Under a Starless Sky

Chapter 13

There was no tracking time. There were no stars. There was no moon. Seasons snuck up on a person. Being near the mountains was almost always cool, but sometimes damn cold. Summer had one obvious sign, glow beetles were more prominent, and the sound of glow cicadas was sometimes so loud, and so steady, he imagined it to be the life support of a spaceship. Shen couldn’t go more than a yard in any direction without finding the empty shells of cicada like creatures. Their eyes were like diamonds. He was reminded of the animae movie, ‘Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,’ and watched it in his head. When it was damn cold, the lake misted over, but never froze. He had two new, empty books, compliments of N’Ma.

“Don’t tear pages out,” she had said. She provided him a satchel with writing supplies, loose papers, and wax. It was a letter making kit. “It weakens the binding and the life of the book. If you make a mistake, leave it. Don’t scratch it out. Write mistake on the mistake. Learn from it. Let others see it, and allow them to make their own assumptions. Sometimes what you think is a mistake isn’t.”

Shen knew this, but hearing it from her made it stick. Partly because it felt like an elder giving instructions, and it was something he missed. The women told him to do things every time they saw him, as they were particular bossy and expect boys to comply, but N’Ma’s instructions were recommendations. She wanted more philosophy. She wanted him to write a map of his other life’s language. He gave her the alphabet, but he had no intentions of giving her a dictionary. That could take forever and he had better things to do. He asked her why she wanted this and she seemed confused, but after questioning him if he was ridiculing her, she relaxed and pointed out he had written things in two languages. Whenever there was a concept he couldn’t explain, he inadvertently wrote a thing in English. He was irritated by the fact he hadn’t realized what he was doing. He inquired about the letter making kit and was invited to write his sister Tama; it was evident that N’Ma would be reading everything first, maybe even by others. How evident wasn’t abundantly clear until he had returned to his cave and examined the content of his new satchel, and the letter box.

Hidden inside were four letters, sealed with wax. Unlike most letters, it was unaddressed. He assumed for him, opened, and indeed found letters clearly intended for him, without salutations. N’Ma had written one of them.

you have peaked our curiosity. We want to understand things. Please respond to the letters, seal them, and when you trade at West Midelay, you will leave

letter that assumed others might one day read it. It was professional. When he questioned it in his mind, he had an image of a copy of the letter written in a book, and the next page would be his response. One of the letters was more neutral, borderline rude. The other was flat out disparaging. The latter dealt with math. He had written down all the formulas he could remember. He was not great at math. He couldn’t do calculus. His physics were limited to theory, which he knew and could visualize, but if you asked him to the math or the proof, he’d be considered a fool at best, at worst a parrot. The other kindly letter bad been written by a person who loved bugs. She had extremely appreciated the detail of the glow cicada he had rendered, capturing its entire lifespan. She had questions about this. She didn’t believe a grub would become a cicada, but the life cycle so mirrored the silk worm, she instantly saw the truth of it. She wanted samples. She collected bugs and her home was full of displays of bugs she had caught and was trying to classify. She had bugs in glass. She had bugs in amber. She had scary unknowable things in jars of formaldehyde. She had aquariums with insects where she maintained the whole life cycle of colonies. She specialized in making bee hives and colonies. She bred fighting beetles, which was her most sought after commodity. She particularly wanted Shen to bring her a live glow

laughing. “I don’t expect you to understand this. Homes, plumbing, gas lines, methane traps, must be elaborately plotted out, not on paper, but in the mind. When the material is brought together, the intent is transferred to the material through our esoteric training; it shaped by heart and love and song. The home isn’t a machine one constructs; it is a living thing, and solidifies into our desires the same way a turtle shell becomes a home for its host. The health of the home is dependent upon the people who live in it, the land around it. It not just a hole in the ground and a pipe bringing water.

insight on making his own toilet system, or how to make his own gas driven, steady fire.

and hiss, almost as loud as an angry cat. There was the equivalent of the dung beetle, which collected and rolled Irk poop and pitch. Seeing this helped him to understand some of the strange ‘formations’ of dirt up around the base of the trees. There were other insects, like

inside. He drew it looking down on it, from underneath it, from the side, from the back, from the front, and from an odd angle- and all in all, it looked like a blue-print drawing. It fluoresced with more colors than any artist could capture- not they could capture color with his crude pencils and ink. It rivaled

this was sorted out in the moments as females hovered and the hues changed, and takers would come even closer, but if it didn’t like who came closer, the hues would change and it would fall back and another might come forward. Eventually, mating was negotiated. Afterwards, the male was killed. She literally ate its head off, ate a hole into its back, and deposited the eggs. Had he known the male was going to die, he might have kept it in the jar. The beetle larvae that eventually departed the male fed on fallen leaves, and would dig into the earth, drawing leaves down, coming out and bringing more leaves. They would continue to grow to incredible sizes, almost as big as Hercules Beetles. The folks of the province Lakeshore, would eat grubs equally as large, skewed on a stick and roasted over a fire. The smell of cooked grubs was incredibly tempting, but he had declined eating it. He only ate the gold beetle because he had been starving that day while trying to cook out the gold. He didn’t die, he hadn’t gotten

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