Chama (Part 1)
Note: This story contains some themes that may not be suitable for younger readers.
The yerka is a huge beast with orange-brown fur the color of sunrise. It has twenty-five stubby legs on each side that ripple in perfect synchronization as it walks – almost rolls – through the fields chomping grass and driving mole worms out of the dirt with its snout. When a yerka is well-fed, each of its fifty legs plumps with the muscle meat many people on our planet find good to eat, and even better to sell for others to eat.
But 3ancestor was not one of these people. That's what father told me almost every time we gathered for the monthly Memory Day to share The Litany of Pain. Father would stare at the floor and say 3ancestor preferred the sweeter wing meat of the elegant shalon, whose six wings did not give it flight, but did grant it the awesome aspect of a miniature angel serving before the throne of God.
No, 3a had no interest in eating or in selling yerka. Besides the taste, 3a said its dozens of legs reminded him of certain nightmares he'd had long ago. As a boy, 3ancestor heard tales passed from 12ancestor forward, tales about The Stella Land, the globe we'd left long ago, the world we’d left long before the Hairless departed it and followed us to Tierra.
Memory Day stories include more glorious and awful things than any one person could ever hope to remember. By the time I was born there were so many tales of what the Hairless have done to us on Tierra that as a child I rarely had time to hear a tale actually set in The Stella Land.
And I know I certainly never heard one often enough to learn it so I could teach it to my own children. The heart, even the broad collective heart of family Chama, only had so much room to warehouse its tales of pain.
But, for whatever reason, 3ancestor remembered one story he heard back when he was five or six. The tale mentioned – just in passing, mind you – a Stellan bug that didn’t journey with us (or even later with the Hairless). It was a creature studded with legs called a centipede.
The centipede was apparently good for no one – except perhaps for other centipedes. It certainly wasn’t good for humans like us to eat. However, 3a's mental picture of the centipede so revolted him that the minor character in the story became a leading player in his nightmares.
So the centipede undulated along the Stellan dirt and through 3a's sleep for a long time. After that, whenever 3ancestor looked at a yerka, he saw a centipede, and it made him feel unwell in a way he could never quite explain.
My secret theory is that what so revolted 3a deep in the core of his ruach was that, even as a child, 3ancestor suspected the Hairless had enhanced a yerka by mixing it with a centipede.
Had they meddled, dominated, and cursed things as they always did? Had they mixed bodycode and forced some earlier, simpler yerka to become more of what they wanted and less of what SOID created it to be?
I wonder all this because father told me 3ancestor would often say to 2ancestor after he'd had too much wine that, while the shalon were native to the is world and to our land, the first waves of Hairless had grown the first yerkas from the Stellan seeds they'd brought with them in their code box.
3a would slam his tumbler on the table, wetting the surface with sloshes of wine, and yell, "I cannot prove it, but I know it!"
I tell you this: What 3a suspected, I have proven, along with many other things besides. But here is what is important for you to remember: No yerka farming for 3ancestor. Never.
So it was confusing when 3a awoke the last morning of his life to find a prize yerka grazing within 3a’s corral, contemplating the world with its dull eyes, agitating 3a's shalon simply by the sheer size of its presence and stench. Yes, it was quite confusing, but only for a short time.
A few minutes later 3ancestor safely snuck up to the yerka's rear end and saw it's laser brand on the shaved flesh next to the great maw of its anus. The brand was a large, dark N about the size of a man's hand. On the brand, the spiraling arms of the galaxy were swirling about the N. It was Nortac's symbol; it was Nortac’s yerka.
Just then Nortac’s men, a posse of Hairless, arrived at the gate, the quiet whoosh of their air bikes escaping our detection until they were upon us. Each of them displayed a smaller version of the same laser brand on the back of their bald heads.
Their eyes were full of arrogance, even as they feigned surprise. They pointed at 3ancestor, and in their deep, slow voices said, "Thief."
Shocked by the sudden need to declare his innocence, 3ancestor slipped into our tongue instead of using Hairless words. He shouted three times, "Dadrevseon!"
But already they were upon him, stripping him, binding him, chuckling at the black puff of fuzz surrounding his penis, dragging him to the great tree at the center of our yard, the tree from which father swung happily in an old tire during warm weather.
The Hairless are truly hairless. I am told this condition applies to their whole bodies. I am also told that this was not always the case. Long ago, they had faint wisps of hair on their skull, their brow, their legs – their everywhere, I imagine.
Their hair was thin and yellow, almost to the point of being white; it disappeared in the sunlight. Eventually they decided to fiddle with their bodycode until soon there was a generation devoid of hair, a first generation of the truly Hairless. They called this change perfection and purity. They said their god had told them to become like little, innocent children, and at last they had fulfilled the holy command.
Then they chased us across the skies to places like this, and they – greedy, little children – took whatever they wanted from us. I do not think they heard god's talk about being children correctly.
So here on Chama land were the truly Hairless, the truly childlike and pure, standing in a circle beneath 3ancestor's favorite tree, nothing on their skin to catch the sweat flowing off their smooth scalps.
And here was my 3ancestor hanging above them, his death struggles gyrating him in circles like a hypnotist's tool. And here was the yerka standing dumb in the background chewing cud.
And then here were the Hairless reaching into their coats, pulling out their laser branders, and aiming them toward 3ancestor as he lost consciousness. A few moments later his skin was filled with the fragments of Ns and spiral galaxies. Watching from the doorway, my 2ancestor was filled with bitterness at the truth of life, and my small father recoiled from the first taste of a cowardice that would pollute him permanently.
I was not there, but, in a way, I was. I still am.
I am told that an hour after they'd arrived, Nortac's Hairless left our land with their prize yerka, and in their wake 2a was washing 3a's stiffening body. My little, cowed father was offering whatever limited assistance a nine-year-old could provide. Both of them were trying to ignore the smell of burned meat.
It was then that Nortac himself came to them. He did not ride an air bike like his servants. He rode his personal yerka over the rolling land. It had been engineered not for eating, but for speed, and its great legions of legs rippled in a blur almost too swift for the eye to see.
The yerka rocketed over the land, its bendable body hugging the dirt like skin sheathing a muscle, the beast's bellows alerting my ancestors of Nortac's approach long before his arrival, the great man sitting erect and regal a few feet behind the yerka's five-eyed head.
Nortac rode shirtless, a small pack slung across his back, sun-drawn sweat glazing his bald head and torso. Upon reaching 3ancestor's gate, he yelled a woah to his yerka, slid off its back, dropped to a knee, and bowed his head to the ground in a single, supple movement as quickly done as a lighting strike.
Nortac called out to us in our own tongue, addressing us as Chama, our family name. Nortac spoke to us in the formal, chivalrous ways of long ago as he requested entrance onto our land: "AlailimafChama. Atsealatreup. OtreibaaimNortac."
Nortac did not wait for 2ancestor to reply. He crossed the threshold of our land and covered the twenty meters between himself and 3ancestor's body almost before the last syllable of his name faded away with the last wisps of flesh smoking in the breeze.
At 3ancestor's feet Nortac once again fell to a knee and aimed his eyes at the ground. 2ancestor stood at 3a's head and my father hid behind 2a's knees and tried to vanish through the sheer power of his fear. There were a few moments of silence before Nortac looked up into 2ancestor's eyes.
Nortac switched to his Hairless tongue, but he retained the formality of official-speak: "Chama, I come to you with infinite apologies for what my servants have wrought. The theft of a yerka should never end in anyone's death. Although the hands of my servants have acted, I feel as if I have wrought this deed with my own. So I come myself to you, and my own hands bear restitution."
With this Nortac rose to his feet and removed his pack. He unzipped it and produced a small compuscreen. As he handed it to 2ancestor, he said, "Here is a standard Life Taken Apology Agreement. I do not know if you have seen one of these before or not, Chama, but I imagine you have at least heard of them."
Now Nortac stood close beside 2ancestor like a friend, totally unafraid of reprisal from my stunned 2a or from the small child trying to bury his eyes in the hollow of his father's knees. Nortac's middle finger – even it devoid of hair – whipped up and down as he scrolled through line after line of the complex Hairless letters glittering on the device's skin.
"Chama,” said Nortac, “I fear I misspoke a moment ago. This is not a standard agreement, not at all. In my sorrow for what has happened, I have increased the standard compensation fourfold. I only need your imprint to make the restitution final."
Nortac took the compuscreen from 2ancestor's hand and moved it up in front of 2ancestor's face. A beam of light emerged from the screen and riffled through 2ancestor's eyes. The compuscreen emitted a satisfied doink, and Nortac was on his way back to his yerka.
Then he was gone.
A year later the gendarmes evicted us from the land on the authority of the High Council. Two years later we finally received a hearing before the High Council itself. The HC told us that thieves forfeit all rights to land, and we were lucky Nortac had given us anything, even if it had only been one half the standard Life Taken Apology Restitution.
The eyebrow-less face of the chief HC magistrate, his face a haughty moon shining out of the hole in his black, hooded judicial habit, spoke his judgment with extra bitterness.
The Chief Magistrate said his anger was because he was ashamed to render such a judgment against us because Chama had once been such a respected name throughout all Tierra.
One year after our hearing, we learned Nortac himself had taken a seat on the High Council, dug deep into early Tierran Writlaw, and grown his claim from 3ancestor's land to an expanse that stretched further than his personal yerka could cover in a week’s time. We learned that Nortac profited from meddling with writlaw the same way the Hairless profit from shaping bodycode to feed their childish desires.
And then, eventually, I was born and laid upon a blanket stretched across the dirt floor of our home. I was born, and my mother pushed my black bangs out of my face, and for the first time my eyes met hers, my father's, and the beady eyes of the last few Chama shalon.
I was born, and after my needy cries were satisfied, we all slept beside each other in a baked-brick shack, a raft made of dirt set adrift in a red sea of still more dirt.
The little bit of land below my little, newborn rump once belonged to SOID and to Chama, and so it was shared by all Tierra. Now it was Nortac's, and his alone.
I was born, and all these stories became mine to live. And I have lived them in ways that would have made 2ancestor cry for war and my father piss his pants.
I have studied SOID and learned that the One pitched his tent in bodyflesh crowned not with a slick, hairless hill resembling a buttock but with black curls.
And I have slept the long, machine-tended pilgrim's nap and arisen from my sleep to plant my feet on Stellan concrete. And in The Stella Lands I have read the most ancient Writ, the Word that gives the lie to Nortac's empire of stolen dirt.
And I have slept again and returned to Tierra so I – with a peacefulness leavened by rage – could speak the Deep Writ to Nortac's face and demand he bow with me before the Writ which was born from the mind of SOID and so is greater than either of us.
This Writ declares a Tierra whose borders must be drawn by justice, and whose land must be seeded with grace.
But 3ancestor was not one of these people. That's what father told me almost every time we gathered for the monthly Memory Day to share The Litany of Pain. Father would stare at the floor and say 3ancestor preferred the sweeter wing meat of the elegant shalon, whose six wings did not give it flight, but did grant it the awesome aspect of a miniature angel serving before the throne of God.
No, 3a had no interest in eating or in selling yerka. Besides the taste, 3a said its dozens of legs reminded him of certain nightmares he'd had long ago. As a boy, 3ancestor heard tales passed from 12ancestor forward, tales about The Stella Land, the globe we'd left long ago, the world we’d left long before the Hairless departed it and followed us to Tierra.
Memory Day stories include more glorious and awful things than any one person could ever hope to remember. By the time I was born there were so many tales of what the Hairless have done to us on Tierra that as a child I rarely had time to hear a tale actually set in The Stella Land.
And I know I certainly never heard one often enough to learn it so I could teach it to my own children. The heart, even the broad collective heart of family Chama, only had so much room to warehouse its tales of pain.
But, for whatever reason, 3ancestor remembered one story he heard back when he was five or six. The tale mentioned – just in passing, mind you – a Stellan bug that didn’t journey with us (or even later with the Hairless). It was a creature studded with legs called a centipede.
The centipede was apparently good for no one – except perhaps for other centipedes. It certainly wasn’t good for humans like us to eat. However, 3a's mental picture of the centipede so revolted him that the minor character in the story became a leading player in his nightmares.
So the centipede undulated along the Stellan dirt and through 3a's sleep for a long time. After that, whenever 3ancestor looked at a yerka, he saw a centipede, and it made him feel unwell in a way he could never quite explain.
My secret theory is that what so revolted 3a deep in the core of his ruach was that, even as a child, 3ancestor suspected the Hairless had enhanced a yerka by mixing it with a centipede.
Had they meddled, dominated, and cursed things as they always did? Had they mixed bodycode and forced some earlier, simpler yerka to become more of what they wanted and less of what SOID created it to be?
I wonder all this because father told me 3ancestor would often say to 2ancestor after he'd had too much wine that, while the shalon were native to the is world and to our land, the first waves of Hairless had grown the first yerkas from the Stellan seeds they'd brought with them in their code box.
3a would slam his tumbler on the table, wetting the surface with sloshes of wine, and yell, "I cannot prove it, but I know it!"
I tell you this: What 3a suspected, I have proven, along with many other things besides. But here is what is important for you to remember: No yerka farming for 3ancestor. Never.
So it was confusing when 3a awoke the last morning of his life to find a prize yerka grazing within 3a’s corral, contemplating the world with its dull eyes, agitating 3a's shalon simply by the sheer size of its presence and stench. Yes, it was quite confusing, but only for a short time.
A few minutes later 3ancestor safely snuck up to the yerka's rear end and saw it's laser brand on the shaved flesh next to the great maw of its anus. The brand was a large, dark N about the size of a man's hand. On the brand, the spiraling arms of the galaxy were swirling about the N. It was Nortac's symbol; it was Nortac’s yerka.
Just then Nortac’s men, a posse of Hairless, arrived at the gate, the quiet whoosh of their air bikes escaping our detection until they were upon us. Each of them displayed a smaller version of the same laser brand on the back of their bald heads.
Their eyes were full of arrogance, even as they feigned surprise. They pointed at 3ancestor, and in their deep, slow voices said, "Thief."
Shocked by the sudden need to declare his innocence, 3ancestor slipped into our tongue instead of using Hairless words. He shouted three times, "Dadrevseon!"
But already they were upon him, stripping him, binding him, chuckling at the black puff of fuzz surrounding his penis, dragging him to the great tree at the center of our yard, the tree from which father swung happily in an old tire during warm weather.
The Hairless are truly hairless. I am told this condition applies to their whole bodies. I am also told that this was not always the case. Long ago, they had faint wisps of hair on their skull, their brow, their legs – their everywhere, I imagine.
Their hair was thin and yellow, almost to the point of being white; it disappeared in the sunlight. Eventually they decided to fiddle with their bodycode until soon there was a generation devoid of hair, a first generation of the truly Hairless. They called this change perfection and purity. They said their god had told them to become like little, innocent children, and at last they had fulfilled the holy command.
Then they chased us across the skies to places like this, and they – greedy, little children – took whatever they wanted from us. I do not think they heard god's talk about being children correctly.
So here on Chama land were the truly Hairless, the truly childlike and pure, standing in a circle beneath 3ancestor's favorite tree, nothing on their skin to catch the sweat flowing off their smooth scalps.
And here was my 3ancestor hanging above them, his death struggles gyrating him in circles like a hypnotist's tool. And here was the yerka standing dumb in the background chewing cud.
And then here were the Hairless reaching into their coats, pulling out their laser branders, and aiming them toward 3ancestor as he lost consciousness. A few moments later his skin was filled with the fragments of Ns and spiral galaxies. Watching from the doorway, my 2ancestor was filled with bitterness at the truth of life, and my small father recoiled from the first taste of a cowardice that would pollute him permanently.
I was not there, but, in a way, I was. I still am.
I am told that an hour after they'd arrived, Nortac's Hairless left our land with their prize yerka, and in their wake 2a was washing 3a's stiffening body. My little, cowed father was offering whatever limited assistance a nine-year-old could provide. Both of them were trying to ignore the smell of burned meat.
It was then that Nortac himself came to them. He did not ride an air bike like his servants. He rode his personal yerka over the rolling land. It had been engineered not for eating, but for speed, and its great legions of legs rippled in a blur almost too swift for the eye to see.
The yerka rocketed over the land, its bendable body hugging the dirt like skin sheathing a muscle, the beast's bellows alerting my ancestors of Nortac's approach long before his arrival, the great man sitting erect and regal a few feet behind the yerka's five-eyed head.
Nortac rode shirtless, a small pack slung across his back, sun-drawn sweat glazing his bald head and torso. Upon reaching 3ancestor's gate, he yelled a woah to his yerka, slid off its back, dropped to a knee, and bowed his head to the ground in a single, supple movement as quickly done as a lighting strike.
Nortac called out to us in our own tongue, addressing us as Chama, our family name. Nortac spoke to us in the formal, chivalrous ways of long ago as he requested entrance onto our land: "AlailimafChama. Atsealatreup. OtreibaaimNortac."
Nortac did not wait for 2ancestor to reply. He crossed the threshold of our land and covered the twenty meters between himself and 3ancestor's body almost before the last syllable of his name faded away with the last wisps of flesh smoking in the breeze.
At 3ancestor's feet Nortac once again fell to a knee and aimed his eyes at the ground. 2ancestor stood at 3a's head and my father hid behind 2a's knees and tried to vanish through the sheer power of his fear. There were a few moments of silence before Nortac looked up into 2ancestor's eyes.
Nortac switched to his Hairless tongue, but he retained the formality of official-speak: "Chama, I come to you with infinite apologies for what my servants have wrought. The theft of a yerka should never end in anyone's death. Although the hands of my servants have acted, I feel as if I have wrought this deed with my own. So I come myself to you, and my own hands bear restitution."
With this Nortac rose to his feet and removed his pack. He unzipped it and produced a small compuscreen. As he handed it to 2ancestor, he said, "Here is a standard Life Taken Apology Agreement. I do not know if you have seen one of these before or not, Chama, but I imagine you have at least heard of them."
Now Nortac stood close beside 2ancestor like a friend, totally unafraid of reprisal from my stunned 2a or from the small child trying to bury his eyes in the hollow of his father's knees. Nortac's middle finger – even it devoid of hair – whipped up and down as he scrolled through line after line of the complex Hairless letters glittering on the device's skin.
"Chama,” said Nortac, “I fear I misspoke a moment ago. This is not a standard agreement, not at all. In my sorrow for what has happened, I have increased the standard compensation fourfold. I only need your imprint to make the restitution final."
Nortac took the compuscreen from 2ancestor's hand and moved it up in front of 2ancestor's face. A beam of light emerged from the screen and riffled through 2ancestor's eyes. The compuscreen emitted a satisfied doink, and Nortac was on his way back to his yerka.
Then he was gone.
A year later the gendarmes evicted us from the land on the authority of the High Council. Two years later we finally received a hearing before the High Council itself. The HC told us that thieves forfeit all rights to land, and we were lucky Nortac had given us anything, even if it had only been one half the standard Life Taken Apology Restitution.
The eyebrow-less face of the chief HC magistrate, his face a haughty moon shining out of the hole in his black, hooded judicial habit, spoke his judgment with extra bitterness.
The Chief Magistrate said his anger was because he was ashamed to render such a judgment against us because Chama had once been such a respected name throughout all Tierra.
One year after our hearing, we learned Nortac himself had taken a seat on the High Council, dug deep into early Tierran Writlaw, and grown his claim from 3ancestor's land to an expanse that stretched further than his personal yerka could cover in a week’s time. We learned that Nortac profited from meddling with writlaw the same way the Hairless profit from shaping bodycode to feed their childish desires.
And then, eventually, I was born and laid upon a blanket stretched across the dirt floor of our home. I was born, and my mother pushed my black bangs out of my face, and for the first time my eyes met hers, my father's, and the beady eyes of the last few Chama shalon.
I was born, and after my needy cries were satisfied, we all slept beside each other in a baked-brick shack, a raft made of dirt set adrift in a red sea of still more dirt.
The little bit of land below my little, newborn rump once belonged to SOID and to Chama, and so it was shared by all Tierra. Now it was Nortac's, and his alone.
I was born, and all these stories became mine to live. And I have lived them in ways that would have made 2ancestor cry for war and my father piss his pants.
I have studied SOID and learned that the One pitched his tent in bodyflesh crowned not with a slick, hairless hill resembling a buttock but with black curls.
And I have slept the long, machine-tended pilgrim's nap and arisen from my sleep to plant my feet on Stellan concrete. And in The Stella Lands I have read the most ancient Writ, the Word that gives the lie to Nortac's empire of stolen dirt.
And I have slept again and returned to Tierra so I – with a peacefulness leavened by rage – could speak the Deep Writ to Nortac's face and demand he bow with me before the Writ which was born from the mind of SOID and so is greater than either of us.
This Writ declares a Tierra whose borders must be drawn by justice, and whose land must be seeded with grace.