Note to readers: “2200 Blues” is a novel in progress, and each chapter is an early draft in its unfolding journey. Your thoughts and reactions are invaluable, guiding its evolution and refinement
“If you look, you see mountains.”
Large looming structures stood out in the distance, shadowed but shimmering with a crystalline reflection. Their tips were glowing lines, snaking across their edges and protrusions in reflected starlight. Below, snaking around the lower halves of their bodies, were pools of orange fog, sinking to the depths below like clouds shrouding the glaciers.
Nickel had strayed far from the path he thought he’d find himself on eventually, far from the confines of the student account his hovercraft was running on.
“Are those mountains?” Nickel asked, turning to face the husky-voiced Thraíha, only to find him gone, having blended into the pack of Thraíha leading themselves back into the pulley platform they’d traveled.
Nickel turned, looking for Farrul, finding him missing amongst the Thraíha stationed around the roof. Thin wisps of light arose from the flat, rusty turrets encircling the roof.
Starlight gleamed like watchful eyes, pouring an awareness onto Nickel like none he’d ever felt before. He felt watched, a rawness like he’d never felt before under the starlight. Countless stars dotted the sky, tremors of light stilled by the cosmos. They appeared like thousands of hovercrafts, frozen by time.
The orange fog was a lake, slowly swirling around these mountains of ice looming in the distance under a cosmic sea of suns Nickel knew he couldn’t reach. The days of spaceflight and voyages to the stars and neighboring planets were long gone.
Nickel’s ancestors, humans across time, had turned Earth into an unknowable alien planet. They created vistas and frontiers of pollution and escapism, from the orange fog to the hovercrafts of the Ether.
The Past World.
Nickel turned around, looking to the Thraíha grouped together in a broken line behind him. They wore multicolored necklaces of kupernacle leaves, chanting.
There were other Thraíha tending to the wisps of light—flames emergent from candles that they carried and pushed across the floor.
“We joined the Huntsman tonight,
Seeking light and the strength of might,
Show us the constellations Of our present,
hiding From our shallow selves.”
The chanting continued, turning into mumblings of the Thraíha language that were incoherent to Nickel. These people lived outside of the Ether and had been living so for generations. They were healthier, stronger than many Nickel had known to live in the Ether, including himself.
Their lives were more meaningful in the tapestry of their religion and mythology. Yet, several of them wanted to attend to Hedonim.
“The wretched soul catcher of the Past World!” Nickel remembered the words of Akela and the priests he’d seen. It was a repressed dream. A dream he hadn’t had since arriving at the Thraíha encampment, yet his presence brought the very visions he’d had to the Thraíha.
Quest to Hedonim.
What was Hedonim except for a vestige of the Past World, the ocean of orange fog far below, and the Ether that Nickel now found himself free of?
He’d found refuge within the Thraíha, refuge from the numbing reality of the Ether. Now, many of them wanted to return to the Ether with Nickel.
“I thought they were going to ask us to do something for them.”
Nickel whirled around to see Farrul behind him, dark hair rolling over his forehead in the wind. His eyes were pale and gleaming over the shadows that stretched down his face.
“I think they’re doing this more for them than us,” Nickel said, nodding towards the line of Thraíha who were kneeling, whispering with eyes closed, bringing closed palms from their chest to their chins, back and forth.
“Bringing us here?” said Farrul.
“And living,” Nickel muttered.
“Living?” rasped Farrul, clearing his throat.
“They live for themselves, not for a token,” Nickel said.
Farrul squinted his eyes.
“I’d rather look for a token if it meant I wouldn’t die in five years,” Farrul said.
Nickel frowned.
“That’s how long they live?” Nickel asked.
“That’s how long they have to live,” Farrul said.
“What—”
“When I found Steve,” Farrul cleared his throat, “or when he found me… He told me that the expedition craft he sailed was searching for the meridian where the storm breaks.”
“Breaks?” Nickel’s frown deepened.
“When it breaks glaciers.”
Nickel turned around, studying the shapes of the looming structures gleaming with starlight. The gleaming light looked brighter, shinier than what he’d expect of a large mountain. Not just around the top, either. They formed below, fainter and smaller, yet still present, losing color to the omniscient orange, joining its dull darkness.
“Those aren’t mountains, are they?” Nickel asked, a foreboding feeling rising over the back of his scalp. He sniffed the air over the rusty turret flat he leaned over. The flat-scented air of their high elevation invaded his nostrils. It still held a sliver of humidity, a chill feeling of dampness that coated the insides of his nostrils.
“No,” Farrul said, “they’re glaciers… and they’re going to break in five years.”
Nickel turned around to Farrul, his eyes and mouth wide with fear.
“Five years?” Nickel exclaimed. “Steve never told me that.”
“Steve’s mad,” Farrul said. “He can’t even tell his left foot from his right.”
Nickel just looked at Farrul in disbelief.
“I told you this, Nickel,” Farrul said, sighing. “That’s why we said we could jump ship, drop him off somewhere… but here we are… and you don’t have a hovercraft anymore.”
The import of his words sank into Nickel’s mind, conveying the distrust and accusation leveled by Farrul’s words. Nickel found himself struggling to process his actions, finding himself struggling to find a mediated response.
“You don’t care about the Thraíha,” Nickel said, nodding.
“I want to—”
“Or Steve,” Nickel said, raising his voice. The feeling of isolation that he thought he could leave behind on his hovercraft returned, slowly creeping down from his chest to the pit of his stomach. Yet, he didn’t want to lose it.
“What do you care about, Farrul?”
Farrul’s face became stony, resolving to a grim expression.
“Fall in!” called a Thraíha man. “Fall in, fall in.”
Nickel rushed past Farrul, eager to leave the conversation behind.
“We prayed, now we fall back,” called one of the Thraíha.
The Thraíha began to glow red. The light of the sky grew behind Nickel, crawling the edges of his fur sleeves. Turning around, the burgeoning sunrise beckoned to him.
It was a warm orange ball of light cascading over the glaciers, the yellow fire shimmering over the mountains of ice like rippling waves in an ocean.
A churning grinding of metal echoed across the space from the far left, reaching far around the temple. As the growing sunlight dipped over the horizon, it touched a giant sphere of dilating metal shapes shifting over a silvery surface of antennae and metal arrays, pockmarked by netted grids and flashing lights.
A gasp rippled through the Thraíha.
“Omens of the Past World!” called the deep-throated Thraíha leader.
The young Thraíha man who had brought Nickel and Farrul up the rock climb staggered out of the amassed Thraíha, the ends of his robes whipping past his legs.
“Did you bring that beast here?” he called, pointing at Nickel and Farrul.
“No!” Nickel shouted. He hadn’t called anything here. That machine—he took a better look at it, leaning to the side to look at the machine, the first real one he’d seen in a long time—since leaving the hovercraft.
“You brought the spirits here!” the young Thraíha rasped.
“We wouldn’t even know how to!” exclaimed Farrul.
“I don’t know how to control probes!” Nickel said.
“Probes!”
“Probes.”
“Probes.”
The Thraíha repeated the word, speaking it like they were testing it for the first time, trying to make sense of it, like a foreign incantation.
Just when it seemed we were getting along.
“He speaks truth!” called the husky-voiced Thraíha. The rest of the Thraíha quieted. The man knew him, he seemed to know Nickel from a previous lifetime, understanding more of his perspective than the others of the Thraíha. He walked around the huddled mass, the young man watching him with a craned neck. The husky-voiced Thraíha walked around and put his hand on the youth’s shoulder.
“Calm, Jovik,” he said, “the machines are a sign of crossing paths.”
“With us or with them?” Jovik said, motioning his hand towards Nickel and Farrul.
“The machine—them,” the husky man said, motioning at Nickel and Farrul. “—All brought by the same winds that brought our forefathers together from the Past World.”
“I hope they leave the Past World behind on the hunt!” called another Thraíha from the crowd. Murmurs of agreement resounded through the mass of Thraíha.
“We’ll make them hunt the Past World out of them!” said another, receiving more noises of agreement.
“Do we hunt for machines or for souls?” asked the husky Thraíha. Jovik said nothing, and the rest of the Thraíha quieted.
“We hunt for the Hawk,” said the husky Thraíha. “For Father Hawk,” he added.
“Just leave as dawn sends the stars away,” said the deep-throated Thraíha. “Let us not leave the sight of our squabbling be the last thing the Huntsman sees of us.”
“His constellations are disappearing,” Jovik muttered, almost in a whisper as he stared up at the morning sky.
“Did you chart the stars?” asked the guttural Thraíha.
Jovik turned to look at him, mouth open, unanswered. His eyes lingered on the deep-throated Thraíha’s hairy face, then darted to and fro, as if he was looking for the answer.
“Well?” asked the older Thraíha.
“I did,” said Jovik, “but I missed the southernmost ones.”
“Why?” grated the guttural Thraíha.
“Because I was distracted by the omen.”
The omen chugged on by, churning in its vibrating frame. It passed closer to the edge of the roof, whizzing past the turrets in front of Nickel, Farrul, and the Thraíha, drawing their looks as they turned to look at it, many of the Thraíha flinching as the machine passed the roof in its wake.
Narrow spindle-like extensions protruded from the body of the satellite. They were arm-like robotic extensions, circling the air out of gyroscopic sockets sticking out of the spherical body like bulbous eyes.
The arm stuck out, hovering over the turret of the roof. Nickel and many of the Thraíha gasped, jerking back in unsteady steps. Was this the world that Nickel’s father helped create? He remembered the empty flagpole he’d first seen in the canyons—his first look at the corroded wasteland of an environment, which reminded him of his father’s industrial complex premises, the infrastructure it helped create in the world.
The spindly robotic arm plopped on the surface of the turret, causing a loud clank and scraping voluminously over the surface.
The Thraíha took further steps back, exclaiming about the machine.
“Omen!” Many of them shouted.
“Demon! Demons under the Huntsman’s watch!”
The scraping arm created bright sparks against the turret, shooting out from its surface, a stark contrast to the slowly brightening color of the sky and the scenery before the glaciers.
If Nickel returned to the student account, finished the engineering program, he’d be struggling to make and maintain more of those probes, engender the satellites, and clean up after the ghostly remains of their larger apparatuses.
As the arm scraped over the surface of the turret, it caused the spherical body of the machine to wobble, pulled by the force of the arm’s friction. The sphere slowly revolved to the left, even as it continued to move forward, around the roof.
“Kill it!” shouted a Thraíha behind Nickel.
“Calm yourself! Have you not seen elements of the Past World before?”
If Nickel returned to the path still waiting for him in the Ether, he’d be a reject, too unfit for its engineering corps, left to clean up after shoddy probes like the one floating before him, barely functional and wandering another one of Earth’s wastelands. If he traveled to Hedonim, what then? Would he just be going back to the Ether?
If he stayed with the Thraíha?
The glaciers poking over the horizon glowed a fiery yellow, their upper bodies appearing aflame under the bursting sun. If he stayed with the Thraíha, he could live without the Ether, but he’d face the flood with them in five years.
Even Chickel and Arolé would have to run for their lives with Nickel.
He’d have to—
“Nickel!” came the booming voice of the guttural Thraíha. Nickel whirled around, facing the impatiently waving man who was waiting for him to come.
Please leave a comment or question about any character, dynamic, setting, or other story element that intrigued you, as your feedback inspires me to add greater depth.
G.R. Nanda 