Wisdom in the Dark

Chapter 8 - Myra

Each building within the Holowycz Village told the same story. The Holowycz were dead.

At first Myra had worried about some chemical agent or disease that could have killed them, but Jak pointed out there were no dead animals anywhere.

Jak had led Myra and the other four deeper into the Holowycz Village and into the Ting. Some of the homes within the village had been empty, and though there were quite a few skeletons in the Ting, it wasn’t nearly as many as Myra had expected.

“Where’s the rest of the Holowycz?” Ctik asked.

“They always seemed like a force to be reckoned with,” Ylya said. “But from the number of bodies I doubt there were more than a hundred or so left.”

Myra knelt down next to a skeleton clutching a smaller skeleton – a mother clutching her child? Myra felt a pang of sorrow as she wondered at the child’s last moments, crying for its parent until it starved to death. What an awful fate, Myra thought as she ran her fingers over the infant’s skull.

As her fingertips ran over the smooth bone Myra realized the child’s face was deformed. While half of the skull seemed normal, the other half seemed to droop. The infant also had a cleft palate, and Myra only counted two fingers on each hand. The skeleton of the infant’s parent was just as deformed, and what Myra originally thought was the adult curling itself around its child was actually a hunch in the back and a fused neck.

“These two have massive defects,” Myra said.

“So do these,” said Ivan from the other side of the Ting.

“They all do,” Jak said, standing from a trio of skeletons and walking over to where Myra knelt. “It seems all of the Holowycz had birth defects. Probably resulting from incest.”

“But that wouldn’t kill everybody,” Ylya said.

“It would if they were all hemophiliacs,” Jan said. “A simple cut wouldn’t clot and could cause them to bleed out. Or perhaps all of their immune systems were so damaged that a normally treatable sicknesses wiped them out. A simple cold could have been akin to a pandemic. Or it could have been a combination of things.”

Myra stood and stared round the room at the skeletons littering the floor. “We feared them. We prepared for the Holowycz to attack us. We thought they could overrun us.”

“One less enemy you have to worry about,” Jak said.

“But who will take their place?” Myra asked, and realized she sounded just like her mother.

“Myra makes a good point,” Jan said. “With the Holowycz gone, another family will move in to fill the vacuum. They may even try to claim this forest.”

“But how were the Holowycz able to create this forest?” Jak asked. “And what or who killed them?”

“Let’s keep searching,” Myra said. “There have to be answers around here somewhere.”

Other buildings throughout the Holowycz Village were filled with more skeletons, some dismembered by animals. One hut revealed a family of foxes living near the remains of a man who had been even more disfigured than the skeletons Myra had seen before. An inspection of the greenhouses showed that the structures had fallen into disrepair long ago, and vegetation seemed to spill out of them like intestines and blood from a corpse. Here the flora seemed to be the largest and healthiest, with trees breaking through the greenhouse roofs. Cattle and horses still roamed around the greenhouses and none of them seemed particularly concerned about Myra and the group she travelled with.

“They all seem well fed,” Ivan said, pointing to a particularly healthy look cow.

Myra eyed Jak as he continued to move at the head of their group. His muscular form loped easily forward with a surety she wasn’t used to in the Pyc Village – at least not since Vlad had been around. Though no one had identified Jak as their leader, he doled out tasks to each of them, even Myra and Jak’s father, as they searched the empty Holowycz Village. Everyone followed Jak without question. Myra found she was drawn to Jak’s strength and courage that seemed to come so easy to him.

Jak led the party through the village toward the small industrial area. Here buildings seemed to have been neglected for several whole cycles. The Sylph hangars stood empty except for one, and the machine inside was only half assembled. A rusted out robotic arm of the lone Sylph lay on the hangar floor. The console within the Sylph’s spherical cockpit had been removed at some point and only wires and cables remained.

“They couldn’t even fight,” Myra said through gritted teeth. “We could have crushed them.”

Answers on why the Holowycz had died out weren’t forthcoming until the group reached the tarmac. The door to the shed-sized building that served as tarmac control hung open. The inside of the building was covered in bird droppings, and the pungent odor made Myra gag. Parts of a skeleton sat scattered on the metal floor of the tarmac control building, the other parts most likely dragged off by some animal.

“Let’s see if there’s anything in the traffic control logs,” Jak said as he began pressing buttons and tapping on screens. “Hopefully there’s still some power left.”

“Most computers have a back-up battery,” Myra said.

“Unless they removed it to use for something else,” Jak replied. “What’s more important when your people are dying out? Making sure a computer can run if the power goes out, or survival?”

Fortunately, despite Jak’s concerns, the computer awoke, bathing the interior of the dark building with bright blue light. A password must not have been required as Jak began quickly tapping away at the screen.

“Looks like there was a recording thirty-one rotations ago,” Jak said after a moment. “Before the recording there’s nothing in the logs for fifty rotations or so, arriving or departing.”

Jak tapped his finger on the screen, and the activity log was replaced by a face that looked as though it was made of clay, and the sculptor had smashed a ball of the material together. The deformed face was pale, and its owner sweated profusely.

“My name is Dan Holowycz, leader of the Holowycz Family.” Myra only knew it was a man by the deep voice. The words were spoken through spittle filled lips, and every few words the man sucked drool back into his mouth. “No, I was leader of the Holowycz Family. We’re no more. I’m the last of us. Everyone is dead. My family. My children.” Holowycz sniffed, his voice cracking. “My grandchildren.”

Dan Holowycz cleared his voice and sucked in spit again, regaining his composure before continuing. “Whoever finds this recording, let our failure be a lesson to the rest of the Jovian moons. We can’t isolate ourselves from one another. Each family thinks they’re so much better than the others. We’re not. No one is. Our pride led us to what we became: inbred, diseased, mutated scum. We refused to build bonds with other families because we thought we were above them. We even scorned our allies. And for what? For power? For a sense of pride? What pride is there in your grandchildren being so deformed that many of them don’t survive past their first few wake periods of life? What pride is there in your people dying from a simple flu? That’s what killed us. The flu. A virus that humanity has been able to fight off for millennia wiped us out.”

Holowycz suddenly began to hack and cough violently. It was several moments before he continued. “If there was one thing we were able to do, it was advance the terraforming of Callisto. While we clung to the dogma of the superiority of our family over the others, we threw caution to the wind when it came to planting. Where other families plant shrubs, we planted trees. We made bone meal and blood meal from our livestock, and mixed it into the soil with compost. We tended the land around our village and were able to get trees to grow outside! Can you believe it? The Families of the Jovian moons adhere to the religion of caution and careful terraforming imposed upon us by our ancestors from ancient Terra, and we practiced an aggressive heresy.” He let out a wet chuckle. “I’m surprised none of the other families have discovered our little forest, but then again, they’re like us, aren’t they? They think they’re better than everyone else, that their land is the best land, that their blood is the best blood. A quick Sylph flight and our creation could be discovered. That’s all it would take.

“And yet we families stew in our villages and refuse to venture too far or take too many risks. We have to make sure we have enough people and enough Sylphs to defend our homes from all the inferior families. Can’t let the other families get a leg up on us, so our resources go towards defense.” Holowycz wheezed heavily at this point, and looked as if he was drained of all of his energy. “If the Lost Factory is real I hope someone finds it and saves the people of the Jovian moons from the hell we’ve created for ourselves.”

The recording ended and the screen went dark.