Erik J Kreffel Presents 2 Shorts (+1)

J. KREFFEL PRESENTS 2 SHORTS (+1)

  Erik J. Kreffel

  Copyright 2010 EJK Publications

  JAUNT

  PEACE, AT LONG LAST

  "Take me back to where Tooraag found me, when I was a young boy," I asked Rogagh, my adoptive brother, one evening. Awaytha the sun was setting in the distant, pale violet sky.

  "There is nothing but pain for you there, Jonathon. It's a twelve-day journey...you are an old man...enjoy your days like Tooraag before us."

  My bones creaked as I stood up to throw a shawl around my shoulders; the air was much cooler now than when I first arrived here, more than fifty years ago. "I need to know...why did it happen? Why did I come here?"

  "Tooraag considered it a blessing, brother. You should as well. You have had a full life among us...you are one of us more than you have ever been a human."

  "Maybe so...but I need answers, peace, Rogagh. I've always been that way, you know."

  Rogagh sighed, his ochre face downcast while I explained my reasons.

  I reached out to him, brushing my fingers against his arm. "Please, have I ever asked you for anything?"

  "No, never, brother. You have always been obediant, despite what Tooraag's superiors did to you." He laughed, then continued, "I would have been less eager to cooperate in your place."

  "Then help me...I can't do it on my own."

  Rogagh nodded, then clapped me on the shoulder. "At dawn, we will leave. I will prepare supplies for us, and make preparations for Juytha and the children in my absence. You should rest now...it will not be an easy journey."

  "I know...the Hooudua administer that region these days."

  "Yes. We will need to wear our uniforms."

  I rubbed my hands together for warmth. "I'll find mine. And my papers."

  "Rest easy, brother. We will find peace, together."

  Smiling, I followed Rogagh inside our domicile and retired to my flat, laying my old bones on the bed for the last time. Staring at the ceiling, I memorized the interior of the only home I've had in my long years of exile on Wayth. Tomorrow, I would embark on my last journey.

  We headed out after I said goodbye to Juytha and the children I had helped raise as an uncle. I tried not to think of farewells, but the truth was I was ready to go home, the home that laid out in the wastes of a vast desert, where five decades ago, so I am told, the generational vessel from a distant star, Iutha, crashed to Wayth's surface, leaving me as the only survivor, all of twelve years old.

  My heart cried out for answers, for peace. I knew nothing of the people I came from, save the clutch of memories embedded in my mind, which surfaced only in my dreams, my nightmares. Some days, it was all too much. Other days, I just tried to live my life as a Gyaath of Wayth, despite myself and other Gyaath.

  "Remember when Tooraag caught me giving you Gyaath food and you vomited it up on his collection of human artifacts?"

  "Ha-ha-hehh, I'd forgotten. I hated our food. I'm so glad Tooraag found that recipe sequencer on the Iuthan ship to modify our food to what I could keep down my throat." I shook my head. "Hope I didn't ruin anything that could tell me who I really am."

  Rogagh grew silent in the skimmer's open-air cockpit.

  "You are Gyaath, brother, don't allow that to ever change. We have always loved you, despite your humaness."

  "I know...but the years haven't been kind to me. I am not one of you, deep down. What sustains you has slowly eroded my body. I can't breathe well at all, brother. And I grow colder by the day."

  Rogagh didn't respond.

  "Look here...we are in the midst of summer, yet I must wear more shawls just to keep from shivering. I'm dying, Rogagh. You're still as robust as Tooraag in his later years, even after the accident. But me...."

  "But you are not alone, remember that. We were too busy living our lives to help Tooraag when his time came. Not you, though."

  I nodded, watching the buttes pass by, the clouds dissipating in the scarlet skies. A gentle, hot breeze blew through what remained of the hair on my scalp, just like it did when Rogagh and I were in the civil militia so long ago, like a lifetime past. He and I rode into the Nurwhua frontier often, sometimes remaining on duty out in the dry wild for weeks, bonding over stories, rations and Qopdrinks. I spoke of my time in captivity as a youth, those years in purgatory, neither Iuthan nor Gyaath. I showed him the scars on my limbs from the tests the scientists performed, as they had never examined-let alone seen-an Iuthan until I had been discovered in the wreckage.

  Despite knowing Rogagh for years at that point, he and I were never close until we grew older. I'm not sure why, but I think we had a strange rivalry for Tooraag's affections since my release from the quarantine facilities into his custody. Rogagh and I barely spoke to one another until the date for our mandatory enlistment into the civil militia. That however, elicited a direct shift in our relationship, one that has remained strong over the years. Now, it is inconceivable to me that Rogagh and I ever be less than brothers.

  Day passed into night, and I wrapped myself in ever thicker and warmer overcoats, the desert evening deadlier to me than it had ever been in my youth. I dreamt of our days together, causing mischief and general chaos for our superiors in the militia, despite our rather serious duties of guarding the border against the Hooudua guerillas. Coming from beyond the western Nurwhua Territory, the Hooudua had been nothing less than nomads until shortly before my generational ship's crash, which drove the Hooudua to try to escape across the border into Gyaathan lands. Skirmishes were frequent until the Gyaath government gave in to demands for a self-governed Hoouduan territory, which enveloped the region where the Iuthan ship had crashed. All contact between the Hooudua and Gyaath was now nearly non-existent, I knew all too well, but my final act on this faraway world couldn't be held off any longer. I had to go home.

  I had to know who I really was.

  The first crater shocked us, the second, saddened. The plateau where once, as young men, we lived a great adventure was now a barren escarpment, devoid of even the lowest scrub grass. A multicolored melange of rock, soil and mountain reduced to pits kilometers across, a rotting, sickening sore of a landscape. After an absence of over forty years, our beloved western desert was debased and defiled beyond even our darkest nightmares, the Hooudua taking their gracious gift and squatting their dirty backsides over it, spoiling it.

  Pausing near the bowl of a crater, we limped out of the skimmer and looked across the horizon in disbelief, neither of us having the stomach nor the energy to curse. It was apparent the remainder of my journey would be filled not with nostalgia, but pain. Would I have anything to go home to? Had the Hooudua destroyed the last shreds of my Iuthan heritage, too, like they had beautiful Nurwhua?

  "Let us go further, brother. There is nothing for you here."

  We skimmed across the pits, avoiding the stinking, rotting matter deep inside them. The devastation was thorough; no sign of the Hooudua-mud camps, fodder corpses or foot tracks-could be discerned, even as we grew nearer to their lands. I shook my head, the tears streaming down my cheeks.

  "We should be there soon, according to Tooraag's maps. Check the scope for landmark deformations."

  I saw nothing of the sort but utter waste. No isobars registered on the scope indicating any deep penetration of foreign metals or impactors. Despondancy bubbled up through my body, a hopelessness I had tried to suppress, but couldn't anymore. I laid a hand on Rogagh, signaling to him my creeping weariness. He didn't give up, I credit him, but the death taking over my body was merciless.

  I could have died there in the skimmer.

  I'm glad I didn't. The ribs of what had to be a large vessel stuck out f
rom the wasteland ground, like some seaborne creature's carcass picked clean. We had journeyed some kilometers beyond what registered on Tooraag's maps, some unexplored landmass that, in all likelihood, no Gyaath had set foot upon in centuries, if ever. Our scanners were no good here anyway; rotting waste covered the metallic scraps in a thick shroud, giving me pause to even want to investigate. But, I was compelled forward by my spirit. My body was broken, soon to be filling the ground. I had to know.

  Rogagh stopped the skimmer in-between a concavity and leapt out, his curiosity obviously piqued as well. He lended me a hand as my foot softly landed, and the two of us investigated, one final adventure as brothers, his vigor giving me strength to continue.

  "What sort of wreckage is this?" I asked Rogagh. "If it's not on Tooraag's maps, could it really be...."

  Rogagh shook his