Unfinished History
Created | Updated Aug 5, 2004
Part One
The forest was quiet, or as quiet as untouched forest ever becomes. A gentle breeze rustled the leaves and assorted scurrying rodents set the undergrowth swaying as they hunted for food to keep them through the coming winter.
One creature in this part of the forest had no concern about the coming winter, for her parents had a fine, warm house and a full store of food from the harvest. Instead, she had what to her was a concern of much greater importance. Three hours ago, Arkyna had asked Firnor, the son of the colony's head meteorologist, to escort her to the harvest ball, and he'd refused her. The prospect of going unattended to the colony's major social event of the year was utterly unacceptable, and she had to decide what to do about it. At seventeen years of age, Arkyna was extremely preoccupied with such things.
Her brother found her on a branch halfway up a large tree as the sun touched the horizon.
'Still sulking, I see,' he observed without preamble, in a tone he knew she wouldn't like.
'Go away Riik. I need to think.'
'Your conquest of Firnor isn't going as you intended, I hear.'
'It's none of your business.'
'Probably not, but since when did that ever stop me interfering?' Riik was three years Arkyna's junior, but had a nasty habit of poking his nose into Arkyna's problems - and solving them for her. Such social skill coming from her little brother irritated Arkyna even more, and out of pride she rarely accepted his solutions. As a result, she rarely succeeded in any of her many attempted social interactions and had become something of a loner. Asking Firnor out had been a final act, a last attempt before giving up completely and resigning herself to life as a spinster.
Arkyna looked down from her branch at her brother, who was looking up at her. 'And what is your advice this time, oh mighty counsellor?'
'Go to the ball by yourself.'
'What? Utterly unacceptable. How can I not be escorted?'
'Quite easily. You see, I heard from Sirenya Del Ithikas that Firnor does actually really like you.'
'He's got a strange way of showing it.'
'Will you let me finish? Sirenya says he really likes you, but you make him so nervous whenever you're around that he never manages to say what he intends to say.'
'Then he should say nothing until he can come up with something in keeping with his state of mind.'
'Perhaps, but you know how it is when you're nervous, you just blurt things out. When you asked him to the ball, he just said no without even thinking about it. Afterwards, he was quite upset, or so Sirenya says. Go to the ball alone. I'm fairly sure he'll be there, also alone, and then you can ask him to dance.'
Arkyna considered this. 'And if he refuses?'
'Ask him again. There will be many dances. Ask him for the second dance, after sitting out the first, and if he refuses, ask him for each alternate dance thereafter.'
'So I either end up dancing with him or leave him a nervous wreck?'
'More or less, yes.'
'I'll think about it.'
'I thought you might,' said Riik in his infuriatingly superior tone of voice he always used when he knew he was right, and was fairly confident that Arkyna knew he was right as well. 'Now come home, mother's getting worried about you.'
'I'm perfectly safe out here, Riik.'
'No you aren't. Lots of predators are looking for food before the winter. And most of them are nocturnal. You're better to get out of the forest before the sun sets, you know that.'
Riik was right, of course, but Arkyna was feeling stubborn, especially since she more than suspected that Riik knew she was considering his suggestion to resolve the situation with Firnor.
'I'll be fine,' she said. 'Tell mother I'll be back in time for dinner.'
'Fine, I'll tell her. She's not going to be very pleased about it.'
'I never suggested that she would be, but that is what I am doing. Now shoo.'
Riik sighed and turned back toward the settlement, leaving Arkyna alone in her tree. A bird fluttered through the branches above her, singing a trilling song which was probably about finding somewhere there would be food for the coming winter. The entire southern hemisphere was gearing up for winter, and the preparation was so tangible you could see signs of it everywhere. Sometimes Arkyna wondered what it must be like on Alledora, the homeworld she had never seen but where her parents and most of the other colonists were born. After thirty thousand years of Alledari civilisation, there had undoutably been little natural left about the world even before the war which had almost wiped the Alledar out. A thousand years later, the planet was still recovering, and here the Alledar were, colonising other worlds, determined not to repeat the mistakes they had made on the one they'd been given.
Such thoughts were melancholy on such a glorious evening, so Arkyna set them aside to watch the sunset. When the last of the sun had vanished beneath the western horizon, she climbed down from her tree and turned back towards the settlement.
It was then that she saw the lion watching her.
The lions of Dira Tulag weren't exactly like the lions of Alledora, but they were similar enough that the same name had been applied to them. Where Alledari lions were sand-coloured, Tulagian lions were a mottled brown, but both species had a full mane, and both had as similar anatomy as could be expected on totally seperated planets (more proof, the colony biologists said, that there was a common root to at least some of the life in the galaxy). Alledari lions roared; Tulagian lions screamed. This one opened its mouth and screamed. Arkyna screamed right back at it.
Apparently startled, the lion sat back on its haunches and regarded her curiously for a moment. Arkyna was frozen to the spot. Go away, go away, go away...
Almost too quickly to perceive, the lion bunched its muscles and pounced. Acting without thought, Arkyna raised a hand and gestured, a flicking motion like she would use to shoo an insect away from a plate of food.
The lion halted in mid-air and floated about Arkyna's height above the ground, now looking unmistakeably startled. Arkyna was barely less surprised herself. She lowered her hand, and the lion fell to the ground. After scrambling to its feet, it looked at her for another moment, then turned and fled into the undergrowth, making whimpering noises. Arkyna stared after it, then sat down heavily against a nearby tree. Something told her that even Riik wasn't going to have any suggestions for this.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Arkyna returned home long after night had fallen. Her mother scolded her for staying out so late by herself, which she accepted without saying anything. When the tirade finally ran out, Arkyna went to her room, closed the door and powered up the computer terminal. During her long period of thinking out in the forest and on the roundabout route she had taken home, she had come to an inescapable conclusion. Whatever had happened with the lion had in fact happened, and there must therefore be a scientific explanation for it. Raised by a fusion reactor engineer and a faster-than-light physicist, she had been taught from an early age that science had the potential to answer every question, even if not all the answers had been found yet.
So she sat in front of the computer and began to search through the colony's extensive files. At her fingertips was the entirety of the knowledge of the Alledar, supposedly in an easy-to-use searchable format. This worked very well, until you didn't really know what you were searching for. Arkyna didn't really know what she was looking for, so the first half hour was fairly futile.
Despite her upbringing, she had read the occasional story when she was a child, and one of them had definitely contained people doing magical things. There had been a word for the ability to move objects with one's mind. She frowned, trying to remember it, then it came to her: telekinesis. She asked the computer to search for it, and found a definition from the Alledari Encyclopaedia.
Telekinesis: Name given to the ability to move physical objects without the application of physical force, or by the power of the mind or other unconventional means. Telekinesis is one of the abilities commonly associated with the mythical Psidar.
Arkyna frowned. She'd never heard of these mythical Psidar before. Curiously, she looked up a definition of Psidar in the same encyclopaedia.
Psidar: a mythical group of Alledar reputed to live in hiding among the general population. Psidar are said to be possessed of numerous powers stemming from their mastery of an energy known as 'Psi'. Such powers traditionally include telekinesis, the ability to manipulate heat, light and sound, telepathy, and the ability to move long distances without passing through the intervening space. No conclusive historical evidence has ever been found of the existance of the Psidar either now or at any time in the past, but popular myth gives them a central role in the ending of the Great War of 8734-8753.
'No conclusive evidence, eh?' Arkyna tapped out an another query and waited for the result. 'That means there must be at least some.' It seemed obvious to her that if these Psidar did exist, or if they had existed at some point in the past, her own apparent telekinesis might be the same thing. If they didn't exist... she didn't particularly want to think about that possibility, so she didn't.
The computer presented her with a vast list of articles, gathered from historical and archaeological journals from the past thousand years since the end of the Great War. This was clearly going to take quite some time, but the enthusiasm for research had abated somewhat with the knowledge that none of it was likely to be reliable. Outside it was the depths of night, and the smaller of Dira Tulag's two moons was only half full, giving plenty of cover in deep shadow. A kilometre or so out in the forest would give her the perfect opportunity to attempt to control this power, if power it was, without interruptions.
She crept out of her room and found the house in darkness, for at this late hour almost the entire colony would be in bed. The front door opened silently, and she wrapped her coat around herself before venturing out into the night, not noticing Riik watching her leave from his bedroom window. Her brother saw her vanish into the forest, wondered why she was going there, shrugged, and tried to go to sleep again.
