again, ‘ochuks, ochuks… Law be damned, we’re too late. It’s too late.’ He laughs nervously, fumbling with and dropping brass-plated bullets through shaking fingers. ‘Too late.’ He turns to me. ‘Too late, girl! Too late! TOO LATE!’

            And he is right.

            From over the crest of the mountain comes an army of the biggest animals I have ever seen. 

            They move like Onyongo did, graceful and muscular on all fours, their front legs longer than at the back, with shoulders massive and bulging. But that’s where any similarities to my friend Onyongo stop. The animals’ heads are as big as boulders, matted all over with a thick brown fur, through which protrudes two sets of horns: an upper pair pointed outward, straight as daggers, and a lower pair, curved like hooks. 

            As they run, they sing their battle cry, unhinging their jaws to reveal in the rising starlight row upon row upon row of serrated teeth. As they run, somehow maintaining their tremendous speed despite the mud, the ground beneath us trembles. And as they grow close, I see their hooved feet stomp the ground, each one as big as my pelvis. 

            The first of the ochuks reaches the base of the machine. I hear another shot ring out, and cough, as the smoke from my father’s revolver blows through me. Twice more he fires, each shot finding its mark in the thick, woolly skull of the nearest animal.

            But if the ochuk even notices, it does not show it. It rears, as I had seen Onyongo do, and from its terrible mouth comes a bellow of rage. Anton Trujillo unleashes a fourth shot into the animal’s chest, and now other ochuks have reached the machine, to join their captain in his roar. My father fires once more, before his pistol clicks, clicks, clicks. The chamber empty.

            ‘No. No, no, no, no, no…’ he murmurs, frantically padding at his jacket. But too late.

            Though bullet-ridden, the leader of the ochuks begins ascending the steps to the walkway, its movements curiously easy, manoeuvring its monolithic frame as if it weighed nothing. 

            I watch on, filled with something more complex than horror: numb and yet also relieved, also intrigued, also ashamed.

            My father turns onto his stomach and begins crawling toward me and the dying Cóng, mouthing garbled apologies. Suddenly, a great shadow falls on him. The ochuk captain has reached the walkway, and now it raises itself up on hind legs, blocking out the light of the new moon so that only its silhouette can be seen – perhaps twelve feet tall and comprising some four-thousand pounds of crude muscle. 

            With a thunderous cry, the animal hammers the whole of its strength down upon my father, its front two hooves landing on the backs of his knees, his legs severing instantly in two. 

            My father’s scream tears octaves through his vocal chords, eventually and quite suddenly drowned in the thick gurgle of black blood and bile spilling from his mouth. 

            I feel nothing, and I cannot look away. 

            The ochuk, noticeably woozy now from the gunfire, bends its head low and slides its two massive, gleaming lower-horns under what remains of my father’s scrawny frame. The last I ever see of my father is a bundle of gory cloth, illuminated momentarily against the night sky, as he is tossed through the air by the immense ochuk, who moves as easily as if he were clearing his path free of brush. 

            Somewhere amidst the roaring waves of the ochuks’ call, I hear Anton Trujillo’s body hit the ground with a thud. From the corner of my eye, I see the animal hordes converge.

            My father’s killer, this great bull or cow or chief of the ochuks, however, is not yet satisfied. Beginning to wobble on its haunches, it staggers towards me. Inches from me, I see the fire in its eyes, blazing only fiercer for the injuries inflicted on it, and in those eyes I see death.

            As the thing rears up once more, a hot green blood slicking its fur to an estuary of lost life, mentally I make peace with it. On me still clings the mud of the quagmire, the moulded remains of this being’s destroyed home, for which I – me, my father, my mother, my people – am responsible. Here I lie – guilty, on the frigid metal of the machine designed to take everything from this creature, from all those creatures whose spiritual home we had made our playground. 

            The ochuk cries aloud. 

            I close my eyes, terrified, yet accepting, and wait.

            

Wait for… nothing. 

            Nothing happens. 

            After what seems an age, I open my eyes again, and the ochuk is gone. I catch only the brief flash of his tail as he descended the steps from the walkway. In the moonlight, a thin-skinned hand is raised in front of me, its three fingers held together in a command I can only guess the meaning of. 

            Onyongo, their head lifted momentarily from my lap to watch the ochuk leave, collapses once more, their hand falling heavy to the walkway. 

            Their head is heavy in my hands, and as I hold their gaze, I realised I am still crying, for their cheeks grow wet with my tears. 

            Slowly, Onyongo turns an ear to the metal of the giant machine. They listen, and as they do they run their fingers across its surface.

            ‘My people, they say…’ their words as fragile as a remembered kiss. ‘They say that Spirit moves through all things. But… hnn… they were wrong. There is no spirit in this thing, no song. It is quiet. Cold. No spirit. No spirit…’ Onyongo’s ear goes limp. Their eyes close, their voice becomes a whisper of wind in the treetops. 

            ‘Do you… hnn… do you understand, Pasha? No spirit…’

            But before I can answer Onyongo, my friend breathes their last, and from the heart of the mountain I hear a sombre song.

 

It’s been four years to the day since that night on the mountain. 

            Unit C-4 was dismantled by the ochuks, though they let me leave before I came to any harm. I tried, of course, to take Onyongo with me. I thought that if I could at least bring them home, I might atone for some of the damage my kind had wrought. The ochuks would not let me, though. Back then, I’d been angry. But I think now I understand, that Onyongo was already home.

            The mountain is slowly recovering, and this year the first few flowers and saplings have returned to the crater. I like to think that in them will be some of the pride and strength and ferocious beauty of Onyongo and all the other lives which were claimed by the machine.

            Upon my return to Greater Nørdvig, I worked to dismantle what my father and mother had helped build. I started by approaching some journalists I knew, and together we exposed the genocides conducted by the Zemblan Academy. We showed the public what they had done to the people of the Cóng, and we dug deeper. We discovered how the amphibious Kuàngwù were tortured and experimented on, before being exterminated; how the wings of the nocturnal Biānfú, living in the cavernous pueblan cenotes, had been pulled from their still breathing bodies in the name of scientific discovery; or of how as my father and I had trekked the mountainous regions of the Southern Islands, the icecaps which were home to the aquatic Hǎiniú were being melted by the machine drilled into the seabed. We exposed the experimental genome programme, and the many thousands of children who were already the test subjects of it (as well as the many more thousands of parents who had signed up for it).

            The Zemblan Academy collapsed under public outrage. Its schools were stripped of their funding, and several members of the R&D Department – which once my mother had directed – were given intensive labour sentences, sent to help the species they’d strived to destroy rebuild.

            Still, the outrage didn’t last long. Not once people started realising that their radios, aerocopters, picture-boxes, sonar and more had all been made possible thanks to the work of Zembla’s Academy of Inter-Species Archaeology.

            Even now, as I write from my new home on the coastal mountainside of the Cóng’s heartland, there are those in our world who are beginning to spout that same, recognisable old vitriol, regarding a hierarchy of the species. 

            They do not see the scars on the mountainside, nor the latest generation of Cónglín yōulíng, many of which were born deformed or paralyzed, their parents poisoned by forage and river water tasting metallic and acrid. They do not hear the mournful whale song of my friend Onyongo, underscoring my nightmares. They can never remember the feel of the mud, sucking at their thighs, comprised of a million lost lives: plants and animals, killed and consumed by that most banal of butchers: the human machine.

            They cannot see the look in Onyongo’s fading eyes, who died too soon to hear my answer to their question. 

            And my answer? I think at long, long last, I do understand. I understand that whilst they could hear no spirit in the empty metal of that gruesome machine, still Spirit moves through all things, and more wisdom comes from the earth, than ever could from the mouth of a man.

-

Thank you for listening to Stories from the Hearth. With today's story, I wanted to try and write something that would sit between my two favourite genres: science fiction and fantasy. I was also inspired by the System of a Down song Science, and so wanted to also explore the theme which that song explores, namely: the irony surrounding our proud scientific engagements with the world around us, predicated on a  complete disregard for the spiritual connection to the earth which thousands of generations of our ancestors felt deeply.  Now, I'm an atheist. But even I think there's something in that.

If you liked what you heard, please do subscribe, and share this podcast with friends, family, and anyone you know who could use just a half-hour’s respite from the chaotic energies of the everyday. You can also now rate podcasts on Spotify, so if you’re listening to it there, why not drop us some stars. If you wish to support the podcast, please head to my Patreon by hitting the link in the description. Similarly, you can check out the podcast’s Instagram, Twitter, website and email address via the links below. Story episodes are released on the last Sunday of every month. Additional episodes in The Wandering Bard historical mini-series will pop up from time to time. Until next we meet around the fire, I’ve been Calum Bannerman, and you’ve been listening to Stories From The Hearth.