The Wild Lands: Legend of the Wild Man (10 page)

He nods. The tribe needs their celebration.
He needs the celebration. The chief is chief because he is wise
enough to know this. Now, the hunter will dance and sing and eat.
He will boast to his friends and play with his sister. He will talk
to the troubles. His mom must be mistaken. She can’t know about the
beauty and intelligence of the one’s eyes. Those eyes haunt the
hunter. They tell him he’s not a man, not quite yet, but they beg
him to be one. Maybe his mother is right about their danger.

Only later will the young hunter slip off,
when the light of the waning moon can guide him from his sleeping
sister, and when not even his mother's watchful eyes will
notice.

Hunt only among Father Mountain's children, never
leave their heights. Do this and nothing shall wake The Hidden from
their restless slumber

Urea explored the granite edifice, this time
as an elk. The connection was even weaker, and she kept telling the
elk to turn back, but it ignored her orders. She could hear the
unmistakable cracks and flashes of light of a
biselk
joust
and was drawn to it. She wondered why she had chosen the body of a
doe. They were almost never implanted, and her skills were far
beyond those needed to carry a female through birthing, but she
forgot the thought as quickly as it came.

The two bucks were in the central chamber of
the giant granite dome. They kicked the ground; their stony black
hooves turned the immaculate stone floor into fissures and
detritus. Their eyes were wide, blind with testosterone and lust.
Still, Urea glided forward, unable to stop. The air is thick with
their musk, it stinks of sweat and dirt but Urea finds it
irresistible. She’s never smelled anything like it before. She’s
never smelled anything on the surface.

Finally, like the water behind a demolished
dam, the two bucks charged each other. Instead of jousting, they
careened past their opponent and battered the walls of the ancient
stone dome relentlessly. Urea saw them do this a dozen times. Her
doe meekly approached while the
biselk
defaced humanity’s
oldest surviving relic. Each strike discharged electricity from
their skeletons in loud echoing thunderclaps. Stone blocks fell
from the ceiling. Each one exploded into shards when it hit the
floor. She could feel the buck's impacts in her own body. Her VRC
was picking up interference. She wanted to make the elk stop but
she couldn't. She couldn't even stop the doe from walking into the
crumbling dome. She was drawn to the battle, like a moth to
light.

Then fear gripped the doe, and she ran. Her
hooves clacked on slick stone. Somehow she was down the long
hallway, running towards the cellar, hidden from the Spire. Urea
was terrified. She felt if the doe made it to the cellar neither of
them would ever see the Spire ever again.

She implored the Evanimal. No
avail.

A crack of antler on horn and she was her
panthera
, watching the tiny doe’s nimble hooves slide around
on the polished floor. Now meant something quite
different. The
panthera
would stop the doe, with claws sharp
as knives and a hunger known only to those who kill to eat. Urea
was so confused. She had no idea how she got into her
panthera
, but she hesitated no more than she did as the doe.
The river had changed but she was still adrift.

Then Urea was the doe again, with a thousand
pounds of black, razor-sharp, feline death gaining on her. Another
tremor and she was her
panthera.
Her VRC switched between
the two animals every time the bucks discharged electricity. She
didn’t know if she preferred the doe’s pathetic fear or the
panthera
's vicious hunger, but the bucks wouldn't allow her
to experience just one. She tried to tell herself she was
accustomed to the
panthera
's hunger and blood lust, she had
killed hundreds of Evanimals, but her feelings were heightened and
more brilliant contrasted with the doe's dull terror.

Back and forth she switched, faster and
faster. She was hunter and prey. The cracks from the bucks came
relentlessly. There was almost a rhythm to them: knock, Knock,
KNOCK.

Urea sat up in bed and slapped her hand on
the Virtual Reality Chip imbedded in the base of her brain. It was
hot, charged.
Just a dream…

Knock, knock, knock.

She got out of bed, pulled on a habiliment
and deactivated the opaque field that blocked her doorway. Phoebe
stood on the other side of the door, breathless.

“Urea, I'm sorry, I didn't know what else to
do. I... he... I lost him.”

“Snake eyes,” she cursed. Phoebe stifled out
a sob. She was taller than most, at nearly five feet, but Urea
towered over her, no one was taller save her brother. Even late at
night, yanked from slumber, Urea envies her hair. Supposedly there
was a time when it was more common, but in Spire City, hair only
came in two types, black or none. Phoebe's was neither. It was
iridescent, like
biselk
antlers,
kingcrow
feathers or
the
panthera
. It was beautiful and sparkled wildly each time
her shoulders heaved from her distress.

The girl was barely eleven, but already
showed promise as an Evanimal pilot. She was already learning to
birth animals and looked the part with her soft features and round
eyes. It made Urea's head spin seeing one of the few Pilots who
actually worked with
biselk
females so soon after her
dream.

“Where's Baucis?”

Phoebe only choked out a sob and managed a
weak shrug. So this was on her.

“What happened?” Urea barked. Phoebe's eyes
only welled up. Urea took a deep breath and put a hand on the
girl's shoulder. “It's OK, just tell me what happened.”

“I was observing a pregnancy, but it seemed
like it wasn't going to happen until morning, so they put me on
watch. Everything was fine, the doe was asleep, but then Zetis said
he'd be right back and asked me to monitor this map and tell him if
anything moved.”

Urea scowled. Zetis was a weatherman, a
position that hardly deserved a VRC. He spent most of his time
exploring the capabilities of the VRCs or playing virtual games
instead of doing his job. Whoever assigned him the duty made a
mistake.

“He said it was really important and he'd
just be a minute. So I was synched with the doe and had the map
running at the same time. The doe was asleep so I thought I could
do both! And then the doe started having contractions and well, I
had never done one myself. Its just so...” Phoebe choked burst into
tears.

Pregnancies were difficult. Nothing was as
emotionally draining as helping an Evanimal bring a baby into the
world. Urea was relieved when she had moved on to predators. She
squeezed Phoebe’s arm gently. “Then what happened?”

“The birth was successful, thank Nature. But
it took everything I had. The bucks' antlers develop during the
fetal stage now, and I couldn't risk the mother. It took all of my
concentration to safely birth to the buck. He’s so healthy and
already walking… he’ll see his first sunrise in the morning,”
Phoebe’s voice wavered and she took a moment to compose herself,
precious seconds the animal could use to slip away. Urea’s hid her
frustration. Phoebe had just experienced child birth,
biselk
childbirth, at eleven years old. She deserved a moment.

“As soon as I remembered the map, the blip
was gone.”

“It’s OK. You did well. You shouldn't have
had to do both.”

Phoebe sniffed and nodded.

“I tried to chime Zetis but I just... the
birth was so beautiful, All I could do was run down here. My mind's
too wired for my VRC and that poor baby!” She collapsed against
Urea, a mess of Evanimal emotions.

“That's fine. You did fine. Go get some
sleep, OK? I got it from here.”

Phoebe nodded.

Urea was already racing down the halls
towards the stairs.

She chimed Zetis first.

She heard his voice inside of her own head.
app for a minute. Stupid->

digiscopes. Now.>

Urea didn't wait for his reply. If he didn't
beat her there, his VRC would go to an Evanimal.

Zetis was the most brilliant moron she had
ever met. He was obsessed with the VRCs, and could do amazing
things with them. He had invented games, programs, even chiming.
Person to person communication was forbidden. The law had been set
up in the early days of the technology, so Ntelo and Rufus Aurelius
maintained, but Urea didn't see any problem with it. It was fast,
easy, and convenient. If Zetis hadn't been the one who invented it,
she would’ve fed him to her
panthera
right then. End of
story. Instead she chimed her brother,

She could hear the sleep in
Skup’s voice even through the wireless VRC connection.

She heard a crash and
profanities transmitted from Skup's ears.

Now.>

Urea closed the connection and ran faster.
She took steps two at a time. She didn't like the idea of that
thing out there running wild. If they lost its position now, they
might never find it again, and its existence would be lost to myth
and idle speculation.

Urea still didn't even know what it was. It
troubled her that Skup referred to it as a
him
. He seemed
very sure that the thing was a man, or a male anyways. Urea had
asked her elder brother if he thought it was the
Wild Man
,
but he only shrugged and turned away.

Skup wasn't one to hide his feelings. He
regularly challenged Baucis in defense of his methods and openly
derided the Naturalist services, something akin to treason if it
wasn't for his undisputed rule of the
vultus
flock. But on
the subject of the
Wild Man
, he remained silent. Urea
understood. She had never truly believed the prophecies either, yet
here he was: the
Wild Man
, just like High Priestess Ntelo
had always said.

Zetis said directly to her
brain.

This is bad.>

and she closed the
line. She cursed Baucis and Ntelo's outdated rules about the VRCs.
The technology existed for Zetis to show her exactly what he was
seeing, just like an Evanimal synchronization, but the two
Councilors said it was unethical, that it was wrong for a human to
enter another human's mind. Urea scoffed at the idea. Their
religion controlled almost every mind in Spire City, whether they
meant it to or not.

Urea was only two floors away now, and though
she couldn't see whatever Zetis was seeing through the digiscope,
she could see the app he was running. Applications required less
processing power than raw footage, and Zetis had managed to find a
way to share them over the same channels they chimed with. If the
Council knew, they'd all be in deep trouble. But what could they
really do? No one could synchronize with the Evanimals like Urea
and her team. Sanctioning them was an empty threat, so she
hoped

The map filled her vision, superimposed
faintly over the hallway she ran through. It showed the Spire, The
Garden, the surrounding mountains and plains. There was a fat red
X
deep in the mountainous jungles West of the vast gardens
the Evanimals tended. Urea pulled up all of the information they
had on the area.

The mountain range provided Spire City with
most of its water. The negative polarity of the Spire created a low
pressure zone that provided regular rain showers for the garden,
but it was nothing compared to the jutting chunks of the earth's
crust that served as a wall against weather itself.

The mountains held water captive, nothing
that came from the west came through directly, instead water came
down as rain and snow in the forested mountains, then dribbled down
into the Garden. There were dozens of creeks and tributaries that
all began in the mountains and eventually culminated in the two
rivers that irrigated the Garden and made its border. They once had
names, before the Scourge, when things were still made, the surface
still tangible. People had long forgotten or abandoned them.

The rivers were called the North and the
South. The Spire would have burned without them long ago.

Spire City was a giant conductor for the both
electricity that coursed through the magnetosphere and the heat
from beneath the earth's crust. It provided all the energy the
citizenry could ever hope to use. When it was built, it had been
estimated that nineteen more of the structures could have
electrified every cubic inch of air on the planet and powered the
industries of the earth in perpetuity. Currently it had less
ambitious goals and no projects to sell, so the citizenry only used
its electromagnetic field to power what they used: Virtual Reality
Chips for human and Evanimal alike, the waste processors, the
taunting casino games, the lights, the heat, the force field that
kept the Scourge out and the Citizens safe, all the doors and
elevators, the mainframe that all their VRCs could sync with, and
the constant lightning storm.

The Spire did all of this and asked for
little more than a drink of water. Running a twentieth of a
planet's magnetosphere through an enormous superconductor caused an
amount of heat best expressed in volcanic terms. The North and the
South carried all that energy away, over rapids and underground,
beyond the horizon and beyond concern.

Knowing that the
Wild Man
, for she had
no other name for him, was in the mountains that fueled Spire
City's existence made her want to scream. How long had he been
there? Were there more like him? Did he know of the Spire? How
could he not? A thousand more questions raced through her brain as
the stationary red X on the map taunted her.