The Nebuchadnezzar magazine

A short story

by

Eric Momou

They landed in the heart of the Massif Central, near the French department of Dordogne, at forty-five degrees North latitude and five degrees East longitude. Oblong, the construct which carried them was recognizably avian in form: it spanned thirty metres, from nose to tail. Comprised of aluminum the hull and fuselage shone silver with iridescent impurities of olivine. Though shabby, the shuttle flew aloft, attesting to the acquired metallurgy of a lunar forge.

Men had left the moon to live on Earth again.

In her sanctity, the Earth smote and rent their lofty vehicle, sullying their plumage so that they returned tarred with dust. Her intent was simple: to mar them again, for another season. For the settlers, these specters stood in recent memory. Their passive thought lived, as if it could respire. It swam in elated minds, laying dormant to oxidizing consciences.

Fleeting, it gave way to rumination and this in turn to fear, which did well to inspirit the Men of the Company. They numbered seven.

For two days the Men witnessed the gray of the moorland. Now the land gave way, plain as an offering, to a patch of alpine forest. Vegetation died and the hedges dwindled, but the trickle of the rivulet stayed, and to this fact the Men held fast. A gradual incline uphill, the march had been long and strenuous. To this extent, the land claimed them, forcing them into recompense until it bore their bones.

At one time there were twelve. The Last died from a common cold; his successor perished from the flu. Those following grew weary and collapsed; one drowned. The remnant Men grew hardened at the passing of their comrades. Several, on the cusp of madness, saw the futility of the matter. As to this revelation, they kept to themselves for none were as brazen so as to speak to the First Man at the head of the company.

Conversely, the First Man was amongst the last of prolific Men to have fled Earth. He was a scientist, the kind that thought long and logistically about things, past the ethics and into their plain natures. The rest were born, or more so intubated, upon the Moon. They had never walked the terrestrial landscape, or tasted of the cool waters from the mountain streams. Water that rose from the lunar core was frozen and poisonous, full of syndicates and had to be thoroughly purified.

On earth, the richness of minerals and the presence of eukaryotic organisms, such as protists deemed the water unsafe— even deadly.

As they continued the rivulet grew into a river, roaring like palpation in their ears. Soon the surge was deafening, the sound cutting off conversation.

“Water.” said the First Man. And the Men listened. “Is it safe to drink?” said the Second. He wore his face pale and downtrodden, but his eyes bore steel. The First knelt. He placed a Geiger counter near the water and waited a long time. He took other readings, this time with a refractometer, and then with a litmus strip.

“By god,” said the First in undertone. Then he smiled and turned to the others.

“Yeah. It’s safe. But use your purifiers, just in case.” Relieved, he washed his face, cleansing it of soot. Then, he walked into the creek, wading barefoot. The Men followed him. They drank, but kept their heads elevated, always searching through the pine.

After drinking, their strength returned to them. The First pointed westward, towards a ridge.

“We will go a little further now, up the summit. There we can camp. Build a fire.”

Away from the disarray of wilderness, the ridge provided respite. Light kindled towards the forest’s Western edge, so that in the East its warmth forsook them.

At this portent, the First Man stoked a fire: greatly and hot, as he had done on the hearth in his crooked house a long time ago. The others gathered, amazed.

The First Man began his story of the folly of his predecessors, and their irrevocable natures. He spoke of the East and West and their affiliated feuds that all Men had forgotten. And the Men believed him for it was he who had kept the Company alive, until now.

In the morning, light splayed upon them, and their backs hurt from the rigid ground beneath, wrought of permafrost. Although snow had not yet fallen, the season was early winter. The wind grew most bitter at the timberline, as rime frost accumulated on the tents and trees.

They found the girl due north, sleeping in a cave of bedrock, near the river. When they had found her, a psychosis had already set in her feral eyes, and she was combative. She had remedied an affliction of parasitic helminths with stick rolling: reeling the worms around a twig at the base of her heel. When the worm had reared its head through the callused limb, she would tug at it (and her flesh stretched with it). In the span of several weeks the entire body would emerge, in full length, a dried vermiform body like a spirochete around the branch. Were she to cease this process or sever the worm, it would propagate and she would be obliged to start the process again.

“She’s delirious. Lifeless.” said the Third Man, who was a medic. “Imperceptive of stimuli.” With a hideous strength, she resisted any attempt to free her. She spat and muttered incongruent words, from which the linguist of their number discerned as an old tongue, Gaelic.

“Leave her,” said the Fourth, a Man of reason. The rest kept silent “Any further attempt would risk puncture to our suits, perhaps depressurizing them.”

She was blinded and fettered, with a thick twine fashioned from coarse, thorned flora. This heinous construct had caused her skin to bleed, the blood septic. The Fourth, being the horticulturist had administered anodyne, intravenously. The plant that twined about her extremities, was a variant of coniferous fern that had been inscribed in taxonomy books long ago. By analysis, the sap was toxic not in chemical composition but by its biological complex with a surge of virulent mycobacteria.

Pinaceia mortus, the horticulturist named it.

The Men camped within the cave. “Do not light a fire,” He told them. “When I return, we will hunt.” When night came, The First did not sleep. Rather, he assigned the Second as sentry, standing vigil at the cave entrance. Meanwhile, the First took this opportunity, as a time to explore. He carried a flashlight.

The complex was comprised of several antechambers, all of which had drawings that lined the walls: great works of abstractionism that ancient museum curators would gloat at.

There were the paintings at Lascaux, but monoliths also: tools of steel and canopic jars. In several chambers, where the previous occupants inhabited, was evidence of irrigation and riverside plumbing. Termite mounds grew from their bases, extending to the ceilings.

Like the fabled Mesopotamian city of Ur, this one stood in the midst of a vale— with access to fertile plain and hunting ground. It made him curious, however that the people did not grow their crop of corn and barley outside the antechambers. Instead, they planted within the main vestibule. This, was incredibly high— thirty fathoms at least. It tapered like a rotunda lined with an assortment of toothy stalactites. At the top of the vestibule was the source of cultivation, a sky light. Livestock lived in the chambers, grazed even on the edge of crop. The civilization gleaned, whenever there was famine.

They plant inside because of the fallout, thought the First Man. Already, he had prospects of rebuilding, of colonizing. Like a visionary, he saw many encampments, fashioned in the form of these caves speckling the horizon.

We can send ambassadors, build a country.

Of course, if the politics played out, they could trade-even reconstruct the main infrastructure for the current inhabitants, a symbiosis efforts.

He wondered what the air smelled like. Surely, it was pristine in such a place— an area where plants proliferated and animals lived mundane lives. Yet, the organisms might well have adapted to a nitrogen rich environment. He tested his luck, and removed his rebreather.

He had forgotten the smell of soil; the taste of water free of particulates.

Just maybe Men could re-populate. Maybe they could find the xylem, or the very moral fiber to reseed. But, Earth was not like home.

At twilight, The First made his way towards the cave entrance. Excitement had taken root like soil in his veins, enriching him. With stronger still. them:

With each step, the palpitation of his heart grew As he ran, he mouthed the words, recited.

Come! See that my stories are true.

And he ran harder, almost taking flight. When he did arrive, his Men had gone. Remnant kindle and cinders smoldered. In his absence, The Second had annulled his command. As he trod in the darkness, he almost fell on a carcass that lay on the floor, skewered on a pit. The beast, he did not recognize. Rather, whatever miasma possessed him, turned to a sullen anger. Were they to return, from some unknown excursion, he did not have the spirit to wait and greet them. Instead, he slept.

It was not until afternoon, that it occurred to him, the Men had been ousted. When the grey of morning settled and the sun had nearly reached its apogee, he saw the carcass. In the light, the body of the Second was mauled: mutilated like a mass of meat, extremities torn. The only limb that remained was the left leg. Dependent lividity shown in the torso.

His instinct told him to run. He made his way to fissured rim of the vale.

Down in the basin, the Men numbered six. All stood in a line parallel to the river, clad in the white of their space suits. Each Man knelt in a state of genuflection, bound about their ankles with thick twine. Another paced, separate from the Men. Dressed in the garb of the cave dwellers He wore feathers, like some avian mediator, and carried a sword of steel. He spoke: an orator of orators.

“Our forefathers taught their sons these things, so that we may know what went and came. This was after the Dreaming, but the world continues sleeping still and through all else we have kept it so. The story has been told. We are of the good people. As for you, the Earth is not your inheritance. You rejected it and you abandoned it. Because of this, it does not receive you.”

The First Man gazed onward, out past the river to the mountain and the cradle of valley beyond it. And for the second time the First Man imagined.

East, out past the vale he saw juniper trees. Cedars too, lined the horizon— the like of which grew in Lebanon; a place he had only read about. At the memorial scent of figs, his mouth watered. The sweet smell of wind wafted to the back of his throat, only to be caught by the saline scent of blood. And as he ingested it, the iron made his stomach turn.

Further, he witnessed the generations of Men who would inhabit the vale, even their children. He saw their abodes: cabins and houses-all strong, even resilient. Unlike the laborious tilling of the moon, fine crop grew each season, and the collection for the harvest was plentiful. Seeds germinated, the moon waxed and waned, the sun tumbled and rose, and the stars sifted through the celestial murk. Orion’s belt quivered on high, out past the assortment of nebulous clouds, and the fractal limits of his own reckoning.

These thoughts contented him. But as this madness overtook reason, the First Man unbridled himself from instinct. He very nearly plummeted into the vale, that slaughtering place. He met the eyes of the Men with the elderly spark of resilience. In the current, The First Man saw the blood of his comrades. Flecks of red settled down in the river silt, swirling around his knees. Above all, he heard their cries: one after the other as their throats were slit. None were louder than the rushing of the river.

After he collected himself, The First Man prostrated. Then, he set his face to the wet soil.