CHAPTER NINETEEN – THE MEN OF TERRA

Aurora drops a bombshell as she diffuses an arrogant young man's anger

“Gornley?” spluttered Melvin when recognition dawned on him. It wasn’t really surprising - one doesn’t expect to meet blood relatives on an out-of-the-way planet light years away from home. It just about never happens, yet here was Gornley, his sister’s first-born and the apple of her eye

He’d never liked the lad, not even when his sister had brought him round to visit, aged a few weeks old. There had been something impetuous about him even then, something possibly to do with the way he pissed in his face when he bent down to coochy-coo him and offer him a bright and shiny silver token worth all of a hundred sesterce, which at the time, being little more than a boy himself, he’d found hard to afford. But a seed had been sowed by that stream of urine, and Melvin disliked the lad.

He’d heard that he’d had been accepted as a junior on one of the small ships that had been sent out on the big search and had mumbled to anyone near enough to hear him that it would prove to be folly sending a foetus on a man’s job. But at the time when they’d set out there had been a shortage of applicants so even unsuitable ones were chosen. But the last he’d heard he’d been paired with a more senior officer who rejoiced in the absurdly appropriate name of Stardust and that they were to go in an older ship on a short journey somewhere in Creation where they were unlikely to meet with any trouble. Stardust was a woman, and that didn’t sit comfortably in Melvin’s mind because he knew his nephew to be temperamentally misogynist and strong-willed.

And they were here. On this planet. At the same time and with the same motive as he and Aurora had. To find the home planet on which mankind must have evolved from the slime millions of years earlier before leaving on a mass exodus for the stars. It was a noble, even worthy, search and part of Melvin’s mind respected it as that.

“What are you doing here, and why are you shooting at me?” he demanded.

“I didn’t know it was you, sir! I saw this movement (like any man might) between the trees and being half off my head on a strange planet with its rarified atmosphere I thought it would make a fair target to shoot at! I mean, it was trowelled into our heads back home that we needed to get as much practice as we could when it comes to the manly arts...”

Aurora had, by this time, reached the confrontation between uncle and nephew.

“Manly arts?” she asked, curiously, “since when was firing a lethal weapon on an unknown figure on a planet you know nothing about remotely manly?”

The young man might have looked crestfallen, might have looked sorry, but he didn’t. Like a cockatoo he puffed out his chest and an iron smile crossed his still acne-marked face.

“We are superior to the squalid little figures living on this wretched, filthy planet,” he said brazenly. “Everyone can see we are! Creation is full of tiny little worlds where hominid creatures live and bathe in filth and eat worms! It’s in the books! Haven’t you read them?”

Aurora shook her head sadly. There were too many youths like this on the civilised worlds, she knew that. It was as if some genetic force had trailed mankind and settled in the minds of the young males, to make a virtue out of being quarrelsome, to revel in wars, to love battle. Why, in her lifetime - and she wasn’t so old, not by any means - entire civilisations had been rendered into dust and the worlds they inhabited turned into radioactive wastelands. And all because of this arrogant attitude in which mankind became a lordly figure at the pinnacle of the universe’s evolution and all else was useless.

And in their self-assured confidence they even destroyed themselves. After all, wars were fought between man and man and rarely if ever between man and non-human species.

“You represent the worst that lives on Terra,” she said, shaking her head. “I have heard speeches like the one you just made more times than enough, and they are always spoken by young men who allow themselves to see mankind as some kind of super-being with excellent judgement, incapable of being wrong. And from their silly words spring wars and during those wars millions die. And the masters of war, the men with balls too big for their bodies, they hide in bunkers or on satellites where they can remain free from the death their actions spread. You and your kind make me sick!”

The one called Gornley stared at her, open-mouthed. He wasn’t used to this, the words of a woman condemning him as a war-monger when all he wanted was a future in which manly pursuits were regarded as superior and the frailty that was womankind nurtured and loved in lace and with soft music surrounding their gentle smiles, and all the pretty things they liked provided by the muscles of their masters.

“I would have women who speak thus put into cells where they can fester without defense!” he almost squawked. “Life is about strength, about victory in battles in which only the fittest survive! That’s how mankind has come to this fine state of manly lust and female submission!”

Umbaga was getting fed up with a conversation he certainly couldn’t understand or take part in and even Juju was clicking her teeth in impatience. They obviously didn’t any idea about the nature of the discussion but it was apparent to them that the young man who had fired a weapon they couldn’t understand at Melvin represented an attitude they didn’t like. It wasn’t so much the words that they couldn’t understand but the attitude and body language that were both as clear as day, not needing language to convey their sentiments.

And he also understood that the young man represented a threat to himself, to his lovely Juju and to the tiny Idju, who was quietly playing by herself mere yards away. And no man likes the idea that his loved ones are at risk or being threatened in any way. So he took a step towards the arrogant youth and poked him with one finger in the chest whilst glaring at him from his dark brown eyes.

“You bad,” he said, “you very bad. You wrong.”

Gornley brushed his hand away angrily. He was overflowing with hatred for the woman who had tried to chastise him and, in a way and without him realising it, had partly got through the testosterone barrier he had surrounded himself with, a barrier that maintained that everything he said or did was right and anyone who would gainsay it was, by definition, wrong.

Umbaga saw the movement as a threat, and he grabbed the man’s arm.

Now, Gornley had exercised almost daily for most of his young life (as all young men of Terra did - it was a cultural thing), but that exercise was nothing to the daily battles a Neanderthal man had in the wilds when he was out hunting and gathering and providing for his family. So when he tried to jerk free of Umbaga’s grip he got nowhere. He recognised strength when he came upon it and found himself almost respecting the savage who had him in an iron grip.

“You very bad,” repeated Umbaga.

This is going too far, thought Aurora to herself, and she moved close to Umbaga.

“The creature’s a savage! Keep away from him or he’ll kill you!” blurted Gornley.

Aurora shook her head. “He’s no savage,” she said quietly, hoping to defuse the tension, “and if you were to kill him I wonder what will happen to you? After all, as I see it he may well be one of your own ancestors, and if you take him out then all of them, the whole procession of men that gradually and over more years than you can possibly count arrived at you, may well vanish in a puff of Neanderthal smoke!”

© Peter Rogerson 03.11.16