| Chapter 20 | Chapter 22 |
Part III
21
Caverns
Amazon rainforest, August 15 2047
Though Bjarne might have been through this many times before, he hadn't recently. Neither his mind nor his body was in anywhere close to the shape they had been in before. But even if they had been, encounters with the Hylobo-Sapiens weren't a thing that could ever have become a truly comfortable experience.
This assignment had not been what Bjarne had anticipated when he had reported on the shocking questions that this young Dutch student had asked at one of his guest lectures. How could this youngster know how to even ask such a question about the unbreakable cord? Questions that society members had been attempting to unravel for decades?
Had a society member violated his oath of silence? The society had to get to the bottom of this, and as at many events in the past, they needed the special abilities of the Hylobo-Sapiens to pull that off. Hylobo didn't particularly like working with humans, or Homo-pseudo-sapiens as they often jokingly referred to humans.
For one, their history with humans hadn't exactly given them much reason to be comfortable about working with Homo-Sapiens. To them, humans were dangerous and primitive beasts that they knew to be a violent and vicious creature. Many of the Hylobo had been killed by humans throughout history. All out of fear. Out of religiously-fed false projections. These creatures, these humans, the Hylobo had learned, were oh so quick to turn into violent mobs.
And then the awful names that had been used for them. Hylobo had been referred to as evil trolls, daemons, and more recently, as grey aliens by the Homo-Sapiens. None of these could be further from the truth.
Hylobo were very much terrestrial and compared to humans and their tendency for violence, the meek and skittish Hylobo were about as evil as a two-week-old human baby. They could be quite dangerous though. Very dangerous indeed if approached with the wrong mindset.
Bjarne disliked descending into the cave systems to seek an audience with the Hylobo. He had retired from the society two years before. But this was big. Big enough to drag him out of retirement.
The alliance between the Society and the Hylobo had been an uneasy one at the best of times, and these weren't the best of times. With most of the transport sector and more than two-thirds of the food industry having been made obsolete by replication printers, global warming was on its way out, and the idea of the Holocene ending made the Hylobo even more nervous than they naturally were already.
The idea that a new ice age could bring the Jötnar back to Earth was the Hylobo biggest and oldest fear and their sole reason for accepting any kind of alliance with Homo-Sapiens.
The alliance the society and the Hylobo had made was and always would be an alliance that felt uncomfortable to Hylobo-sapiens and Homo-sapiens alike.
Given their special abilities and cultural sensitivity, approaching the Hylobo took a special type of person, the type of person Bjarne had proven himself to be. Hylobo were telepathic. Not the type of sideshow trick telepathy or the friendly twin mind telepathy that a rare human could be. No, they were a badass type of telepathic. The type that would let a visitor like himself get lost in the labyrinth of their cave systems for weeks by the power of their mind if that visitor happened to startle them with his conscious thought.
Hylobo were startled oh so easily by humans and their rude thoughts. And oh were they ever sensitive with regards to rudeness or secretiveness.
Obviously, it took amazing skills from a human, Bjarne in this case, to control his own mind in such a way as to not even think a single mildly rude word while descending the dark moist and slippery labyrinth cave systems. Yet Bjarne needed to control them, at least until a guide would feel safe enough to make an overt mind link and guide him to the underground Hylobo city.
As Bjarne approached the entrance of the cave system that he had used so many times before, Bjarne cleared his mind from all concerns about the Hylobo, all concerns about the Holocene and most importantly all concerns about the moon situation that had resurfaced. Resurfaced before the society had prepared the world for the coming battle.
As he filled his mind with happy thoughts about his granddaughter playing with her dog, Bjarne began his descent.
In the dim light of his led-suit, Bjarne noticed this entrance to the cave system had grown in disuse amongst the Hylobo. The walls were now covered with a layer of dark green moss, and the stones that made up most of the cave floor were covered in a thin moist layer of what appeared to be slimy algae that made them extremely slippery.
Then Bjarne noticed a giant centipede of almost half a metre in length that instantly hid away between two large boulders. Seeing the monstrous centipede, Bjarne almost slipped into the wrong mindset. It had been such a long time. 'Replace fear with wonder', as Bjarne recalled the mantra from his youth, from his first days with the society, a mantra that he had no longer need to use on any of his more recent visits, Bjarne realized just how old and rusty he had become.
These centipedes, while being quite dangerous due to their poisonous bite, were indeed marvelous wonders of evolution.
Replace fear with wonder indeed. A mind filled with wonder to the Hylobo was what a kind smile would be to a human. While a fearful mind to the Hylobo was like the foaming mouth of a crazed animal suffering from rabies. As his led-suit illuminated his surroundings, Bjarne kept his mind on the rock formations looking out for whatever allowed him to prolong his state of wonder.
When, once in awhile, his feet slipped on a slimy wet rock, the image of his granddaughter kept him from thinking negative thoughts.
About twenty minutes had passed before Bjarne sensed a probing presence in his mind. Now was the crucial moment. The reason why he was set to the task of arranging this abduction. This moment required a type of diplomacy so different from human intercultural diplomacy. A type of diplomacy that would probably be seen as the inverse of diplomacy by many a diplomat. In normal diplomacy, one needed to think carefully what to say. No such luxury with the Hylobo.
The Machiavellian thought patterns of average diplomats had proven to be a prime source of diplomatic incidents in the distant past. Bjarne cleared his mind of thoughts and decided showing would be more appropriate than thinking. As he felt the Hylobo exchanging the quite formal stream of thoughts of customary introduction ending in a request for the intent of the visit, Bjarne guided the visitor in his brain to his memory of Robert Gottschalk and his question.
Then a set of events took place in Bjarne's mind that even with all of his Hylobo encounters Bjarne had not in any way been prepared for. His previous encounter with the Hylobo had all been rather emotionless from the part of the Hylobo. But then, this was his first time with a female Hylobo as guide. As Bjarne and the female, who had identified herself as Azraella, replayed Bjarne's memories of Robert Gottchalk's question, for a short moment Bjarne felt the barrier between his guide and the Hylobo collective thin.
Azraella was startled quite intensely by the memory and then had relayed the memory into the collective. By doing so, however, she had exposed Bjarne to part of the collective, and more shockingly to part of the collective memory that went back many millenniums.
First images of a giant raging wolf monster were projected in his mind together with a deep emotion of fear and despair. Then other images from the collective were projected into Bjarne's mind. Images of a past much deeper; both beautiful and frightening.
An Image of a large and prosperous city that seemed to be made of glass and ice. It's inhabitants having Hylobo traits, but different in some really major ways.
Their eyes were not the huge black eyes needed to live in the daylight-deprived underground cities the Hylobo resided in today. The Hylobo in this vision actually wore clothes. They even had bodily hair! In fact, they looked almost human as far as their clothing, hair, and eyes were concerned, yet with bodily traits that made their kinship with their distant yet closest cousins, the Gibbon, all that more obvious. Their slender figures, their arms that in relation to their body size were quite a bit longer than those of humans.
Then, above the city, there appeared a pitch black round circle. A huge black sphere. What Bjarne concluded must have been the Hylobo, their distant ancestors all collectively looked up at the sky. The black sphere flickered to white for a short moment. Less than a second. Then with a flash of light, a large section of the blue sky turned a bright yellow. A look of puzzlement in the almost human eyes of the proto-Hylobo, and again the same deep feeling of fear flashed through Bjarne's very essence of being.
Then darkness. The link with the collective was severed, leaving Bjarne to struggle with his pose. What did he just witness? 'No, no distractions!', Bjarne focused again on his memory of his guest lecture. Replaying his memory again in his mind for Azraella to witness.
A feeling of compassion washed over Bjarne that he realized came from Azraella as a form of Hylobo apology.
"I'm so sorry for that, my friend, I didn't mean to expose you to that," the sultry female voice of Azraella spoke in his head. "Thank you so much for bringing this urgent matter to our attention. How can we assist?"
Still startled by his experience, one word formed in Bjarne's head:
"Abduction!"
| Chapter 20 | Chapter 22 |