Chapter 1

Yakhir was four years into his apprenticeship when his tribe celebrated the year 250 AB, 'After the Great Burning'. "The Great Burning" was the fourth time the world attempted to destroy itself, only three hundred years after the third attempt. Two hundred and fifty years ago, the world's population jumped to their genocidal task with great energy and managed to incinerate a majority of their possessions and themselves.

His tribe survived the conflagration because in the days leading up to The Great Burning, they had been condemned as the backwater ignorant cousins, desert rats who were beneath regard and unworthy of little but occasional aid. When destruction came, apparently no one thought to destroy them.

Never allowing the tribe to forget their dubious distinction, the elders demanded that they never forget, first and foremost, that they didn't survive because they were the strongest, neither did they survive because they were the most worthy nor the cleverest. They survived because they were out of the way, the humbled and overlooked detritus of inconsequential circumstances. However, even humility can become a form of arrogance.

His tribe survived specifically because they didn't have the internal tags of enhancement that brought down the weapons from above. The entire world was healthier than his tribe with these mechanisms that were placed in the flesh of their necks from birth. The already ancient health clinics of his ancestors received promises and old style medicine: pills and injections with hollow needles. When the killing spread across the globe, the flying death needles only sought out those with the birth tags.

His tribe also survived because the local technology wasn't tied into the world neural net. They had been dependent on centuries old satellites and cables. The broad swathes of smelting burn followed the convoluted lines of the great Neural Net; yet those areas off the Net were never touched. (One can still travel to the burned cities to this day and see squares and rectangles of raked areas of sterile land surrounded by wild.) To his tribe's great relief, the vast garbage dumps of the world also avoided the great burning. They knew garbage dumps; the tribe had been the custodians of one of those great data storage dumps, another dubious distinction despite of the blessing of survival.

Those garbage dumps held the keys to their survival. The tribe still had access to the old computer nets with their dated equipment. They also had actual books made of plastic infused paper and stacks of magazines and journals, all of which found their archival resting place in the vast riven caverns beneath the local mountains. Corporations and governments had paid disposal fees to lock away their old secrets in the secured depths of rock and stone. This was the tribe's only claim to fame in the years before The Great Burn; they had been one of the best secured data dumps of the world. What the desert and the mountains couldn't stave off, the squalor and disease of the natives would.

The great civilization died and his tribe lived; but there is no moral.

No one among the tribe living at the time knew why The Great Burn began. The first generation wrote down all of their best guesses with the hope that one day their descendents would seek out the great centers of the old world or burrow through the data storage and find the true answers. In two hundred and fifty years, designated explorers had traveled in small groups far and wide, remaking maps and marking the land, but found no clues to answer that original question. They had traveled in caravans to loot other dumps.

Yakhir's father thought he knew the answer. As the chief archivist of the mountain storehouse, he had mined more material than any who had held the post before him. His father's mentors had been great scholars and he began his studies based upon the conclusions of his mentors. He had been raising Yakhir as his apprentice, when death struck him down. Yakhir was cheated out three years of apprenticeship under his father.

Yahkir was an apprentice, and after seven years of toil he would become an archivist. Upon selection by the chief archivist, know as the Archivist (with a capitol "A"), he would become a master archivist. Master archivists were responsible for training apprentices. The teenager had already demonstrated great potential.

Yakhir was just past his month of mourning when his new master took the helm as Chief Archivist; he was the Archivist Atto. This new Archivist was a practical man who spent his energy delving for the practical needs of the tribe. He was the antidote to Yakhir's father, who was criticized rightly for not digging out the answers to the present needs with sufficient haste. What was the plastics formula for the best water filters? Which data ports were the most efficient without losing their durability outdoors? These questions had been answered in the past and the data was buried in the vast piles in the caves.

The tribe was growing and needed these practical answers now, but Yakhir was convinced that his father had found a source to the truth of planet's last near death. He sat on an outcrop of rock overlooking the festival grounds, wondering which set of answers would have a more profound effect upon the future: the practical ones or his father's. He was concerned that loyalty to his father clouded his objectivity, but Yakhir surmised his father's work was the clear winner. However, as soon as the festival was over, he was subject to the demands of his new master, and his father's research would be consigned to the few moments of free time.

The land was blossoming. This fourth destruction of civilization had unexpected consequences for the survivors, and one of them was the reversal of desertification of the continents around the line of the equator. Hieroglyphs from canyon walls in North Africa dating back over 11,000 years had depicted early man hunting hippos, lions, and giraffes in the midst of what became the Sahara Desert. The best guess among the scholars was that the Sahara, one continent over, was blooming again with life; maybe not with hippopotami, but with creatures of the plains. Their own lands were.

Their land now bloomed without hydroponics. The stream had become a river in the past two hundred years or so. The rainy season had expanded and become more powerful. The photonic platforms that sat on top of the mountains churning sunlight into power had to be cleaned once a week these days because of encroaching vegetation where nothing had grown in generations. In continuing revolutions around the sun, the planet was renewing itself despite, maybe because of, the devastation her progeny had wrought.

This night was the New Year Festival, held at the summer Solstice, and the town was converting itself into a garish display of light, gaudy decorations, dancing and revelry. Yakhir sat on an outcrop overlooking the beautiful scene unfolding beneath his feet. He was sad, yet still young and eager to join the best party of year below. Time was nearing to return to the streets below, but he was in no hurry.

A scrunch of loose rock let him know someone was approaching. Since both his sister and his friend, Adilah, knew this was his favorite spot, Yakhir figured it had to be one or the other. Adilah plopped down beside him.