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We entered the village in tight formation like a group of tourists might be expected to. The dirt road took us to an open space inside the village. The road encircled the village pond that took up most of the space. There were houses on all sides of the open space. All houses had wooden fences in front of them. Still, the place was as empty as if it were a ghost town. Of course the day had just begun.
The first to discover us, were the children. Except, they were too shy to come near us.
"The men from the city are here!" they shouted in front of a prominent place at the edge of the village, near another lake among the fields.
A darkly dressed figure came out, walking towards us with the children all around, pointing in our direction.
"Go and find Reuel," the figure commanded in a voice that carried well in the morning stillness. The figure was that of a man, an old man. He introduced himself as Mahesh when we stopped at his side and bid us welcome.
"We are not from the city," Jill explained. She pointed towards the meadow.
"Then you're from the coast, from Virtus," he said.
We didn't answer. Reuel came towards us surrounded by the children who had called him.
"These people have come from Virtus to honor our village with their presence at the festival," Mahesh introduced us. His hair blew loosely in the morning wind.
Reuel blushed.
"Our village chief is honored," Mahesh explained. "There are few festivals left, and fewer people who know about them."
The captain and most of our company went with Reuel, a tall blond man with baby eyes. The two appeared to be one of a kind.
Mahesh invited Jill and me, and Mark into his house. As we went in, we noticed Reuel in the distance trying to ride the captain's bike.
"We are not from Virtus," Jill explained to Mahesh inside the house. "I am from Thailand, a country far away on a planet of a different solar system."
"No, you are from Virtus!" He blinked his eyes when he said this.
Jill nodded.
"Anything is possible in Virtus," Mahesh said in a flat sounding dialect of Gamma language. "Do you understand what I mean? You must never, under any circumstance deviate from insisting that you have come from Virtus! Regardless of who may ask you," he added. "Always insist that you are from Virtus!" He took Jill's hand.
She said she understood and hugged him. We all did.
By then I noticed that his wife and daughter had entered the main room, which was on the ground floor next to the one we were on. The room looked like a farmer's kitchen of ages past.
Mahesh called them by name and introduced them to us: "This is Cira," he said proudly in a soft tone.
"Cira was married once to our village chief before he died." Then he pointed to his wife and said merely,
"Alenaah," in a slow and drawn out speech. He took a deep breath and turned to me with some apprehension. "How far is your planet?"
I was lost for a term of reference that he could understand. Finally I held my hand out somewhere four feet of the ground.
"As far as it takes a child to grow up to here."
Mahesh nodded and sighed. "We have been forced to live here for this long." He showed me his hands, scarred with deep cuts. He explained that he was a musician once and a nuclear engineer before.... His hands started to shake. I calmed him. Jill assured him that we understood.
Jill was a dream to be with, on this planet. I had never known anyone as sensitive to things as she was, especially to those little things that I are so often conveniently overlooked as insignificant. The old house was a gold mine to her; an open door to a culture that she felt had something rich in it. It wasn't the primitiveness that she liked, but the little art objects that Alenaah and Mahesh were only too glad to show her, and explain their origin.
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Stories about
Sex
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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