CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR – NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS

Aurora struggles with the consequences of a past accident whilst Umbaga sleeps

In an attempt to find a way back to Terra and her own time and away from the Neanderthal world she was in Aurora had set the computer one great silicon headache of a problem, and while it wrestled with numbers so huge that Umbaga’s head would explode if he even started to contemplate them, she decided that she would try to learn something about the people on the planet and the way they lived. She had already decided that this primitive planet was the home world and that she and Melvin had succeeded in their search. After all, the woman Juju’s DNA proved that there was a genetic link between the two of them, a trace of Neanderthal DNA having survived the millennia and still being present in modern mankind, including herself.

So she left Melvin yet again in their spacecraft with its computer humming angrily as it wrestled with its titanic problem. This time Melvin was quite happy to remain. She had told him of the grief Umbaga had displayed on finding his family dead and he preferred to steer clear of it. And he was troubled about his nephew’s predicament and wanted to work it out. The lad had always been headstrong, but what he had done was absurd, to say the least, and there simply must be an explanation for it somewhere.

But back to Aurora. She set about learning the Neanderthal language, and as it contained only a necessary vocabulary with no words for the enormous discoveries that lay in the future (and no word for murder, which she found intriguing) it wasn’t long before she could converse with Umbaga. And to her surprise she was impressed by how much could be said using a fairly small vocabulary.

“Me sorry about Juju,” she said one evening when cold was setting in as the first real bite of an early autumn found its way into the cave. “She was good woman,” she added, truthfully rather than diplomatically. The reality was she had grown to like the much simpler woman, and had gained a respect for her thought processes and the way she understood far more than had been evident when they had first met.

“Me not forget,” sighed Umbaga. “Me knew Juju when she small. Pretty face and bright eyes. Good girl, kind to mother, kind to everyone. And thinking … she good at thinking.”

“She clever,” agreed Aurora. “She understand shiny wristwatch I gave her!”

Umbaga had learned the word ‘wristwatch’ before Juju had died, so he understood what Aurora was referring to. He had the watch now, but he couldn’t bring himself to wear it, though he had spent a considerable amount of time gazing at it and thought he knew how to read it. He now kept it near his bed and gained a kind of comfort from its simple display when the world was black at night.

“Juju clever with most things,” agreed Umbaga, and he smiled at Aurora, “Word ‘clever’ invented for Juju,” he said.

“Tell me … the stump before you get to the mushrooms … why do you … piss on it?” asked Aurora. It was something that had intrigued her since first she had seen the men of the small tribe urinating on that particular stump.

“It mark the boundary,” murmured Umbaga, “and the lands beyond forbidden.”

“But who forbids?” asked Aurora.

“Ancestors. They forbid,” Umbaga told her. “Umbaga explain. Once, when world was young there was a great fire in forest. Fire raged for many sunrises and when it stopped was a great opening with no trees.”

“The clearing?” asked Aurora.

“You call it that, so yes. But men found when went to clearing that some became sick. Got big wounds from nowhere. Hair fell out. Bad times. So Ancestors said keep out of clearing. The clearing forbidden territory.”

“Radioactivity,” murmured Aurora. “It must have been a long time ago.”

Umbaga nodded. “It many lives of men,” he confirmed. “But trees not come back. Instead there is much grass and those poisonous things that make men dream bad things.”

“Mushrooms,” said Aurora.

“Mushrooms,” nodded Umbaga. “Sometimes Juju go to edge of clearing, bad girl, and pick mushrooms! Juju says mushrooms make meat good!”

Aurora wondered if there might still be radioactivity in the clearing, maybe enough to have changed a native fungus into something extraordinary. Something capable of affecting minds. Something potentially dangerous.

“Clearing still bad place?” she asked.

Umbaga nodded. “Clearing bad place. You see: make other space man mad.”

The Aurora understood instantly what he meant and warmed to his insight. Maybe Gornley had gone wild because he’d eaten one or maybe more of the mushrooms. Stardust’s body, after all, was in the clearing along with their space vehicle. Maybe there were even spores in the air that could turn a man’s mind and if he was prone to youthful egocentricity could flip his mind until he became a killer.

“Clearing bad place,” she conceded. “Did ancestors tell of how the fires came?”

Umbaga nodded slowly. “The story goes,” he said, “that there was a light from the skies, brighter than lightning and suns, and then a noise like a thousand thunders. It roar and blast and many trees get blown away. Then the fire. Raging for days, it was, and hotter than sun!”

“It sounds like a nuclear explosion,” murmured Aurora to herself.

“It explosion!” agreed Umbaga. “It mighty explosion! Ancestors say.”

“Were your people here then?” asked Aurora.

“Some people, but long, long time ago. Many lives of men. Too many for Umbaga to count!” he said, and he grinned. “Maybe Aurora could?”

That night Aurora got to thinking when Umbaga had passed into sleep. She was lying next to him because there was really only the one comfortable bed and Umbaga didn’t seem to think there was anything odd about the two if them sharing a bed. It’s where he had slept with Juju, and often Idju had joined them. Sleeping together didn’t. For Umbaga, equate to loving together. It was no more and no less than a convenience.

Then, as she thought she built an image in her mind of what might have happened on this planet centuries earlier. She didn;t know how many centuries, but is must have been quite a long time for the clearing to have become safe for people to walk across.

Maybe, she thought, a space vessel like their own, with its atomic power source, had crashed and burned, spreading its deadly radioactivity over an area in which all that could subsequently grow was a fungus that had been genetically altered by all the stray remnants of the explosion and a few species of tough grass. It made sense, but in her head it was only part of the story.

There was another part that she needed to find out about. After all, if all that happened in the early Neanderthal period of life on Earth, before even Umbaga and his people lived and breathed, then where had the exploding craft come from? There was no trace anywhere in Creation of an earlier dominant species, and if there had been surely a trace would have been left behind, even if it only was a radioactive clearing in a luxurious forest?

She looked towards Umbaga as he slept. He was a simple soul, a good man, she knew that much, and yet his corner of his world had been forever tarnished by an accident from space, and it troubled her.

He tossed and turned in his sleep.

“Juju,” he muttered as he dreamed, and Aurora wept.

© Peter Rogerson 09.11.16