Chapter 7

Taima awoke on a warm slab in a white room. He was naked. Sitting up, he took stock of himself and found that the sunburn, the insect bites, and the various cuts and rashes were all gone. His eyesight seemed incredibly sharp, so much so that he got a slight headache.

"Where am I," he said.

"Welcome Taima of the Trapi," a melodious female voice said from nowhere but was everywhere.

"Where am I? Who are you? What happened?" He said all at once.

"You are safe within the Fish-metome-te-pat Observation Station. I am the overseer and you pressed the button to enter the station."

"Where are you?" Taima said, craning his neck in every direction.

"Your question has no answer that you would understand at this time. Would you like to learn the answer?"

Taima lightly stepped down to the floor from the slab and walked around the room. There were shelves and hidey-holes and pulls and even a doorway.

"This is a relic," he exclaimed with awe in his voice. "How do you understand me?" Taima said to the thin air. "You are a people from the far past."

"I scanned you while you recovered from your travel," the voice said. "I probed you while you were in a semiconscious state and tested your language, which is a distant derivative of the Spengali family of languages with definite influences of Weetani in your vocabulary."

"Huh?"

"Step through the doorway, Taima of the Trapi, and find the chair. If you wish to understand what I just said, place the helmet over your head and make yourself comfortable in the chair."

"Food?" Taima said, falling back on his instincts.

"You will not need to eat for a number of hours. I will prepare your meal for you. Go and sit."

Taima walked into the next room and saw the chair. Next to it was an almost round object with a hole in the bottom of it. He held it. The shell was smooth. The helmet wasn't heavy and the inside had no smell. The covering inside was soft to the touch.

Food wasn't coming for a long time and he had no idea where he really was. What options did he have besides waiting for the opportunity to escape and discover what happened to Manahay? He sat in the reclining chair with its cool padding and slipped the helmet over his head.

Light flickered before his eyes. He stared at a great black vastness except of the center of the picture. A blue marble turned with white marks growing and shrinking over the blue. The marble grew bigger. The entire marble wasn't blue anymore; there were large splotches of grays, greens and browns.

The marble grew larger still. The large splotches became rough in some places and smooth in others. There were blue spots and lines across the splotches. As the marble continued to grow, a thought began to bubble up in Taima's mind.

The marble filled the screen and then centered on one great splotch. The splotch began to grow before his eyes and finally Taima understood. These masses of dark color were mountains and plains. The blue was water. He didn't know so much water existed.

The land became clearer as Taima came closer. On the great plain in the center, the outermost of the great circles appeared. Then the others became visible like a giant bulls eye on the face of the land.

"The planet earth," the female voice whispered in his ear.

The scene changed to symbols and sounds. A symbol would flash and a sound rang in his ear. When he repeated the sound, a new symbol appeared.

After his first time in the learning chair, Taima had stumbled, trying to stand up straight. He looked at a wall and words like "drawer" and "doorknob" swam through his head unbidden. They weren't just words, they were new concepts. He gingerly walked to the bathroom trying to keep his eyes focused on this target and ignoring terms like "interior lighting" and "pneumatic door" and "pressure sensor", terms that didn't make a lot of sense yet.

His first look at an indoor toilet brought on a slight panic attack. His bladder ached and his thumbs were fumbling with the pants fasteners. The overseer was saying something but all Taima could hear was the buzzing in his head as he shamefully peed in his pants before getting them down.

The next day was better and the day after that better still. No longer intimidated, he asked the overseer and learned Manahay was alive, but that the only way to truly rescue her was by sitting in the chair day by day. He bowed his head in acceptance.

After rising from the chair each day, Taima practiced his new knowledge. He also tried and practiced new weapons. He played in the observatory, looking upward at the stars and down upon the earth. He must have slept and ate and shat, but he remembered little of those mundane things because the universe was calling to him. Each moment was a haze but he learned. He learned like no one had in thousands of years.