The Shadowlands

By Morgan Charr

The Shadowlands is set on a distant planet in the future that has been colonized from Old Earth. Its protagonist, Stephen Hardy, is an adventurer and scholar exiled from his native Philos to patrol the wastelands beyond which lie the breakaway civilization of Hedon. When Hardy rescues a teenage boy and his girl lover from the wastes, and finds himself ethically unable to fulfill his duty and see them safely back to his homeland, Philos, his life is changed forever. This sci-fi tale has existentialist philosophic and Taoist and Zen religious undertones and a low-tech slant.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 21, 2009
• ISBN: 9781465320575

Morgan Charr

Morgan Charr is a writer living in Colorado. Professionally he is a multi-lingual and widely traveled scholar and teacher. In addition he holds certifications as an over-the-road truck driver (with endorsements in singles, doubles, triples, tankers and hazardous materials), and a developer of various kinds of projects. In his early life he was a boxer and a motorcyclist. His hobbies include hiking, camping, hunting and shooting, and he is an aficionado of the lore of the Old West. His works are published under the auspices of Aeon Project Development, LLC.

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Copyright © 2009 by Morgan Charr.

Library of Congress Control Number:          2008904700

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

The Exile

Philos and Hedon

The Shadowlands

Weapons

Encounters in the Shadowlands

The Old Man

Destination

Reunion

Mastery

Ambush!

To rule in Hell…

The Exile

The solitary figure with the stringy, streaming black hair stood rapt, listening, feeling, sensing in the harsh desert air. Any observer of the species Homo sapiens would have recognized the figure for male: a set of wide shoulders swayed over narrow hips and firm thighs and calves in this forbidding environment. The man cursed softly at the bitter acridity of the stale dusk air. A thin wisp of alkaline dust, burning like smoke, hung on the edge of the evening. An unmistakable scent, sharp yet muted, eternally reminded the broad sinewy figure that he was not in his homeland, with family, friends, and comforts. Instead, he was living and working as an exile here, in the Shadowlands, that broad belt of arid wasteland that lay between the two halves of this world, the established barrier between two ways of life, two systems of belief, two ideologies, two ways of being human, two ways of surviving in an alien world.

Usually, at this time of day, with this planet’s drooping sun lowering itself in the sky, a cool breeze would be sweeping across the wastes, bringing relief to the few living creatures that might have braved the surface. Not today, however. Something unsettling disturbed the air—something vaguely familiar, foreboding, foretelling danger. The exile had smelled it few times before, and while nothing had ever yet come of it, the taste of the dust made him uneasy, as a wild animal might instinctively fear a forest fire. The male human checked his weapons, then resumed his lope back to his sanctuary. He did not want to be out on the wastes when darkness had fallen, when the great rock lizards had begun their own hunts.

The exile’s name was Steven Hardy. He had once been a working-class boy who had risen on his side of the Shadowlands to become a scholar, soldier and adventurer, only to be exiled to this forbidding region for his violation of ancient taboos in leaving his first wife. The marriage had been dysfunctional, to say the least, from the outset, and had yielded no children through the few perfunctory and unsatisfactory sexual encounters these two very different persons had had. The two had been attracted to one another for intellectual reasons, a reason not unusual on Philos. She had been drawn to Hardy’s rugged real-life adventures, and to his flawless memory of the events he had experienced. For his part, he had been drawn to her spare yet shapely form, and to her high critical acumen.

Yet initial attraction does not sustain a marriage. That takes intimacy—and communication of body and soul on a deeper level. Hardy was a romantic, a dreamer, a creature possessed of the wanderlust that had characterized nomadic peoples and wanderers across aeons of human experience and over many galaxies. This disposition suited him to be a perpetual adventurer, despite the extreme intellectual discipline his life had imposed on him. As his marriage and his hopes for it had collapsed under the burden of his own internal drives, and as these all too quickly wore away the illusions his bride had had of him, he had strayed all too easily for Philonian custom.

That is, he had allowed himself to fall in love with a red-haired girl of his own original class, the workers. Her name was Tamara. He had met her as a dancer at a social club—the kind of establishment frequented by the men of Philos’ patrician class. Such clubs promised men pleasure away from their often dull marriages. Most of the relationships struck in this setting did not last—nor were they meant to. They were trysts at the most, fleeting encounters that assuaged the deeper needs of a man’s soul. Wives of Philos’ upper class rarely objected to such relationships because, in truth, these relationships relieved them of the burden of satisfying the needs of their men.

Yet Hardy’s relationship with Tamara had from the first been different from such normal trysts. Although the dancers at such places rarely allowed themselves to get involved with the upper-class men of Philos, Hardy and Tamara had both been taken with one another from the start. Initially, he had simply come to watch her dance, but with increasing frequency. Then she had noticed him, dark and brooding, his long straight black hair falling across his shoulders, so unlike the disciplined, closely cropped locks worn by the rest of the men of his class. Their first meeting was simply held over drinks at a table, where Hardy had had the best wine brought for her. This encounter led to others, and finally, she invited him to her own apartment. Afterward, they took to meeting apart from the social club, and he finally procured for them both a better apartment than she had been able to afford on her own. That place had become a home away form home for Hardy.

As the relationship deepened, he spent less and less time with his wife, who became increasingly suspicious. While she had tolerated, and even appreciated, the emotional distance between them, she distrusted the increasingly unexplained days of separation. Hardy’s disappearance from her side at important social functions raised questions among her circle, and called into question her own social status.

Finally, Tamara bore Hardy a child: a large boy, with red curls and pale skin like his mother’s. They had called him Seth. At this point, he stopped going home almost completely.

The strict social regimen of Philos, however, brooked no violation of its arcane moral conventions. Hardy’s wife, already suspicious of his increasingly long absences from her side at serious social functions (the importance of which Hardy understood all too well, having advanced in that society precisely by learning not only to adhere to such customs, but to exploit them for his own advancement), and hearing rumors of her husband appearing in male circles with new and striking consort, availed herself of her own means to find out the truth. It did not take her spies too long to bring back their reports. Angry and determined to exact punishment from her husband, she had them attest to what they had seen, had taken their affidavits before a magistrate, and had proffered formal legal charges of adultery against him.

Too high a person to be executed or sent to prison or to the mines, Hardy had been given the choice of suicide or exile to that forbidding border territory known as the Shadowlands. The legendary philosopher of long-ago Earth, Socrates, had preferred suicide to exile from his Athenian homeland. But Hardy was a survivor, and he had faced the worst his planet could offer already—or so he thought. Thus he chose exile instead of self-imposed death, and with it, a life in the barren no-man’s land between two enemy civilizations: Philos and Hedon.

Still, those so exiled were not free. They bore the charge of their society to guard their civilization’s frontier against incursions from their Hedonian enemies across the wastes. Two other responsibilities they carried as well: watching lest any from their side cross over to the other, and helping those escaping from the other side to attain the seemingly more hospitable realm behind.

Tamara, holding by her own right no more than a worker’s social status, had only briefly possessed a higher status through her relationship with Hardy. Yet mistresses and courtesans were only barely tolerated on Philos, and least of all by the wives they had displaced. Thus she had not met with a benevolent fate once her benefactor had been exiled. Hardy’s jealous and jilted spouse, herself of aristocratic family and connections, had had the poor girl charged and convicted of violating the rights of a woman of the patrician class. The courts, being themselves patrician by viewpoint, administration, and personnel, had condemned Tamara to leave her position as a dancer, and had enforced upon her a lifetime of service in a brothel. The handsome red-haired boy-child she bore to Hardy the judges ordered sent to an orphanage to be raised for the brutal work in the mines, the fate of an orphan born to that class.

The existence of officially sanctioned brothels on strict Philos should come as no surprise to anyone who knows their social history. Puritanical societies often have brothels, no matter how well-hidden, precisely to deal with the pent-up frustration and the sexual repression which would otherwise disrupt that society. The social club in which Tamara had been a dancer stood far above a brothel, and could only be frequented by men of the patrician class. Freer, less rigid societies had less need of this institution. On Philos, the brothels were worked primarily by girls such as Tamara, who had dared breach class lines by a tryst with some married man of the upper class, or who had otherwise violated one or another of the patrician rights or taboos. Brothels were for all men, but especially men from the lower and working classes, and the women who served in them were considerably worse off as a result.

Steven Hardy was, in his own way, a man of honor, and would not allow his lover to perish laboring as a brothel-woman, contracting some disease or another from a patron and dying a slow agonizing death. A man of resourcefulness, he would not see his woman destroyed thus, nor his child consigned to the mines. So using his not-inconsiderable connections, he had reached back across the wastes of his own exile and arranged for their escape to the Shadowlands with him. For a few years thereafter, the three of them had eked out an existence together, eating rock lizards, snakes, birds, various insects and their fat, nutritious larvae, along with a variety of desert nuts and berries, and drinking from the occasional springs and wells located there.

Ultimately, however, the existence to which Hardy had brought Tamara and Seth in the Shadowlands had taken its toll. First, the child Seth had died from diarrhea contracted from alkaline water. Hardy and Tamara had buried their six-year-old son under a sun-burnished vermilion cliff, providing a home for his like-colored curls. Then Tamara had become pregnant again, despite their best efforts, using the clean dry desert pebbles she had forced into her uterus as a primitive IUD. She had died miserably in a breached birth, the two sobbing out their last kisses together in each other’s arms. Hardy had then buried his love beneath the same red-rock wall as their son, inscribing in rough capital letters of the old Latin alphabet he had learned, a brief and acerbic epitaph above their stone tomb:

TO TAMARA AND SETH, IN LOVE, FOR THE SUFFERING BROUGHT ON THEM BY THE BETTER

OF THESE TWO WORLDS.

These losses had left Hardy a bitter and hardened man. A deeply passionate protector of his family, who had committed to them for life, Hardy came to view subsequent relationships as brief interludes in the longer course of a solitary existence. Indeed, his new outlook served him well here. For all practical purposes, he was alone now—since persons in his situation were not assigned companions or teammates—and thus perhaps better able to perform the assignments left to them in exile.

Those exiled from Philos to the Shadowlands were called Guardians for their role in guarding the crossings from Hedon to Philos, though they received scant succor in return from their own side. Yet what they did receive was enough: periodic supplies of dried meat and fruits to supplement whatever they could gather or kill on their own, dropped every few months at secretive border stations, along with ammunition for the selected weapons each Guardian had a right to choose, as well as some special requests for necessities—clothing, shoes, goggles, night-vision equipment, and the like.

Training, however, was not provided. Either an exile made it, or he (or she) did not. Most of those who ended up in this situation were renegades of elevated rank who, like Hardy, had the internal or experiential resources to take care of themselves. Those who were not of this ilk and character did not survive. For Hardy, of natural grit and stamina, descended from ancient tribal roots going back to Old Earth, accustomed to early work in fields, later in the mines, and still later as a stevedore and heavy overland driver, acclimating to the vast loneliness of the Shadowlands and the arduous overland treks required there was not difficult.

Hardy had adapted well to the wastes. Out there, he had adopted different modes of dress according to his personal preference and to the demands of the clime. On some occasions, he dressed in multiple layers of clothing, usually of some fustianlike cloth, his final covering being long light desert robes, a heavy head scarf which hung off his shoulders, and a pair of military-style desert goggles. The uneven robes, with their tatters and folds and desert dust, broke up his outline in that barren landscape and protected his skin from the blistering heat as well. On other occasions, Hardy wore only a breechcloth, after the style of Old-Earth nomads from the North American continent, and nearly knee-high fringed moccasins of the kind worn by a Southwestern desert tribe called Apache. So attired, he slung a belt with knife and pistol, carried a water-skin of about three liters over his shoulder (a tough hombre, acclimated to the Shadowlands, could survive at least a week on such an amount), and a carbine in one hand or the other.

This day Hardy was wearing mottled linen robes, and these covered a multitude of weapons as well: a rapid-fire short carbine and a heavy-caliber handgun, multiple magazines for both, and a long hunting knife with the blade on the curved interior face. The design of the knife was ancestral: it came from an ancient Earth tribe of mercenary warriors who had lived on the southern flank of the highest mountain range of that world. They had been feared there, it was said, as Gurkhas. The knife carried the legendary name of kukri. With such a weapon, a Gurkha warrior was said to have been able to decapitate an eight-hundred-kilogram bull with a single stroke.

Outside his robes, Hardy wore a light shoulder pack with first-aid and refresher supplies for anyone he might encounter who needed help, enough dried food and water for himself for several days, and a light all-weather techno-sheet to protect from the heat as well as the cold. Together, his entire pack weighed less than five kilograms. In addition, he carried a pair of long-range binoculars and a long-barreled, long-range camouflaged rifle with a scope that had infrared capacity.

Thus equipped, Hardy went forth on his patrols each morning, some days sticking near his permanent base, but more often than not planning long eight-to-ten-day treks through the Shadowlands, picking his route carefully to conceal his passage from those from the other side, who called themselves Watchers, and refreshing himself from caches of supplies stowed at secret locations along the way. He had known the Watchers from Hedon were out here, at least by rumor, even before his exile. Now, from the fleeting glimpses he had had of their scarecrowlike figures he had caught on occasion while perched in the groin of some high crag, whence he had killed any number of them, and now and again from a long-range shot that had splattered off the rock against which he had crouched, he knew for a certainty they were with him, in this same forbidden land, and with the same assignment. So far, he had had continual success against them and they had had none against him.

This day, Hardy was on the lookout for Watchers. Dusk was passing into darkness and carrying that uneasy alkaline scent he had detected with it, catching him at least two kilometers across the open desert from his shelter. Hardy stopped again, crouching down alonside the skeleton of one of those resilient desert shrubs, and wondered whether he was being tracked. He could see no one, no small puff of red-ochre dust here or there to betray the footsteps of another human out here on the surface of the Shadowlands. Finally, after long minutes of scanning to no avail, Hardy had no choice but to hasten on long loping strides across the barren flats to the rock-hewn refuge he had made for himself in the middle of this emptiness. Two kilometers, mused Hardy. The distance should take less than ten minutes.

Hardy rose to leave his position of bare cover, but that smell caught him again, now stronger than before. The Guardian had developed the wary and unpredictable instincts of a feral cat out here, so he stopped to take one last scan of the surrounding area through the scope of his long-range rifle, which he adjusted to its I-R mode. As he swept the barren, shadowy flats, he picked up a faint red heat signature far out on the wastes, diagonally to his right. His refuge lay to his left about thirty degrees off dead ahead. The blur lay at about the same angle off to his right. Hardy adjusted his rangefinder… 3,600 meters… and zeroed in. At that range, he could only find a stationary blur, spread elongated on the ground. It could be a human, he thought, or a large lizard, still warm with the heat of the day’s sun. Yet a lizard would not be lying prone and still as the night rolled in with its unexpected horrors. It would be trotting, its long tongue flitting, looking for prey, head up, tail whipping and darting in anticipation.

Hardy scanned the I-R image again. No. It was not rapidly giving off heat as a lizard would be at this time of day, nor was it showing any signs of metal. He concluded it was not one of the Hedonian Watchers. They always carried metal weapons outside their clothing—on display, as it were. Part of their machismo, he knew. Hardy scanned the horizon on all sides again: no other I-R signatures. That fact meant unless the Watchers had seen him and had gone to cover, to lie in wait and ambush him, or to cut him down with a single round from one of their own long-range weapons, he was alone save for the one I-R-emitting image.

Well, Hardy knew his business. Three thousand six hundred meters… maybe twenty minutes maximum if he ran hard. He set off at a long, easy lope, running as easily as a well-conditioned dog would have. Despite his thirty-eight years, Hardy was as fit and as fast and as light-footed as a man could be. Not to be able to run, and to run easily, in the Shadowlands meant swift and certain death. Hardy tacked irregularly as he ran—a few paces forty-five degrees in this direction, several paces forty-five degrees in that—to keep from providing an especially easy target. Still, a crack marksman like himself could bring down any runner at inside of 1,300 meters, so Hardy knew his own chances were not good if a Watcher was tracking him with a scoped rifle. He could not worry, however. He had to rely on animal instinct and other primitive senses, and equally as much on intuition to detect any danger or presence, and on his by-now acute sense of smell. And while the acrid stillness of the alkaline desert dust continued to disturb his olfactory nerve, and to interfere with his other senses, he felt nothing like he ought to have felt had someone been out there tracking him with a scoped rifle. For all his effort, Hardy could detect nothing besides that blur, and that blur was not a Watcher anyway, he thought fatalistically. Three thousand four hundred of the three thousand six hundred meters disappeared under his light-treaded footfall in less than eighteen minutes. He had run hard. Now he dropped where he was and re-spotted his target, carefully scanning the darkening landscape.

"Nothing, damn it!" he cursed to himself. He had exposed himself out here on the flats, delaying his return to sanctuary, and he could find nothing! Hardy lay in the open, with full night almost upon him with all of its dangers—especially the nocturnal rock lizards and, to a lesser extent, the rare but large venomous serpents and occasional poisonous arachnids. If someone or something had used a ploy to get him into the open, it had worked.

Still, Hardy was not ready to admit that reality fully to himself. So he scanned again, more slowly this time. As he lay prone, his legs spread, hugging the gnarled rocky surface for what concealment it would offer, he picked up the glow dead ahead, but only faintly, as if the source were lower than the surface of the desert itself. Then he noticed that the ground here was on a slight rise. He speculated that whatever was there might lie just beneath the near edge of that rise. Hardy slung the scoped long gun on his back and bellied forward, like the plains Indians of Old Earth long ago stalking antelope—the Comanche and Sioux and Cheyenne, who for a quarter of a century had bedeviled the better-armed, better-equipped Whites encroaching onto their lands. Hardy was at home in what he did.

Unstrapping his pack, carbine, and rifle a hundred meters out and setting them down, Hardy approached the place by crawling forward with the pistol in his right hand and the Gurkha knife in his left. He tried to be silent, but he sounded to himself like a straining beast of burden, snorting, panting, and grinding against the earth. Yet Hardy knew by experience that his progress would be almost soundless a few feet away. He reached the crest of the rise about thirty meters before he had estimated he would. There, thirty meters away, lay the figure of a human, stretched out on the sand, barely covered against the elements.

Hardy stole forward in a crouch, ready as a cat to spring upon its prey. When he was less than a meter away, he saw that the figure was a man, or rather, a lanky youth. Unkempt blonde hair still not tamed, and raw bleeding feet, told a tale of haste and flight and ignorance of the way. And the youth was not alone. He was lying on his belly, facing away from Hardy, his right arm lying over another form. Hardy rose from his crouch, putting both weapons away, carefully, but still within reach. He peered intently into the rapidly vanishing twilight: beneath the young man lay a girl, smaller than the youth, stringy and lithe, her feet and legs also cut and bleeding. The boy had adopted a protective posture toward the girl, and both had apparently lain down in exhaustion, in the hollow of the landscape where Hardy had found them—in the only possible cover for many kilometers.

Hardy stretched out his hand to rouse the youth, and the boy stirred, but barely. Hardy tried again. This time the boy started wildly, like a wounded animal.

Steady, steady, Hardy said in the formal Hedonian language he knew, a friend has found you.

The boy continued staring wild-eyed, not moving, every muscle of his body taut, almost twitching.

Again Hardy admonished him, now using a more colloquial form of the boy’s tongue. Steady, steady, kid. We’ve gotta get you and your gal there out of here fast, and into shelter, before the wildlife gets moving out here. Wildlife, you know? Lizards? Serpents? Arachnids?

The boy continued staring, but nodded his head and turned to rouse the girl, gently, affectionately, with genuine tenderness and concern. Hardy was touched. Tenderness, he thought incredulously, out here in Hell. Old Earth’s mythic terms were very appropriate, he realized once again. The girl stirred, and the boy helped her up. Hardy reached into his robes and withdrew a clay bottle, about an eighth of a liter, with a wooden plug in it attached to the bottleneck by a leather thong. It contained a dark elixir that he carried to revive the weak in the desert. Its effects were really quite miraculous in this environment. Hardy knew it to contain serious stimulants. He had learned to make it from an old dweller of the Shadowlands whom he had met early in his exile. The emaciated but still lively denizen of this forsaken region had shown him how to take the bark off the base of a certain dry shrub, cut it into shavings with his knife, and boil it in a little water until it was a dark syrup. Then one only needed to add water to bring the elixir to the right strength.

A sip of this liquid Hardy offered