A Crystal-Clear Intrusion

Rimachi ambled up the trace that led away from the family farm. He did not appear in a hurry, although he was in as much of a hurry as he’d been in ages. His ambling gait was deceptive, for it enabled him to cover large distances without fatigue, both up mountain and down, the only available modes on the vast majority of paths in his homeland. To the Ollatambo, his gait was the ideal gait, essential for getting anywhere fast in their precipitous country, where the heaviest-duty road was a wide walking path paved by the ancestors at least a millennium ago.

There was no path at all covering the route that Rimachi was on, only occasional, barely perceptible evidence of his own past footsteps, for he was on his way to a place that he visited often, but almost always on his own.

For Rimachi and his peers, an hour’s walking covered the shortest distance he would even regard as a jaunt. Anything that could be covered more quickly was considered simply going out in the backyard for a moment. It was about an hour after setting out that he arrived at the top of a peak that by local standards was considered a hillock, although by the standards of any other range it was a righteously massive mountain.

The only evidence that this summit was a hominid-frequented spot was a stone tower. Its mode of construction was not very different from the fortresses and waystations of the ancestors found all over the Sierra Descuidado. The ancestors had dominated the range for a span of time long enough to stud practically every strategic prominence or valley resting point with watchtowers and waystations engineered for the trials imposed by the winds, storms and snows of the highest mountains in the world. However, in the case of the tower now visited by Rimachi, the approximate nature of the joints between blocks gave away its makers as contemporary. It was not lack of skill, but lack of motivation that had kept the tower’s builders from grinding and polishing each block to fit so exactly that a knife blade would not slip in. Among the inextricably intertwined causes and effects of the ancestors’ dominance was the compulsion to build for the ages. Rimachi and several of his friends had expended backbreaking labor on the tower, but their awareness of the suffocating presence of the NH had robbed them of the ancient confidence that their works would remain relevant for as long as they could conceive.

Although intruders from the world of the NH were so rare that most Ollatambo had never dealt with one, the nation was well aware of their existence. Indeed, the more sophisticated, including Rimachi, knew of the Ass. Rep. and what it implied, namely, an allegiance to artificial boundaries set only by their designators’ ability to enforce them. This was a convenient ideology to adhere to for the NH, as they were the designators, and well aware of their superior enforcing abilities.

From what the more au courant Ollatambo could see, there was no reason to assume the NH would continue ignoring the nations of the Sierra. If they had so far, it must only be because they were occupied in other lakes that offered bigger, fatter fish. Those stocks would surely soon dwindle, and then, to the NH, asserting hegemony over the Sierra would merely be following the natural order. Even a young Ollatambo consciously determined to resist such an eventuality was unconsciously affected by the knowledge of the surrounding hominids’ undeniable advantages in both numbers and technology. The unconscious feeling that the entire nation was crowded on a tiny nubbin of land about to be submerged by a rising sea level resulted in a cultural lassitude that was ultimately more debilitating to the Ollatambo than any physical disease invaders could transmit. Thus, like all sapients, acting on the sum of his conscious and unconscious influences, Rimachi designed the tower as a purely functional-for-now-and-the-near future affair, rather than building for the ages.

There were no windows or doors, indeed, no space inside for a hominid to occupy. The edifice simply served one purpose-to get a long metal wire, obtained on a difficult expedition to the land of the NH, stretched out and elevated to the maximum extent, so that it would serve as an effective antenna. Its mountaintop position maximized the sightlines that were also radiowave-lines, and the care the builders had taken to secure the receiving metal to the tower ensured it would remain stretched in the ferocious windstorm that would send a less well-connected antenna spinning off the mountaintop. Despite this propensity for hurricanes, there were no concessions to comfort at the summit, for the transient hominid occupant of the mountaintop was used to bringing everything he needed.

For this quick visit, Rimachi did not need much. It was all contained in a small woven bag suspended by sinew straps around his neck. It was not only a traditional design and construction, but an actual artifact of the ancestors, except for the strap, which had been replaced as something that would undergo much wear and tear. Rimachi had chosen it as a special case for special contents, and the woven image seemed so appropriate that he was amazed that such a thing had come in to his possession. It showed what could be interpreted either as a double headed deity or two such entities, each with the normal number of hominid noggins, confronting each other. Each had multiple protrusions from the scalp which were too thick and not numerous enough to be hairs, not to mention the knobby finial on each. The colors of these appendages had the special quality of the ancient weaving, vivid to the point of neon, yet somehow earthy and restfully muted. Those from the scalp on the left were a bright brownish red, and those from the scalp on the right a dark yet brilliant green. In between these confronting antennae, (if that's what they were) stretched stylized zig-zags that Rimachi interpreted as lightning bolts.

Without further ado, he drew a precious device out of the bag. A silvery crystal gleamed in its metal holder, bolted to a base plate which also supported a post which bore an adjustable arm extending parallel to the plate. Barely visible to the eye of the reader was a hair-thin sliver of metal suspended over and barely touching the bright surface of the crystal.

Rimachi brought the device to the base of the tower and drew a threadlike extension from the main antenna and looped it around a post on the crystal holder. He then drew out the other treasure from his bag- a tiny earphone, obtained on the same risky and unpleasant expedition to the lowlands that had supplied the antenna. This he also attached to the crystal-bearing device, this time to the post with the arm. Sitting down on a relatively flat rock which from experience he had found to be the most comfortable, he placed the whole contraption on another flat boulder, inserted the phone in his left ear, and, using a third prize from the expedition, a finally threaded screw controlling the reach of the horizontal arm, began making minute adjustments to the position of the whisker of metal, which contacted the crucial crystal at a critical junction.

Now is when the omniscience of the reader must be extended to the auditory as well as the visual. The strength of the radio signal detected by the elegantly basic indigenously brewed crystal set was already minuscule, given its inverse square diminution as it traveled from the NH expeditionary force 105 km to the north west. The listener to such primal radio technology is faced with the dilemma of whether absence of perception implies actual absence, or less philosophically, whether hearing only silence meant there was no transmission, there was a transmission but it was too weak to be heard, or simply that the detecting whisker was in the wrong place on the crystal.

The winds picked up and began whistling through some of the chinks in the rudely constructed tower. Rimachi hunkered down to a slightly warmer, less exposed position without conscious thought, and continued his absorption in the minute adjustments to find the detecting sweet spot. To tolerate the monotony and discomfort of making such tiny motions in a cramped position sitting on a cold stone, he found that it helped to visualize what would happen when his metal probe contacted his goal. He knew that would be a place where a tiny amount of silver was included in the lead crystal, and he knew that radio waves from all over were causing the antenna stretching 14 meters up to the top of the tower to electrically vibrate. Those waves had been modulated by hominids to send their information, and the way for him to receive it was to listen. But without the crystal, his earphone would not stir. By what was not alchemy but seemed close to that for all but a few professors in the central universities of Kronin, clear across the continent, if his wire touched the crystal at a place where the silver impurity was just enough, the electrical vibration of the radio waves would be transformed, or to put it technically, “rectified,” to a form which would make the diaphragm of the earphone and thus the diaphragm of Rimachi’s ear move, and the encoded information would be received.

In this case, imagining it seemed to make it so, for he heard speech and immediately stopped his agonizingly fine motions of thumb and forefinger on the whiskers screw. The hominids modulating the radio waves received by Rimachi’s tower were doing that for an express purpose involving others of their dominance group, coordinating their activities with a central authority. While the technology Rimachi was using to receive it is well known and indeed had been superseded by far more sensitive but less accessible versions, the idea that anyone in the even remote vicinity of Rimachi’s tower would be able to receive at all was something that had never crossed the minds of any of the members of the particular dominance hierarchy using the signal that the young Ollatambo intercepted.

Static was part and parcel of Rimachi’s device, in fact it was an indicator that he was in the right part of the crystal , because the wrong parts simply gave complete silence. The auditory decoding centers of his brain had become adept at filtering out the noise and comprehending even the faintest, seemingly drowned out language, but even they were challenged by what he heard, which clearly originated either from a low power transmitter or from an area which presented many obstacles to the carrier waves. The transmission’s contents was of such electrifying interest that his ability to understand was galvanized, as though by some magically acuity enhancing ear drops:

“Point 6192 inaccessible without technical equipment. Realistic candidates for monitoring stations almost certainly need to be lower elevation.”

“We have to accept that, but will they have adequate sightlines to the glacier front?”

“Need to do more surveying to answer that. Right now we're still coming over the crest, 5412 meters at this moment.”

“How are the grunts holding up?”

“ Not bad. Doc says only 8 cases of true altitude sickness so far, and no pulmonary edema. That diuretic really seems to work .”

“ OK, when you get to the front, make sure they all get those medical tests-don't accept excuses. We need to document the effects of this environment-it seems plenty of people are going to be coming in who aren't accustomed to it.”

“Gotcha-you know I can be tough. They’ll all get those tests, believe me.”

Abrupt ending rather than a fade into noise suggested the dialogue had been intentionally terminated. Rimachi was relieved, for what he had already heard was as hard to digest as a lump of unthawed chuno.

He had heard rumors of atrocious goings on at khunu chhullunkhatamp from his “uncle” Catari in some of the erratic bulletins from the NH stronghold of Sprawnia that his elder countryman managed to transmit for the benefit of the half dozen or so Ollatambo who had managed to put together crystal sets, but the details were so vague and the scale of the purported project so presumptuous that he wasn't sure he believed them, until this moment. That the hardened voices had accents he recognized from his sallies into NH territory to get his earphone and antenna and discussed in real time challenges caused by the simple fact they were intruders, convinced him that the idea of a massive incursion into his homeland was not a paranoid fantasy, but a reality. That homeland was clearly an alien environment to the intruders, as demonstrated by their talk of pulmonary edema, which was an unheard of problem for the Ollatambo, who had been fully adapted to elevations of 6000 meters and higher since before anyone could remember.

Some things are most realized at the moment they are lost. Rimachi had long known his homeland was a fortress, defended by the cruel cliffs crusted with ice that made point 6192 and its fellow turrets spiking the curtain wall of the crest “inaccessible” even for determined warmongers with riches and domination on their minds, and also rendered close to impregnable by the more abstract threats of partial pressures of oxygen low enough to kick lowlanders into the “wish-I-could-die” misery of altitude sickness or worse, apparently now preventable by some newfangled medication (for all but eight?, he thought. Sounds like a way-too-huge expedition).

“Plenty of people are going to be coming in who aren't accustomed to it.” So the seemingly huge group was just a precursor, engaged in some sort of preliminary survey. The “monitoring stations”- almost certainly not for scientific research, more for keeping the subjugated in their place. They needed “adequate sightlines to the glacier front”-why? Clearly that was the crux of it, and the rumors that Rimachi had already heard suggested that a vast scheme to steal minds and memories as well as resources was well underway, yet still well hidden for a heist of its audacity.

Catari needed to know of what Rimachi had just heard, to seize whatever benefit was possible from the pure happenstance of Rimachi’s arrival at the antenna at the moment of that revealing transmission. However, transmitting was not something his tiny crystal set could do, and although he was capable of building a transmitter, quick attention from the authorities would be a guaranteed result of any unauthorized transmission.[1]

As Rimachi loped down the “peak-ette” towards home, rage fueled his headlong yet controlled plunge. The passage of the expeditionary force past point 6192 gave notice of a medium-term existential threat to him, his family and friends and the way of life of his entire nation, but the proximate cause of anger and resentment so bitter it brought tears to his eyes was the imminent disruption of the chuno-stomping ceremony he was rushing to attend.

Knowing how disappointed his mother would be if he arrived at the ceremony late, he had given her an overestimate of how long he would be gone, but he had already pushed past that particular envelope. His alarming interception of the NH transmission now forced an escalation of urgency.

There were few Ollatambo who possessed crystal receivers, and the likelihood that any of them had been able to eavesdrop on the NH expeditionary party’s transmission was minute, as its faintness had pushed the tallest antenna in the Sierra to its limits. Thus, he was the only member of his nation with knowledge of the intrusion, but lacking a transmitter, he had no way to tell others but the time-honored face-to-face.

The knowledge of responsibility had its effect. He girded himself to think rapidly yet clearly as he slalomed down the mountain. he knew there must be an optimal running velocity which balanced the inversely varying parameters of speed and probability of a functionally intact arrival. He attempted to set his pace at that theoretical ideal by intuition, although anyone observing his buoyant bounds would not be able to tell if he was running to an emergency or simply reveling in his ability to careen down the invisible path like the legendary messengers whose relay stations remained, scattered across the ancient network of cunningly paved paths.

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[1] When Semiramide was still in the days of its aviation fiasco, regulation of such transmissions was strict to avoid disasters in terms of communication between aircraft and ground. Little did anyone know that the bigger disaster caused by air travel had nothing to do with hominid activity except in the sense that hominids were the hosts and victims of the viruses and air travel enabled them to spread far and wide, literally at supersonic speed. Although those days of rapid travel and reconnaissance now seemed like ancient history, the regulatory network remained as a legacy, unwelcome to most.