The Cliffs of Utpala: Chapter Four

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three

Chapter Four

The people of Utpala, the colonists from India, had been adapting to their new world. One of the hardest to adapt, at first, was the length of the day. It was thirty hours long. That meant for every day five days on Earth, it would have only been four days on Utpala. For people who grew up with a 24 hour day, that was brutal. For Kyra and her generation who had always known the long days of Utpala, life was easier. Ten hours of sleeping and then still having two hours in the 'morning' of darkness was a little rough for the young. Fortunately, the administrators had set the time to be an hour after sunrise and children, well, children needed their rest. And they would take it. Except when they won't and that could be brutal for parents.

Kyra had never had much of a problem with Utpala's long, cold nights. Other than they were cold. And long. And...well, no, actually she just didn't like the cold. It was ever present and ever problematic. That was Utpala. It had its name for a reason. Summer might give an extra hour of daylight, but winter would steal it back. The Utpalan colonies needed to be near the equator, because about the tropics were too cold. Fortunately, there were suitable, if you could call them that, locales along the cliffs at the 'comfortable' latitudes.

One might presume Kyra would be used to the cold, since she grew up in it, but some people never take to their home. Not inside it nor in the greater home around. Kyra was one of those. Unfortunately, for Kyra, she lived at the edge of human space and in a Utpala didn't have many leave.

Kyra was snuggled deep in her very, very warm blankets. She had been having a wonderful dream of a beach - something she'd never actually experienced! Utpalan altitudes where oceans were or even large lakes were poisonous to humans! - and the warmth of the sand and she had a wonderful warm breeze blowing on her and she loved every minute of it. It was warm and gentle and then she had a cat jump up on her shoulder and start purring in her ear.

Had Kyra owned a cat or wanted a cat or could even tolerated a cat, then she probably would have been fine in the dream and kept dreaming. Except. She didn't really care for cats. Some were okay, but most seemed to give her a look as they they were plotting against her and would wait until she wasn't expecting it to bring about her downfall. At times, she either thought they were secretly running the world, or actually just fuzzy parasites. That one was in her dream, shook her within it. It broke her out of her pure dream state, enough to become aware she was in a dream...and then she noticed the purring wasn't really purring. It was thirrrrring. And it wasn't coming from one side. It was coming from all around her head!

She bolted upright in her bed and as she did so, Uptalan krntak scattered everywhere. The Utpalan krntak looked superficially like lemmings. In fact, they did some things that lemmings of earth were falsely claimed to do, but it was part of their very weird life cycle. However, Utpalan krntak were rather different than lemmings. For one, they might have a cute little outside, but they rather than Earth like teeth, they had a continuously growing beak-like structure underneath the fuzz and whiskers. They also didn't have a tongue. Rather their palate, cheeks and jaw both had fully attached muscles that would act grasp and pulsate something, like peristalsis on steroids, to swallow. That also meant their mouths were slobbering all the time: they needed more lubricant for their food than terran animals did. It made them really, really messy at times. They also had the habit of seeking out warm spots to snuggle in. In the wild, they would burrow and chew their way into a chamber and then whole droves of them would snuggle during the night. When they did, they thirrred. It wasn't a purr: the pitch and rhythm was wrong. However, a purr was as close to a thirr as any Terran animal could do. That meant, if they got into a house, they would seek out people and pets to snuggle with. And slobber on.

Kyra screamed at the wretched little creatures. Why wouldn't they learn people were murderous monsters and should not be snuggled with at night?! As they scattered and tried to find a safe place from the bombardment of objects Kyra was throwing at them, one looked up with a gaze that could be nothing short of pure, suffering hurt. A 'how could you do this to us! we're sweet and snuggly! you meanie!' look. No malice, all hurt.

Kyra's Dad and mom burst into the room: a scream on an alien planet had long since trained everyone to expect the worst and Hollywood, if not Bollywood, had provided enough nightmares to make sure everyone was on edge even before the Americans settled Escheria and afterwards...seeing what was the problem, her parents started trying to capture the krntak.

She jumped out of bed and helped her parents capture the little beasts. If they stayed in the house, they could chew their way into far, far too many things. Most items these days were powered wirelessly, but backup power was present in most places in the walls. And holes in the walls would be disastrous. A whole family could freeze if the weather was just right or the krntak had chewed up the house AI. The little brutes might look innocent as a baby, but they were very dangerous in their own right.

When they had captured the last - there turned out to be ten (!) of the fuzzy monsters - Kyra realized she had another problem. Her hair was matted with saliva. Her pillows were wet. And so too was her blanket. In a few hours, they would all stink. Including her. It was hours before sunrise or even time to get up, but Kyra clearly wasn't going to sleep. She waved her parents back to bed and her siblings as they peered around the corner into her room.

She caught her youngest brother's eye, Aarav's eye, and she saw the twinkle there. She knew how they'd gotten into her room. She was just going to have to decide, later, in the light of day and a clear head, what to do about the baby of the family. Revenge? Or turn him in to her parents?

Later, she thought, and set the washing machine to clean the blankets: gentle on the electronics and sterilize it all. She dressed heavily and then took the cage of krtnak outside. She had thought to just place it there until dawn and deal with them. It would serve them right for slobbering all over her. But there was a chance they would freeze. And those big, big eyes looked up at her and pleaded for mercy. She sighed and trudged out twenty minutes to the edge of the village and turned them loose. None even looked back as they ran. Some thanks, she thought.

She trudged back in the blackness of night, no one to be heard or seen until she got home. All the shadows from the LEPs gave seemed to dance. A few seemed to have something shifting in them. It was nothing, she knew. Cold fog coiled and blew in. It encrusted her in ice again and she sighed.

She made it home. She set the food printer to make the ersatz coffee replacement and hot in the shower. A very HOT shower.

Every day was a long day for Kyra on Uptala.

Today was going to be extra-long.