Jarn’s Journal Year 6 Day 105

Year 6 Day 105

Almost any stone will do for pounding, Little Gnu assures me, but for tools to cut, the stone and how it is shaped depends on what is to be cut. Most of the cutting tools he showed me were some form of microcrystalline quartz: chalcedony, flint, jasper or even agate. A few decorative pieces, more for showing off or for grave offerings than for use, were of colored quartz. But his real prize, used only for the most delicate of tasks, was a carefully chipped piece of obsidian as sharp as any steel knife.

“The stone is rare,” he told me, “and not easy to work. Sometimes I can arrange to trade a worked piece for a much larger piece of the raw material. But sometimes a thorn or a spear is driven into the body, and this is the best kind of knife for cutting it out.”

“It is also,” Gazelle remarked, “the best thing for cutting hides. When I can get my hands on it.”

It took me a moment to remember that Little Gnu was not at the gather the year I presented them with obsidian. “Would you like some raw stone to work?” I asked. “I know where I can find some, and it would be easy enough to get it. You could make knives while you cannot walk well enough to hunt.”

He was delighted at the suggestion, and so was Gazelle. “If he has more of that stone, perhaps I could have a knife of my own,” she said, “just to use for cutting tanned skins.”

Jarn’s Journal Year 6 Day 85

Year 6 Day 85

Well, they’ve left.

I keep telling myself not to become attached to individuals of the People, because they age quickly and will die all too soon. On that basis, it is a very good thing that Songbird, Giraffe and WildDog will not be staying with me this year.

I will miss them.

I will even miss Meerkat, who has finally realized I have no interest in her as a mate and set out, very much behind my back, to seduce Lion, who lost his mate to a fever last year. I hope Lion knows what he is in for!

Not that Gazelle, the mate of Little Gnu, is not a good cook and clothing maker, or that her daughter does not remind me of Songbird as I first knew her. Gazelle has also taken to the fish traps, and we eat well even without a hunter.

Little Gnu has turned out to be remarkably adept at knapping stone. Giraffe did make a small spear point for WildDog, but he spent a great deal of time doing it. Little Gnu has almost finished his supply of stone, and every tool he has made is a success. He is not very talkative, but he has managed to make me understand that different tools are best made from different types of stone.

“If I bring you several kinds of stone,” I said, “can you show me what each is best for?”

He beamed as he has not done since the elephant attacked him. I think I may learn more about stone tools than I had intended.

Jarn’s Journal is a part of the remote back story of my science fiction universe. The entire journal to date is on my author site.

Jarn’s Journal Year 6 Day 50

Year 6 Day 50

I would never hunt an elephant, or encourage the People to do so. Elephants are too close to sentience. This killing, however, was in self-defense and it made sense to salvage the meat, though I can’t say it was particularly good. Very strongly flavored, I thought, but that might have been because the animal was in musth.

Little Gnu is recovering, and I am having a hard time discouraging him from hobbling around with the aid of a stick. I don’t think he will ever be able to walk evenly or run again, and he is very unlikely to be recovered enough to stay with his group when they leave. His mate and daughter are caring for him, and aiding Meerkat in preparing my meals. Which has led me to a possible change in my life.

“WildDog is really enjoying a chance to play with the other children,” Songbird said to me, and her voice was a little sad.

“Would you and Giraffe like to rejoin Rain Cloud’s group?” I asked. “I’ve been thinking perhaps I should take acolytes for no more than a seasonal cycle, and Little Gnu is not going to be able to travel for a while. He will be able to kill small game Patches turns his way, and his mate is a good cook. It is the cooking and clothing I cannot do for myself, and Giraffe should get more practice hunting with others.”

I wasn’t sure how she’d react, but she and Giraffe were both eager to go back to the nomadic lifestyle they had been raised with. Little Gnu’s mate, at least, was glad he would not be trying to keep up with a group traveling to new hunting grounds, and his shaman was delighted. So I have a new household.

I hope this group works out as well as did Songbird, Giraffe and their son. To be honest, I am not sure how much longer WildDog can be kept away from the computer.

Jarn’s Journal Year 6 Day 46 Evening

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Year 6 Day 46 evening

I am not a Healer, though there are times I have wished I were. Today was definitely one of those days.

I knew it would take Songbird a while to reach the hunters, so I intercepted the runner and had him tell me what he could about Little Gnu’s injuries – which wasn’t much. The runner was the youngest of the hunters, and from his description, Little Gnu (named for his shortness of stature, not his age) had been tossed in such a way that he had landed with his leg doubled under him, and the bone was sticking out. No telling what kind of internal injuries he had sustained, and at his age, he couldn’t be expected to recover as fast and as thoroughly as Songbird had. All I could do in preparation was check everything available in the computer about compound fractures, find several suitable splints and bandages, and pull together the handful of remedies I had been able to make with the computer’s help. These, thank goodness, included a wound dressing that minimized infection.

I stayed open for Songbird while I wrapped all of the things I thought I would need, including an extra warnoff, in one of the hides Meerkat had tanned for me. Meerkat herself had deputized one of the other women to watch WildDog, and was making up a pallet for the injured man in her dwelling. “His mate will tend him,” she told me, “but this place is easier to clean.” The arrangement would give her a good excuse to be important in the temporary village, I thought with some amusement.

Just then Songbird’s mind touched mine, and I picked up the hide bundle and teleported to her.

It was a good thing I had thought of the warnoff. Hyenas, jackals and a couple of scavenger birds were already encircling the carcass, and the women could not have taken the meat back to camp safely without the aid of the hunters. Several spears had been broken in the desperate attack on the elephant, and the hunters were mostly using thrown stones to keep the scavengers back.

Little Gnu was barely conscious when I teleported in. A few of the hunters has seen me teleport before but most had not, and I was afraid I would have to waste time reassuring them. But Songbird promptly started explaining that this was simply the way I traveled. And I was able to concentrate on the injured man.

Setting the leg was not beyond me, and I hoped that with the aid of the wound powder it would heal properly. I suspected that Little Gnu would probably have a permanent limp, though. I thought getting him back to the encampment would be the real problem, but the other hunters had already rigged a stretcher. Their main concern was the scavengers, since several who would normally be protecting the group would be needed to carry the injured man.

I had set the warnoff to maximum range, and the scavengers were staying well back. When they moved Little Gnu to the stretcher, I bound the warnoff to it, as well. “This should tell the scavengers to stay back,” I told them. “Take him and the meat you have butchered back to camp.

The first runner had already come back with more hunters and replacements for the broken spear shafts, so I decided to leave my own warnoff with Songbird and teleport back to camp.

Jarn’s Journal is the fictional journal of a human-like alien stranded in Africa roughly 125,000 years ago. The entire journal to date can be found on my author site.

Jarn’s Journal Year 6 Day 46

If you’re looking for the A to Z post, click the logo to the left or scroll down.

Jarn’s Journal is the journal of a (fictional) human-like alien, a R’il’nian, who was stranded in Africa some 125,000 years ago. He has been adopted as a god (much to his annoyance) by a group of primitive humans. The entire Journal to date is on my author site.

Year 6 Day 46

I sat at the entry to my home, and watched Songbird, Giraffe and WildDog happily interacting with their friends. To their left, Rain Cloud was toiling up the hill toward me, and I waved and gestured him closer. He paused once, looking where I was looking, and then frowned and continued up the hill.

“They do not show you proper honor,” he said, but I shook my head.

“They have missed their friends, and WildDog needs to play with others his age,” I replied. “They have aided me well. But it is not fair that I take all of their time. I think that perhaps I should make a rule that no one with a child should stay with me more than the time from one Gather to another.

His brow creased. “But surely we must find a way to honor you!”

Before we could carry the conversation farther, there was a sudden commotion in the camp as a runner arrived. He was shouting and waving his arms, and he came from the direction toward which a hunting party had left this morning. Several of the group, including a fair number of women, were grabbing carry lines and hides and jogging along his back trail, probably to bring back meat, but that did not seem to explain the agitation of the runner. I glanced at Rain Cloud, and we both started down the hill.

“Is something wrong?” Rain Cloud called as we got within shouting range.

“Little Gnu is injured,” the runner called back. “An elephant attacked us as we were stalking a zebra. It caught Little Gnu up in its trunk and we thrust our spears in its belly to distract it. We killed it — there is much meat – but Little Gnu cannot walk.

There was one person in the camp that I could find and teleport to anywhere. “Songbird,” I shouted, as loudly as I could. “Go with them. Think at me when you have found the hunters. Leave WildDog; Meerkat will care for him.”

She nodded and took off, running after the others.

Jarn’s Journal Year 6 Day 32

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Year 6 Day 32

Well, they’re back.

I tried to explain my map, now transferred to a hide with Songbird and Meerkat’s help, to the gathered shamans. Songbird seems to have figured out that the map in some way corresponds to where I have been, though for the most part she considers it some sort of incomprehensible magic. Rather as I regard their ability to find their way around by using landmarks, I suspect.

The general reaction of the shamans could be summed up as “But we are standing here, on grass. How can we also be standing on that piece of hide?”

It might be possible to teach WildDog what a map means, but would it be wise? In fact, is it wise to let him grow up here? There are no other children here, and it has taken him only a few days to discover friendship with other children coming in. Songbird and Giraffe, likewise, are delighted to renew bonds with their old friends. Is it fair to them, to keep them here?

I need to think more deeply about this.

This is an except for Jarn’s Journal, supposedly the journal of a human-like alien stranded in Africa some 125,000 years ago. He has made contact with a group of primitive, nomadic humans, three of whom (with their child) are staying with him at the area where the normally scattered family bands meet once a year.

Jarn (A to Z Challenge)

Jarn was a R’il’nian who lived around 125,000 years ago, during the penultimate interglacial on Earth. He was a starship designer, but he was young and he left a few safety features out of his design. As a result he was stranded in Africa, and met primitive humans there. By everything he had learned he should have avoided having anything to do with them – the morality he had grown up with emphasized that proto-sentient and sentient species were to be left strictly alone to work out their own destiny. But he could not refuse to help a badly injured child, and as a result of this and other well-intentioned acts, he wound up hybridizing with the primitives, so that ultimately all of these Human ancestors had a small contribution from Jarn’s genes. In my science fiction universe Jarn made it back to his people after several thousand years, taking many of his hybrid descendants with him.  Here he is recording his first thoughts after the crash.

His Journal is currently being blogged a bit at a time on Fridays, and is also on my author site. The Jarnian Confederation, home of all my science fiction, is named after Jarn.

 I am alive, which still astonishes me. I do not know enough about this planet yet to have more than a rough idea of its year length, but no doubt I will find out soon enough. If I ever get back to where designing another starship is possible, I will design it with a few more of the standard safety features. Like the block against exiting a jump point too close to a gravity well.

If by any chance I do not get back home, and this record does, perhaps I should introduce myself. I am Jarn, a R’il’nian and a designer of starships. Not, I regret to say, as good a designer as I thought, or my third ship would be around me instead of lying in pieces on the bottom of one of this planet’s oceans. Indeed, it all happened so fast I am still somewhat confused, but I will try to state briefly what happened.

I was aiming for the vicinity of a G-type sun, and I came out of the exit jump-point too close to the third planet’s atmosphere, and heading into it. All I could do was maneuver into a braking orbit and try to kill enough energy that a water landing wouldn’t vaporize the ship and cause a major tidal wave. No, I could not have teleported to safety. I never was any good at interstellar teleports, or at going someplace I hadn’t been before. Another thing to work on if I ever get home.

Anyway, not only does the planet have lots of water, it also has land areas with large stretches of chlorophyll green. A huge one stretches almost halfway around the planet in the northern hemisphere, with an extension into the southern hemisphere at its trailing end, and a pair on the other side of the planet together extend almost from pole to pole. It looked as if there was ice at both poles, though it could have been clouds, and the readouts as I got into the atmosphere indicated one part oxygen to four of nitrogen. All this strongly suggested life, and it would be unethical in the extreme to let the ship destroy any more of that life than I could help.

I managed to trigger the escape capsule a minute or so before impact, which was toward the leading edge of the broadly serpentine north-south ocean, and flew it, with some difficulty, to the trailing edge of the southern extension of the larger land mass, where I am now recording this. I suppose it was a good landing, since I am still alive and sound, if shaken, but the capsule will never again be anything more than a rather crude shelter.

There is a small stream nearby, and an abundance of fibrous-looking vegetation which is being eaten by a wide variety of animals, including what appear to be perfectly good mammals. I don’t have and probably never will have the equipment to test whether their proteins are compatible with my own, but a fish from the stream was tasty enough. The stream water seems reasonably pure, though the larger water areas taste salty and are probably too mineral-rich to drink on a regular basis. The atmospheric oxygen content is neither so high as to allow uncontrolled wildfires nor so low as to give me any problem in breathing, and so far there are no obvious atmospheric toxins. So if I don’t swell up and die tonight from the fish, it looks as if I have the basic requirements for staying alive.

I didn’t manage to get a measurement of axial tilt, so I have no idea what the weather is likely to be or what season I am in. A lot of the vegetation looks desiccated, which may indicate that I arrived during a seasonal dry period, in which case I may need shelter when it starts to rain again. Or I may have landed in an area entering a long drought. I hope the stream does not dry up completely.

I suppose I should count myself lucky, but I have no idea of what I can do beyond keeping myself alive.

I’m doing my A to Z blogs from my books, both characters and background information. For characters I’ll introduce them quickly, say what point of time they’re talking from since their situations change drastically through the books, and let them talk. Background information will vary according to what I’m talking about. All of these blogs will be scheduled to go live just after midnight Alaska time.

Humans (A to Z Challenge)

This is a place where my science fiction departs from general scientific agreement. I have assumed that the modern human species – almost – evolved in Africa. But I have also assumed a R’il’nian, Jarn (who will be my “J”) was stranded in Africa some 125,000 years ago, and that for some reason which is still not well understood, he turned out to be slightly fertile with these primitive humans. They were already more artistic than the R’il’nai (mostly expressed in adorning themselves) and using language, but his genetic addition, slight though it was, kindled something additional within them. In my universe we are all remote descendants of Jarn.

Jarn was a starship designer, and with the aid of the information on the computer from the escape module, he was able, over several millennia, to get his descendants to develop a starship to carry him home. But they didn’t stop there. The global population was not large, and they split between those, mostly more technically oriented, who followed Jarn back to the stars and eventually became the ancestors of the Humans in my science fiction, and those who stayed on Earth, rapidly lost their force-grown technical civilization (they were mostly the ones who disliked technology anyway) and became our ancestors.

The early crossbreds and others who showed a high percentage of R’il’nian genes were wiped out in an epidemic lethal to them but not to Humans roughly ten thousand years ago, as were many of the R’il’nai. The Jarnian Confederation in its present state developed in the period following the epidemic.

I’m doing my A to Z blogs from my books, both characters and background information. For characters I’ll introduce them quickly, say what point of time they’re talking from since their situations change drastically through the books, and let them talk. Background information will vary according to what I’m talking about. All of these blogs will be scheduled to go live just after midnight Alaska time.

Jarn’s Journal Year 6 Day 1

If you are looking for the A to Z Challenge post, click on the logo to the left or scroll down.

Year 6 Day 1

I now know what this continent looks like. Meekat and Giraffe looked at my map with total bewilderment, obviously not seeing any relationship to the ground on which they stood. I tried to explain to Songbird, the only one who had ever seen the ground from high above. “You know how things look smaller when you are far above them? Well, this is how the land would look if you were very, very high. So high you could see water on all sides.”

I should have known better. Being Songbird, she immediately demanded that I take her up that high.

“There isn’t any air that high,” I told her. “You couldn’t breathe.”

She looked at me, puzzled. “But you can always breathe.”

I started to mention difficulty in breathing on top of mountains, and almost immediately realized she had never been up a mountain high enough that she would be short of breath. And most of my exploring has been along the coast; the great waterfall, my original landing site and the lake we live on are almost the only internal points marked on my map. I really should find out if there are any really high mountains on this continent.

Maybe the shamans will understand. They should be here soon.

Jarn’s Journal Year 5 Day 271

Year 5, Day 271

WildDog is a year old today, by my reckoning.

We don’t celebrate birth dates, at least not as adults. There would simply be too many of them! But we do celebrate a few important ones, and one of these is when a child completes its first year. Friends of the parents come together, and the child is given its first taste of sweets.

Little WildDog is still getting almost all of his nourishment from his mother’s milk though he does have teeth, as my fingers can attest! I am not sure why, as he certainly cannot chew anything, and they merely make nursing him uncomfortable for Songbird. She is beginning to chew food and then give it to him, and it occurred to me that it has been a long time since I brought sweet fruits to my helpers. So I teleported to the sites of several palms that have had sweet fruit in the past, and brought dates for Songbird to give WildDog. I also teleported a bit of honeycomb from a wild bees’ nest – from a healthy distance!

I had a hard time not laughing at the results. WildDog screwed his face up and prepared to cry at the strange taste in his mouth, as he usually does when Songbird gives him something new. Then his eyes went wide and he blinked a time or two, working his mouth. The final stage was a beatific smile, and a mouth eagerly opened for more. “That’s a special birthday treat,” I told him firmly. “I know it tastes good, but it won’t help you grow strong.”

I am not sure how much he understands, as I refuse to employ my mind-reading talent. But I could swear he looked disappointed.

Jarn’s Journal is a bit of the back story of the Jarnian Confederation, where most of my science fiction is based. It is the journal of a human-like alien with esper abilities, Jarn, who was stranded in Africa some 125,000 years ago.

By the way, I am participating in the A to Z Challenge this year, with posts live just after midnight about the characters and some of the world-building in my books. I’m letting the characters speak for themselves, though I try to tell when they’re speaking from.