Star Wolf! by White Ted

Author:White, Ted [White, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2013-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

The two thousand years since the onslaught of the plague had not been kind to the land men knew as the Arathdom. Divided into two halves, north and south, by the equator, its jungles were burned dry and then reduced to ashes and sand, a wide band of equatorial desert that cut the land in two with a hellish no-man’s land.

Perhaps—there was no way of knowing—it went better for the Arath of the south, but those few who survived in the north found themselves unable to maintain the machinery of their beautiful cities. Knowledge—in ‘ the abstract—survived in the racial memories of the Lothian. In a sense each Arath-Loth symbiosis carried a private library of all the Lothian culture—but too often the demands of existence, or the inadequacy of personal experience, made access to this library, this whole wise culture, a luxury the surviving Arath could not easily afford. Once more thrown upon their own wits to survive, denied the bounty of rich Lothian technology, the Arath must need devote much—most—of their time to hunting, to the satisfaction of their own simple hunger to remain alive.

Now the still-beautiful sky-tall pastel spires of the cities stood as a monument to the past, a memorial to a better time, when the machines worked, power was cheap, and every Arath knew the security of a well-provided-for existence. The towers still stood, sterile and empty, too proud to fall to the creeping jungle that had swarmed over them, but unable to support Arath life.

Lorex had grown up in the shadows of the City Lonnor, had known its high towers as a young nestling, light of body and able to soar upon the winds for hours on end. Often he had landed upon the exterior balconies, provided for just this purpose, to catch his breath and rest his wings. And, as he grew older and heavier, and the rest periods became longer, he had spent that time roaming within the towers, exploring room after room, discovering half-hidden chambers, with all the quick delight of a youth.

As he had grown older, the towers and the city itself had come to fascinate him for the myriad secrets they held. Not the grandiose secrets of which the legends told—legends passed from child to child before one earned one’s own Lothian—but the secrets of a city’s trivia: the personal effects of its citizens now long dead. Loroloth knew the entire broad spectrum of Lothian and Arath history, among all the accumulated memories of its two “parents” in fusion. The generalized memories were passed from Lothian to Lothian of each generation, reinforced by every Lothian down the long chain of descent which shares these memories. But individual memories—those of a specific Lothian—were diffused and lost within a few “generations.” Lorex could share Loroloth’s accumulated knowledge and memories of his parents—whose symbiotic Lothians had paired to create his own symbiote, Loroloth—and he had access also to the memories of his grandparents through their Lothians. But his great-grandparents were rarely tapped and he neither knew nor cared for the generation before them.

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