[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 37

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He looked at my prosthetic arm. Then at my leg, then back up at me. Slowly, he shook his head. What’s that about? Am I really that unfunny? Aubrey always used to laugh at my jokes. He gestured for me to follow him down a well worn path through the undergrowth I’d only now noticed.

Should I really follow some random old indigenous man I just met? For all I know, this is how they hunt. For all I know he was sizing me up and working out the choicest cuts of my body to serve his extended family.

I meant to find civilization in a hurry though, for lack of any other way to get my bearings. This man was the first sign of civilization I’d so far encountered, and it seemed foolish to let him slip away without at least asking a few questions.

They couldn’t be one of those uncontacted tribes you hear about, otherwise they would most likely speak a dialect sufficiently different from anything already known to linguists that it couldn’t be included in my translator.

InterNourish wouldn’t just air drop aid crates onto the known locations of uncontacted tribes either, as it would contaminate the ongoing research of anthropologists. Who are these people, then? Might they have some form of internet access? Or better yet, a vehicle?

No such luck. When I asked him about it, he waved me off and insisted they had no use for such frivolous things. “How do you mean?” I badgered. “Without either of those, how do you get supplies?” He peered over his shoulder at me with a familiar expression on his face.

The expression of somebody who’s just heard the dumbest shit in their life. It didn’t bode well for my chances of catching a ride to the nearest city, and indeed when we arrived at his village, it was more or less paleolithic.

Wreaths decorated with flowers hung upon every other branch. Amid the trees, rather than in a clearing, sat around two dozen huts fashioned from leaves and grass. Villagers with the same complexion and haircut as the old man milled about or chatted with each other.

Not one of them had any sort of robotic prosthetics, which didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me is that they didn’t have anything electrical at all. No generators. No lights. No radios or televisions, no computers, no nothing.

Some of them were wearing InterNourish shirts, like the old man. Others were wearing clothing apparently made out of huge leaves. From banana trees, if I had to guess. Except when several of them congregated to greet the old man and get a closer look at me, I could see no stitches anywhere on the garments.

“How did you make these?” I queried, rubbing the sleeve of the woman nearest me in bewilderment. “We didn’t” he answered, then led me into the largest hut. I expected to find the cheiftan here. In fact, I half suspected it was the little old man the entire time.

Instead, I was greeted by an absolutely radiant beauty of a woman wearing the same plant based garments as many of the villagers, perched on a throne which looked to have grown out of the ground into the desired shape.

She was lovely in a way that I never knew a woman could be. Her face round and flush, her body well muscled from what I could see. Even beneath the jungle canopy, she shone like the sun, exuding health and power with every word, gesture and step.

“Welcome to our humble home” she said, smiling at me the same way the old man had earlier. As if we knew one another for years before this. “If you’re a missionary, please leave whatever book it is you mean for us to read on the pile over there.”

She pointed to a stack of various holy books in the corner on a table which apparently grew out of the ground into that shape, like the throne. How did they make it do that? Besides which, if they’ve been contacted, why don’t they at least have smartphones by now?

I asked her name. She frowned as if I’d done something untoward, but obliged. I couldn’t pronounce it, and elected not to make any more of an ass out of myself by trying. “I’ll just call you chieftess if that suits you.”

She smirked, betraying a hint of irritation in her expression. “As well you should. I didn’t just start calling myself a ruler one day, I’m the one who brought these people together. Who kept them united through hardship, guided them in their ways all these years, and protected them from harm. You will indeed address me as chieftess, and look at your feet when you do it.”

Fair enough. I then somberly introduced myself, though she seemed uninterested. “We know your kind. You come from the world of metal. There is no metal here. We have renounced that way. The world of metal demands aggression, duplicity and cruelty. In such a world, the only unforgivable sin is gentleness. Our way of life can only survive so long as it is kept separate from that world.”

It made some sense of why they didn’t lift any gadgets off the missionaries, or make use of the charity laptops regularly delivered to villages like these. By the sound of it they viewed such offerings the way I would view a dealer who offers me a free sample, hoping to get his hook in my mouth.

“You wear the shirts though.” She nodded. “It’s thoughtful of you to send them. We would be rude to turn them down. Please, no more of those chewy bars though.” She sounded just as adamant about that part as the old man before her.

I recounted how I crash landed in the jungle and found the InterNourish crate nearby. “I’d have starved otherwise. Though I agree, eat enough of those things and starvation starts to look pretty good.” She offered to feed me and have someone examine my wounds.

I accepted the offer of a hot meal but wasn’t keen to let the local witch doctor put leeches on me, or whatever passes for medicine around here. But for that matter, who knows what they eat? Their apparent matriarch seemed friendly enough I doubted that I was on the menu, but that didn’t rule out insects, monkeys and a great many other things I’d rather not inflict on my stomach.

Instead, it was a vegan banquet. The fruit and vegetables were unlike any species known to me however, which I put down to my unfamiliarity with South American ecology. That is until I bit into one of them.

“This tastes exactly like pork” I remarked. The fellow next to me handed me another. “It’s a copy fruit. Replicates the flavor of whatever you rub it on.” I rejected it. “That’s impossible. No such fruit exists, and I doubt if genetic engineering has come far enough to make something that sophisticated.”

He didn’t bother trying to convince me, just turned his attention back to his own meal as I continued munching on the green, meat flavored pod. The next one I bit into tasted just like venison. How can something like this exist?

“You could make a fortune exporting these” I mumbled through a mostly full mouth. “What would we buy with that money” the woman across from me inquired. “Meat?” I was struck at once by the absurdity of it, as she probably intended.

“Maybe you think we could use it to buy clothes.” Again, they clearly had the means to grow their own. I studied the jungle canopy around me until I spotted a tree with shirts, pants and slippers dangling from it. All looked as though made from leaves, but apparently grew into that shape of their own accord.

Various other trees also had useful products growing from them, as did a handful of nearby bushes. Knives, arrowheads, hatchets and other sharp implements, formed out of a rapidly hardening resin secreted by bright yellow bulbs on the bush behind me. I took care not to lean back too far.

Another grew what looked to be respirator masks, presumably how they survive gas storms. The next one over grew rope. Not the individual filaments one might weave a rope out of, but complete, pre-woven lengths of rope. What the fuck is all this? Some sort of illegal, off the radar field test for genetically engineered flora. I felt sure of it.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 38}