Tales of Midbar: Religious Intolerance

When she’d cut my hair, she cut Mum’s as well. A man came in and used a laser to remove Dad’s tattoo. Then she asked us to strip down to our underwear, took our clothes and gave us other clothing, which wasn’t as nice and wasn’t new.

“These are artifacts,” said the woman, handing small boxes to Mum and Dad.

“We don’t use magic,” said Mum.

“You may need them for defense.”

Mum and Dad opened the boxes and got out bracelets made of transparent material, probably geodeserine, with swirling patterns on them. Each box also contained a small book.

[Translator’s note: I usually try to avoid words derived from people or places who/that the inhabitants of Midbar shouldn’t know about (e.g. using “prickly pear” instead of “Indian fig”). “Geodeserines” are forms of carbon with molecules resembling geodesic domes. In our world they’re called Fullerenes after the architect Buckminster-Fuller.]

“Try not to lose the manuals,” said the woman. “They’re quite simple, they just temporarily paralyze whoever you point at when you say the magic word.

”When we left the barn it was blue day and there were some ominous looking clouds. Our car had gone but there was another one that wasn’t as nice. We got into it and I realized that I could only faintly feel Tianamet. Dad found an envelope on the dashboard. He opened it and read something inside. He turned his seat to face the back, where I was sitting. Mum also turned her seat to face me.

“I know where we’re going now,” he said. “She was right they have changed almost everything about us.” He pointed to me, “Your name is now Eleprin and you’re eight.”

“I’m nine!”

“You’re going to find school very easy for a bit!”

“I always find schoolwork easy, it’s the other girls I have trouble with and I don’t like boys either!”

“Perhaps they’ll be nicer where we’re going,” said Mum.

“Not if they think I’m a Winemaker!” I said.

“Let’s get going before white day,” said Dad, handing Mum the envelope, “you two start memorizing this!”

He turned the chair back and started the engine, and we started driving back the way we’d come.

We stopped part way along the dirt track.

“I think this is the place,” said Dad. “I only saw one droven.”

A droven’s a type of photoorganism, they have fat, twisty stems with flat dark purple discs at the tops.

Dad found whatever he was looking for and put it in the trunk. I felt a bit better.

We drove along a road with farms on either side, we were still in the Great Basin in north Pax. Aleph’s red disc rose over the horizon, turning blue day to white day but the clouds rolled in and it started to rain heavily. Mum read the information from the envelope to me over and over again and then quizzed me on it. I like making things up myself and pretending to be the things I imagined but this was pretty boring. It was mostly things like what town we came from and what jobs my parents did. What really upset me was that they’d changed our religion. We were really Trulists, Pax’s main religion. We worshiped Tianamet, the Trulist goddess, the goddess of Ermish temple, the goddess of exploration and ignorance.

Sorry, I’m explaining how I felt!

We’d have to pretend to be Winemakers, a weird minority religion that nobody liked! I know religionism is a sin but most people made an exception for Winemakers.

We drove for two days, hardly stopping, repeatedly being drilled on who we were supposed to pretend to be. These new identities weren’t even interesting but Mum and Dad said I could pretend to be a priestess who was on a secret mission and pretending to be Eleprin. I thought we should have tried to find out more about Winemakers but Mum and Dad kept drilling me with this boring stuff instead. They said that we weren’t very devout Winemakers so we’d have an excuse if somebody realized that we didn’t know much about Winemakerism.

I was getting increasingly frightened of what was happening. I’d heard too many stories of parents abandoning children at Holy Sites. The fact that Mum and Dad were being rather evasive about things didn’t help.

In the morning of the second day I realized that we were going into the mountains, heading west. I started to see clouds hanging against the sides of mountains. Large birds or flutters or a mixture of the two were gliding round in circles.

“Where are we going?” I asked. “Not many people live in the mountains and they’re mostly weird.”

“I don’t think that stereotype’s reliable,” said Mum.

“It isn’t much farther,” said Dad.

That made sense. Beyond the mountains was the desert, where very few people lived. There was just too little water to maintain a human community in most places.

It was the second day of the light cycle so Aleph sank behind the mountains in front of us a bit before midday. In the afternoon, as it was blue day, I started to see the dark mountainsides beyound the light of the sapphires. This became more obvious as we climbed higher, above most the clouds. Then I saw an ancient-circle! This is a circle of rocks, about ten meters across, open on one side, with a very tall rock about sixty degrees from the opening. They were built by the ancients but nobody seems to know why. I realized that this was the sort of place where ancients were supposed to lurk. I think they were on Pax when humans arrived, like the flutters and some photoorganisms only smarter but not as smart as humans. I don’t know much about them, I don’t think anybody does.

Did you?

Well it didn’t work, did it?

Then the sapphires turned off, plunging us into black night. For a while I couldn’t see anything but black and a bit of road lit by our headlights out the car’s windows, Bet was hidden by the roof. Then I started to notice small lights on the mountains beside us. There was also a glow ahead.

“Those are farmhouses,” said Mum.

“What’s that glow?” I asked, pointing foreward.

“That’s Taunbrit,” said Dad.

Soon we came to a village with some buildings on legs over a lake.

“Do we need to stop here?” asked Dad. “It’s not much farther to where we’re going!”

We left the village and continued up a steep hill and another glow appeared ahead. I was about to find out where we were going; probably the most frightening place I knew of in the western mountains!