The Orphans of Man - Chapter One

Farsight - (Rhea: Circa 425-430)

Ave regularly gazed towards the nighttime sky to enjoy the unpopulated peace it offered, completely unaware there were far more people up there than in her own village. She had always longed for the stars, and although she would never have the opportunity to visit them herself, she would take the first critical step that would propel her people to them. She gripped the one of branches of her treetop home with her hind talons as the wind blew in beneath her wings giving her temporary lift. She let it raise her body a few centimeters as she came just that much closer to those mysterious twinkling lights in the night sky. She thrilled in the breeze as the leaves rustled around her and then faded as the wind subsided. She settled back on her branch firmly reminded that to the Rhea, she was forever bound. She was not deterred. Though she could not go there, she would still explore the stars.

She was not unlike her fellow rohks, physically. She was about one and half meters tall with a wingspan of about two meters, adorned with brown and gold feathers. The crest on her head was only matched by her slender beak, giving her an aerodynamic shape. Her talons were meticulously manicured and painted, like most females of her species. Where she differed was in her dreams. She wanted to reach the stars. Other rohks might, she reasoned. They just needed the right inspiration.

Ave spread her wings and leapt from the thick branch that was the entrance to her nest. She caught the rising thermal currents that radiated from the ground some thirty meters below and glided into the evening air. She climbed and leapt from one branch, as thick as she was tall, to another branch feeling the familiar bark of the four hundred year old tree as she went, as she had a thousand times before. Its unique fingerprint pattern with the deep, wide network of grooves gave her spiderlike purchase as she ascended. It offered her a solid base to push off from as she flung herself onto another thermal updraft. Her feathers captured it and carried her up another five meters to the next set of branches. Most of the branches were easy to reach but as she got higher, she had to rely more and more on the gliding power of her wings, the wind currents to carry her, and her own strength to climb. Finally, she made her way to the highest points of her treetop village where the canopy of leaves gave way to the evening sky.

Ave had been coming to this spot since she was a hatchling to marvel at the heavens as had many other rhoks who would come to the evening roost: Young couples during eclipses to set the mood; parents with their hatchlings teaching them constellations and the legends behind the stars that were their ancestors; artists and poets seeking inspiration; even adolescents just looking for something different to do. She began to notice one male rohk who came often and always alone. He would perch in the same place and, even though others would come to talk to him from time to time, they would move on with their night and he would perch there, watching the sky, alone. It wasn't a sad alone. Rather, he was always at peace. Content. Eventually, he would rouse, stretch his wings and glide down to his nest. At least she assumed he was returning to his nest. He would soar out of sight to the far side of the tree.

Ave watched him for many nights and eventually became as fascinated with him as she was with the stars themselves. Who was this tercel? What brought him here alone? After thinking that, she realized that she too had come here alone. She too, would speak to a few other villagers and go home alone.

Lost in these thoughts, she suddenly realized that he was watching her think about him. He had been looking at her for some time before she realized that she was staring at him. She started for a moment, shaken and slightly embarrassed. He cocked his head to one side and flitted his wings. There was no doubt. He knew she was staring at him and she briefly wondered if her thoughts had somehow been broadcast to him. Clumsily, she backed away, broke eye contact and leaped from her branch. She glided awkwardly away and out of sight.

For the next few nights, she sneaked back up to top of her tree and made sure he wasn't there before she enjoyed the night sky again. When he was there, she would either return home or find another vantage point. Eventually she had to swallow her pride and just accept that he would be there and life would have to go on.

He was kind. He either pretended she wasn't there or he'd glance disconnectedly at her as she made her way to her roost and then looked back to the sky.

Eventually, she noticed that his clothing changed. He was wearing brighter chest bands; and when she looked his way, he would puff up his chest feathers and caw a few quick, rising baritone notes. He was courting! She followed proper rhok etiquette, however, and ignored him. He became more aggressive. He'd stand up and raise his wings before singing. This went on for many nights and at the end of each night, Ave would leap from her roost and glide home, but not one of those nights did she go to bed unexcited. He filled her thoughts and made her heart beat faster making it difficult for her to fall asleep.

Eventually his boldness brought him to her. He glided to her branch and perched three meters from her and sang. The deep tones flowed from his throat and beak simultaneously. The feathers on his throat rippled with the tune and his beak shuddered with grace. The melody ebbed and flowed sending a heated thrumming through Ave’s chest. The tones filled the night sky and the rhoks who roosted and chatted nearby fell silent and listened. The song spoke wordlessly of longing and care. It made promises of companionship and possibility. It offered protection and happiness and finally spoke of the future and love. The song flowed out into the air, up and up and mingled with the wisps of clouds where it faded into the night. Ave was lost in the melody. She cooed quietly and made room for him next to her. His feathers settled as the last remnants of his voice drifted off and he settled next to Ave.

"I am Antarus," he said in a voice so quiet she almost didn't hear him.

"I am Ave."

"May I share the sky with you, Ave?"

And she was his.

***

Soon, they were married and together, they watched over the sky. They kept an eye on the moons Tethys and Phoebe and the mother planet Hesperides. They ensured the stars were aligning properly. They invited the occasional shooting star to draw white hot arcs across the horizon. They planned the sunsets and sun rises. Together they governed the heavens. In short order, they had children who would inherit their night sky from them and all the jewels it contained.

One evening, Ave settled onto her favorite spot next to Antarus. He clicked his beak, tilted his head, and sang a short, gentle tune to welcome her. They watched as the last moments of the setting sun sent golden streaks across a deepening purple sky. Together, they marveled at the waxing moon Tethys as it moved across the face of Hesperides, the mother planet. Beyond them, a small green dot appeared above the planet’s nighttime horizon.

“There’s Phoebe”, Ave pointed to the distant moon.

“It’s so far away tonight,” Antarus replied. “You can’t even see the oceans.”

“In just a few nights, it’ll be so close that we’ll be able to make out the coastlines!” She trailed off in thought as her wings idly dropped to her side. As much as she watched and loved the heavens, she would never be able to visit them. Rhok wings did not give her people full flight. They were only strong enough to allow her to glide or lift her temporarily on the occasional thermal. The trees lifted them high above the ground, but they were still planted firmly in Rhea’s soil, bound to the earth. The wind swept through the branches catching the feathers in her wings, trying to lift her, as if to say keep reaching. Those faraway places aren’t so far.

The following morning, Ave came to Antarus. "I want to show you something, Antarus. Come with me."

They leapt from the tree and soared towards the river. They banked though the branches and flashed past leaves that rustled in their wake. At the bank of the river, she came to rest and he, behind her. She searched along the bank for a minute or so and picked up a twig. She showed it to him quickly and turned towards the water. Antarus cocked his head to the side curiously and peered closer. She dipped the twig in the water and glanced back at him. He looked at her doubtfully, but curious.

"Watch," she said unnecessarily; he was riveted. He moved closer and focused on the twig.

Ave clucked once and quickly splashed Antarus with a handful of water.

"Wha...!!" Antarus shrieked and scrambled backwards. Ave laughed happily.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I couldn't resist." She reached for him.

"You…!" Antarus hit her playfully. "Is that why you brought me here?"

"No, no... I really want to show you something. I'm sorry." She squeezed his talon lovingly and turned him towards the bank. She searched among the rocks and found something that suited her.

"This," she said and pointed.

"It's a bug," he stated. She then showed him the twig, still wet from the river and pointed to a spot where two branches converged.

"And that's a stick," Antarus said, matter of fact.

"No, this," Ave brought the stick close to his eyes.

"A droplet of water?"

Ave nodded. "Now watch." She held the twig, or more specifically, the droplet of water over the bug. "Look at the bug through the water droplet."

The tiny bug morphed into a giant, though slightly disproportionate image of its former self.

"The bug looks bigger, Ave. I know this. Every fledgling knows this. I don't understand what..." Ave slowly moved the water droplet to the sky but never stopped looking in Antarus' eyes.

"Now look at the stars through the droplet."

"It's daylight. There are no stars. We'd have to..." And then he knew what she was saying. Slowly he reached out and took the twig from her talon and held it aloft. Looking through the droplet, he scanned the noonday sky and wondered.

"But it's so small. Any more water than this and it's just fluid. How can we... How do we...?"

"Glass." Ave whispered. "We task the window maker to make us glass droplets big enough to look at the stars with. Antarus thought in silence for a moment and then bobbed his head with approval.

The glass smith's shop wasn't in the trees like the rest of the village. It was in a clearing at the foot of the village and was built out of hard packed and baked clay. It was dome shaped and had tubular vents in the roof to let out the smoke from his forge. Fex, the glass smith himself, was a kind, but reclusive rhok. He loved his work and sacrificed his already limited flying abilities for it. The feathers on his wings were almost completely scorched off and the skin on his exposed flesh was scarred from the flames of his forge. He would never fly again. It was for this reason and the dangerous fires he worked with that he remained on the ground rather than in the trees with his people. Blacksmiths and other rhoks that had to work with super-heated or open flames tended to remain on the ground for the same reasons. It was not uncommon. Keeping super-heated flames in flammable tree villages was far from safe.

Ave and Antarus spoke with Fex and explained what they wanted. He had never made globes like this before. Mainly he made window panes and vases and other glass containers but this shouldn't prove too difficult for him.

It took a considerable amount of money and even more time but eventually Ave and Antarus had a small collection of flawless glass spheres. They varied in size from as small as their youngest hatchling’s fist to one as big is Ave's head. On clear nights, they would experiment with them by holding them up to the stars and bringing them closer in or further away to see how the heavens looked through them. Then they would hold smaller ones behind bigger ones and look through both. They would wrap them up in cloth or leather tubes with one on each end to block out ambient light. When one of them broke, they looked through the broken halves to see what that did. Over the next couple of years, though trial and error they had made progress and had returned to see Fex with new ideas on designs. They had him forge oblong lenses and concave lenses and convex lenses and refracting lenses. They added polished silver mirrors to what they finally named ‘scopes’ in various configurations. They wrapped them in longer and shorter tubes and placed two or three lenses in them at a time.

Their hatchlings were growing into fledglings and, as children sometimes follow in their parents footsteps, were becoming interested in the heavens as well.

 “Mother, what are stars made from?” Her youngest fledgling, Reeshee gazed up beside her.

“The legends say they are our ancestors; all of the rhoks who came and died before us.”

“Like grandfather?” Ave nodded. “But how did they get up there?”

“Well,” Ave explained, “I don’t really think they are. That’s just what the legends say. I think they are other suns like our sun. Or maybe other worlds like Hesperides or Tethys; just much, much farther away.”

Reeshee cocked her head quizzically to the side. “And other rhoks live there?”

Ave shrugged. “Perhaps.”

“Do you think that’s where grandfather went when he died?”

“I would hope so but I don’t think that’s how it works.”

In a few weeks, the view of Tethys was expected to be the better than it had been on its last fifty-year cycle. They would be nearly in alignment and would be much closer than they had ever been since she was young. Ave was now twenty-six and would not get another chance to see Tethys at that distance. The only thing she wanted greater than to view the heavens was to share those experiences with her family. She envied her children for there was a good chance that they’d see Tethys return again before they left this world behind.

She had contacted her brother who worked at the university and made arrangements to join the science department in an excursion outside the village. They were going to the D’tong plateau where they would be able to view the moon without the interruption of the village lights or the branches that could block some of their view. Their world, the moon Rhea would almost pass between Tethys and their sun Gaia giving them a view of the daytime face. They would, themselves, be blanketed in night.

Ave arrived at the glass smith earlier than she was expected but Fex was not put off by this. He had grown fond of Ave’s nature. She always seemed to be in a hurry. Not one of need or desperation, but rather of anticipation. She reminded him of himself as a fledgling: eager to experience anything at all just for the variety. But with her, the novelty never wore off. Fex had been one to have a desperate need to try something new but he would discard it once he had. He was older now and not as interested in such things but through her, his childhood vigor remained fresh.

“Have you my new lens?” she flitted.

“And a good day to you, Miss Ave.”

Ave’s feathers fluttered in embarrassment. “Pardon my curtness. It’s just that…”

Fex held up a talon, “Please. It's okay. It's just me.”

She cocked her head from side to side and unconsciously tapped her talons on the counter. He nodded. “I’m just finishing the final polish. Give me a few more moments. For the price you’re paying me, I want this to be flawless.”

Ave had spent almost two hundred coins on this lens. It was nearly one tenth of her and Antarus' savings, but this would be the biggest lens ever crafted. She had quite a collection of scopes and had spent a considerable amount of money on them, but this was her first love and Antarus supported and shared her passion. By now, she had provided the university with a considerable amount of information on astronomy and she accompanied every excursion that had to do with the heavens and arranged many of them herself. With this new lens, the continental ridges of Tethys would be sharper than ever and she would be able to see rivers and canyons that were previously undetectable. She was more excited now than ever before.

“Here it is, Miss Ave,” Fex carried in his featherless wings a large cloth-bound bundle one-third his height in width and, assisted by a young apprentice, they struggled under its weight. They carried it outside and placed it gently on a padded springbok skin in the back of Ave’s cart. “Are you sure you won’t need help with this?”

“Antarus and my brother will be there to help assemble the scope. We’ll manage fine.” Ave clasped his featherless wing, “Thank you, again, dear Fex.”

He nodded, “Any time, Miss Ave. Thank you. You keep me in business.”

The crowd atop the D’tong plateau numbered nearly fifty. Antarus met her there with her brother Netaal, their son P’taur and her two daughters, Reeshee and Justiel. Between them all, they assembled nearly a dozen of their scopes. The newest was as long as she was tall and rested atop a sturdy tripod. They positioned it to view Tethys coming into morning. Her feathers raised and shuddered. This was a notable milestone in her career and she almost could not contain herself. Her brother and her children had each picked out a scope and were preparing for the view.

She and Antarus took turns gazing into the scope that contained the new lens and watched open beaked as the shadows of Tethys’ mountains slowly began to shorten as daylight engulfed them. Their reddened peaks actually showed varying shades of crimson, amber and burgundy. There were glints as light reflected off the rivers and seas. The shorelines were gray as waves from the oceans broke on the beaches. Patches of desert differed from salt flats to barren sand and the few patches of vegetation stood out in greens and yellows from the normally sun blasted landscape. Ave’s family looked over her shoulder trying to get a view through the palm sized eyepiece. She moved aside and let them look as she compared land features through the other scopes. Even in her second best scope the land was a little more than a blend of colors. The oceans, continents and some seas and mountain ranges were distinct but little else was.

For the first hour they watched the moon pass by into daylight. Other rhoks approached Ave and were allowed to share the view through her new scope. But soon, something caught Ave’s eye, and she strained to make out a feature she hadn’t expected. It was on the shore of a large sea that was just coming into daylight. She squinted and tried to focus, resisting the urge to stand up and try to move closer. There was a large… something that sat on the shore. Part of it rested on the water. From the shore side there were very thin lines that extended away from it in about a dozen places. Each of them reached out to different locations. Each one faded to nothing some distance from the source.

“Antarus,” she said without turning away from the eyepiece, “what do you make of this?”

He cocked his head and looked through as Ave moved aside. “The shore of a sea?”

“Look on the west bank.”

“It looks like stone formations.”

“…And the lines leading off of it?”

“Hmm… Strange.”

Ave started dismantling another scope and was pulling the lenses from it. She moved back to her new scope and started dismantling it and swapped out one lens for another and then another. After some time, she had it back together again and was scouring the moon's surface making adjustment after adjustment.

“I lost it,” she muttered. “I can’t find it.”

The night drew on and for hours she looked and looked but saw only the mountain ranges, rivers, and non-descript sea shores.

“What do you think it was?” Antarus asked as they packed up all of their scopes. The fledglings had long since fallen asleep.

“I’m not sure,” she said after a pause. “But it looked…” She was searching for the right word, “…manufactured.” Antarus' crest raised as he cocked his head to the side.

Tethys would be at its best viewing for only a few nights and Ave was going to take advantage of every moment she could. The next day she sketched the sea and land formations from memory and compared it to the existing maps of Tethys but they didn’t match. She disassembled her larger scopes and began comparing lenses. She mixed and matched some, discarded others. She focused and refocused them. She created an adjustable slide that allowed her to zoom in and out and one that adjusted the focus. She took them to the D’tong plateau and tested them as best she could and then waited for nightfall. Again the university excursion was there; mostly new students and a few from the previous night. The science department, however, had heard about Ave’s new scope and made their appearance. Antarus met her there later with their children.

Morning on Tethys came as night fell on Rhea and Ave welcomed it with a determined, purposeful eye. Her scope rebuilding had been successful and the rivers and deserts and plateaus were even more prominent. For an hour she searched the landscape for her seashore. The moons features were crisper and more prominent with the new combination of lenses and the university science department scribbled notes and drew diagrams. And then she found it.

“There it is! There it is!” She shouted.

“Can you make out what it is?” Antarus asked.

“I think so,” she replied. She adjusted the sliders and zoomed in as far as she could and focused. Deliberate lines had been carved in the landscape. Geometric shapes created patterns. Their layout was purposeful and even… efficient? She knew what she was seeing though she had never seen the similar structures on her own world from such an angle.

“Great Berchier!” She said in awe.

“What? What is it?”

She slowly turned to look at her husband.

“It’s a city.” Antarus cocked his head to the side, eyes wide. "It's a city with a seaport and roads. Antarus... There's a city on Tethys!"