Survival
- Solitude
The starship dropped out of what could be called warpdrive. Red warnings and sirens abounded: the two adults on board frantically trying to retrieve the situation. Alas, they’ve left routine maintenance a little too late. The mother took the child and pushed her, protestingly and without understanding, into the emergency escape pod, and then after making a sign of eternal love, pulled a lever and sent her out into the void, knowing they will never meet again…
A few weeks later I was on a aeroplane, flying home across the trackless forests of northern Russia: what I was doing up there wasn’t important, what was far more important was that something went wrong with the plane, which caused it to dive and crash into the ground. I don’t know what made me go to the rear toilet just at that time, but it saved my life. Alas, the same could hardly be said for the rest of the plane: I was the sole survivor, a freak of chance. Clambering out of the remains of the burning plane was my best bet, despite the usual chilly weather. I waited until the fire had died down before going back to pointlessly check for other survivors and, far more usefully, find supplies. There was plenty more than I could carry, so I found a rucksack and filled it with all sorts of stuff, put my warmest clothing on, picked a direction at random and started walking, being as that seemed the best way to find help. Perhaps I should have stayed with the plane in case of rescue, but I thought that would take too long to reach me. And thus I wandered on, encumbered by as much food and supplies as I could carry without overburdening myself and making the whole exercise pointless.
- Struggling for Life
The escape pod landed heavily in a forest somewhere on the larger of the two northern continents, although thankfully its young passenger was at least in one piece, if a little bruised and a lot scared. She clambered out of the broken pod and felt the chill wind, which was much less pleasant than the warm breezes of her home. She pressed her thick glasses against her face, struggling to get some detail from her first view of this unknown world, but all she could see were the fuzzy green blurs that indicated some sort of trees, a featureless and meaningless forest somewhere: it might as well have been nowhere. She hoped there might be someone friendly around: she couldn’t remember her parents telling her if this planet was inhabited. At least she could breathe, despite the horribly cold air: she hugged herself, shivered, and said something that sounded like “Gnash,” a swearword she’d never dared use around her parents.
After a few days the pod’s supply of food ran out, thus she was forced to forage for something to eat here. At times she could hear a scampering or a fluttering above her head, but what made these noises she had no idea. Turning her head and following the noises with her fuzzy, distorted and shrunken view of the world gave her no clue as to what these were and no better idea where they came from. She had to comfort herself with the thought that perhaps they weren’t edible anyway: however, thoughts did nothing to assuage her growing hunger. She found water readily enough; that nutrient of life on her home and here, dripping from leaves in the morning after rain or snow, or in small rivulets she’d stumbled on. Finding her way back to the pod became irrelevant after a week, being as there was no food in there, and the thing was too badly damaged to provide shelter from the cold. As she wandered onward, she found herself wondering where her parents had landed, or if they had landed at all; at other times calling piteously for help. Her alien cries were swallowed by the endless forest, or blown back in her face by the uncaring wind.
After a few more days, she was faint with hunger and reduced to searching for bugs under rocks and between crevices. For her, they were usually too small and indistinct to easily see, thus sometimes she picked up small stones or clods of earth instead of the insects she thought she could see crawling between the boulders; these she spat out feebly but irritably. There was no such thing as a meal now, just hunger and more hunger, that strength-sapping cold and the wind that seemed to be aimed solely at her. After some days of this, in a blur even more intense than she was normally used to, she lay down in a crevice, trying to ward off the biting cold and forget the empty stomach that she carried with her. Chewing the leaves proved pointless: they made her retch. She couldn’t eat these plants, that was a painful lesson. As she lay on the rocks, she moaned faintly; the wind prowled around her, keening mockingly at her distress.
- Not Quite Alone
I’d been walking four days when I came upon an interesting rock formation: I wouldn’t say that I’d have gone out of my way to see it, but it seemed to be a cleft boulder larger than I’d seen elsewhere on my travels during these last few days. The wind seemed to whistle in my ears: cold but not that cold, I thought. I hoped that could get some relief in the lee of that rock, so I went over and sat, thinking that this was the most impressive rock I’d seen for a long time. Such inane thoughts were driven from my mind by a faint moaning; almost a whimpering, crying sound. Was it a trick of the wind? So I thought for many moments, but then the wind stopped blowing for a few heartbeats; the sound still came unmistakably to my ears. Something was the other side of the rock, and it definitely wasn’t happy.
Perhaps rather fatefully I got up and went to look. Just around the corner I stopped, with my eyes wide open. There, not more than ten feet from me was a young woman looking approximately 18 to 19 years old, dressed in no way that could be considered suitable for these conditions: a sort of skimpy top made of some red material, and some short, thin brown leggings that ended above the knee. She had lovely copper-coloured hair that seemed to flow from the back of her head, despite being tied back by two bands, one against her the back of her neck and another higher up. But what I could see of her skin amazed me: parts of it had a look and colour similar to my own flesh, but other parts, on her knees and elbows and around her neck seemed to be patterned, like tiny scales: apart from that she looked really thin, wasted away. Who or what she was bothered me, but I couldn’t let her stay here alone and freeze, which looked a strong possibility at the moment: her shivering was barely abated by her arms clutched around her torso.
She gave an unhappy moan of distress, then stirred and raised her head to look at me, and I could see… glasses. They were metal framed, but thick myodisked versions, similar to those I’d seen and read about before. Her eyes were shrunken and squinting at me, her head cocked, listening, uncertain. Then, suddenly she got to her feet and sprang at me, knocking me over. She wasn’t as tall as me, by several inches, but made up for that with what remained of her strength and, I suppose, desperation. Perhaps well-fed she’d have been able to wrestle me easily, but now I could push her away. She got to her feet quicker than I could, but I cried out at her, ‘hey! I’m not your dinner!’ She instantly seemed to relax, realising that I wasn’t some animal intent on harming her, or worse still, wanting to kill and eat her. She said something that sounded like, ‘Tragat? A-niet’gat?’ I hadn’t a clue what she was saying, but her posture seemed to indicate she wanted to be helped. But after a few more words she then realised I hadn’t a clue what she was saying, so she resorted to pointing at her mouth and belly. Well, I had to be an idiot not to realise she was hungry; after all she had a moment ago been quite keen on having me for lunch, if she could.
Slowly I unhitched my rucksack and sat down with it, and started to rummage though it, asking myself aloud, ‘well, what do lizard girls eat?’ I looked up at her, and she looked so adorably cute for a moment; I sighed, and beckoned her closer. I thought perhaps the best thing to do would be to show her. She didn’t seem able to see what I was doing from over there, which was a few feet away, so I thought that she must have really poor vision, I mused briefly as I got things out. She sat beside me and started picking things up and inspecting them closely, as I thought she might: I assumed she probably couldn’t see detail unless it was within a few inches.
I decided to try her with the energy-giving chocolate bars: they’d been a favourite of mine since I’d tried one, but I’d done my best to ration them, thus I hadn’t eaten the lot on the first day, as I could easily do with chocolate bars of any sort. I unwrapped one and gave it her; she gave it a good sniff and a lick, then started eating it. Her eyes lit up a little behind her thick specs and she looked up me, making a gentle humming, crooning sound I took to be contentment. “At least that went down OK,” I thought. I said to her, ’that’s good to eat, eh?' For some reason I expected her to say “yes” and “thank you”, but of course she’d not the faintest idea what I was saying, and was far more interested in getting food out of me than talking. I gave her some more food, mostly high energy stuff. She seemed willing to eat and eat till I was out of food, but I couldn’t do that: I had to eat too. After the last bit I was prepared to give her, she pulled at the bag and said, ‘yetga?’
I had to pull it from her; she looked very disappointed. Perhaps she didn’t realise this was all I had, but I had no way to explain it to her. She continued to crouch shivering beside me, watching intently. To me it was cold, yes, but I wasn’t quite at the shivering stage she was in. I touched her forearm and discovered that her skin felt slightly slick: not like human skin at all, more like soft leather, but more importantly, her flesh was almost ice cold. She flinched from me, then reached out for my hand again and felt it, and made that peculiar crooning sound again, then said, ‘cre’det.’ Then she pointed at herself, and said, ‘jindet. Yetey jindet.’ To reinforce her message, she shivered. I realised what she was saying: I said, trying to sound reassuring, ‘you’re cold.’ She looked up at me mournfully through those thick glasses of hers. I melted a little inside, despite the cold.
I got to my feet and made a decision; it wasn’t much use just feeding this girl, being as she’d die from cold long before we found somewhere to shelter. So, I unzipped my jacket, took it off, and held it open for her. She realised what I was doing, and got up too. I helped her into the thing and she hugged it against herself, crooning gently as she was apt to do when something pleasant happened. Now I was without a jacket, thus my situation was not so great, but I felt I could cope with the cold better than she appeared to be doing unaided. I started to pack up my supplies bag when she touched my shoulder, and said, pointing to herself ‘Valia.’ I took it to be her name, so I copied her, saying ‘Puffin.’ She repeated it, saying it more as “Puvvin”, but fair enough, she’d learnt my name, and also her first word of English. I very much doubted she was aware it was a kind of seabird. With that, I finished packing up and I trudged off in the general direction I’d headed for the last few days. After a moment, Valia trotted up and walked beside me.
- Travelling and Learning
After a while I sneaked a long look at her in profile: she was an attractive girl, about five-six or so, and the glasses she needed to look through were something just over 1/2 of an inch thick. The way she peered at me through those little myodisk bowls was so appealing to me, and the side view was far from uninteresting, a great expanse of ground lens sticking out behind her frames, and a considerable chunk in front too. Abruptly she seemed to realise I was looking at her and she caught my gaze, then tried to explain in a sort of sign language something which I took to be, not unreasonably, “I’ve got really poor vision”. Eventually she pointed at her glasses and said, ‘gee yest?’ I realised she wanted to know what they were called in my language. ‘Glasses.’ She repeated the word, then I asked, ‘you are a high myope?’ ‘High myope?’
She was pretty good at imitating what I’d said, but that was a bit hard to explain, so I simply repeated to her as much as I could remember of her sign language version of “I’ve got really poor vision”. She seemed to understand me, so I thought I’d better start teaching her a few things, with the hope that we could have something resembling a conversation. As you can imagine, the things that could be seen and named in a forest, apart from trees, were a bit limited, but it was worth a try. Alas some of the things I was pointing at she couldn’t see far away, so I had to stop and lead her over to what I was pointing at, for instance things like “leaf” and “snow”. I taught her “ground” and “sky” and basic words like that too, all easy-to-see stuff. Every so often we’d start a brief session of “what’s that”. She wasn’t stupid, just completely unfamiliar with the English language. Every so often I’d notice something interesting and, drawing her attention to it, tell her what it was.
As we went on during the day she took my arm and hugged at me, seemingly in an effort to draw off some heat and vigour from me. She seemed to become fatigued, and I concluded that despite the warm overcoat she was struggling to stay warm. Her skin was still colder than I thought it ought to be, albeit warmer than it was when we’d first met. As the short autumnal day began to end and the sky darkened, she pointed up and then briefly covered her lenses with both hands. I took that to mean she was night blind; with vision that poor, it was quite likely. The quality of her eyesight was a matter of some conjecture: this had kept my mind busy for much of the last two hours. My best guess was something between minus 30 and minus 35, maybe a bit more, and visual acuity of somewhere in the range 20/100 to 20/150. Pointlessly I wished someone had thought of this admittedly bizarre situation and put a handy Snellen chart in with the survival kit on the plane, but I doubted I would have foreseen this eventuality, let alone anyone else.
She seemed to have increasing difficulty seeing, squinting and straining more than usual, keeping her eyes dead ahead, looking for trouble. For a while it helped, after that it seemed she was losing it badly, and I had to guide her around some obvious “trip-traps”. The plain exhaustion on her face was quite distressing to see, but we had to keep moving, in order to keep warm and hopefully to find some help. But it was getting dark and quite plainly colder: I knew she’d had some nights in the open and survived them, but it seemed by not much margin. Thus I started looking for some form of shelter, leading her toward some rocky outcrops. She didn’t see them until we were almost on top of them, then I led her around the back of one, and finally out of the cold wind and into something that might be called at best a very shallow cave, no more than a few feet deep and about the same wide. In this icy wind, it was as good as a nice cosy cottage… that got me thinking of a fire. Perhaps it would attract some attention and certainly keep us warm, even allowing Valia some limited vision with its light. I shrugged at that thought, and set myself to the task of finding some suitable pieces of wood. Valia didn’t appear to see what I was doing by now, sitting in a silent huddle.
When I’d come back I was carrying a good armful of wood, and set myself to starting up a fire. Valia shifted, and asked uncertainly, ‘you do what?’ Casually I remarked, ‘Making a fire.’ ‘What is fire?’ ‘It keeps us warm. Like the sun.’ She crooned a little; I wondered if she thought I was going to make something as hot as the sun. She said wistfully, ‘Sun, it…. Yetey Cre’det.’ Having build a little pyramid of sticks and wood shavings, I got out the cigarette lighter I’d salvaged from the wreck and set light to them, which was much easier than fooling around with bits of flint and all that. In just a few minutes I had a nice warm fire going. Valia instantly felt this and said, ‘it is Crelta Osian…’ She huddled closer and started crooning more than she’d done all day. I watched her for a while, the uncertain, flickering light from the flames illuminating her pale face and reflecting straight off the twin round mirrors of her thick lenses, a small delight to behold.
After some time she said to me, ‘you look me?’ ‘Can’t you tell?’ She fell silent. Obviously there was more going inside her than she could explain in English. After a while she asked, ‘food. Hungry.’ I immediately assumed she wanted more of the chocolate bars she’d enjoyed before. I got them out, and pushed one into her questing right hand. She peered closely at it, as if checking I’d given her exactly what she wanted. Halfway through eating it, she asked, ‘What this?’ ‘chocolate.’ ‘chocolate… ’ She then indulged in a brief satisfied crooning session. After some more food, she lay down beside the fire, huddled herself into the back of the cave mouth and slept.
- Civilisation
I awoke to sunshine. The cold wind that seemed to have been blowing direct from the North Pole to us had abated, although I doubted it would stay that way for long. I lay huddled up to Valia: I squirmed around to face her, looking into her almost impossibly thick, nay deep lenses with great interest. Such a sight as this I’d long wished for in my dreams, but now was it here, less than six inches from my face, two thick roundish lenses with myodisk bowls ground into them, and lost somewhere behind those shimmering, flat surfaces, two tiny eyes lay shut tight. I lay there some time, contemplating that highly appealing sight… and then her eyes, tiny pale blue things lost in the endless depths of her lenses moved and opened. Her eyes quickly adjusted to what was in front of them, namely me. I realised that she hadn’t seen me close up, and quite possibly couldn’t make out my face very well with us both standing up. I felt her hand on my cheek, relating what she saw with what she felt. Again she murmured, ‘you look me…’ and made that strange crooning sound that I by now knew meant she liked whatever was going on.
Abruptly she sat up and took hold of her thick glasses, and without further ado pulled them from her face. She squinted very briefly in my direction, and then gave up, giving her uncorrected gaze a certain mystical, innocent look. She had often peered and squinted through those amazing glasses with no real effect, so without them I imagine such efforts would have been quite pointless. I waved my hand about a foot from her face: there was no trace of a reaction from her. She yawned and gently rubbed her eyes. I wasn’t sure that was a great idea for someone with high myopia, but I later learnt she was in no danger of a detached retina. She then put her glasses back on, holding them with her fingers and looking at me. I smiled at her. She didn’t respond: obviously where she came from smiling meant nothing. But she was perfectly capable of it, and did so for a brief, precious moment, as if uncertain of what to do. She then touched my face, and said, ‘You… chocolate.’ I hoped that what she was trying to say was “you are like chocolate.”
After that we were soon up and going. The morning proceeded much as the previous day; the air was cold but dry and the wind less fierce, though hardly a tropical breeze. Valia kept close to me and at times relied on me for guidance around roots and suchlike, walking in silence apart from the occasional halting conversation or another bout of naming of things: because she had poor distance vision it was me who took the lead in most of that.
Presently I saw a tree stump over in the distance, about 20-30 yards away through the random dotting of trees. At first I didn’t realise what it was and more importantly what it meant: then it hit me, and I muttered to myself, ‘oh, I must be losing it.’ Valia looked uncomprehendingly at me. I pointed, and she squinted over in the direction I was pointing. For her there was nothing but a featureless, fuzzy, distorted green-brown blur of trees and ground. So I led her over, and she saw what I was making a fuss about. This tree stump had been cut with a saw, and recently: that implied someone had to be living around here. The thought of being back at home sprung into my mind… “not just yet” I reminded myself. I wondered… “which way?” It was as near guesswork as anything else. The only direction not to go was back the way we’d come from. I decided to carry on the same direction as before.
After another ten minutes I saw another sawn tree stump, and over the next twenty minutes four more. I scanned the tree line for some sign of smoke. Surely whoever lived hereabouts needed a fire to keep warm, unless they liked the cold. There was no sign of smoke, but I knew we must be going in roughly the right direction. Valia asked, ‘what there? I not see.’ ‘Smoke… from “Creda Osied”…’ She looked at me oddly, and I realised I’d said her word for “fire” wrong. I then said, “fire. Smoke.” Accompanied by appropriate hand gestures. She understood, and gave me a little smile. Perhaps she found my feeble attempt at her language amusing.
After another short time I saw the smoke we sought. We’d come across more and more sawn tree stumps; I thought that we must have wandered into the very edge of the area which had been used without knowing it, walking past a couple of stumps without seeing them. The smoke rose to the left, so I led Valia over to it. Half an hour later, in what seemed like almost a clearing of sawn stumps sat a little hut with smoke coming out of the chimney. The thought of being warm almost made me want to croon.
I walked up to the door, knocked and waited, trying to remember my Russian. I had once learnt quite a bit of it, all seemingly useless stuff then, but as for now, I would have given much to have remembered it all. The door opened and an oldish man stared at me. I mangled out the Russian word for “help”. He seemed to understand what was needed without me elaborating further. He spoke to me in thickly accented English, ‘come. Westerners?’ I nodded. We sat in front of the man’s fire for a while, where he and I talked in my mangled Russian and his imperfect English for a time. Valia crooned a little as she sat nearest the fire, visual echoes of the flames dancing off her lenses and sliding off them as she turned her head to look at me. She was a bit confused, being as I was talking in a manner she realised was quite different from what she’d previously heard from me.
I managed to put across that our plane had crashed, and we needed directions to get to the nearest village, town or whatever else was around. I said nothing about Valia, letting him assume that she was a fellow survivor. He gave us food, a spare coat for me and then led us through the forest for most of the remainder of the day to a small village, and left us there. We said our goodbyes, and there we stayed the night. From there, we were taken the next day by horse and cart to a nearby town, then within a few days to somewhere with an airport. There we were received as miracles, being as we’d survived the plane crash. Nobody really asked many questions about who we were beyond that, they were more interested in our story. I simply pretended Valia was mute and that was that, they left her alone.
- Getting to Know You
The next six months were very pleasant for me. I spent my time teaching Valia our language: she had to know that. She obviously wasn’t stupid, quickly getting her brain and tongue around our difficult and confusing English language, although when faced with the grammar rules, she complained that it was very odd and made no sense. And then spring came: Valia seemed much happier in warmer spring weather than in the chilly, damp English winter: that wasn’t as bad as the Siberian mid-autumn but she wasn’t keen. Once indoors sat in front of the fire she was happiest, crooning away like crazy… especially when there was chocolate around.
We made plans to go to somewhere really hot for our summer holiday, a sun-drenched Carribean island. But before that Valia needed an eyetest: I had to take her to a local optician and hope he’d be OK testing an alien lizard girl. I had to tell him she had a sort of skin condition which explained her odd scaly patches. By now she could get along with speaking English at a reasonable level, although she had much to learn, always new words every day. Then there was the reading: she could only do it close up, but the first thing she said on seeing the alphabet was, ‘oh, too many letters. Why so many?’ I had no idea, I wasn’t that clever, so I shrugged. She was fast learning human mannerisms like the shrug and smile: her race seemed to use different ways to communicate such things, or simply crooned a lot when really happy.
I sat in with her on the eyetest. The optician was a good one with long experience, but he’d never seen eyes like hers before: outwardly they looked just like everyone else’s, but inside the main difference was her retina. He stopped peering through his instruments into her eyes for a moment, and then shook his head as if he were dreaming and wished to wake up. Then he looked again, and after a long moment commented, ‘you don’t have a blind spot.’ Well of course she hadn’t: her retina was made the right way around, with the receptor cells facing outwards toward the light and the nerves going straight into the back of her eyes. It wasn’t like our rather crazy design, with the nerves trailing all over the surface of the retina and then pulled down into one area, our human “blind spot”. It also meant she was in no danger of having her retina detach. Compared to ours, it was nailed in place. But that didn’t stop her having a gross refractive error, or in layman’s terms, really, really crap vision. She could only read the top two lines on the eyechart with her distance eye, with the best correction she could get. For an 19 year old Lizard girl, or any other sort of girl, it was pretty poor: about 20/150 or something thereabouts. She needed a lens with minus 34 of correction in it to achieve even that feat.
He tried to get me to explain it all, but I really couldn’t, basically because I wanted to disappear and lead a life with Valia as near normal as possible, without people running around looking for aliens and nonsense like that. He made a slight change to her prescription in her closeup eye and left it at that.
And here we are, sitting on the beach in the Caribbean. Valia tells me that the sun here is just like home. She’s lying next to me, soaking it up in her bikini and pushing her shoulders into the warm, dry sand. She did croon a lot at first, but she realised that nobody else does that much around here, but I don’t mind. But you do know what we’re doing when she croons the most….