Flashbacks on the Way to the Stacks

The building had been Rachel's home away from home during her student days, and still felt familiar. Those halcyon days had ended almost nine years ago, and now, she entered for the first time without the magical student ID, worried about the ineveitable security checkpoint.

It faced her as soon as she enterd the lobby. As she approached the desk, she felt both amazement and relief, for there was Manqu, the officer she had become friendly with during her senior thesis slog. She knew that he would remember her.

“Doctor Rachel!” Manqu enthused, using the standing joke between them that he had developed when he found she was about to get a degree. “You haven't changed a bit! How are your surgeries going?”

“Wow, great to see you again, Manqu! I'd hug you if you weren't on duty! Thanks for asking about the surgeries, but you know I was never in medicine. I'm here to do a little research in the law library.”

“No problem, doc. You know it's building F, down the Northeast Corridor and then left to take the North Hallway.” Manqu paused to look quickly around. “Here, just hand that around,” he said softly, motioning to her to pass her purse around the metal detector. “OK, you're fine!” he continued, and motioned for her to step into the secured area.

Even without lingering to catch up on the intervening years, Rachel knew that it had could not have been easy for her security guard friend. Manqu was a member of the Huari First Nation, and one of the tiny group of First Nation individuals who survived living in New Hominid (NH) society. Like all Huari, he had grown up without fixed abode, for his Nation’s homeland, south of the Ollatambo lands, was a quarter where isolated stratovolcanoes overlooked desolations of basaltic lava flows extending to the horizon, too bereft of soil for the crops that were provender for their northern neighbors, and thus eanbling its inhabitants to become virtuosos of the nomadic adaptation.

The fire mountains of the Huari country were superficially continuous with the range encompassing its sister Ollatambo Nation to the North, and on the official maps of the NH were encompassed by the general term “Sierra Descuidado,” which, in the reference frame of the namers was appropriate to its inaccessible and apparently useless nature. However, the Huari and Ollatambo, divergent in many respects, but both sensitive to the subtleties of their terrain, distinguished the Huari homeland with Pelea, a name that was the same in both tongues. The distinct quality of Manqu’s home landscape resulted from a series of processes that ocurred hundreds of millions of years later than those that formed the province to its north. These forces still operated, as evidenced by the multiple occasions when Sprawn City became a virtual ghost town due to ash clouds ejected by one or more of the dozen volcanoes determined to be "active" by the reigning savants of the Ass. Rep. Academy of Physical Semiramidology.

Although such apocalyptic events made the average NH, already feeling hostility from the endless succession of 40 degree days and water rationing at a time when "hyper-hydration" was rumored to prevent dreadful diseases, confirmed in her or his vision of

The Huari culture adapted to harsh conditions and over the millennia developed a form of living founded on nomadic herding but transecending that to become an irreplaceable Semiramide-view.

The humble quadruped that enabled and fed this hominid structure of ideas and hopes was the tanymyk, a camelid cousin to the mala of the Ollatambo to the north.

The two provinces showed evidence of different origins in their styles of ruggedness and in their rocks: harshly craggy and notched granitic spires and pinnacles interspersed with profound canyons in the northern domain, and in the South, mammoth cones capped by snowfields dominating plains where fiery lava had cooled to black rock, both smooth and jagged. To a believer in the ability of deep time to give rise to mind-boggle magnitudes of diversity, it would be astounding but not surprising that these only superficially similar environments would give rise to two quite separate species of camelids. The southern species, known as the tanymyk, was paradoxically larger and more robust than its northern cousin, presumably due to the advantage of a lower surface area to volume ratio, which enabled it to survive frigid nights without the benefit of the sheltering canyons that the northern species enjoyed. The fabled hump of the camelid group, a water and nutrient storage feature spectacularly preserved as an ecological adaptation even on a trans-planetary-system level, was also more robust in the tanymyk, explaining the animal's ability to tolerate the long journeys over the barren stretches separating the sparsely scattered “pastures”, where one bush every 10 meters seemed lush when arriving from days spent traversing the complete sterility of the basalt flows.

New Hominids had never penetrated Pelea, as they believed that sapients could never survive there without supply lines to “civilization.” This conclusion was based only on rumors and crude preliminary surveys of Pelea’s periphery. The fact that, as far as could be told, there was nothing of value to extract, hunt or harvest in the supposedly empty wasteland was certainly most important in the decision to leave it alone.

As we already have learned from the instance of Manqu, contrary to the accepted wisdom promulgated by the numerically dominant group, and as with the neighboring more jagged, yet more arable province of the Ollatambo, the Huari had flourished in their own style before the great intrusion, and thanks to its lack of commercial attractions, they were in large part able to continue in that fashion.

To an outsider, Manqu might seem the unfortunate exception that proves that interaction between Huari and NH4 was precluded, although Rachel had no doubt that if she pressed him to evaluate the trajectory of his life, he would contend that fortune had smiled on it. While still of school age, his was one of a dozen Huari families who happened to be ranging their camelids in an area close enough to “civilization" to be caught in the dragnet of Ass. Rep. laws and expectations. In what was framed to the media as a magnanimous gesture, Manqu was among several Huari “selected” to participate in a misguided rare project: to grant “promising” young indigenes access to the putative intellectual bounty of the NH way of life. The project was rare in the sense that any projects meant to assist any of the First Nations were practically unheard of, and misguided because the few that were initiated were always misguided, as the best “help” the Huari could be given from the New Hominids would be no “help” at all.

To say that most of Manqu’s peers did not thrive in the cultural transplant experiment would be a whitewashing understatement, for almost all either ran away or so blatantly failed to thrive that they were sent back, many of them requiring hospitalization first.

Whether fortunate or not, it was different for Manqu. Perhaps because he was the oldest of the group, he was more susceptible to hormonal charms. In any case, events would suggest that the relationship he found was based on more than mere biochemistry. The girl he met was a born and raised member of the NH culture, yet their love was strong enough to survive the numerous slings and arrows directed towards them because of their “mixed” status. It was also so strong to make any permanent return to his homeland out of the question for Manqu, for he felt (perhaps erroneously) that his chosen life-partner could not survive the rigors of Pelea. The hail of prejudicial weapons directed against the unusual couple grew densest and most vigorously thrown when they committed what the truly bigoted believed was the ultimate offense-reproducing, resulting in four children that those small pseudo-minds did not know how to classify, and who were thus reviled as “half-breeds.”

All of this intimate knowledge came back to Rachel in a flash as Manqu ushered her around the metal detector. “Wow, thanks again!” she responded in amazed gratitude. “How’s your family?”

She asked because she truly did not know was how he managed to support a family of six in the current nationwide (or in actuality, planetary) state of overlapping crises. Given this condition of overall deterioration, it would be a severe economic challenge to sustain that many dependents no matter what career one was engaged in, unless that “career” was that of heir to a leading lineage. Rachel knew that even though her friend’s so-called education in the skills expected by the culture imposed on him could not be considered complete, he was nevertheless unfairly relegated to positions for which the pay and prospects were completely incommensurate with his intelligence and abilities. The bosses in such settings were hardly progressive, and Manqu’s background was so unfamiliar that to them that he might as well have come from one of the exoplanets of whose existence Semiramide was still unaware. Thus, Manqu’s chances of promotion from the bottom rung to which he was always assigned could be described as dismal to miniscule.

As she mentally reviewed those dim current circumstances, she gave Manqu the once over and realized he did not look at all the worse for wear, given it had been over eight years since she last had the opportunity. “They’re doing well,” the guard replied. “We're thinking Yarawi will become a doctor like you.”

Rachel did a quick mental calculation. Yarawi was the oldest girl ...Eleven when I last saw Manqu here at the archives?... “So, she's starting a new school?” Manqu looked very proud. “Yes! She's going to... What do you call it?... You know, your Alamo mother!”

My alma mater... “Oh, you mean she’s going to SCUT. That’s great! What's she studying?”

“She says she likes history, but we’re trying to get her to take some science courses.”

“Nothing wrong with history. I'm kind of a bookworm myself. That's why I'm here instead of at a lab.”

Manqu was silent, unusual for him. “Well, speaking of that, I've gotta get off to the stacks. Wish me luck!” Rachel continued.

“Whatever you're doing, I'm sure it's the right thing. May your criru be always born with the sun!” Manqu concluded with a thumb up of farewell.

Rachel would never forget the meaning of this traditional Huari toast, or the circumstances in which she learned about it:

Manqu had surprised her one day by inviting her home to meet his family. Her assumption had been that the cultural divide between them precluded that degree of intimacy, but she had not considered that Manqu already had a paradigm of open mindedness and inclusiveness in his wife Joss, in whose exceptional character he had found his match.

When Rachel met Joss, she accepted the NH dogma that no one but the exceedingly few remaining First Nation individuals could even penetrate the Huari or Ollatambo homelands, let alone live there. She was thus perplexed when her friend’s wife explained in great detail how in Manqu’s homeland, the nocturnal temperatures were so frigid that newborn tanymyks had almost no chance of surviving the night. As the animals were by far the most important source of food, clothing, and assistance with labor and transportation for the Huari, it was fortunate that selection had resulted in the vast majority of criru, as the newborn tanymyk was known in Huari, being born in the early morning. When they were not, they rarely survived, an occasion for grieving as multiple births were extremely rare and the animals had a very long gestation period. Thus, the traditional salutation or goodbye wish of “May your criru be always born with the sun!” was equivalent to “good luck,” or at least to “may you not have rotten luck.”

Joss’s description of the mother-criru interaction during the baby's first hours was so compelling that Rachel gushed, “it's like you went up there and saw it yourself!” This resulted in a sidelong glance from Joss to her husband. Apparently getting a nonverbal OK to go on, she said “well, it's something we don't tell everyone, but I did.”

Rachel was thunderstruck. In all of her hours in the lookout cabin of the SCHAF observation tower, she had never even dreamed of an NH like herself venturing into the true wilderness that began one micron beyond where the farthest reservoir-impounded water molecule wetted the first non-hominid-transported grain of soil. The idea that a born and bred Sprawn City resident such as Joss had taken such a trek exploded her ideas of what was possible and what was not. Joss was unique in that she had a husband who had actually been born and bred in that wilderness. Nevertheless, she thought that Manqu had been in enforced exile and had not been back since arriving as a young adolescent. While she did not know, she had always assumed that there were checkpoints and patrols to enforce her idea that no one was allowed to leave known precincts inhabited by the NH. Until her current revelation, she had thought the NH territory was a territory sufficient for anyone, extending over 50,000 square kilometers and inhabited by over 20,000,000 NH (and a few others who weren't always counted), with seaports, farms, roads and railways, a huge city and its boring suburbs, country towns that admittedly had only a short history, and all the other accoutrements of what the NH regarded as “civilization”. Now, her complacency was shattered. Her glad acceptance of the “mixed” marriage and gleeful welcoming of the “mixed” offspring of Manqu and Joss already placed her on the extreme right slope of the mental enslavement by cultural stereotypes bell curve. Her friend’s wife was the catalyst for the change from accepting that other cultures and values are honorable, to a wannabe explorer, contemplating concrete expeditions to meet and experience what most of her peers did not even know existed.

Nostalgic for his birthland, Manqu had once longingly described a lake formed long ago when the torrential headwaters of a mountain river vertical kilometers above tree-line was crossed and dammed by a solidifying lava flow. Millenia later, he and his family had set up their temporary residence on the shore to oversee the summer grazing of their camelids. Parina, the volcano which had parented the lake, appeared to float above it, her blinding white cone standing on a raft of low fog. The lake itself was brilliant, as was the surrounding air. No trees cast shadows on the smooth plain of basalt which the cobalt blue lake was set. A scattering of spiny olive green boojum bushes provided fodder for the family’s herd of camelids, which had spread out over a square kilometer.

When Rachel first heard Manqu's description of what he clearly regarded as an idyllic scene, her point of view was different. The plain of frozen lava did not seem a brightly-lit paradisial pastorale. The high altitude, stark light she envisioned did nothing but reveal a dry and desolate sterility. But now that she had met someone from her home town who had been in the rarefied air of the Huari high plateau as her friend’s lifelong partner, for her to see it through the mind's eyes of someone who loved it. Once she had attained that perspective, the fearsome and startling symmetry of the fire-forged volcano no longer seemed purely desolate. Instead, her wide and full skirt of snow attracted her mind's eye and she longed to see it the way a girl might long to someday wear a beautiful costume she sees in a story book to a fancy ball.

Eight years was more than long enough for the malady of the quotidian to set in. In her absorption with trying to survive on a civilian observer’s measly salary, what now seemed merely girlish dreams faded until they were almost forgotten, so that when she was on her high perch above the reservoir, she was preoccupied with remembering combinations and wondering about water levels, rather than remaining aware that many horizons beyond where the molecule of reservoir water wetted wilderness dirt, there existed what to her mind was a fairyland complete with white cotton candy mountains and herds of cuddly camelids. Now, on the surprising occasion of a reunion with her Huari friend, the waking dream came back.

For Rachel, these memories, although they require paragraphs to describe, flashed in full form before she even reached the left turn that would take her to building F. Once to that lobby, she opted for the stairs over the elevator, as the section of the archives she needed to peruse was in the third subbasement. The elevator did go there, but the three flights of utilitarian stairs with their bare concrete walls, unadorned pipe-like railings and echoey-vault sound effects gave credence to her idea that documents that needed to be buried in such an obscure corner must be highly significant or hopefully even incriminatory, and that reminder that she might not be on a wild goose chase motivated her for the task ahead.