Waiting for the Return

     Aturok stood at the western shore and gazed up at the night sky. The moon had not yet risen and the Pleiades shone brightly. He could clearly see each of the seven stars in the open cluster. It wasn't difficult for him to imagine his ancestors calling this star system home, though it was more than four hundred light years away.
     Aturok had been born on the planet where he now stood, the product of a coupling between a male ancestor and a female native. His mother had not survived his birth and so he was raised by the ancestors in the years before their departure. Bridging two worlds, two cultures, two life forms, Aturok was a being of both and neither.
     His creation had been no accident. The ancestors were ill-adapted to life on this planet and needed intermediaries to fulfill their purposes. Aturok was one of many they had created to serve them and then abandoned, with the promise of their eventual return. Now, many years later, Aturok still looked to the sky for some kind of sign.
     During his childhood, Aturok learned from the ancestors about their worlds and culture, with special emphasis on their technology, the technology he would use to control the native people and to mine the resources needed by the ancestors.
     The ancestors were believed to be gods by the native people. Aturok and the other hybrids were treated as the children of gods. The native people's creation myth foretold of a time when the gods would descend from the heavens, and the ancestors did nothing to dispel this belief. On the contrary, to ensure their cooperation, the ancestors applied their technology, which the native people considered pure magic, to build stone temples and monuments that reinforced native beliefs.
     When Aturok was of age, he took a native woman as his mate. As every hybrid was male, there was no other choice. But in common with the mule, a cross between a horse and a donkey, the hybrids were sterile and produced no offspring.
     Aturok's first mate was one of a succession of mates he had been paired with over the years. His ancestral genetic heritage gave him tremendous longevity, though not so long as the ancestors who had crossed the vast distances between stars.
     The natives who had been alive when the ancestors arrived were long dead, and the succeeding generations knew of them only through stories, temple ruins, and the persistent presence of the hybrids. Though Aturok and the other hybrids continued to exert control, there were grumblings from the native people and insubordinate questions. They wanted to know when the ancestors would return, and they believed the hybrids knew but would not tell them. If only it were so, thought Aturok, but the ancestors had taken their technology with them when they departed and there was no means for communication. Thus, he watched the night sky.
     Though doubts persisted among the native people, they still admired the hybrids for their knowledge and abilities. With no possible offspring, and with native people incapable of mastery, those advantages would ultimately die out. The native people, in deliberate attempts to prevent this eventuality, took to flattening the heads of their infants, believing that hybrid intelligence was contained within their unique head shapes.
     One of the infants thus affected grew to manhood as a leader of his people. He was confident, as were they, that he was the equal of the hybrids, and he sought to challenge them to prove it. What this leader lacked in hybrid-level intelligence he compensated for with guile and cunning. He would engage the hybrids in games and connivances, which the hybrids would purposely lose to preserve the peace. Instead of gloating over his small victories, the leader would seethe with anger over the knowledge that he was being manipulated. Finally, he called upon his people to rise up against the hybrids and force them to reveal the date of the ancestors' return.
     That event had taken place earlier in the day, as the sun was setting and the light was tinged with red. Now Aturok stood at the shore and awaited his fate. He turned at the sound of approaching footsteps and faced the leader holding a spear aimed at his heart. When will the ancestors return, the leader asked. Aturok gazed calmly at the leader and spoke the words he had come to know as truth: They will not return.
     With an anguished cry, the leader plunged the spear into Aturok's heart. Aturok did not cry out. He dropped to his knees and slid slowly to his side on the sand. With effort, he turned his head for a last look at the Pleiades and then closed his eyes and welcomed the starless darkness.

Aturok and the other murdered hybrids were buried among the stones of the temple ruins in graves befitting the children of gods. The native people abandoned their ancestral lands for new lands, where they could forget the past and resume living as they had before their creation myth had become their reality.