The List

Mr. Tergils,

As per the new guidelines, I’ve earmarked this piece for approval before publication.  Apologies for the lack of decisiveness; this is my first experience with our new format.  Is Pypaluk too close to the mark here?  We’ve printed this writer’s op-eds in The Noble Wanderer for years; there may be suspicion if we ‘lose’ this one.  Please advise.

Regards,
Kanun Kawakatuus
Editor-in-Chief
The Noble Wanderer


Noble Reader,

In a world governed by conspiracy, there are no accidents.  It is no accident that the Rahmosian government - an administration bereft of moral fiber, steeped in corruption, and ruthlessly committed to destroying all civilization(s) it does not control – is the most successful on the face of the planet.  Furthermore, it is no accident that Atelia – with abundant natural resources, a rich cultural heritage, intelligent, capable citizenry, and, most importantly, freedom for individuals to live according to the traditions they hold dear, a freedom that homogenous imperialist powers like Rahmos find a great threat – is among the poorest and least developed on Theia.  

The challenges we the nomadic peoples of Atelia face are many.  The weight of our finest tradition - a free and masterless traveling life – grows heavier each day Rahmosian spies breathe Atelian air.  Those of us who cannot bear it must move to the cities.  The neighborhoods set aside for us there (by the Rahmosian manipulators and occupiers) are always crime-ridden, always poverty-stricken, always dangerous.

Their scientists manufacture sweet numbing poisons and sell them to our children on street corners.  Then they blame us for being drug-addicted.  They refuse us city funds for school construction, yet there is always room for another tavern or saloon.  Then they blame us for our drunkenness and lack of education.  They engineered the Crawling Sickness in a supposedly secret lab thirty-four miles north of Fael - I can show you on any map - and purposely infected our people with it.  Then they blame us for spreading disease.  They refuse us adequate jobs, with fair salaries, in humane environments.  Then they blame us for failing to find employment, failing to pay their taxes.  They devote every resource to making life for us, on their terms, unlivable.  Then they blame us for our despair and desperation.  They grind up all that is rational, sensible, or loving in the world with their war machines.  Then they blame us for the chaos.

They have destroyed our present and polluted our future, and now the gaping maw of Rahmosian ‘culture’ seeks to swallow up our past as well.  The ancestral tombs of the Northern Fen Pypaluk were recently ‘discovered’ and forcibly occupied by Rahmosian propagandists and their Atelian scientist-slaves, in the interest of ‘preserving archaeological evidence’.  For a thousand years and more the Northern Fen have carved those hallowed tunnels deep into the mountain to house the honored dead.  Cut through sacred rock inside a sacred mountain, the Singer revealed these tunnels to the nomads and gave us the safest place in all Theia for our fathers to rest.  Now foreign men with foreign guns guard our tombs, and foreign fences run the foothills.  

Unsurprisingly, their ‘research’ yields ‘evidence’ that nomad culture is backwards, barbaric, and lacking any indication of social development over the past centuries.  They enter the graves of our fathers, where we have entombed with love and respect the riches of our culture.  They bring out chipped stone points and crude bone needles to show the world.  They work diligently towards establishing that the site holds nothing ‘valuable’ to anyone but them.  My brothers, my sisters, we know better!  We know what lies buried in the graves of our fathers!

And for those who do not know, I will show you. I left my clan in the south and crossed for one week the poison soil and the twisted black trees of the Dead Ground.  The land itself rebels at the coming of Rahmos.  When my father was a boy the Dead Ground was a fertile plain, covered with lush grasses and the low, wide-branched Buj-Buj trees beloved by the Singer.  But when Rahmos came, all that once grew there sickened and died.  To remain too long on that blasted plain means death for all but the strange fat white worms and clumsy scuttling beetles that burrow through the fouled soil.  The blight grows larger every year, sapping the life of Atelia as Rahmos saps the life of her people.  I left that shattered earth and climbed the mountain of the Northern Fen.  

Now I have gone among the invader.  I perform the menial tasks they reserve for those of nomad blood: I unload their trucks, I clean their toilets, I run their errands and carry their loads.  I stay behind the barricades that stop we mere nomads from entering too deeply the tombs of our fathers.  Most importantly, I sort their mail.  So even though I cannot come down the mountain and deliver them myself, my words can still reach you.

My masters see me as just another nomad laborer, mute, blind, rolling wheelbarrows full of the ashes of my grandfathers, the dust of my grandmothers, from one paper-strewn lamp-lit tabletop to the next.  But I am watching.  Tomorrow I will cross the barricade, to the deep tunnels where only the men with guns and their scientist-slaves may tread.  Their guards are sluggish and their perceptions are dim; it will be easy to slip past.  I will wait and I will watch.  And I will give all that I see to you, noble reader.

Bethel Pypaluk
Nomad


Kanun,

This piece of writing has been deemed ‘sensitive’ by the board.  Affiliates of RahmoPress Ltd, including the Wanderer, will not be publishing it.  The submission does not meet our quality guidelines or research requirements.  Please remove all reference to this submission from your records.  If Pypaluk creates a problem, run our pre-approved series about substandard academic performance among itinerant nomad children in his slot for a few weeks.
Further, this publication’s tagline will no longer be ‘by nomadic Atelians, for nomadic Atelians’.  Our marketing development team suggests ‘The Noble Wanderer: A Bolder Voice’ to accompany the new format.

Jonas Tergils
Senior Regional Design Liaison
RahmoPress Ltd


Jonas,

I’ve received another piece from Bethel Pypaluk through the mail, this one considerably longer.  I have forwarded it to your office and await its return pending your approval.  This piece is not only some of Pypaluk’s best writing but, if true, represents something that the public needs to know.  Right now we’re halfway through the series you suggested, ‘Atelian Nomad Children and Formal Education: Unsuitable, or Just Untalented?’  I would like to interrupt the series in order to run Pypaluk’s piece in its place.  I feel we as journalists have a responsibility to do so.  We can’t hold this story until a more ‘marketable time;’ we have to speak out now.  I hope you’re with me on this.  Please advise.

Regards,
Kanun Kawakatuus
Editor-in-Chief
The Noble Wanderer


Noble Reader,

They have built a city beneath our tombs, and that is the least of their horrors.  The terrors they’ve spawned in the dark below our honored dead are beyond description.  I am not mad, although what I am about to impart to you will make me sound so.  You will shake your head, smile knowingly, and tell your family that Bethel Pypaluk has lost himself in muddled fantasies, that I have stayed too long away from home and clan.  All I can do is trust in you by telling you what I have seen.  I hope that you will trust in me, as well.

The entrance to their city is perhaps a half mile from the tomb entrance.  A pair of massive steel slabs, more like walls than doors, guard a downward-sloping tunnel.  It is reinforced with steel bolts and altogether different in appearance from the rough-hewn stone carved by the Northern Fen.  The doors are always open to accommodate the constant flow of supplies and soldiers; I had no difficulty slipping through unnoticed.  Behind these slabs the Rahmosians have built something amazing.  And terrible.  

They have dug enormous steel-walled caverns into the heart of the mountain.  These caverns are roughly square, and so large that steel-framed buildings (everything is steel here, as gray as the uniforms their soldiers wear) stand two and three stories high within them.  My observations must remain covert, so I cannot explore as freely as I’d like.  Even so, the little I have seen indicates a full-scale settlement is being planned and constructed here.

This nearly empty subterranean colony will one day contain all the amenities the Rahmosians hold dear – I’ve seen cafeterias without food, parks without trees, and endless rows of neat, industrial half-cylinders holding endless rows of neat, industrial bunk beds.  There are office buildings, facilities for cleaning the air and water, even a tiny hospital with a three-bed ward.  Double-fenced power generators already vibrate the still air of this unborn town.  One structure, hollow tubes twisting from its roof to the air outflow pipes, can only be a crematorium.

Four great reservoirs occupy three of the caverns, supplied by a source within the mountain.  They are as large as lakes, rowboats mounted on wall-hooks in case repairs are needed on the other side.  I am not sure which are destined to be drinking water and which are to be used for other purposes, although one of the reservoirs has a legion of sinister, glinting spheres, each bigger than a man, bobbing on its dark surface.

I have found a place to hide in one of the laboratories.  The soldiers spend less time patrolling here, and the scientists are too consumed with their work to notice me.  Once inside it was easy to find comfortable places to sleep and the food stores are generally left unguarded.  That I’ve chosen this place to center my investigation is fortunate; I’ve had opportunity to eavesdrop on their conversations, to see the drawings they leave lying on tables, to discover what they are planning and why they’ve built a city beneath our graves.  The answer is grim.

They plan to kill us all.  The instruments of death being constructed down in the darkness will murder the world.  There is a flying bomb, like the missiles Rahmos already rains down on us, but it holds a steering compartment large enough for a man.  What madness would make someone, even a Rahmosian, enter such a thing?  How could any man strap himself into such a machine, feel the cool wind under him, the warm sun above, and steer towards a place where only a flash and lasting silence wait?  How could even a Rahmosian hate so much?  There are drawings of a thing like a metal bird with no body, only vast metal wings like sheets, and endless guns hanging below.  A thousand machines, each deadlier than the last, all far faster, far more efficient at killing than the airships they use to destroy us now.

And the spheres in the reservoirs.  There are hundreds of them, orbs made of something like steel, gently bobbing in the cold dark tides of the underground lakes.  I sat watching them, hypnotized as they spun slowly in the water.  Light never quite seems to touch them.  It slides off their slick, gleaming sides and hides itself in the rippling water, throwing shifting yellow patterns across the waves to trick my eye away.  Again, here you may think me mad, but I saw the spheres rise from the water and fly, quick as thought, into an overhead tunnel, without a sound and with no visible means of propulsion!  

One of their nightmares I have not seen, and of that I am glad – the most heavily-cloaked shadow in their arsenal of secrets.  Below the ground floor of this laboratory lurks a chamber, heavily-reinforced sliding doors and decontamination rooms guarding the entrance.  Peering inside the inner chamber from my hiding place, I saw a dull steel floor, and dark steel walls climbing up to unknowable tons of rock overhead. Something in there pulses and glows purple.  Even now that awful throbbing headache-light beats behind my eyes.  The scientists don protective white suits before they enter the inner chamber, their skin completely obscured beneath thick fabric.  Tubes and goggles cover their faces and change their voices into hollow, echoing parodies of themselves.  

Early this morning something went wrong in the chamber.  An alarm screamed through the lower floor and scientists, pulling on their white suits, rushed through the decontamination room and into the purple light.  The sliding doors hissed shut behind them.  From my hiding place I watched and waited, and when the alarm died and the doors hissed open, I jammed my knuckles in my mouth to silence my shout.  

The white-coated technicians staggered one by one out of the inner room.  Gloved fingers clumsy, desperate, fumbling, they disconnected air hoses.  When they pulled off their masks, the flesh on their faces sloughed away as well.  Their peeling hands, covered in oozing red sores, clutched at their shining, pustulent throats.  Watery yellow bile spewed from their mouths, trickled down the front of their protective suits and I swear to you, my brothers, my sisters, the puddles on the floor steamed.  The technicians collapsed and writhed bonelessly, too weak even to moan, and when their eyes began to burst I looked away.  Only when I heard the rapid reports of a pistol did I look again, to see another white-suited figure moving through the twitching mass of melted men, mercy-killing the few agonized survivors.

When the killing was done, he holstered his weapon and sat down at a communications desk.  The intercom radio buzzed mindlessly as he settled his gloved hand on the microphone.  He lifted it to his masked face, and said words I will never forget:

‘Tell Command it is ready.’

I had been wrong.  Nothing had gone amiss…whatever pulsed in that secret chamber was working exactly as they’d hoped.  I cannot know what the thing is, what they plan to achieve with it, but I know that it lays waste to all life that draws near.  Thick metal shielding protects the walls and floor of the chamber that holds the nightmare.  But they have not coated the ceiling, trusting to the rock of the mountain to contain that purple, rotting pulse.  In their haste to subdue the world, they have lost sight of two vital truths, two signs of what is to come:

The thing they have built sits a quarter-mile below the center of the Dead Ground.  

And the Dead Ground grows larger every year.

Bethel Pypaluk
Nomad


Taddeus,

We at RahmoPress Ltd would like to take this opportunity to welcome you to the RahmoPress family.  We are a close-knit team that relies on prompt communication and cooperative fact-checking to function.  If you’re not sure about something, contact me immediately and I will advise as soon as possible.  

Jonas Tergils
Senior Regional Design Liaison
RahmoPress Ltd


Dear Mr. Tergils,

Thank you for the warm welcome and for helping me to acclimate so quickly to my new role.  With Mr. Kawakatuus’s unexpected departure I feel like I’ve been thrown in at the deep end!  
I’m forwarding you a piece of writing that came in today so that you can look it over and tell me what you think.  I have seen the name ‘Bethel Pypaluk’ on a few bylines, but I don’t know the writer personally.  Is this for real?
Thank you for your time and consideration,

Taddeus Ujuraak
Editor-in-Chief
The Noble Wanderer


My brothers, my sisters,

They are searching for me – the men with guns.  My time is running out.  They nearly had me last night; I spent two hours clinging to the cold wall of an ancient grave, the bones of my ancestors pressing my living cheek.  Their spirits kept me hidden and the boots of the occupier thudded past until dawn.  This morning the site is on alert, every eye watchful for my face, every ear straining for my footfall.  I have slipped from shadow to shadow, conforming fully to their favorite stereotype of Atelian nomad: the stealthy nighttime raider.  I write the coda of my life hidden beneath a pile of coarse sacks in the mailroom.  When I have finished I will drop it with the outgoing mail and flee, as fast and as far as I can.  I will not escape, but my words will fly free to you, noble reader.  And so will the list.

Their machines of death, their plots and plans, their endless, screaming, stupid need to destroy all that is not them…this is the proof.  It is the list of those chosen to survive the coming apocalypse, stolen from the black thudding heart of their conspiracy.  Those on this list will live in the city beneath our tombs when Rahmos’s machines of death have murdered the world.  They have chosen doctors, lawyers, artists, writers.  And soldiers.  Oh, yes, many, many soldiers.  Even when their wars drive them underground, when their greed chokes off the wind through the trees, when their bloodlust has turned the sun’s face from them forever, still they will fight.

This list is their legacy, my brothers and sisters.  It is their plan for the future, their last gasp of human breath before they bring down eternal silence on us all.  And if they somehow survive, what will be left?  Who will come blinking from the caves a hundred years from now, and take their first feeble steps on the surface of a wrecked world?  Rahmosians.  Only the worst of them, and those who have curried their favor, will endure.  Only those who have made themselves useful to those behind Rahmos’s never-ending wars, its never-ending greed, will have even a chance of survival.  Everyone else will sicken and die, like the Buj-Buj trees that rot in the crumbling earth of the Dead Ground.

Do you think your name is on their list, nomad?  Your sister’s?  Your children’s?

That is why I send it to you.  With this list, you have the knowledge they would have kept from you.  You have proof.  It is a power their guns and their machines and their doomsday weapons cannot ever match.  Only you can stop them.  Take these names and shine truth into their darkness.  

Our lives, our future, our hope rests with you now, my brothers and sisters.  The road is long and the load is heavy, but you are our people’s…no, you are the world’s only hope.  You face a foe so terrible it would consume all that lives and go down into the dark hungering still.  None but you can slay this monster, my kinsmen.  None but you can fight.  I go now to my death, but you have a different path.  Take up a weapon it can never wield, on a battlefield it can never enter.  Fight it with the truth.

Goodbye, my brothers, my sisters.

I love you.

Goodbye.

Bethel Pypaluk
Nomad


Taddeus,

We will not be going forward with the material as presented.  As you are aware, all external documents submitted to The Noble Wanderer become property of RahmoPress Ltd upon delivery and will not be returned.

Regarding your request for clarification on the Pypaluk matter:  Neither RahmoPress Ltd. nor any of its affiliates, including The Noble Wanderer, have a relationship with or knowledge of a writer known as ‘Bethel Pypaluk.’  Arguments to the contrary are to be treated as dangerous acts of media espionage, probably originating from Atel propagandists.  These security breaches will be turned over to the proper authority immediately.  As far as affiliates of RahmoPress Ltd are concerned, there is not now, nor has there ever been, a Bethel Pypaluk.

Some of your archived materials have been corrupted with ‘Bethel Pypaluk’ references by propagandists.  To preserve the integrity of The Noble Wanderer’s journalistic objectivity, be advised that RahmoPress Ltd. will be sending your archives several pallets of updated, corrected back issues and ordering a general recall.

Jonas Tergils
Senior Regional Design Liaison
RahmoPress Ltd

P.S. In the past, to what address did The Noble Wanderer mail Bethel Pypaluk’s paychecks?