Tales of Midbar: Secret Priest

The King of Photoorganisms was a bar on the edge of town. We just arrived as several people were leaving.

“Clathmior!” said Dad, stopping the car in the entrance to the parking lot and jumping out.

I got out as well, still feeling a bit dizzy and nauseous. I still had the camera so I trained it on Dad but not sure why I was bothering.

Dad walked up to a fairly normal looking faharni man who was walking in an unsteady way.

“What the feces do you think you’re doing?” shouted Dad. “A data deluge! A fraudulent confiscation order!”

“Slander,” grunted the other man, who had to be Clathmior.

“Half the order was written in Hecrini!”

“That’s legal,” Clathmior shrugged.

“Not if it’s excrement!”

“Just go home, calm down and ...”

“By that time all of Wennifarg’s property will have been confiscated and it will take a court order to get it back! I’ll help him sue you for everything you’ve got but I think we can come to a quicker and less painful arrangement.”

“Sorry, there’s nothing I can do,” he held his hands out with the palms upturned.

“What does that mean?” Dad said loudly, waving his arms. “You’re a good lawyer, you can think of something.”

“Orders.”

“From whom? Who else cares about this apart from our clients? The settlement’s hardly going to bankrupt them!”

“Benai Nibeyim.”

This shocked me. I’d heard of them but didn’t know much. They were a rather secretive organization who raised money for charity. However, they were reputed to conspire to manipulate big business and politics and mess up the lives of people they didn’t like.

“What the feces! That’s the most pathetic ...”

“Why do you think the police wouldn’t arrest the bailiffs? Anyway, I’m told they’ll give Wennifarg his stuff back and make it up to him.”

“What?”

“They just want to frighten him or something. Who knows why they do any of the things they do? I think half the time they do things that make no sense so people can’t figure out the motives for the things they think are important or to spawn ridiculous conspiracy theories so nobody believes any conspiracy theories that might be onto something.”

Dad came back to the car and looked at the camera. Then he reached out and switched it off. “Did he mention Benai Nibeyim to complicate the case if I try using this footage as evidence?”

“How should I know,” I said. “Why’s that a problem?”

“Because people think you’re nuts if you start claiming it was some sort of conspiracy. There are a lot of Benai Nibeyim working as judges and things and they won’t like being implicated so they may interfere if I try using this in court.”

I was afraid to look at my underpants, when I took them off. Then I thought Mum might realize there was something strange about them when she put them in the wash. I thought about getting rid of them but thought Mum might notice that as well. I took a look and didn’t see anything unusual. I just put them in the laundry bin as normal but I was worried about whether Mum would notice anything odd about them for several days.

I walked with strange ghostly images swirling around me. The light suddenly got a lot darker and red and I stopped. The haze evaporated like surfacing from water but my head was still muddled. I was struck with the most horrendous realization, somebody had used a date rape spell on me! That probably meant...I checked myself quickly. My clothes were a bit dirty but... I felt sick and broke out in a cold sweat. My legs felt strangely weak. My bottom didn’t feel sore or anything, how did you know if you’d been raped? I’d heard there was a serial rapist in Laraget but I thought he only raped girls. I told myself date rape spells left you unconscious but I knew there were a number of variations, usually mentally incapacitating the victim long enough for the attacker to get away. I was standing in a street, I think just after sapphire dark but Aleph was still high in the sky, must be day three of the light cycle so I’d only lost about a day’s memory, or a multiple of three days. Now I stood in red night feeling sick and disorientated. Where was I? Tianamet Lane. What was I doing here? It wasn’t far from my home but not on the bus route from school. Perhaps I’d been robbed? I checked my pockets: money chip, bus pass. I still had my bag so I checked that as well: notebooks, textbooks. I was breaking very heavily now. I suppose you could be robbed and raped but the fact that I hadn’t been robbed ... I didn’t even think anybody wanted to have sex with me. I didn’t understand why. Of course I’d willingly have sex with about half the kids at school and lots of people who didn’t go to my school. I didn’t think any of the people I didn’t want to have sex with fancied me either but that didn’t bother me. Perhaps they had some strange thing about me because my father was a rabbi. Many people respected him greatly but he’d greatly angered others by his modern, rather rational approach to Trulism. He’d once told me it was very difficult for a Trulist to be a heretic but some people thought he was one. Although Nuharas were generally friendly towards me, I knew they disliked my father’s teachings although he was strongly opposed to religionism. What was I going to do? I wasn’t even sure if I’d actually been raped, did I want to know? Date rape spells did have other uses, maybe I’d seen something somebody didn’t want me knowing about. It would be a great relief if I hadn’t been raped but if I had, I’d rather not know. That was no way for a boy to have his first sexual experience, even if he couldn’t remember. What time was it? Oh yes must have been about six in the evening on the third day of the light cycle. Should I tell anybody about this? I knew enough about police procedures to not talk to them. I didn’t want to tell my parents. I considered Narblo, the school counselor, but decided I didn’t even want to talk to him about it. I headed for home.

Midbar orbits a brown dwarf (an object intermediate between a gas giant and a star) named Bet about once every eighteen hours. It’s rotation locked to Bet, meaning that the same side of Midbar, on which all the humans live, faces Bet all the time. Bet orbits Aleph, which is the source of most natural light on Midbar. Therefore Aleph rises and sets in an eighteen hour cycle.

As plants don’t grow well in the red light of Aleph, there are associate magic cyan lights in the sky called sapphires. These go on and off in a roughly 24 hour cycle imitating Earth’s days and seasons. The interaction of the 18 hour cycle of Aleph and the 24 hour cycle of the sapphires results in a three day light cycle. The time when the sapphires go off is called sapphire dark.