STORIES FOR THE PEOPLE

It was a rare and spectacular double sunset. The two suns sailed down toward the lip of the moon, burnishing its vast desert with shades of fire. Cain stood atop a dune, leaning on her staff, watching. As the sky darkened, the glowing phantom of the planet she orbited became clearer. One half was painted with the green of the land, the snowy white of the clouds and the deep blue of the oceans. The other half was cast in dark night, with islands of incandescent orange where the sprawling cities glowed.

It was best to hunt at night, so she waited little longer, watching the desert fall into shadow. Then she paced down the dune, crouched, and sank her fingers into the coarse sand. She closed her eyes, feeling the warmth of the desert. After a few minutes, vibrations tingled like electricity through her fingertips. Her staff in her other hand, she began to beat the surface rhythmically, like a heartbeat. The tingling vibration intensified. She beat harder, thumping the ground, and as if in harmony the vibrations crescendoed. Cain squinted over the desert, searching with sharp eyes. Then, in an instant, she stood, lifted her staff, and hurled it deep into the sand. She leapt over and withdrew it to reveal a sharp-toothed sandfish impaled on the pointed end, thrashing. ‘This is a big one’, she thought as she finished it off.

Cain secured her prize to her sled and set off. Propelling herself with her right leg, she glided meditatively across the rolling dunes and admired the wide starry sky. Soon, her mind turned to the memory of last week’s discovery. She had been fast asleep in her cave, when a huge shudder had awoken her. Rushing to the mouth of her cave, she saw explosive fire rising in a boiling mass, not far away. She had watched in fear until it died down to a red glow, then made her way over to find a mangled mess of steel and billowing black smoke, with rubble scattered around. Tangled in the wreckage she found a body, a man. He was covered in ash and badly burnt, but still breathing. She had hauled him out and borne him back, to nurse him to health.

She remembered vividly the first time he opened his eyes; they glistened with kindness. He moved little as he was weak, but she was patient; she kept him cool through the day and warm through the night. When he awoke in a panic as if from terrible nightmares, she held him until he fell calm. When he brightened, she fed him to build his strength. As he recuperated, he spoke to her in Planet Language, which she had learnt long ago and mostly forgotten. They spent hours together, and though they communicated mostly with gestures and smiles, it felt to Cain there was a deep understanding between them.

Cain shook the memory from her eyes as she crested the last dune and drifted down to her home. She padded in and smiled to see the man bundled up next to the fire, breathing steadily with sleep. Stoking the embers into flames she laid the sandfish on a large rock to sizzle, flipping it from time to time. Then, she crept over to awaken him. He sat up stiffly and she passed him some fish – he smiled at her and bit into it. He gave a thumbs up and grinned. She laughed, nodded and touched her chest to say thanks. When they were done, she applied ointment to his burns, dabbing gently at the scars on his chest and back. He quivered with pain but she was gentle, and afterward she held him close and rocked him to sleep. Shooting stars swarmed across the sky, but Cain was oblivious, gazing at this strange man until she drifted into sleep.

***

Cain awoke suddenly. Through the rock she felt tremors. Her man was fast asleep, so she left the cave and prowled to the top of the dune. At its crest, she felt a shot of adrenaline: a bright red ship was standing a few hundred meters away, its landing booster fumes settling around it. It blazed with aggressive floodlights and from the open hatch two figures were approaching, holding pistols.  

Cain studied them steadily for a while, then judging that they had not seen her, she dropped back down the dune and circled around widely until she was behind them. Then, she approached with her hunter’s silent prowl until she was just a meter from them. She glared at the man on her right and touched the needle sharp point of her staff to his neck. He stiffened and yelped. The second whirled around and pointed his pistol, glaring. He shouted something in Planet Language, but Cain bared her teeth and pointed at the man, then back at the ship, to say they should go. He frowned, holstered his gun and showed the palms of his hands. Then, he reached into his pocket, withdrew a small black stick and pressed a button. She inhaled sharply. The stick projected a hologram; it was the man in her cave. There was planet language written below and from it, she could discern two words: ‘wanted’ and ‘murder’.

Cain could hardly breath. She crouched and clutched at the sand and squeezed her eyes tight shut. It couldn’t be, that her man, so gentle, so kind, was being hunted for murder! She felt a tumult of confusion raging in her belly, that soon turned to a fierce anger. How dare he deceive her like this! In her fury, she pointed at the cave below, then sprinted out across the sands. The two men nodded at one another.

Cain ran blindly, sick with betrayal. Faster and faster she ran, flying across the sand, screaming inwardly. Then something tripped her, the world whirled upside down and her head thumped into the ground, hard. She lay, eyes squeezed shut as a pain stabbed into her head. Only when it subsided to a dull ache did she crack her eyes open. Strange hazy shapes loomed around her. As her eyes adjusted she realised they were the twisted remanets of the crash site where she had found the man. She had not aimed for it, but her feet had brought her here all the same. She pulled herself up and leant against a mangled piece of metal, steadying herself until the world stopped spinning.

Dazed, she gazed around herself. Last time, the need to attend to the man was so urgent that she had not paused to search the wreckage. Now she began to skulk around it, as if hunting for some clue, some sign; though of what, she did not know. At the centre of the wreckage was the cockpit, jutting out like a great, broken eggshell. She clambered into it and sat in the torn-up pilot’s seat, brushing her hand over the control panel of dead lights and levers. She looked up to see, set in the wall by her, a framed picture: the man with a woman, both smiling brightly. She removed it carefully and turned it over in her hands, wondering where this other woman was now.  Cain frowned. The back panel was loose. She removed it to find a scrap of paper with Planet Language written carefully across it.  Cain desperately searched in her memories for the translations of the words she had learned as a child, anxious to understand. And as she inspected, it began to make sense:

My Love,

I write in haste as I know now you are about to leave. I will miss you more than you can imagine, but you must go. If you don’t, they’ll lock you up forever and that is more than I can bear. I know you are innocent, and I know they just want to erase you. It breaks my heart that you have been caught in all this conspiracy and deceit.

Run, my darling, run. Run far away and one day, when they forget about all this I will come and find you. Until then, I will carry you with me, always.

Cain read it over several times.  A tear rolled down her cheek and felt a throbbing in her chest. Who was this woman? And who were the men with guns? What should she believe? She squeezed her eyes shut and watched her memories flood in: the man she saved, with such a kind smile. The two others who arrived in their big red ship, encased in metal armour with ugly weapons.

‘Oh mother’, she thought, gazing up at the glimmering stars. ‘Why him? Why me? How I wish you were here’. And it was her mother’s words that drifted through her mind, “you are strong my love, stronger than all the desert; follow your heart”. Cain felt the throbbing subside and warmth grow again. Then a certainty and clarity washed over her. She knew what she had to do. She quietly slipped out of the cockpit and made her way across the sand.

***

Cain watched the two figures march the man at gunpoint toward the red ship. He shuffled and stumbled, still exhausted from his recovery. She weighed her staff in her hand and tightened her grip on sled. With a deep breath, she pushed off. The men were close but she didn’t aim directly at them. Instead, she circled them and began drumming the sand with her staff rhythmically. Then one of them stopped, pointing. The other looked. The ground was rippling, as if the sand had become water amidst a sea gale. Both lifted their pistols and began shooting, bolts of light flashing across the desert. But it was no good, the ripples had become waves and were rolling toward them rapidly, like great roaring dementors of sand. They turned and sprinted toward the red ship, stumbling with fear. It was at that moment that Cain swooped in, lifting her man onto the sled and scudding away to the dune. Only when they reached the crest did she stop to look back. The men were gone and the red ship was frantically engaging full thrust to escape the maelstrom of sand that swirled around it. In and out of it leapt the sandfish. It was a huge shoal, whipped up into a frenzy by Cain’s drumming. The boosters burned orange and the ship just lifted away from the sandstorm, and Cain watched as it accelerated upward to become a speck in the vast night sky.

She knew the sand fish would be swimming for hours yet, and any good moonperson would take the opportunity to hunt a month’s worth of food. But she did not. She lifted the limp man onto her sled, and pushed off toward her cave, to gather essentials and take her man far away.