Tonight I visited Tuk’s rocky grave as the evening wind began to wail its aeolian dirge. I knelt there and tried to pray but nothing came.
Edouard, nothing came. I am as empty as those fake sarcophagi that you and I unearthed by the score from the sterile desert sands near Tarum bel Wadi.
The Zen Gnostics would say that this emptiness is a good sign; that it presages openness to a new level of awareness, new insights, new experiences.
Merde.
My emptiness is only … emptiness.
Day 96:
I have found the Bikura. Or, rather, they have found me. I will write what I can before they come to rouse me from my “sleep.”
Today I was doing some detail mapping a mere four kilometers north of camp when the mists lifted in the midday warmth and I noticed a series of terraces on my side of the Cleft that had been hidden until then. I was using my powered glasses to inspect the terraces—actually a series of laddered ledges, spires, shelves, and tussocks extending far out onto the overhang—when I realized that I was staring at man-made habitations. The dozen or so huts were crude—rough hovels of heaped chalma fronds, stones, and spongeturf—but they were unmistakably of human origin.
I was standing there irresolute, binoculars still lifted, trying to decide whether to climb down to the exposed ledges and confront the inhabitants or to retreat to my camp, when I felt that lifting chill along the back and neck that tells one with absolute certainty that he is no longer alone. I lowered the binoculars and turned slowly. The Bikura were there, at least thirty of them, standing in a semicircle that left me no retreat to the forest.
I do not know what I expected; naked savages, perhaps, with fierce expressions and necklaces of teeth. Perhaps I had half expected to find the kind of bearded, wild-haired hermits that travelers sometimes encountered in the Moshé Mountains on Hebron. Whatever I had held in mind, the reality of the Bikura did not fit the template.
The people who had approached me so silently were short—none came higher than my shoulder—and swathed in roughly woven dark robes that covered them from neck to toe. When they moved, as some did now, they seemed to glide over the rough ground like wraiths. From a distance, their appearance reminded me of nothing so much as a gaggle of diminutive Jesuits at a New Vatican enclave.
I almost giggled then, but realized that such a response might well be a sign of rising panic. The Bikura showed no outward signs of aggression to cause such a panic; they carried no weapons, their small hands were empty. As empty as their expressions.
Their physiognomy is hard to describe succinctly. They are bald. All of them. That baldness, the absence of any facial hair, and the loose robes that fell in a straight line to the ground, all conspired to make it very difficult to tell the men from the women. The group now confronting me—more than fifty by this time—looked to be all of roughly the same age: somewhere between forty and fifty standard years. Their faces were smooth, the skin tinged with a yellowish cast that I guessed might be associated with generations of ingesting trace minerals in the chalma and other local plant life.
One might be tempted to describe the round faces of the Bikura as cherubic until, upon closer inspection, that impression of sweetness fades and is replaced by another interpretation—placid idiocy. As a priest, I have spent enough time on backward worlds to see the effects of an ancient genetic disorder variously called Down’s syndrome, mongolism, or generation-ship legacy. This, then, was the overall impression created by the sixty or so dark-robed little people who had approached me—I was being greeted by a silent, smiling band of bald, retarded children.
I reminded myself that these were almost certainly the same group of “smiling children” who had slit Tuk’s throat while he slept and left him to die like a butchered pig.
The closest Bikura stepped forward, stopped five paces from me, and said something in a soft monotone.
“Just a minute,” I said and fumbled out my comlog. I tapped in the translator function.
“Beyetet ota menna lot cresfem ket?” asked the short man in front of me.
I slipped on the hearplug just in time to hear the comlog’s translation. There was no lag time. The apparently foreign language was a simple corruption of archaic seedship English not so far removed from the indigene argot of the plantations. “You are the man who belongs to the cross shape/cruciform,” interpreted the comlog, giving me two choices for the final noun.
“Yes,” I said, knowing now that these were the ones who had touched me the night I slept through Tuk’s murder. Which meant that these were the ones who had murdered Tuk.
I waited. The hunting maser was in my pack. The pack was set against a small chalma not ten paces from me. Half a dozen Bikura stood between me and it. It did not matter. I knew at that instant that I would not use a weapon against another human being, even a human being who had murdered my guide and might well be planning to murder me at any second. I closed my eyes and said a silent Act of Contrition. When I opened my eyes, more of the Bikura had arrived. There was a cessation of movement, as if a quorum had been filled, a decision reached.
“Yes,” I said again into the silence, “I am the one who wears the cross.” I heard the comlog speaker pronounce the last word “cresfem.”
The Bikura nodded in unison and—as if from long practice as altar boys—all went to one knee, robes rustling softly, in a perfect genuflection.
I opened my mouth to speak and found that I had nothing to say. I closed my mouth.
The Bikura stood. A breeze moved the brittle chalma fronds and leaves together to make a dry, end-of-summer sound above us. The Bikura nearest to me on the left stepped closer, grasped my forearm with a touch of cool, strong fingers, and spoke a soft sentence that my comlog translated as, “Come. It is time to go to the houses and sleep.”
It was midafternoon. Wondering if the comlog had translated the word “sleep” properly or if it might be an idiom or metaphor for “die,” I nodded and followed them toward the village at the edge of the Cleft.
Now I sit in the hut and wait. There are rustling sounds. Someone else is awake now. I sit and wait.
Day 97:
The Bikura call themselves the “Three Score and Ten.”
I have spent the past twenty-six hours talking to them, observing, making notes when they take their two-hour, midafternoon “sleep,” and generally trying to record as much data as I can before they decide to slit my throat.
Except now I am beginning to believe that they will not hurt me.
I spoke to them yesterday after our “sleep.” Sometimes they do not respond to questions and when they do the responses are little better than the grunts or divergent answers one receives from slow children. After their initial question and invitation at our first encounter, none of them originated a single query or comment my way.
I questioned them subtly, carefully, cautiously, and with the professional calm of a trained ethnologist. I asked the simplest, most factual questions possible to make sure that the comlog was functioning properly. It was. But the sum total of the answers left me almost as ignorant as I had been twenty-some hours before.
Finally, tired in body and spirit, I abandoned professional subtlety and asked the group I was sitting with, “Did you kill my companion?”
My three interlocutors did not look up from the weaving they were doing on a crude loom. “Yes,” said the one I have come to think of as Alpha because he had been the first to approach me in the forest, “we cut your companion’s throat with sharpened stones and held him down and silent while he struggled. He died the true death.”