Night Tales

A voyage of the Far Horizon

It's something of a shock to wake up in bed with another man for the first time.

Not that I've got anything against that kind of thing - I'm not prejudiced or anything, It's just that I prefer to sleep alone, or with people of the opposite sex. So I think you'd understand my surprise when I awoke lying in bad with another man and no idea how I'd gotten there.

Still, the first thing a world traveller learns is - Observe. "Monkey See, Monkey Do" is a rule of human behaviour which is applicable almost everywhere, to a greater or lesser extent. So I sat up in bed and looked around curiously.

It was a long, rather dim room, lit with overhead light panels and tall windows which let in a warm afternoon light. There were nine beds in the room, and all of them had two or even three people in them, all of them male, ranging in age from little boys up to grandfathers.

All of the people were dressed in white robes, and many of them sported bandages or casts, so it didn't take me long to work out that I was in some kind of hospice, although of course it was nothing like any medical establishment in the Nexus.

I raised my wrist to my mouth and spoke.

"Cynthis, Status Please."

"Cynthis is online." A female voice whispered in my ear. "All systems are green. Security is intact. The Far Horizon is parked, camouflage is deployed. All lift cells are deflated. Estimated time to flight readiness is 3.5 minutes. Cynthis is awaiting orders."

I sighed with relief. However I'd gotten here, at least it didn't appear to have affected the ship.

"Cynthis, Location Please."

"Tristan is 10.7 kms North North East of the Far Horizon. Estimated pickup time is 9.5 minutes."

To a traveller in an unknown world, the pickup time is always reassuring to know, but the situation didn't seem life threatening, and I didn't think I wanted to draw that much attention to myself. Besides, I still needed to find out as much as I could about this world, and the only way to do that was to get among the people and observe - although certainly I'd intended to be much more discrete than this on my first visit.

I realized my bedmate was looking at me with a strange expression, so I smiled at him blithely. He was an older man, his black hair was greying. I gazed at him curiously, able to see no obvious physical differences from the norm. He returned the appraisal, finally grunting and rolling over, dismissing me.

He couldn't hear Cynthis, of course, to him it must have seemed that I was muttering into the inside of my wrist. Implanted communications systems have big advantages for a prospector. They can't easily be detected, and they're difficult to take off you. There are disadvantages too, of course, and not everyone likes their technology that close to the bone.

The practice of sleeping two to a bed in hospices was unusual, to my knowledge. It was in fact the only thing that stood out about this world so far. But really, I had to suppose it wasn't all that strange. Even on Prime people had slept two or more to a bed as little as a few hundred years ago. I wondered why the practice continued here while on other worlds of the Nexus it had died out.

How in the world had I gotten here? The last thing I could remember shortly after jumping in. I had been hiking along a road, watching the primitive surface vessels go by, even then beginning to wonder is I wasn't on a fool's errand. I'd gotten hot, and dizzy, so I'd sat down to rest and then... I'd awoken here.

I lay back on the pillows and continued looking around, trying to find out as much as I could. It was a primitive place, all plaster and glass and painted metal - hardly any plastics, which was disappointing and didn't bode well for a successful trip.

Still I needed to know much more before I could say for certain. Cynthis, of course would be monitoring the radio spectrum, and that would help, but direct observation, and written material in particular - books - are the key to knowing if a world will pan out or not.

I examined the blankets and sheets closely, they seemed to be animal and plant fibres - natural materials - mass produced with primitive automation - Not promising.

There was a button nearby, one of the few items of plastic in the room. Plastic is normally associated with electricity, so I reached out and pressed it, expecting something to come on - lights, audio, possibly even a holovisual system. Of course nothing happened.

I sighed. I was going to have to get out of here, of course. Having made up my mind, I decided to act at once. I was swinging my legs over the side of the bed, about to try to make an exit when the woman appeared.

She had that cool "not a hair out of place" look that one associates with healers and teachers. She was wearing a long robe of purple that seemed to positively shout "uniform" somehow, and given the context I'd have bet credits that she was some kind of healer or med-tech.

I sat looking up at her and she looked back down at me with businesslike blue eyes.

"So, our mystery man is awake at last." she said, "You're very lucky to be alive."

The accent was strange, and the word ordering was stranger still, but she was speaking some form of Anglic, which is one of the Germanic/Caucasian branch languages. I could make out her meaning fairly clearly which was reassuring. It had been a minus 99 jump, which shouldn't have taken me too far off the baseline, but the two to a bed thing had startled me more than I'd cared to admit.

"What happened to me?"

"You had the Blue Fever. We can't understand how you missed the immunisation shots. You were nearly gone when you were brought in - We had to boil your blood."

"You had to what?"

My amazement must have shown on my face because she smiled reassuringly. "The blood heating treatment. It's not used very much anymore since the universal immunisation, but we keep the machinery on hand just in case. Besides, it can be used for treating various kinds of blood humours."

"Oh." Otherworldly diseases are a hazard no prospector takes lightly, but my boosted immune system should have taken care of anything in the normal run of bugs. That this Blue Fever should have knocked me down so quickly and effectively argued that this wasn't going to be a profitable world.

She pushed me gently back into the bed. "You just lie there and recover your strength. You're making a remarkably good recovery, but there's no call to overdo it. Now I need to know your name - Your folks will be worried, and the immunisation people will want to talk to you."

"Oh, I'm Tristan."

"Tristan who?"

"Just Tristan."

She nodded and picked up a wooden board that was hanging from the end of the bed, making a mark on it with her stylus.

"Well Mister Just, you concentrate on getting better. Is there anything you need?"

Wordlessly I shook my head, then realising that this might not be understood I added. "No."

She nodded and left, her shoes clicking oddly on the smooth floors.

Shortly after that my bedmate left too. "Where are you going?" I asked curiously.

"On patrol." He muttered, leaving me no wiser than before. He sauntered right out of the room and turned left into what seemed to be a corridor beyond. That was the last I saw of him.

Shortly after that another woman came by. She was wearing a long, colourful skirt with a separate white top, and she carried a small boy dressed in the by now familiar white robe. By her manner she was his mother. They stopped opposite my bed and she set the boy down and they began going through a box that on the floor by a window. It was a box of books.

One big, thick, blue book caught my eye - It was titled The Concise Junior Compendium of Modern Knowledge.

"Excuse me," I called. "May I please have that book?"

She looked up at me quizzically and smiled. "You most certainly may."

As she picked it up, I noticed the title underneath, it had a far more lurid cover than the compendium, covered with unicorns and fley-boggarts, and it was entitled Night Tales.

"Oh, and the Night Tales - Please!"

She really smiled at that, and you could understand why, for it was an illustrated children's book, but I've found that nothing gives you a more intimate feel for a world than their folklore, and it seemed likely that Night Tales were this world's version of Goblin Stories.

Still smiling, the woman handed me both books. "With my felicitations." She declared.

"Thank you."

She turned back to helping her little boy choose his reading material, and I turned to my books to find out what I could of this world.

Now I don't know about you, but personally I know of nothing more boring than wars and politics and science facts - particularly when they are someone else's history and technology. So I just leafed though the Compendium.

I did read the entry on the Blue Fever with some personal interest, noting with satisfaction that the development of the vaccine was comprehensively described. The rest I skimmed, noting only that the world was disappointingly low tech - but I'd noticed that already.

I turned to the Night Tales book more eagerly, wondering what sort of stories this world had produced. "Night Tales and Scary Stories for younglings of all ages" the title proclaimed. I smiled and plunged in.

The tales were interesting enough, but half way through I found a real gem. The story was called "On Patrol" and in it's own way it was more illuminating than the dry facts in the Compendium.

It was the story of a little boy who wouldn't go to sleep, and he wriggled and tossed and turned and talked so much that his oldest brother threw him out of the bed.

"Go on patrol!" He was sternly ordered. "And don't come back!"

The illustrations were delightful, but I won't try and describe them. The book is in the Library if you're interested - Search under Night Tales.

So the boy went to his parent's room, but his father didn't want him there. "Go and find somewhere else to sleep!"

So next he tried to sneak into his the bedroom of his sisters, but they weren't having that. "Go away!" They screamed and they threw pillows at him until he did.

After that he tried curling up and going to sleep in other places, on the couch, under a chair, by the radio - the illustration showed a huge old valve driven relic - But wherever he went his sleep was disturbed by visits from the creatures of the Night Tales.

These creatures were strange. Some were funny, some scary, some mischievous, and some just plain odd, however all of them were disturbing enough to wake the little boy up, and when he did they vanished with a triumphant cry of "Away Avaunt!"

Finally he pulled the table cloth from the dining table and wrapped it around himself, and he found the cat and hugged her to him and he was at last able to sleep. The lesson of the story was that the next night he was much better behaved in bed.

When I finished the Night Tales, my head was spinning. From what source I couldn't say, but something had altered the culture of this world beyond what you expect from a single jump, no matter how special.

There were possibilities here, I could almost taste them. A different culture means different ideas, different designs, different arts and sciences. If only their technology weren't so primitive.

In any case I had what I'd come here for, and it was time to go. I got up and walked from the room, taking my books with me. No-one tried to stop me. I got out of the hospice in exactly the same way - you wouldn't get out of a Nexus hospice that easily, but it seemed they thought differently here.

Outside my white robe drew some strange glances, but no stares. The man mostly seemed to wear kilts and jackets, while the women wore long colourful skirts with white or pale coloured tops.

I walked a couple of klicks to the edge of town, then I called Cynthis and told her to inflate the lift cells and to come and get me.

After an endless five minutes the Far Horizon appeared, shining in the late afternoon sun and rarely more welcome. She extended her legs and dropped down into a cow-pasture under Cynthis' control.

Quickly I was aboard and in the pilot's couch. I angled the jets downwards for lift and we were off, bumping over the grass for a few meters before the wheels lifted smoothy free and we rose gently into the air.

At a thousand meters I stopped and hovered, the whisper of the jets dying away as I prepared for the jump. I donned the helmet and closed my eyes, concentrating on the positive 99 jump back to Tiller's World and fixing it in my mind. I was almost ready to throw the switch when my concentration was shattered by a clattering roar that seemed to shake my teeth.

I opened my eyes in time to see a primitive white piston engined flier shoot past, dangerously close. It seemed to be just beyond the view port - so close I could reach out and touch it. I could see pilot of the sudden and dangerous contraption where he crouched in a little bubble dome towards the flier's nose, the whole thing canted over at a ridiculous angle as it swept by. Along the wings and tail of the little flier were painted the lines of a multicolored condor.

I shook my head. What would this world come up with next?

"Cynthis - monitor radio transmissions from the flier."

"Working..." Cynthis' soft voice was cut off with a hiss of static.

"..ister Foo Fighter, I repeat I'm going to have to ask you to accompany me to the nearest aeroport - Respond please."

"I hear you, I hear you!" I assured him. "What have I done wrong?"

The little condor flier swept around me in a wide circle.

"Well, you're flying an unidentified, unlicensed craft in a protected volume, I guess, that'll do for starters, wouldn't you say?"

At full thrust the Far Horizon could probably outrun the prop driven flier, but why bother?

"This is an experimental lighter than air craft" I protested, stalling for time. "I didn't mean to enter a protected volume." I closed my eyes, thinking all the time of the positive 99 jump.

"Be that as it may, Mister Foo Fighter, You're going to have to come along with me, you wouldn't want a shot across your bows now, would you? Besides, everyone knows that lighter than air flight is impossible." He laughed. "Your ship looks more like a cloud gobbler to me!"

I recognised the reference from the Night Tales book. A cloud gobbler was one of the nasty ones, a misty floating shape with burning red eyes - It ate the unwary.

True, I had to admit there was some resemblance, and the Far Horizon does have eyes, but her eyes were peaceful and blue, painted on so she could see the way, and to find luck - Not for hunting down prey.

The Condor flier with his guns and his roaring engines was a much more sudden and hostile contraption than my serene craft.

I sighed and banished all thoughts from my mind except fixing the jump in my mind, ignoring the drone from the Condor.

But I couldn't resist a parting shot, so with the jump fixed firmly in my head and my hand on the switch, I replied in a steady, calm voice, "Well, you may be right. Away Avaunt!"

Then I made the jump and I was gone.

*

The Far Horizon


This floating life is harder than it seems,
I'm falling through the worlds as through the air.
Would you believe the things that I have seen?
I sometimes even wonder if you'd care.


Your settled life is not for such as I,
I wasn't made to lie upon the earth.
I sail among the oceans of the sky,
I'm worlds away from all that gave me birth.


Yet if your settled home becomes too tame,
And all your dreams are ashes in your hand,
And day that follows day seems all the same,
And weary darkness falls upon the land.


Look long into the blue and think of me,
Beyond the far horizon I will be.


Che Monro 1997

*

Well, the Night Tales world didn't pan out in the end.

The healers were fascinated by the Blue Fever and they kept me in quarantine until they'd studied it carefully and worked out how it got around the immune boosters and patched it up.

The Nexus Authority studied the two books thoroughly and concluded trade wouldn't be profitable, so the Night Talers were left to look after their own interests.

I hoped the blood heating thing might be novel, but it turns out we've had that for a long time.

For a while I thought perhaps I could make something by peddling the Night Tales book to a publisher, but they shied off in the end, citing negative test reader reactions, the cost of translations, and some lingering concerns about the two boys being in the same bed together.

So in the end both books ended up in the Library, on public download for a nominal fee. Unless someone takes it into their head to visit the place again, the only credits I'm likely to make are from downloads, so if you're at all interested, feel free!

Still, it was an interesting place, a little bit off the standard pattern somewhere, even if it wasn't the pot of gold that all prospectors dream of.

I've occasionally toyed with the idea of going back there again, because they were friendly people, and I kind of liked their style. But of course I've got no real reason to, it's just another world and there are always more worlds waiting out there, just beyond the far horizon.