Kinkajou interviews 
Milo Morai (immortal HorseClans Emperor)
and Director Sternheimer .
(Robert Adams: Horseclans Series: The Coming of the Horseclans)
Kinkajou: Greetings, great ones. I have facilitated this conference to see if common ground can be found between you.
Milo Morai: I fear not Kinkajou: There is no common ground between bloodsucking vampires and men.
Director Sternheimer: My dear Milo, all we would ask is to be able to study you to see what is the basis of your long life, your healing abilities and your Sigma Psi capabilities.
Milo Morai: More likely you would like to dissect us all and to take us over to become a vehicle for your own consciousness through time. To steal the life of others for your own purpose is a sacrilege. This is the difference between our paths to long life.
Director Sternheimer: We are scientists Milo. We represent the United States of America. We represent sensible government by informed people.
Milo Morai: And did you heed the instructions of the government to cease your ungodly experiments and to close your research program. No! You continued your work. You stole the life of innocents to prolong your own life against the laws of the country and against the ethics of your fellow man.
The people of this age do not need your feeble excuse of intellect to underwrite your right to rule.
A ruler is responsible for his people and to his people. Your people take what they want, when they want and how they want. Your people have no concern for how civilisation functions. You have produced a hereditary elite hierarchy in which you have ensconced yourselves by your own divine right. To achieve this you steal the bodies of others to enable your own minds to circumvent age and time.
Director Sternheimer: And you believe that your own warring peoples are more deserving of the future. Your nobles are hereditary as well.
Milo Morai: Our people can always aspire to better and ennoble themselves by their own efforts. Your people are forever servants to you and the scientific elite who purport to represent the United States of America.
Director Sternheimer: But our research is for the common good.
Milo Morai: You simply seek to research how to enable yourselves to live forever. You have no regard for the longevity of others.
My own immortality came to me, I believe, as an accidental by-product of the nuclear war which destroyed our society in the 21st century. With it came in incredible capacity to heal injuries. Many previously lethal injuries such as the cutting of an artery or the penetration of vital organs are within the capacity of my new body to heal.
We can still be killed of course. Beheading and even the simple denial of air (as in drowning) are lethal. I have travelled far across the globe to discover is others such as myself. There are a few. I have managed to band many of them together to maintain the long-term rule of our peoples, to bypass the fratricidal conflicts that arise from death and succession and inheritance.
Our people enjoy rulers who work to the long view, who understand their problems and who can function when need be in the capacity of ordinary citizens.
Our Sigma Psi powers seem to be an innate part of our longevity. The ability to mindspeak and to farspeak, the ability to control some aspects of the physical environment as in calling and mobilising environmental energies to create weather, are some aspects of these abilities.Our ability to talk to animals such as special horses and cats and even other wild creatures ensures that our people and our civilisation resonate with nature and the environment.
These are gifts which we have not sought but which have been imposed upon us by nature. We have used them to build a civilisation and to plan for its long-term success. We have achieved this in notable measure.I personally undertook the education and training of child survivors of the 21st-century apocalypse and through them created the horse clans folk and entwined these humans with the lives of other creatures notably horses and the great cats to create a civilisation.
At many times have I fought side by side with the same peoples to achieve our common goals.
You command. You do not get your hands dirty and you function at level far above that of the ordinary citizen, who can never aspire to your level. By leaping the consciousness from one body to another you can transcend the limitations of age and time but only at the cost of others’ lives. Is this really a direction we want to take our society?
Director Sternheimer: Yes but think of how much we can learn from studying the genetics of healing and growth and employing the same techniques for the good of the people.
Milo Morai: Our society will one day reach these barriers as well. But at that time it will be so that all can share the benefits, none at the expense of others. The society has much evolution to do before it is ready to accept such a gift without engendering its own destruction.
Director Sternheimer: We would also welcome a greater understanding of the Sigma Psi sense. I have heard reports of your ability to control the weather. Such an ability would help us to grow crops more reliably for the good of the common man.
Milo Morai: You would only to seek such as sense as a weapon for the enslavement and domination of others. I believe you would only think of the benefits to yourself and the power it would bring you not of the benefits to the common man.
Director Sternheimer: We do not aspire to the primitive and uncouth agricultural techniques practised by Milo’s uncivilized Barbarians. We have developed scientifically efficient food production techniques which provide plenty for all. We also have vertical farms that are capable of producing some foodstuffs naturally. So not all our people have to eat glop for all their meals, I would have you know.
Milo Morai: I do not think that your ability to produce energy containing goop using nuclear derived energy should view you with a sense of moral superiority. I doubt many of your own people would prefer your food to ours. Our people grow what they want and they want what they enjoy.
Food is meant to be enjoyed. It is not meant to solely be a scientific and energy filling experience providing continued function for the body. Indeed even in the 20th and 21st centuries , people have come to realise the benefits of many of the natural chemical compounds in organic foods and how beneficial they are to health and longevity.
Raising high-protein algae which tastes like shit though nutritious, is not a path that many people would choose if there are any other options available.
Director Sternheimer: But it is full of vitamins and minerals and can sustain life.
Milo Morai: Exactly the sort of narrow-minded idiocy that a scientific elite would dictate to its members. What little they know and understand is all that is important and they choose not to seek knowledge which conflicts with their own. Truth is truth: Truth is not what you create or choose to see.
Vertical Farm Greenhouse
Vertical Farm Greenhouse
Director Sternheimer: Our underground bunkers are substantially limited in the space available. We have had to do the best we can to survive for over 1000 years underground, past the plagues, past the radioactive contamination of the earth and passed the hostile natives and creatures which have filled the planet since our civilisation fell and apocalypse reigned.
Milo Morai: I will accept the morality of survival. It is the morality of your current actions in our current era which concerns me.
I will accept that your food bio-technology has enabled your people to survive through the lean years following the apocalypse.
Unfortunately, our people have continued to evolve and have developed resistances to many of the diseases and infections following the apocalypse. Your own isolation has guaranteed that the survival of your people demands the taking by stealth of the genetic heritage of others. Again, it is the morality of your current actions in a current world which concerns me.
We are finished. 
Kinkajou: Thanks to both of you. I implore you to consider your actions in the light of the benefits of the people you rule whose lives you hold in trust for the future.
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Kinkajou interviews
Jestak the Pelbar, now of Northwall and Manti the Jestan, chief of the defences of Northwall (Paul O. Williams: The Breaking of Northwall: book in a series)
Kinkajou: I catch you both at a “truceweek”. I would speak with you both and share between us some of the ancient learning. I’m amazed at your city. How do you manage to feed all your people?
Jestak the Pelbar: We are very shut people. But we are very efficient in producing food for us all. Every available portion of our city is used as appropriate and as possible for food production. We have orchards within the walls and cultivate around these as well.
They may not know it, the Pelbar do fish. And we are the only people who do it with a line,
Manti the Jestan: I would also comment that much of our efficiency in food production relates to the efficient organisation of our city. The job of the protector is not simply to protect. Our protector was a shrewd woman who maintained her position for many years by decisions wise in the proper manner and by holding the tight organisation of the city to its duties without slackening.
Jestak the Pelbar: True. But our food technologies are important as well. Our knowledge of fertilisers and of crop cultivation is 2nd to none and has allowed us to achieve incredible yields. Secondly, we Pelbar are very skilled in building. Part of our skill has been the integration of vertical farming technologies within the city building constructs.
Our designs not only allow easy defence but also maximise food production.
Manti the Jestan: The efficiency of the design is not really apparent to outsiders. Many of the outside tribes would comment to me at truceweek “do you think Pelbar, that those walls could keep us out if we really wanted to get in?” I would reply “yes.” “What if by chance you got in, you would never get out again”.
The stone construction of our buildings employed interlocking stone blocks, whereby each stone would support several other stones. So the removal of a single stone would not destroy the support of the structure. In conflict, situations this means our walls be very difficult to breach.
Jestak the Pelbar: But in day-to-day situations, water used to maintain crops would not destroy or structural elements of the building. I believe you mentioned to me Manti, that the protector had been considering expanding our city.
Manti the Jestan: Yes our population has been slowly growing for some time. Our food production is the main limiting factor controlling population growth. The protector had considered expanding city for some time.
However it will be difficult for the existing cities to be easily added to without enormous labour for little gain and without jeopardising the food supplies of the economy. Our people do almost no unprotected farming. Our enemies rarely trade food. Rather they largely trade material gathered from the wilderness. So food supplies are critical.
All the good sites for new cities are already ours.Again it will be difficult to build a new city with workers away from the protection of the existing cities, and without utilising such a high proportion of the population, that food production and even the population itself will be substantially endangered.
The situation has reached a critical plateau at the time of Jestak’s arrival. Jestak the Pelbar: I remembered when I had returned from my journeys to the eastern lands. I had not remembered, in my childhood, the great stone walls of Pelbarigan as I saw them when I returned. They barred out the cold, but also the light.
They barred out the enemy but also the light, wind and birdsong. In spite of the apparent shame of exile from Pelbarigan, I was glad to be gone.
Manti the Jestan: Yes, I remember when you first arrived at Northwall. Primarily, you are sent to us as an exile from Pelbarigan, which perhaps was a suitable shame for you, but hardly a compliment to us.
Jestak the Pelbar: The city seem so small to me. It is hard to believe in such a small space we could feed, accommodate and look after so many people. It is the food bio-technology of the Pelbar which has allowed us to succeed for so long in this hostile land.
Kinkajou: I noticed that the Pelbar citizens all bear a striking resemblance to each other.
Jestak the Pelbar: I have considered this issue for a long time. I believe that after the great War which destroyed so many of the peoples who had once lived together in this land, that there remained only a few small pockets of people. All the citizens of each of our cities would have been descended from the very few small groups of people.
Consequently, we all share a substantial portion of our genetic heritage. We are indeed very much alike because that which makes us is so very much alike. We are all essentially relatives of each other.
The situation is not that different with the outside tribes. The members of these tribes are very hostile to each other and maintain separation between the peoples.Killing occurs often and opportunistically and prevents the mingling of the peoples. Many of the members of each of these tribes bear a substantial tribal resemblance with others of their tribe. Again, I believe that the situation with them is similar to that which was present at the founding of the Pelbar. Small surviving groups of people interbred. Because the original founding group was so small, again the people developed an almost identical physical appearance, modes of thought, and physical capacities.
I had discussed some of these ideas with the ancient men of the eastern islands.
Still looking at oneself from an outside perspective is difficult. Few ideas really reach across tribal boundaries and even within the cities of the Pelbar there are parties with strongly divergent ideas (factions).
Kinkajou: So how has this common heritage, socially engineered your peoples?
Jestak the Pelbar: Again, an excellent question Kinkajou: I believe the personalities of the original founders have produced societies which mirror the preferences of those original people.
The Sentani on migration have a military structure arranged in seven bands, each of these bands being at the start point of their government symbol, each with its own band name.
They are despite their free habits a strict and ordered people.
In Pelbarigan, there are strong factions. The people theorise endlessly. They hold their opinions very strongly and without any recourse to doubt. They would never have understood or believed or accepted what I have declared that I have seen. It would have put my family in a bad position if I were to have told them anything. Again, in this fashion of thought we are much alike.
Kinkajou: Old Erasmus in my era has proposed that genetics underlies the programming of human modes of thought. We are who our genes make us. By knowing what genes we possess, how we act and how we think can be predicted. Still experience and learning must count for something as well, surely?
Manti the Jestan: I think you can see some of our typical strength of character in Jestak. In his time away from us he has become different, independent. But he was not a nobody. He took reticence even though they put into scrubbing for it. He kept his own counsel. He had been through a great deal, that was clear.
He was like no Pelbar that I have known when he returned, though once he was as much a Pelbar as any of us. It is his experiences that had made him different. But, I believe that had many of us had the same experiences, we would well have shown the same personality traits in our behaviour, evidence of our common heritage.
I noticed that Jestak would talk to fellow tribesman differently. He would at truce meetings insult them. But the Pelbar do not indulge themselves with insults. It is unwise and undiplomatic. If I may be permitted to say, I realised that Jestak was not indulging himself, but rather was using a diplomatic method common among the outside tribes, with whom he was familiar.
So I would say that Jestak was being as diplomatic as any Pelbar, even though his words would appear to be undiplomatic to the uninitiated. In that sense, he is as much a Pelbar as any of us.
I remember when he brought a Sentani into Northwall as a friend and a companion, as had never been done and then went to talk with a Shumai enemy on apparently equal terms – neither of these things had ever been heard of to my knowledge. Jestak told me that even the wild Shumai were men of honour, in their own way.
Kinkajou: So I understand that you feel the behaviours of the various tribes reflects their genetic behavioural heritage. The structure of the different tribal societies (Pelbar cities, Shumai packs and Sentani war bands) has been socially engineered by their genetics. The methods of interacting and understanding amongst the different tribes (the matriarchal Pelbar, the blustering Shumai and the ordered careful Sentani) similarly reflect their genetic behavioural heritage.
Again, the different tribal societies have been socially engineered by their genetics, resulting in shared culture and values. However, life experiences are important in shaping culture as well. But again it is the genes coding behaviour interacting with environmental experiences that create a response that is typical of the genetics of each tribal group. Jestak’s experiences may have made him different, but in the same way that other Pelbar sharing the same experiences may have become different.
The environment of the cities has enabled the Pelbar women to rule, when the environment of the plains, the physical constraints of genetics on strength and the demands of family, dictate that the men take charge in Shumai and even Sentani society.
Jestak the Pelbar: A complex analysis indeed Kinkajou: I did indeed survive, but not by observing Pelbar niceties.
Manti the Jestan: This relates to one of the things which has driven us as Pelbar. We find ourselves mired in the wastelands, trading with savages only and shut off from the ancient learning.
Jestak the Pelbar: Yes, it was our people’s desire for trade, learning and growth for our people that lead us to seek out others. I was sent to the East to organise trade with the cities which we had only dimly heard of. Little did we realise how like butterflies to the forge we were. Still I did learn, I did earn new friends and I did return. In learning how to deal with outside peoples, we at Northwall were able inveigle the local Sentani and Shumai tribesman with our hopes and aspirations.
When the Tantal attacked Northwall, our peoples all combined to save each other. This was the beginning of the birth of our civilisation here on the Heart River.
Our boats plying the river and our network of tribes enabled us to shift learning and technology between peoples as a common benefit. Kinkajou: You would be amazed where time will take you. In my era we have a thing called the Internet. Any question you may ask of anything or anywhere can be answered by someone somewhere through words or pictures. And this can all be had in the twinkling of a hand, not journeys of a lifetime.
Jestak the Pelbar: It is hard to imagine information being so available, so readily. One can imagine that this would truly change a society and people.
The eastern prophets saw the coming together of our peoples as an inevitable tendency given the forces of unity and conjunction growing in the world. I think I can understand this type of prophecy better than the prophecy of Pel. Our destiny is our own. Our future is what we make it. It is our acts and our choices that define our future and our destiny.
Kinkajou: Thank you both for your words.
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