The Yerin Alternative

By Erik Ga Bean

George runs a quiet Hastings junk shop in this parallel universe adventure. One day he discovers two bigfoot creatures in his cellar. Soon he is sailing the seas of an alternate version of the Earth with an unexpectedly pregnant woman and a rubbish anthropologist. Can he make it home in time to prevent the invasion of the Yerin?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Erik Ga Bean
• Release date: May 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301239184

Erik Ga Bean

Science fiction fan, astronomy enthusiast and IT professional Erik Ga Bean lives in the English county of Hertfordshire with his wife Helen and his growing collection of carnivorous plants. As well as being an author, he is a keen narrowboater and a leading light in the Stevenage Plus social group.

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The Yerin Alternative

By Erik Ga Bean

Published by Erik Ga Bean at Smashwords.

Copyright 2013 Erik Ga Bean

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

To my wonderful wife Helen.

Chapter 1

Three million years ago the Earth was a very different place. Animals and trees ruled the world and there were no people. Chief amongst these animals were the various species of proto hominids that were competing for dominance across Africa. One day a young individual of one species cut his leg on a rock while chasing an individual of another species off his patch. This individual would go on to be the grandfather of a great warrior chief who would lead the ancestors of humanity to a crucial defeat in the ongoing battle for world dominance.

There is a theory that every event with two possible outcomes will see them both played out in a different universe. While this is not always the case, the cut on the leg did leave to two worlds - one with the infection leading to death and the other with the leg soon clearing up. One with humans going on to create the world that we all know and one where the Yerin became the dominant species.

The Yerin were bipedal and broadly stocky human in proportion, though with slightly longer arms and slightly shorter legs. Their hands were of the human design and their large feet were slightly more human than apelike. Males typically grew to about nine feet tall and females to about eight feet. The thick fur that covered their bodies meant that they had no need of clothing and ranged by individual from black to dark red, greying from the extremities with age. Their strong smell, coupled with their thick skin, made them invulnerable to malaria carrying mosquitoes.

By the time that humans think of as the start of the second millennium after Christ the world of the Yerin was rather different to that of the humans. Most of the planet was a largely untouched wilderness. The entire Yerin headcount was a little over one million. They mostly lived along the south facing coast of western Africa. They had a broadly iron age level of civilisation. They lived in roundhouses and practiced agriculture. The various communities peacefully traded with one another, a practice helped by the whole population sharing dialects of the same spoken language.

The monasteries were an important part of Yerin culture, with about five percent of young males choosing to join them when they reached their late teens. The monks were the only Yerins to use the written word, hand writing tales of the other world into parchment tomes.

The other world was in many ways similar to the world of the Yerin. It was though filled with countless wonders and populated with tiny, mostly bald creatures. It was not a spiritual world of belief, as with many human religions, it was a physical place. Many Yerin monks had briefly visited the other world. It was accessed via portals that were distributed around the planet. The portals were few in number and it took many years for the lucky few seers amongst the monks to hone their gift of being able to detect them.

Small bands of devout monks would travel the globe, locating the portals and returning to the monasteries to record their discoveries. Some monastic expeditions travelled by mastodon train; the short haired mastodon, which had not been hunted to extinction by early humans in the Yerin world, being the Yerin's primary beast of burden. Over countless generations the Yerin had found them more hardy, intelligent and loyal than elephants. They were also much less likely to consume crops in the field. Other expeditionary parties travelled by sea in duel hulled open boats, powered by oar and sail, which were rarely out of sight of the coast.

One particular maritime expedition was not going well. It had set off from West Africa in two boats two years earlier. Fishing and hunting for a living, they had worked their way along the coast, over wintering on the Iberian peninsular and then on the Dover straight. Progress had been slow and one of the boats had turned back after an argument between the two seers. The remaining boat had then encountered a semi permanent encampment from an overland expedition. They had stopped on the northern French coast to await inspiration after having travelled all the way to the Arctic Circle and half way back without discovering a portal. Despite the morale levels at the camp being very low, half of the crew of the remaining boat had decided to stay behind and await the decision to load up the mastodons and make the long trek home. It was a party of four who were left to pick their way west along the south coast of England, somehow still believing that their seer knew what he was doing.

Chapter 2

James was a human who had been in his mid thirties when he had decided that his career in advertising had been a huge mistake. It had been what he had wanted to do at school. It had been what he had worked towards at university. He had been lucky with his early progress. He had then met Coral. Coral had wanted to be a hippy at school and had fully embraced the idea at university. She had then hitchhiked to India where she had found that her intestinal situation there didn't suit her. Returning to London she had decided to marry into conventional society.

Coral's early question to James about the whole concept of advertising being a morally indefensible fraud had blown his bubble. Soon the two of them had married and the millennium bug had disappointingly failed to rescue