The Nature of Predators - Wild West (11/11) (Patreon)

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Memory Transcription Subject: Nilrie, Takkan Smuggler

Date [standardized human time]: April 25, 2158

I’d thought that spending time in the future would make Blake more civilized, but that did not appear to be the case. He’d discovered liquor stores on Earth; after thinking the bars were much too “loud an’ electric, compared to a saloon,” bringing bottles of alcohol home was much more his style. He seemed shocked by how strong the spirits were, and even the beer. Apparently, after a bit of research, it seemed that in his gross era, alcohol was safer to drink than water; that “cholera” sickness prevailed in his day thanks to a nasty bacterium. I was floored that his people hadn’t known that boiling water was enough to purify it, and disconcerted that I’d drank any of his liquids.

Sheriff Donovan had accidentally managed to get a music app open on his holopad, and prowled around our new apartment “dancing”; he whooped and hollered with shocking noise intensity. The human later professed that he didn’t even like the music, but that he was awestruck at having it recorded and played back to him. Predators of his day couldn’t distribute songs in their grating voices; that technology had arrived with a phonautograph, about a decade after he was sealed in a cryopod. I’d been worried about lowering his inhibitions, but it seemed to only make the primitive’s intelligence disappear altogether. He wanted to teach me something called a waltz, and to grab me and drag me into his prowling around despite my protests.

“You are such a primitive. The liquor has you fully acting like an animal.” I stared unimpressed at the human, as he tugged at his belt and hopped around like the exterminators had lit him on fire. “You’re acting like this is the first time you heard music.”

“Y’act like we ain’t made nothin’ ‘fore this future stuffs. We ‘ad parlor songs, sent out as sheet music to buy and play all over the place. Ye had to actually read the notes, not just get it all spit out at ye by some thinking computer whatnot,” the predator drawled. 

“I admit, that’s more culture than I expected from you. But for crying out loud, is there anything you do like about the future, Blake?”

“The licker store.”

“That’s it?!”

“Hm. By golly, the cold air is nice, though I ain’t know how it done chill up the wind itself. We don’t got to leave no half-open doors to let the breeze in. They…the humans uh today…can make everythin’ just how they want it.”

“That’s a good thing. They’re living better lives. Their music isn’t glyphs on a physical paper; it’s the original, just how whoever wrote it wanted. If you heard a singer’s voice across the globe, it’d let you have actual stars…people who travel, not people who sell sheets.”

“We tot’ly had our famous singers. There was that Jenny Lind, tourin’ the USA with her concerts, spikin’ up all kinds of popularity. She was super moral an’ charitable, and one of the most talented voices in opera, the kind of good folk I wanna support. Ever’one ‘cross the world knew how great her performances were.”

“I thought your barbaric nations hated each other and agreed on nothing?”

“Art’s diff’rent. Entertainment’s either entertainin’ or it ain’t.”

“What a great, well-phrased thought, Bullseye Blake.”

“It’s true. Them New Yorkers love fightin’ over theatre, they’re crazy…they were crazy about their performers. Theater riots were very common.”

“So you do fight over everything. You predators don’t have a peaceful inclination in your body.”

“Y’wanna know my inclination, Nilrie? I miss my family. I miss the person who loved me and gave me guidance through all the things we been through. A world without Cornelia…”

As Blake’s drunken reverie morphed into deep sorrow, I turned to him with an expression of worry. “I don’t know if this helps at all, but either way, you weren’t going home to her. She lived a full life, and she made her choices because, like you said, she loved you.”

“That don’t bring ‘er back. I could prolly find a headstone with ‘er name on it. I dunno if I could bear to visit it, with how long she’s been…gone. My kids prolly buried right next to ‘er, and it’ll be like a kick in the teeth.”

As someone who recently got kicked in the teeth by Marlow, I know that’s not fun. My jaw’s still tender, even after our hospital stay.

“You have family out there,” I offered. “Have you thought about trying to find your descendants?”

The sheriff waved a hand, expression sinking into despair. “They ain’t wanna see an ol’ man like me that they ain’t know. I got nothin’ to offer ‘em, and they been a lotta the generations away…”

“You don’t know that. And you could at least see what happened to them. It’s a little part of Cornelia and your kids passed on: remember, you’re the one that has that. I imagine you were a good father, and you could offer them mentorship.”

“Nah. It’s like ye said. I don’t understand nothin’ ‘bout them science. Ye yell at me ‘bout everythin’ and treat me like a leper; hand-washin’ like it’s sum obsession, can’t eat food off the floor, sayin’ the other humans ain’t stink when they sweat.”

“You’re…mad about that? I’m just trying to teach you basic hygiene. It’s not that hard; all of the other predators on this world do it.”

“I ain’t like them. I ain’t from ‘ere and ain’t never gonna be.”

“Well, guess what? Neither am I.” I snatched his bottle of liquor, and gave the beast a stern look. “Somehow, you’ve gone from loud to mopey, and either way, I like you better sober. We’re supposed to go on the fire kite tomorrow. Seeing the stars, Blake; I really want to show you what the universe is, and where Takkans are from. Please, get some sleep?”

“Fine. Oh, I do like the mattresses they ‘ave. I don’t get what this ‘weighted blanket’ is though.”

“Maybe it’s for prey who live on Earth, to make us feel trapped even as we sleep.”

The hunter snorted. “I doubt that. G’night, Nilrie.”

My eyes followed Blake as he staggered off to bed, and thought about how terrified I’d been when he first found me. Now, I was living alongside him, and taking him to the stars in a confined space with me, of my own free will. I hoped the starship ride the United Nations had signed off on would be enough to lift his spirits, and to appreciate the little piece of sky that I hailed from.

---

Sheriff Donovan seemed nervous as we approached the landing pad, and he surveyed the winged craft laid out before us. Matteo Bernardi, the man who questioned me straight out of the cryopod and had become our contact with the UN, leaned against the hull. The more I truly looked at the modern beasts, they seemed gentler than Blake; their fingertips were soft and uncalloused, and their grooming habits appeared much less wild than his. I thought about what he’d said last night, about not being like them. The current beasts carried many of the same objections as me, tilting the scales from the half-prey life he’d lived; he might’ve been right. The gunslinger had been enamored with a light switch when we first walked into our UN-provided abode.

Blake said humans weren’t ready to go to the stars in his day. Does that include…him?

“Thank you for letting us borrow the ship,” I said to Matt, trying to shake my doubts. “It means a lot to be able to…show Blake what it’s like.”

“Are you kidding me?” The UN representative flashed his teeth, which were much whiter than Blake’s yellowed chompers. “I wasn’t going to be the one to deny an actual cowboy a chance to take a joyride on a spaceship. If the public ever found out I did, they’d eat me alive.”

“…eat you alive?” Humans haven’t changed that much. I didn’t know they did…that kind of Arxur-like predation.

“It’s an idiom, dammit. It means they would…feel extremely negatively about that decision, and go after me for it. I would face the severe judgment of Earth.”

“So you’d go to the g-gallows?”

“What?! No! Blake, you told him about gallows?”

The sheriff shrugged. “That’s how the criminals done get punished, ain’t it? Gotta put the animals down.”

“No jurisdiction of the United Nations practices the death penalty, not in the 22nd century. Taking a life is taking a life, as far as human rights are concerned.”

“Shucks, y’all are soft. Yer tellin’ me ya let the murderers keep breathin’ air they ain’t deserved?”

Predator attacks on their world, of course, are just the natives slaughtering each other. The Federation was much safer than this violent, crime-infested world.

Matt looked uncomfortable, biting his lip. “Of course not. State-sanctioned killings of any kind are just…problematic.”

“Ye talkin’ about the gallows like it’s a deal uh Anne Boleyn gettin’ her head whacked off,” Blake objected. “These ain’t no innocent women getting a beheadin’ from a king who wantsta marry ever’one.”

“What?” I shrieked.

“Yup, King ‘Enry was real mad that he ain’t had no son, and she ‘ad daughters ‘stead. So he killed her and a buncha his wives fer treason.”

Matt slapped a palm to his face, as I gaped at my friend in horror: no wonder Blake’s country wanted away from a monarchy, assuming those were the same people. “You have a way, Sheriff, of explaining the highlights of human history.”

“Thank ye. I ‘splain stuff to Nilrie good.”

“You know what? I don’t care. Get in your starship, and talk about Henry the Eighth all you want up there. Maybe talk about Emperor Nero or the Crusades while you’re at it! Just…please, leave. Fly off.”

“Ye got it, sonny. We gonna fly t’day, like a flamin’ arrow in the Cr’sades.”

It sounds like humans before Blake were even worse savages. I have to remember he tried to keep order among ruthless, feral beasts who hunted real animals.

Matteo shook his head, before stepping away from the ship. The fire kite was left in our paws, and I just needed to coax Sheriff Donovan inside, even if it meant listening to his flippant stories of brutality. I placed a paw on the human’s back, pushing him toward the open hatch. The hunter seemed pleased with himself, though I didn’t know why. His snarl disappeared as he ducked into the spaceship, and inspected its insides with a mix of curiosity and nerves. I found my way to the cockpit, and Blake flopped into the seat next to me. Fortunately, the startup functions for the primarily-automated ship hadn’t changed much, and the vessel’s computer would handle the rest. I cast a final glance at the sheriff, who was…struggling with the harness, because it was slightly different from the car’s seatbelt.

I was about to chide him for his difficulties, before realizing it was because his hands were shaking. “You really are nervous, aren’t you?”

“It’s a long way t’fall,” Blake mumbled.

“Is there…anything that would make you feel better?”

“Hm. I got an idea.”

The human removed his beloved, weathered hat, and placed it squarely atop my head. I curled my lip, not enjoying the feel of dirty Terran cloth wrapped around my skull—and the weight perched above my brain. It cast a shadow over my eyes, and made the world darker and more sinister. Why did Blake like wearing this all the time, refusing to go anywhere without it? The sheriff’s teeth were on full display, and he seemed quite amused by the sight of me in his headgear. I decided to leave it alone, if this would make him settle down long enough to climb the atmosphere. I adjusted the brim of the bulky attire, fixing my line of sight to be tolerable. All that was left was to achieve liftoff, and to follow the approved and cleared-out lane the UN had left on my navigation system.

“Here we go, Bullseye Blake,” I sighed.

The predator stiffened as the shuttle throttled its way off the pavement, and his hands tightened to white-knuckled fists around his armrest. His tunnel vision eyes couldn’t help but to turn out the window, watching the ground grow further away in a span of second. We were rising much faster than any hot air balloon he’d known of, in order to build the speed needed to escape this planet. I thought I’d never leave Earth again, but here I was—with the twisted world soon to be a sphere to look down upon. The towers of Portland shifted from building blocks to imperceptible pixels on the landmass, as the blue sky darkened ever closer to the inky dead of night. Blake’s eyes were bulging in their sockets, realizing just how far up we’d gotten in minutes. The people below were smaller than mites of dust, invisible without magnification.

“That’s how tiny you, and all of your species, are from above,” I told him, as he began to realize the scale of his world—a distance he couldn’t have traveled in a lifetime on a horse. “Likewise, this distance is nothing compared to how far away Marna is. It takes light, at the speed I told you about, years upon years to reach my home from yours.”

The human’s eyebrows furrowed. “But ye said it’s near instant from the sat’lites, all the way up yonder.”

“It is.”

The sheriff’s pupils darted back and forth, struggling to wrap his mind around how much further away Marna was from Earth; it was an unfathomable distance, to think of something taking years to clear the gap at that “near instant” speed. Even his world’s sun was far enough away to take minutes for light to arrive, something I doubted his primitive people had grasped with their nonexistent science. They probably thought it was a magic ball of fire that swung around their planet like a pendulum, camping overhead to light up prey in the undergrowth because it was humanity’s destiny. Maybe what had changed the brutish predators was seeing how vast space was, and understanding that none of it was about them. If only the Arxur had grasped that concept from this view.

Our shuttle was no longer within the Terran sky at all, instead looking down on the globe’s circumference from a breathtaking vantage point. The backdrop of stars traveled in all directions around Earth, as her oceans and landmasses were etched on a ball we could take in the entirety of with our eyes. That was Blake’s home, with all of the way-too-many predators that polluted its surface. I placed a digital pin on Corvallis, Oregon using GPS data, then pointed to the tiny dot that the viewport marked and labeled in his writing. The sheriff’s eyes shone with water; he grasped what he was looking at with only that visual aid. What had been beyond his comprehension not too long ago was now sitting here for him to behold. A lump seemed to pass down his throat as he swallowed, lost for words.

“It’s beaut’ful,” Blake managed. “This is what we done got to protect. It looks so…fragile. Can’t see none uh our towns and lives below. Just cold an’ calm, and a whole lotta darkness ever’where else.”

I fidgeted with the hat, still bothered by its presence. “You’re right about it being cold. There is no air to breathe in space, because all of that comes from your home down there. It is the total absence of warmth. Sound can’t travel here either, because there’s no air to carry it.”

“Then why can I hear ya?”

“Because we’re in a spaceship where we brought up oxygen, and put it into the cabin.” Obviously. “I think most living creatures like breathing.”

“Well if they don’t, then they usually ain’t livin’ creatures no more.”

“Your commentary, as always, astounds me. We try to recreate the conditions of a habitable world. I have to leave the air on, actually, but there’s something else I can turn off. Do you trust me?”

“No.”

“Good. Unclip your seatbelt.”

Blake made a face, before unhooking his harness and giving me a befuddled stare. I removed my own safety restraints, before pressing the switch to turn off artificial gravity. The predator issued a surprisingly high-pitched scream as he floated up from his seat, before turning frenzied eyes on me. The blasted hat had drifted away from my head, along with any objects that were untethered. I maneuvered through the zero-grav environment, chuckling as the human looked like he tried to swim back toward the ground. Sheriff Donovan appeared entirely disconcerted by the feeling of weightlessness. I squirted a tiny bit of water from my drink container, and the individual droplets hung in the air.

“Witchcraft,” Blake hissed. “Put me down. What the hell even—”

I pulled myself back toward the console, reaching for the switch. “You could at least have fun with it. There’s no gravity in space. Earth, down there, is what pulls objects inside its grip down toward it; that’s why you fall when you jump off of something. We’re beyond the influence of its mass. Up here, there’s nothing keeping your feet on the ground without artificial gravity!”

“I ain’t s’posed to be floatin’. I feel sick and my head done feel dizzy.”

I flicked the gravity back on, and the human yelped again as he crashed back to the floor. “So, they gave us a ship. If you don’t like the future here, we could go anywhere.”

“We ain’t stealin’ the ship!” Blake yowled.

“They gave it to us, and didn’t say not to borrow it for years. We could continue my good work. Go to all sorts of planets, and help people—just like how you got me back on my feet. You and me, a team again.”

“We don’t got to smuggle an’ sneak around. Ye wanna do good, then try joinin’ a charity. That’s how the law don’t frown upon ye.”

“Humans have charities?!” As in helping others altruistically, for nothing in return other than the kindness of your heart? But they’re warring predators; why would he even know the concept?

“Of course we do! That stuff goes as far back in human history as war! Ya act like we ain’t got nothin’ good an’ pure-intentioned. I’d be up to go ‘round helpin’ star folks, and anyone down on their luck, but I ain’t no Robin Hood. I like the law. Yer on yer own if ya gonna do that.”

“It was worth a try. After meeting you…I don’t think I could go back to working alone.”

“I could go back to workin’ with the deputies ‘stead of ye, ‘cause they were a lot less trouble, and they didn’t make no ground stop workin’. My life was way simpler when I trusted that my feet wasn’t gonna fly up and away.”

“There’s a simple beauty up here, Blake. I thought you’d appreciate the real frontier.”

The human pawed at his chin for several seconds, before nodding. “Y’know what? Actually, I do. It’s sure a sight for sore eyes. I see now my lil town was a part of somethin’ a whole lot bigger.”

“This is only the beginning of ‘a whole lot bigger.’ What do you say we pay a few other worlds a visit?”

“Take the reins, Nilrie. We’re on yer horse now.”

With the FTL drive fully charged for a slip off into space, I set the coordinates for Marna: a world that was no longer my home. Having Blake willing to see my civilization and where I came from—knowing his predatory people were somehow our friends—gave me a reason to at least give the Takkan homeworld a look around. Finding charity work somewhere along the way didn’t sound like the worst option to utilize our new lease on life. While I’d thought that being stranded on Earth was a death sentence, now, I realized it’d given me someone I was eager to travel the galaxy with. My goal would be to keep Sheriff Donovan safe, and to help him find purpose and beauty in this future…just as he’d done for me three hundred years ago.

A/N - Wild West’s conclusion! Blake is reluctant to reach out to any descendants, instead sticking with Nilrie to drink and dance at home; throughout the chapter, he shares about innocuous pastimes like singers in his time, while also going out of his way at the spaceport to mention Anne Boleyn, arguments for the death penalty, and the Crusades…to Matteo’s dismay. The sheriff rides the fire kite to the stars at last, with Nilrie now wearing his hat. Bullseye Blake is quite awed to see Earth from above, if not thrilled about the lack of gravity, and mentions the idea of joining a charity instead of Robin Hood smuggling.

What do you think the future holds for Blake and Nilrie, with the potential for charitable work and traveling the galaxy? What will the cowboy think seeing the Takkan homeworld…and do you imagine he’ll return back to Earth and try to meet his family one day? What do you think of how Blake and Nilrie’s friendship grew and developed?

As always, thank you for reading and supporting! The saddest story ever launches this weekend: for real, it’s a good one!