Lost Worlds (my sci-fi short collection)

Lost (Part 3)

I don't know when Prime left, but ... have you ever seen that place in England people call Stonehenge? I couldn't help but wonder. Who else would want to build a signal to the stars?

This time, I decided I too, had had enough. There was no longer the faintest hope of being rescued, I would leave the ship and live out what remained of my life here, in this time, on this world. I disguised the entrance to the cave as best I could, ironically by causing a small avalanche to fall down over the face of it and left it behind without a backward glance.

I came out of the mountains into a country called France.

It was like I was on another planet. People covered the surface like a plague. All the large animals I had seen, the mammoths, even the sabre tooth tigers were gone, along with most of the trees and the plants. At first glance I thought the Dark People and the Runners had been annihilated too, modern people were so different, their skin and features varying from place to place. It took me a few years of study before I discovered they were all descendants of the more aggressive Runners.

It was a dangerous time, people were killing each other for the slightest of reasons. Difference meant death. Foolishly, I tried to get work as a teacher and ended up fleeing for my life. Not even the simplest science I could convey, was acceptable to these people.

Eventually I found I could survive by posing as an itinerant gardener, as long as I didn't stay in any one place for too long. Working my way across country, keeping to the out of way places as much as possible, I ended up after several years in a country called Tibet. There, for the first time, I found people more in tune with my own philosophy.

I lived a simple life. I kept up my studies for the first few years but when my recorder was full I put it aside and and concentrated on learning what the monks had to teach me. Every five years I would take leave to journey down to India to catch up on all the outside news. I found myself constantly amazed by the speed of change. Every visit some country had risen or fallen, some new technology had been developed, some disease conquered or discovered.

I wondered if it was something to do with the short life span of these people, only a few decades at a time. Although I was by no means immortal, my expected life span of three of their centuries almost seemed so in comparison. More than once in the last two hundred years, I had had to leave the monastery, pretend to 'die' and return as an acolyte with a slightly altered appearance. Even so, I had overheard references to 'tulku' more than once when people thought I couldn't hear them.

I admit I enjoyed those short sojourns into civilisation. My favourite invention was the radio, it was the only thing I missed when I was in the monastery. Each visit, it was the first thing I sought. I loved to listen to all the different songs and music from around the world, everything from jazz when it started, to classical, then as the years passed, rock and roll, pop and hip hop. Even heavy metal. I cried the first time I heard the song "Far from Home."

"All the places I've been and things I've seen

A million stories that made up a million shattered dreams

The faces of people I'll never see again

And I can't seem to find my way home"

It summed up my situation so accurately I actually spent a bit of time investigating the band who wrote it, but they were all human, as far as I could tell.

I wish I had never heard it. The song brought back memories of my home world, of Holtar, and Prime. I wondered if he'd ever noticed I had a crush on him, wished uselessly I'd told him, even if he couldn't return it. I wondered whether Jamila and Mohktar had ever had the family they wanted and what had happened to them. I had been here, alone, for too long and I wanted to go home.

I left the radio behind and went back to the monastery, feeling every one of my two hundred and ninety nine years.