Prelude III | Starbuilders

After arriving back at the village, Nothaar and Baubu retired to the older man's hut. There, Baubu's assistants had kept the fires burning while they were away; thus, it was actually quite comfortable inside. Nothaar was amazed at the ingenuity that went into insulating the building to keep so much heat in the interior while letting all the smoke out. Sweating from their vigorous walk, Nothaar was quick to shed his warm layers. Still, the cold felt like it had seeped as deep as his organs and was stubbornly refusing to allow his internal body temperature to return to its expected normal level.

In order to banish Nothaar's chilly core, Baubu advised a rather straightforward solution: building an inner-fire. As the two seated themselves upon stuffed cushions on the floor, one of Baubu's aides brought over bowls filled with a fish broth that had been heated in a cauldron hanging above the nearby fire. Much like in Nothaar's homestead, Baubu's people also preserved foodstuffs by smoking, pickling, and other such methods in order to make sure they had enough to eat through the winter season and into the spring before fresh options became readily available. Due to this, the contents of the dish were mostly pureed such that their previous forms were no longer obvious. Still, the scent was distinct enough that Nothaar had no doubt as to their origins.

When Nothaar took the provided wooden spoon towards his mouth, Baubu warned, "Be careful with how quickly you eat it. It's impossible to tell until afterwards, but some batches may not be digestible for you."

Nothaar gave a knowing gesture, having experienced such situations many times before himself. "Over my long journey," Nothaar elaborated, "this issue with some food becoming disagreeable seems to be happening at a higher rate. I wish I'd thought to document it at the beginning of my quest, but it took many cycles of the seasons before I even recognized the pattern. At first, I thought it was a condition unique to the southern lands, but every Keeper has assured me that this isn't how it was in the past."

"Therefore," Baubu interjected, "it was not just poor meals that spurred you to leave your home village?"

Laughing as he took his first spoonful, Nothaar explained, "No, no; I quite liked the cooking they did where I came from. We have some aromatic spices that I have not come across since I entered and crossed the wastelands. Sadly, my supply ran out long ago, otherwise I would offer you some to zest up your own serving of soup."

"Oh? Do you find the meal bland?" Baubu teased.

Although Nothaar actually did feel that way, in deference to his generous host, he graciously expressed that it was not a significant concern to him before declaring, "Honestly, I prefer to experience a locale as it customarily is without contaminating it with my preferences."

Baubu gave him a thoughtful look before responding, "But you're the one who just told me that you want to spread the Knowledge with no restrictions to all the laypeople. Is that not the definition of 'contamination'?"

"I doubt most average folk would understand the wisdom we could share, anyway," Nothaar asserted with some bitterness. "Or would care to know to begin with."

Quickly picking up on Nothaar's tone, Baubu assuaged, "I know how you feel. It can be difficult being… different… from the rest of the people around you. Feeling the drive to take up our calling of maintaining and building upon the Knowledge makes people like us stand out, and not always in a beneficial way. Even some of my own kin have difficulty seeing the value in what we do. Not all of them, mind you, but their opinion is shared in one way or another by the vast majority of people who reside here. 'Is it safety, shelter, or sustenance? No? Then we don't have a moment to even consider it.'"

"It's as if I've had that exact same conversation hundreds of times before!" Nothaar exclaimed. "While at my home, I quickly noticed the Sky Shift, as well as the slight fuzziness that now pervades the sun and the moon. I tried to convince the others in my village to just look up and confirm it for themselves with their own eyes, at least to verify that I was not the only one seeing it. After all, it's not uncommon for people in our profession to lose their wits and start to see the imaginary as real. Without corroboration, I knew that I couldn't trust my potentially biased sight and conclusions."

"And did they do as you asked?" Baubu inquired.

"Not many, no," Nothaar confirmed. "It took quite a while to get others to start to notice these things; and I could only convince a handful of them to assist me, at that. Yet even among that group, they did not think it was particularly important or worth pursuing. 'What does the position of the stars have to do with me?' they would ask. Another would say, 'Who cares if some wandering stars have left and new ones have arrived to replace them? Perhaps they've finally gone off to wherever it was they were going while the new ones appeared simultaneously?'"

"An intriguing proposition," Baubu thoughtfully pondered. "Sometimes the unschooled can be the most insightful, being so unencumbered by the Knowledge."

"I ruminated on that very idea for several summers," Nothaar confessed. "As you say, it certainly seemed reasonable and plausible. We don't know where the stars are going on their treks, especially the wandering ones. There was a certain logic to it with some stars exiting and new ones arriving. Still, it bothered me that all the stars left together at once, literally overnight, after their exact locations and paths had been documented over many Keepers' lifetimes. In my village, each successive generation of Keeper has been even more fastidious than the prior at recordkeeping. While it's not much by the standards of some of our ilk, there were still hundreds of drawings of the movements of the stars and other observations that I had access to that the general residents did not. The more I thought about it, the more this schism seemed to be a complete inflection point unlike any other.

"This became especially clear once the post-Sky Shift newborns started to appear in the world as changed beings, and later when they began speaking the Language of Children. I thought the two events must have been connected, but I could not confirm it until a traveling trader - Vedoori was his name, I believe - emerged and set up shop for a season. I obsessively interrogated him and he became quite annoyed with me. Vedoori didn't notice things the way people like us do; he didn't detect the Sky Shift at all. Still, I was grateful for the one thing he could confirm for me: he said that progenies like the ones we were birthing at my village were also being born everywhere he had been, and that they were speaking a babble nobody understood. That was all the evidence I needed to substantiate that there was something more going on than just what we could see in front of us, and I resolved to head out the following spring. I realized that I actually had a dearth of information, and I needed to leave in order to fill in the gaps so as to get real answers."

Baubu requested that Nothaar confirm that the spring he left was his twentieth one. Once he had done so, Baubu asked, "A man of your age going on a quest like this; did you not have a family already?"

Exposing his embarrassment, Nothaar explained, "As a person who stood apart as I did, I could not woo any of the women in my hometown. If I may be frank, I'm quite jealous with how Keepers seem to be generally more revered and taken care of here in the deep south. I cannot emphasize enough that it's not that way up north. As a consequence of this, my occupation did not provide me with any excess wealth so that I might potentially purchase a mate instead of convincing one to join me willingly."

"You poor man…" Baubu attempted.

"It's fine," Nothaar cut him off. "I didn't really feel a burning desire for the opposite sex, anyway."

"Ah, I see how it is," Baubu observed. "You are one of those men with the soul of a woman within you, then."

"It's not really that," Nothaar demurred. "An attraction to other men is not what I felt, either, though I have nothing against it and have met many such individuals on my journey. I liked these people well enough, but I wasn't sexually drawn to them. Besides, I had other things I was much more interested in. Men, women, family - none of those really hold my interest as much as learning all there is to know about this world of ours.

"For instance, as I was traveling village-to-village, I found that the percentage of irregularities of all kinds was the same anywhere I went. While some local residents believed that having traits like containing the soul of the opposite sex was an abomination that needed to be purged, others thought that these people were unique and special and needed to be cultivated and worshipped to appease the gods. But no matter how they viewed the condition, the number of such individuals as a ratio to the total population was always relatively the same. In other words, this characteristic appears to be a naturally occurring phenomenon."

"And you believe this theory is relevant to our current predicament?" Baubu queried.

"Yes," Nothaar readily agreed. "With what we've seen thus far since the Sky Shift, everyone must reset their expectations and attitudes so that we can deal with what's happening with the younglings. Unfortunately, history has already shown that we cannot expect the denizens of our world to react so logically. I have seen places where they eradicated all the newborns in their quest to purify themselves. Elsewhere, I came across the shells of what once were thriving settlements. From the few survivors I met, it sounded like they devolved into civil war and left nothing but destruction and dead bodies in their wake. Sadly, these types of reactions are not unexpected. Such is the way of small-minded people who fear what they do not understand… and do not want to understand."

Giving a sound signifying defeated agreement, Baubu propositioned, "As a man many seasons your senior, I believe you should reconsider your stance on forsaking a family of your own, or even just seeking out pleasures of the flesh. There is far more to life than only building upon the Knowledge! For instance, we have many eligible women here, several of whom would be happy to have someone for a mate who is not a fisherman. Besides, I'm not sure how many seasons I have left, and could use an official Keeper apprentice to take over for me permanently."

"Baubu, I am flattered, humbled, and honored by such an offer…" Nothaar initiated.

"However…" Baubu started for him.

"However," Nothaar continued without pausing, "my work is not yet complete and my journey is far from at its conclusion. I want to compile all of my findings into a collected opus, written both in my native tongue and the Language of Children. Picture an open book with pages on each side. The way I imagine it is that on the left will be the lexes that any Keeper and some learned people would be able to read and recognize, and then on the right I could use the Script of Children - or, at least as well as I can write it based upon my own comprehension and ability to determine the purpose behind these glyphs."

"You never cease to amaze me!" Baubu cheered. "You've even learned what their squiggles mean?"

"Sort of," Nothaar granted. "At least, I know it decently enough that I can create a phonetic translation table. This is information that's not just invaluable right now, but will be crucial in the future. As such, I see it as my duty to retrace my steps and spend time in each village translating my tome into their own distinctive tongue and script. That way, every Keeper will have access to the same reference document, just one that's been custom tailored for their audience."

"I see how it is," Babu commented. "You see this work of yours as some type guide to bridge communications across the generations."

"More than that," Nothaar contended. "We can't just focus on our problems in the here-and-now and how we're going to deal with them. Don't get me wrong; they're critically important to address, too. But if we project out into the far future, we might find that the Language and Script of Children could supplant all of our vernaculars. Given that, these books may end up being the last archive of who our people used to be."

"This is quite a task and burden you've given yourself," Baubu remarked. "How long do you believe such an undertaking will take?"

"If I were to estimate," Nothaar postulated, "I would imagine that it'd take the same amount of time: another fifteen springs."

"My word," Baubu punctuated. "By the time you return to your home village, you'll have seen at least fifty full cycles of the seasons!"

"True enough," Nothaar certified. "Although I'd like to believe I have tens of springs more beyond that like you, it would be quite unusual. Because of that, my return should give me enough time to train my own successor and maintain the unbroken line of the Knowledge."

"A mighty obligation indeed," Baubu acknowledged, "especially since you've mentioned that you weren't particularly appreciated up there. Although I've been a bit flippant about the naysayers I've dealt with in this village, from what you've described there is downright hostility towards Keepers where you're from, and the north in general. As you've plainly witnessed, here, the condition is fairly the opposite. Or to put it more bluntly: we have much to offer a person like you."

"I have noticed," Nothaar agreed, "and it is quite tempting. But I also recognize that among all these pages and helpers that there must be someone you're already considering for your replacement. You don't strike me as someone who leaves anything to chance, so you must be shaping one of them into your planned successor."

"While your presumption has a certain amount of truth to it," Baubu confessed, "none have demonstrated to me that they have the capacity and skillset comparable to what you have shown in just a few short days: insight. As I said before, this is the primary critical skill that will be necessary to lead us during this unprecedented age and transition into whatever the future may bring."

"If I promise that I'll think about it," Nothaar beseeched, "that I will genuinely consider your offer, will you stop pestering me about it?"

When Baubu did not give any immediate response, Nothaar quickly added, "Besides, I'm not planning to go anywhere anytime soon. If possible, I would like to peaceably spend the winter here writing my composition and then translating a copy into your own language and script. I'm confident this will take the rest of the season and then some, so you can guarantee I'll have plenty of time to contemplate your proposition before I'd need to set out in the spring. Would this compromise be acceptable to you?"

With one of his roguish expressions spreading across his face, Baubu declared, "I don't mind at all… but don't be surprised if one night a granddaughter of mine crawls under your blankets and asks you to help keep her warm."

The above piece is an excerpt from the speculative hard science fiction novel Starbuilders by J.P. Prag, available at booksellers worldwide. Learn more about the author at www.jpprag.com.

Twenty years ago, the stars above Nothaar Akii's head suddenly changed.

Christening it the Sky Shift, Nothaar found that this event was merely the harbinger of a devastating metamorphosis that was about to befall his world. More than anything, though, it impacted the children. Newborns came out of the womb with strange physical features, far different than anything seen before. As they grew up, the youths intuitively spoke a tongue that no one else understood. After learning these conditions were not isolated to his far northern village, Nothaar set out on a long journey of discovery, taking him all the way to the southernmost tip of the land.

With his expedition seemingly completed, Nothaar decided to retrace his steps and share his discoveries with everyone he had encountered along the way. However, those plans were quickly waylaid when he chanced upon a gift that had come crashing down from the heavens. Expecting just to find a rock filled with rare and valuable resources, he instead met Syraaq Sec and Ifuwukoogeeq. The mysterious duo not only spoke the Language of Children fluently, but also possessed knowledge far beyond Nothaar's comprehension.

And then they declared Nothaar was the key to unraveling a great injustice, one that had been perpetrated upon his people and many others by the Starbuilders.

Starbuilders is a work of mixed fiction and nonfiction elements. With the fiction elements, any names, characters, places, events, and incidents that bear any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental. For the nonfiction elements, no names have been changed, no characters invented, no events fabricated except for hypothetical situations.