Issue #4

"The Message"
by Dale Glaser

P’jok stepped tentatively to the edge of the quartz hardpan he had crossed over the last several days, and peered down the steep drop before him. A nearly vertical slope of jagged milky white stone, flecked with glittering facets that caught the azure light of the setting blue dwarf star, descended from beneath P’jok’s foot-claws for nearly five hundred meters. At that level a thin ribbon of land studded with rocky spikes connected the two walls of the ravine. The deep gash in the planet’s mineral surface extended as far as P’jok could see in either direction, and his objective lay on the other side of the treacherous maw, some two hundred meters away. Unafraid, P’jok squatted, braced himself with his powerful upper arms, and felt for purchase along the craggy surface with his footclaws and the tendrils of one of his lower arms. Slowly, he began his descent.

The going was slow, as P’jok repeated the same movements again and again. One lower arm would sweep the surface of the gorge wall for a suitable claw-hold. Once found, an upper arm would lower a claw to that position. The process could have been accelerated if both of P’jok’s sets of tendrils had been free to seek out the small cavities in the quartz edifice which could accommodate his upper arm claws. But in his right tendrils, P’jok held a message crystal, and he had sworn to deliver it to Commander B’nug. P’jok would have to accept his slow pace as a necessary price of keeping the message crystal safe in his tendrils.

Meter by meter, P’jok negotiated the glassy slope. The dusk was quiet in this part of the planet, a place where no Makrardian would ordinarily have any reason to venture. Yet these were not ordinary times, as the Makrardians were at war with the Izitzse, a race from the far side of the planet who had begun to lay claim to the entire surface of the globe with brutal force. The Izitzse had held the advantage for some time, in both their superior weaponry and their sophisticated strategy of invading the Makrardian homelands. All that the Makrardians had had was a will to defend themselves, but that will was strong enough to transform the conquest by one aggressor into a war between two races. Now the tide was turning, as the Makrardians had marshaled forces to retaliate against the Izitzse. The Markradian war machine was lumbering across the planet now, and P’jok was scrambling to catch up to it, with a message from the commander of the homeland defense, Ak’mon.

P’jok lowered himself another meter. Suddenly, the serrated tooth of quartz bearing the weight of his right leg crumbled, and his body began to slide unchecked down the steep surface. Reflexively, P’jok flailed at the broken-glass wall with both handclaws and both sets of lower-arm tendrils, dropping the message crystal to clatter downward on its own. The realization that he had lost it terrified him more than the freefall of his body, but P’jok knew that if he did not save himself the message would remain undelivered.

P’jok’s claws and tendrils grabbed desperately at the craggy slope until finally he was able to hook a claw around a small outcropping. The snap as his upper arm went taut against the weight of his plummeting body sent a shock of pain through him, but he held fast. He had fallen a hundred meters at least. He scanned the quartzface below and spied the purple message crystal another twenty-five meters below, a dozen meters to the left. He could climb down in that direction and resume his mission.

Finding another jutting irregularity, P’jok braced his free claw and lowered himself. His tendrils brushed the area to his left in search of clawholds that would allow him to descend in the direction of his goal. He navigated the crystalline surface until he was within a few meters of the message. At that spot, however, the ravine wall became unusually smooth. The message crystal had wedged into a small fissure, but between P’jok and the purple gem there were no clawholds that would put it within reach.

P’jok considered for a moment, then resolved to see his mission through. All six of his limbs tensed, then pushed off against the jagged surface. The force was enough to propel him within reach of the message crystal, which he clutched with outstretched tendrils as he rushed past. Once again, gravity took control of his form as he tumbled down the slope. Before his claws were able to arrest his rapid descent, his head struck a protruding chunk of quartz, and his vision went black. His last thought was to hold tight to the message crystal.

P’jok awoke in a cave, seated on a metal bench against the rockwall, with his four arms bound before him. His head throbbed dully from its impact wound, telling him it had been some time since his fall. Two Izitzse stood on the far side of the cave, with rifles in their webbed hands. One of the guards noticed P’jok had regained consciousness, and left the cave through a metallic iris-like door. P’jok and the other guard eyed each other unflinchingly in cold silence. After a few minutes, the departed guard returned with another, older Izitzse. This Izitzse had more gray scales than green, but crossed the cave floor quickly and with an air of strength and authority. He stopped directly in front of P’jok.

“A scouting party found you in the Scowling Valley,” the Izitzse said, in Makradrese. “What were you doing there?”

P’jok said nothing, and the Izitzse smashed the back of its fist into the side of P’jok’s head. As his arm swung past it fanned the leathery wing which connected the Izitzse’s wrist to its knee. The Ititzse growled, “I am Gaavna, and I am not used to being defied.” Gaavna pointed to P’jok’s lap and demanded, “Tell me what this thing is which you hold – a weapon, of some kind?”

P’jok lowered his eyes and realized he still held the message crystal. His lower arms were rigid, his tendrils interlaced, and his grip on the purple gem was nearly unbreakable. P’jok remembered willing himself not to let go of the message crystal as he had tumbled from the ravine wall, and now realized that he had been able to lock his limbs utilizing an ability of his secondary Makrardian nervous system. The self-induced paralysis would always affect a pair of limbs, and he had deemed it inefficient for scaling down the quartz slope, but in the moment of freefall it had been the last command his mind had time to communicate to his body. The nerve lock would remain in effect until P’jok concentrated on relaxing his lower arms, whether or not his primary nervous system was conscious. And the Izitzse had been unable to pry the message crystal from him since they had found him.

The realization strengthened P’jok, and again, he said nothing to the Izitzse interrogating him. Gaavna’s yellow eyes narrowed as if he intended to strike P’jok again, but instead he turned on his heel and stalked away. As the door spiraled open and Gaavna passed between the two guards, he hissed, “Make him talk.”

The Izitzse guards approached P’jok and began to club him savagely with the butts of their rifles. The beating went on for hours, during which P’jok never spoke. Towards the end he began to cry out in pain, but no mercy wad asked for. Eventually the guards relented, sensing the futility of their efforts, and P’jok once again lapsed into unconsciousness.

When P’jok was again aware of himself and his surroundings, he found himself lying prone on a table in a different, larger cave. The bindings had been removed from his upper limbs, but now wide metal bands across his shoulders, waist and just above his feet held him fast. Gaavna stood above him, along with another Izitzse who was studying P’jok intently. “Well, Feeplo?” Gaavna said impatiently.

Feeplo nodded as if having completed a satisfactory equation. “The gemstone is a standard Makrardian message crystal. This one must be carrying information of some importance to our enemies.”

“And can you decipher the message, or does Warlord Yycoss employ you to make useless pronouncements alone?” Gaavna pressed.

“There are two methods by which we might learn the contents of the crystal’s message,” Feeplo expounded. “One will require the ... assistance ... of the prisoner.”

“Little chance of that,” Gaavna hissed.

“Still, he will have the opportunity,” Feeplo said. He placed an electric light near the tip of the message crystal which protruded from P’jok’s tendrils. The light shone into the crystal, and Feeplo said to P’jok, “Read it for us. Read the words reflected within, Makrardian.”

P’jok would not even look at the crystal. Feeplo waited a few moments, then toggled a switch on the underside of the table. The bands encircling P’jok’s body became hot, and burned his flesh. Still, P’jok suffered mutely, staring back at Feeplo defiantly.

“The other method, Feeplo?” Gaavna asked.

“Makrardian eyes are uniquely suited to detect the patterns of light reflected within the message crystal,” Feeplo explained. “However, sufficient light directed through the crystal can project the message outward. An intense enough energy can even pass through Makrardian flesh and the refract through the crystal.” He turned his scaly face toward P’jok again and intoned sinisterly, “The intense energy will be even more painful than the heated restraints. You may tell us the contents of the message now, if you wish.”

P’jok said, “I will not,” and then returned to silence. Feeplo turned away to retrieve a more powerful source of light. He returned with a large silvery coil, which he wedged between P’jok’s belly and his still nerve-locked lower arms until the coil rested directly behind the message crystal. Feeplo stepped away and then activated the coil, which began to radiate brightly. Feeplo had not lied to P’jok; the agony searing into his torso and tendrils made the pain of the hot metal bindings seem pale. And even as the torment seemed to grow to the point where it would swallow him whole, P’jok could see the shapes of letters forming on the ceiling of the cave.

Feeplo stared up at the revealed message, taking in its meaning. He seemed puzzled at first, then concerned. He glanced sidelong at P’jok, as if trying to read as much from the Makrardian prisoner as from the crystal he carried.

“What is it?” Gaavna glowered at the markings in pale violet light overhead. “What does it say?”

Feeplo smiled coldly at P’jok. “Tell him,” the Izitzse scientist said. “If you read it for him, I will turn off the lumi-coil and end your misery.”

P’jok’s entire body felt cold, as if the pain were high pressure ice water jetting through his body. His only answer was the same as before: “I will not.”

“You cannot,” Feeplo said disinterestedly. He killed the power to the lumi-coil, and the letters faded from the cave ceiling. Slowly, the pain began to ebb away from P’jok. He closed his eyes and tried to slow his ragged breathing. As if from a great distance he could hear Feeplo’s voice.

“This messenger must be illiterate, to guard such meaningless secrets as if he believes them to be more, when the evidence to the contrary is before his very eyes” the Izitzse said. “It is of no great strategic importance in any case. One of his superiors must be displeased with him. The addressee is instructed to kill the messenger as soon as he delivers the message. That is the entirety of it.”

Gaavna snorted. But looking at P’jok, he could see that his prisoner’s eyes had flown open wide in shock, the look of stony defiance on his face replaced by the slack, numb expression of betrayal. “I see,” Gaavna nodded. “Well, perhaps he will find our method of execution preferable to the ones his own would have practiced upon him. We shall see in the morning.” With that Gaavna left, and Feeplo followed him, extinguishing the lights.

P’jok lay in the darkness, his heart racing almost as fast as his thoughts. He did not want to die, not at the hands of the Izitzse, certainly, yet he could not believe that if he had never been captured he would have been killed by B’nug as soon as the war machine commander had read the crystal. Was it possible that Feeplo had lied about the contents of the crystal’s message, yet another form of torture for the prisoner?

It was true that P’jok could not read his native language. It was yet another reason he had been selected to deliver the precious message. The Makrardians did not know if the Izitzse would know how to operate a message crystal, nor if their enemies would be able to translate the written symbols of the tongue. And with P’jok as the message bearer, they would never have been able to torture the meaning from him, either. In addition to P’jok’s own strength and courage, the fact that he had never learned to comprehend the written word made him the perfect courier.

Or so he had thought. But if Feeplo had translated the message truly, he had in fact been chosen because someone had wanted him killed. It saddened and angered P’jok, to think that at a time of war with the Izitzse the Makrardians would murder one another.

The blackness of the cave began to be suffused with an emerald glow. P’jok thought it was another trick of his exhausted mind, a relapse of pain from the beatings and torture he had endured already. But instead of blanketing him with oblivion, the green light became clearer as it drew closer. Soon P’jok could make out a shape in the center of the glow, the source of the green light, a ring hovering before P’jok’s eyes.

P’jok of Naqaz, you have been chosen as the new Green Lantern of Sector 3079, a flat voice spoke inside P’jok’s mind, clearly originating from the ring. Do you accept? the ring intoned.

Chosen as what? P’jok thought back at the floating ring.

You will become a member of the Green Lantern Corps, a servant of order in the universe patrolling this sector of space. I will be your weapon against chaos.

P’jok’s mind seized on the word ‘weapon’, knowing he would need one to escape from the Izitzse. I accept, he thought.

The ring quickly flew down the length of P’jok’s right upper arm, and fitted itself over one claw. You need only think of that which you need, and I shall create it, the ring informed him.

P’jok found himself thinking of the chisels he had used in his youth to hollow out storage pits in the quartz, wishing one were handy to cut through the metal bands pinning him down. As he pictured the tool, a beam of solid green light shone forth from the ring, and coalesced in the shape of a chisel, poised against the binding across his shoulders. It will have to be bigger to take less than a day to cut through these bands, P’jok thought, and the chisel grew in response. A few swift taps of its bladed head severed the top metal band, and the construct moved on to the binding around P’jok’s waist. As P’jok realized he would soon be free, he began to concentrate on relaxing the nerve-lock of his lower arms. That reminded him of the message crystal, and the dire words which might be etched within it.

The glowing green chisel finished cutting away P’jok’s restraints, and then faded away. At the same time, the paralysis left his lower arms. P’jok looked at the crystal in his tendrils, and then at the ring on his claw. “I need to know what the message within this crystal says,” P’jok said uncertainly.

The ring responded, It appears to be a medium which utilizes refracted light. A viridian beam emanated from the ring and once again the letters took shape within the depths of the crystal.

“I can’t read, but you seem to know my language. Can you ... read it for me?” P’jok implored.

I can run the characters through a decryption routine, the ring replied. It will take a few moments.

P’jok was satisfied at that. The ring was obviously incredibly advanced, but it was just as obviously not a living thing. As a machine, it was incapable of lying, and the translation of the message it provided would be one P’jok would have to accept as true.

P’jok waited in the silence and gloom, until the ring’s disembodied voice came to his mind again. The text is as follows:

Commander B’nug,

P’jok has begun to ask many troublesome questions. He has challenged my decisions regarding response to the Izitzse incursions, claiming that every time our forces are concentrated in one place to win a battle, they are thinned in another and lose that skirmish. Of course you and I know this to be the best way to prolong this war, and secure the power we hold over our own people, just as Warlord Yycoss knows that a balance of victories and defeats does the same for him. Since P’jok gains nothing from our enterprise but the possibility of a warrior’s death, I am sure this would fail to sway him. Yet I find it more and more tiresome to fend off his questions, and I fear that his damnable independent thought will spread among the rest of those whom we seek to have serve us indefinitely.

Worse yet, he discovered me returning to the city gates after meeting with an Izitzse emissary three nights ago. If he did not suspect our collusion before, he no doubt will soon enough. I cannot risk him contaminating our followers with his beliefs or any other evidence he may stumble upon. I have sent him to you with this message, which he believes contains strategy for your mock advance. It seemed the easiest way to remove him from the city before he could do any more damage to our plans. He must never return to the city alive. Have him killed immediately.

By the time you return from your campaign with tales of having deeply wounded the Izitzse without entirely removing their threat, I believe our people will be completely and utterly dependent upon us. May the gods of war bring us to that day soon.

Commander Ak’mon

The war machine of the Makrardians had reached the border of the lands inhabited by the Izitzse, and the Izitzse had not stood aside to let their enemies enter. A colossal battle was being waged between the two races, ranging over miles and miles of the planet’s hard white surface. The Izitzse soared through the sky on their leathery wings, raining red fire down on the opposing soldiers from the muzzles of their rifles. The Makrardians’ massive rolling catapults launched incredibly dense ore projectiles at the gliding gunmen overhead, and when the Izitzse were knocked from the sky they found themselves set upon by footsoldiers bearing axes and mallets made of heavy minerals.

The losses were heavy on both sides, and mounting quickly, when an emerald bolt shot above the horizon. P’jok blazed through the air in a corona of green, his body now clad in the black, green and white uniform of the Green Lantern Corps. Immediately, he became the focus of both sides of the battle.

To the Makrardians on the ground, a flying combatant could only be an Izitzse. Catapults were repositioned by the brute force of dozens of men, and projectiles sailed toward P’jok as the arms flung their payloads skyward. The power ring, however, easily gave P’jok enough speed to fly out of the path of any spheres of ore which approached him. P’jok formed a net of brilliant green energy and caught the projectiles in order to lower them to the ground safely.

At the same time, the airborne Izitzse were close enough to P’jok to see that, power of flight and strange garb aside, the newcomer was a six-limbed Makrardian, and they trained their rifles on him and fired. Crimson blasts lanced through the sky, but bounced harmlessly off the protective forcefield of verdant light surrounding P’jok.

P’jok had no more desire to strike out at the Izitzse than he did to cause harm to his fellow Makrardians. Instead he continued to fly through the melee, dodging catapult and rifle fire alike, defending himself without counterattack. He rocketed over the Makrardian formations on the gorund and through the divisions of Izitzse in the air, working his way behind the Izitzse line, until he came to the command center of the Izitzse forces. Until he came within sight of the Warlord Yycoss.

A formidable collection of Izitzse warriors had been assembled as the personal guard of the Warlord, and when P’jok flew into view and then came to a hovering stop over them, their rifles were already hurling red lightning at the neophyte Green Lantern. Yycoss screamed, “Kill the Makrardian!” despite the fact that his guard had already opened fire, his command indicating that failure would mean their deaths.

The forcefield generated by the power ring, which had been a sheath an inch thick against the contours of P’jok’s body, expanded to a glowing green bubble around him, and deflected the firepower the Izitzse trained upon him. P’jok pointed the claw bearing his ring toward Warlord Yycoss, and a ray of emerald light bore down on the Izitzse leader. The Warlord was soon wrapped in an opaque green cocoon of energy, tethered to P’jok’s ring. P’jok began to fly straight up, towing his captive behind him.

Since the power ring had found P’jok, it had explained a great many things to him: the impurity which caused it to be powerless against yellow, the time limit of its charge, the battery which would allow it to be replenished. The ring had explained that the battery could be found on one of the moons of Naqaz, where the former Green Lantern of Sector 3079 had been killed while battling the remnants of a star-spanning death cult. Space travel was unknown to the Makrardians and the Izitzse, and the power ring had provided P’jok with a rudimentary education and promised to explain more once P’jok had expanded his patrol of the sector. The information given, however, was enough for P’jok at the moment.

P’jok rose swiftly through the atmosphere of his home planet and flew into the starry void through which it revolved. He made due course for the moon where his predecessor had made her last stand. Soon he was flying through the satellite’s own atmosphere, which was caustic and sulphurous but breathable. Much of the lifeless moon’s surface was covered in liquid magma, but here and there were rocky islands. P’jok flew toward a large island and dissolved the green cocoon over it, depositing Warlord Yycoss. There, the Izitzse joined Feeplo, as well as Commanders Ak’mon and B’nug.

“P’jok!” Commander B’nug spat. He had intended to bellow the young Makrardian’s name, but it came out in a rasp; the harsh air of the moon had taken its toll on his lungs. “What is this hell you have brought us to?”

“Hell is too good for you,” P’jok answered evenly. “But here you can have all that you wanted. Two Izitzse, two Makrardians. You may make war on each other for as long as you like. But never again will you be able to sacrifice others for your own ends.”

“The gods curse you for this, P’jok,” Commander Ak’mon swore.

“Perhaps the gods are answering your prayers through me,” P’jok said. “You wanted a people dependent on you. I assure you B’nug depends on you now, as you depend on him, for without each other the Izitzse outnumber you.” As Yycoss and Feeplo looked warily between the Green Lantern and the two Makrardians on their island, P’jok turned to them and added, “The same could be said for either of you.”

P’jok rose slightly higher to avoid a bursting bubble of magma beneath his feet. “You sought to control a world by perpetuating a meaningless war,” P’jok said. “I leave you this world. War over it, or do not. It matters little to me. Hopefully it is not too late to stop the war you began on our world. All you need know is that you will never see it again.”

With that, P’jok flew away. Before he left the moon behind and descended to his planet again, however, he retrieved the power battery for his ring from another small island of island of volcanic rock. P’jok knew he had more than 24 hours of work ahead of him.

END

AUTHOR’S NOTES:

Way back in the spring of 2000, I discovered fanfic, and soon enough FauxDC. I really wanted to write for this site, and my audition piece was the story which became Tales of the Green Lantern Corps #2 here. Thus began my semi-auspicious career in fanfic’s fabled halls.

It seemed like that career might have reached a premature end in the spring of this year, 2003. I have a brother, three years younger than me, who is a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, and in March he was deployed to Iraq. It gave me the worst case of writer’s block I’ve ever had in my life. My desire to write fanfic seemed to dry up the day he flew out, and the longer it went on the more I understood why. Even though my brother wasn’t in a combat situation, the whole country was a dangerous place for American soldiers to be, it just wasn’t fun to write about good guys fighting bad guys over bad guys hurting innocent people when one of the most important people in my life was facing a very real threat of violence every day. I knew if he were forced to defend himself it wouldn’t be glamorous and exciting even if he ended up coming through it unscathed … and I didn’t even want to think about other ways he could come through it. For maybe the first time in my life, explosions and gunplay weren’t just elements in the action-adventure genre, they were real, and they were scary, and it pretty much sucked. I suppose I could have tried my hand at talking heads fanfic, and done The 100% Violence-Free Adventures of Melvin Frackle, Real Estate Agent of the SuperHeroes or somesuch, but that didn’t feel right, either.

My brother got home a week ago, and he’s fine, and I’m feeling much better, thanks. I think my attitudes toward fanfic have changed slightly, but I wanted to get back into it, newfound sensibilities and all. Maybe they’ll come through in what I write, maybe they’ll just change the way I think about what I write, but it’s definitely easier to sit down at the keyboard knowing the worst I can get into is my fears of what might have been, rather than the terrors of what might be right around the corner. I realize that there are still thousands upon thousands of troops still over in Iraq and Afghanistan and lots of deadly dangerous places, and I hope I don’t come off as uncaring about them. They’re in my thoughts as much as my brother ever was, and I hope they all come home safe. It’s just that my brother is my brother, you know? What happens to him has more impact. It’s different.

While my brother was in Iraq, just before he found out he’d be coming home, he wrote to me and asked me to write a story for him. He’d had the idea of a story about a soldier in wartime carrying a message, captured by the enemy and tortured for the meaning of the message. The twist would be that the soldier was illiterate, and had no idea that the message called for his own death. Yeah, I know, “kill the man bearing this message” has been done in everything from Hamlet to Road To Perdition, but when your brother is overseas wearing a flak vest at breakfast every day, you tend to want to honor his requests. Of course, all my brother gave me was the premise, and the nice compliment that I’m the writer in the family and I should be able to come up with an ending to the story. I thought about it for a while and realized I’d probably need a deus ex machina to save my illiterate protagonist. And dang if the Green Lantern power ring isn’t one of my all-time favorites. Thus the story which you just read was born. If it seems a little heavy-handed or soapboxy, well, I hope you can forgive me for that. I’ve always loathed the injustice inherent in the fact that the men who make the decisions to go to war very rarely are the ones who fight on the front lines. The past year has only amplified it in my mind, and now I’ve given it a comic book parable voice.

So, that’s the story-behind-the-story. My fanfic hiatus, caused by my brother’s absence, has now been ended with a story my brother gave me an idea for, which I’ve managed to fit into the very anthology which gave me my fanfic start in the first place, just in time for my brother’s return. All my life’s a circle. Or maybe it’s a little green ring.

-DWG 11/23/03