2. Dweller Loyalty

Tibre held a lightbulb in his hands, and a battery, but still didn’t understand what they were. Jassia lightly tapped all components with her hammer—a stone attached to a stick—and then nodded or shook her head. In her enthusiasm, she’d picked up the lamp immediately and burned her hands. Dawn arrived before the lightbulb was cold enough to touch.

“I admit,” she said, “that they might not have been fairy tales. The better question is now: how did your mother know the stars were light bulbs?”

Tibre sighed. He placed his tired and wounded back against the cave wall. “I can barely remember mother’s face. I can’t see father’s face at all.”

“All of us, Tibre,” mumbled Jassia. “Sometimes … sometimes I think our memories are just wrong. That we invented some face to attach to our parent’s names.”

“How so?”

Her face turned sour. “Yesterday, I ran around all day until I nearly fainted. Why? Because you thought you remembered a river in the west, near circle six. The drops of water were exactly zero, let me tell you!”

Jassia’s hands played with the battery, a large black cube that grew wires like a beard. She tried pushing the battery in all the possible holes of the lightbulb.

Until she found the right one.

Tibre covered his eyes at the sudden blinding light. “Hmm. Mother was even right about that. They never run out.”

His children ran inside, excluding Piponre.

“Can we play with the lightbulb, dad? Please?”

“No!” he said, far more stern than he wanted to. “This is no toy. This might be our only way to make great progress and inventions! What if our fires never ceased, eh?”

The children’s eyes were bright again. “Oh! Oh! Maybe we can make food cook automatically!”

“Or Jassia,” said his youngest child, “that wooden cart of yours might even drive automatically!”

Tibre forced a smile. “Well, well, let’s not get too crazy. Go and help the other Dwellers, then you can play.”

They ran away. Jassia bit her lip and looked pained as she watched them go.

Tibre frowned. “What? You want to play too?”

“Huh? No, no, of course not. This lightbulb will keep me busy for months. It’s just …”

He had been working with Jassia for years now. She ran from here to there, researched everything, made inventions, and he had no clue where she found the energy or motivation. He mostly did the physical work, like lifting something heavy, and couldn’t be bothered to do anything else. Even that job seemed to be taken over by her pet bear now. After some extensive training by Jassia, the furry animal could carry tools and even understood how a lot of them worked.

It was all useless. You found food, you ate it, just to have enough energy to find food again the next day. Without Jassia, he’d have given up long ago—and he’d never seen her as tired and uncertain as she looked now.

“It is fine,” said Tibre, “to take a break now and then. Sleep with your husband tonight, instead of in a cave with a broken lightbulb. I think we’ve discovered all its secrets by—”

“No, no, there is far more going on here,” she said immediately. “It is … hard for us to bear children.”

“Because you don’t want to bring children onto our horrible, horrible planet?”

“Huh? No, our planet is beautiful. I … did your mother ever tell you anything about our other rules? Why do we marry each other? Why do we do that?”

Jassia was far younger than Tibre—a young adult—but had already married years ago. Like most. Like he expected Piponre to do soon. But why?

“We need each other to survive,” he said. “If you promise to stay together forever, and support each other in life and death, this becomes easier.”

Jassia put down her hammer and looked away. “And what if it was a mistake?”

Tibre frowned, but made sure his words were clear. “Then you find a way to make it work. It is unheard of to leave your married partner. You only have one tribe, and it is this one, so make it work.”

At least, that’s what he thought mother had told him once, in his memories.

Jassia resumed her work. She carefully took apart the lightbulb. “Yes, yes, of course. You’re right. Forget I said anything.”

“No, Jassia, I’m glad you speak up. We don’t have enough time on this planet, or energy, to spend it on lies.”

All those problems. All the mess. And why? Eventually, everyone dies, returned to the mud around their caves. Oh well. At least they had enough food now to take it easy the coming years.

Tibre stepped outside and nearly received a spear through his belly.

A spear he recognized instantly. It had been made of an unknown material that the owner called metal, which was given to him by his father.

“This is your fault,” said Zandir. “From the moment you took that food, a curse landed on the Dwellers!”

“It is just one lightbulb and we already turned it—”

Zandir stepped aside to show a second fallen lightbulb. His children already arrived to grab it and play with it. Tibre’s loud clanging against his Echobelt did not reach them.

He looked up. And panicked. Another lightbulb was coming down now. This one was nowhere near the caves and seemed to fall more slowly.

Jassia and him ran after it.

“This will be our demise!” cried Zandir at his back. “Your fault! Your gluttony!”

Demise? When had their barren planet ever not been falling apart?

They looked up once more. The light had changed. It changed from a yellow dot, to a different shape, and another, until it turned purple. Normally, the stars were hard to see during the day, but this one stuck out like the eye of an angry god watching them from above.

Faster and faster the object fell down. Jassia and him lost their breath. They entered a cave, ran through the dark for hundreds of paces, to resurface in a completely new area. They were below the falling object now, which cast a shadow over them.

The object was headed straight for that weird cave with the vertical lines and the food storages.

“No! No! Don’t land there!” he yelled, waving his arms. As if light bulbs responded to that.

“This is no bulb,” said Jassia, as she leaned against the Linecave and caught her breath. “This is … what is it?”

Tibre lost hope. They could never move all the food in time.

The object, which looked most like a purple shiny bird with frozen wings, crash landed mercilessly near the cave

Jassia already placed a comforting hand on Tibre’s shoulder. Then they hid inside the cave.

The ground shook and threw both of them to the floor. Bang after bang echoed through the cave and replaced their hearing with a dull static. The cave entrance flashed white, then bright red, then bright yellow, sometimes overshadowed by objects that flew past.

And then—silence. Deadly silence. A few birds sang as if nothing had happened.

They stepped out of the cave. All the food had been burned, squashed, ejected.

Tibre burst into tears and sunk to his knees.

“I give up,” he mumbled. “I give up. I’m done.”

Jassia didn’t seem to hear. “Where … where is the object itself?”

They only saw a wide empty space, covered in ashes and rubble, but only vague hints about what the object was. If they hadn’t followed it, they might have never known anything crashed here. They might have thought a large campfire had gotten out of hand here.

How could something so large just disappear? Without a trace?

Zandir had finally caught up. He thumped his spear deep into the layers of ash and leaned on it like a walking cane.

“That was no lightbulb, alright. Father always called that a spaceship.”