Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/homepage.ez?Who=mysteri

I thought I'd go ahead and post my entry from the contest for the story to go along with the cover image for issue #3. Here's the beginning. I posted the entire story on my member page as an article, as was kindly suggested. It has minor modifications from the original submission, and italicized text didn't come through that way. ---- "Come in; sit down," I said as he stood in the archway. "Good to see you had the sense to keep your helmet on." He even had the faceplate polarized still. "Go ahead, you can take it off now." "Thanks," he replied as he unzipped his flight suit and unfastened his helmet. "I'm frying in here." He brushed the sandy grit off his pants and stamped his boots on the flagstones before stepping onto the intricate inlaid mosaic tiles of my office. "Water?" "Gladly." I stepped around my desk to the dispenser against the wall. His gaze followed me across the room. He had sapphire eyes to match his blond, Caucasian features. The same sapphire eyes I had come to know intimately the last few weeks. "Who is she?" he asked. I knew he was caught by the piercing emerald stare of the Afghan refugee pictured on my wall. "Her name was Sharbat Gula. One of the most recognized faces on Earth about a hundred years ago. Just a refugee made famous by her eyes, fate, and National Geographic." "Offends their sensibilities, doesn't it?" I smiled as I turned to him. So he's a quick study. "Yup, but I haven't had many occasions to have a ruk in here." I handed him the carved stone cup and extended my right hand. "Martin Zagoyen at your service." "James Mitchell. Pleased to meet you." He hesitated briefly and chose to recline on the settee rather than sit. Score one more for Mr. Mitchell. "So James, tell me what you know of the rukai." "Other than the typical propaganda everyone sees on the vid, just the cultural details you've been kind enough to supply. Let's see, generally nomadic but now tending toward urbanism. Hunters turned herders. Alpha male dominance. Aggressive, though enjoying a period of peace. Artistically skilled and intellectually advanced. And obsessed with symmetry. Not what most people expect from a bunch of talking lizards." "I assume you're not like most people. You seem not to have underestimated the rukai in following my advice so far." "I'm a cautious man. Being gutted in the street for showing too much of my face to the wrong ruk sounds unpleasant. It seemed prudent to take your suggestions seriously." "I'm glad to see that you're a sensible man. Not everyone who comes here takes my advice seriously, and that just makes my job all the more difficult. Establishing a working relationship with the rukai is tricky at best. They are certainly our equals. One-on-one, they easily outrank us physically. They are in a golden age intellectually, dimmed only by our own relatively long history of civilization. The rukai excel at mathematics and metallurgy and easily best us in genetic manipulation. You said rightly that they are aggressive. And they have pursued every road to give them an edge in battle or to make better meat animals, whether domestic or feral. "We're just fortunate they don't care much for mechanized transport and never got beyond this content, much less off-planet. If they had been a space-faring race and found Earth first, I doubt the encounter would have been a peaceful one." He nodded in agreement at that. "Are you familiar with the Moors?" I asked. "Lowland bogs? Here? I thought this continent was mostly desert, though I couldn't see much coming in low over the ocean in the dark." "You're right, but I'm talking about the Moorish period in Spain. Earth history." "Can't say I really am." "Islamic invaders we call the Moors swept over the Iberian Peninsula from North Africa. While the rest of Europe groped through the Dark Ages, the Moors experienced their cultural golden age, preserving and extending the knowledge of the civilizations before them. I see a fascinating symmetry between the rukai and the Moors. "There are exceptions, of course. Like the fact that the rukai surprisingly didn't ever develop the concept of zero, like Islamic mathematicians did. But when we introduced it, they grasped it immediately and made the leap to binary computation. But we've helped them along in that area in return for hints in biological design. I hope to help keep this process mutually beneficial. If Earth hadn't seen the darkness of the Crusades and the Inquisition, who knows where our civilization would be today?" "That's all well and good, Martin. But none of that really concerns me. I just want to find Sharon." "But it does concern you, James. You've already shown yourself adept at following cultural protocol for your own benefit. That's what my job is all about. It will help keep you alive here in Maz-ir-Ruk. And it will help us find your sister. Now, do you have what I asked for?" James pulled a data wafer out of an inner pocket of his flight suit and handed it to me. Stepping behind my desk, I quickly copied the information. Then I handed the wafer back, along with a cloth turban and gilded mask. "Keep the disk on you," I instructed. "And leave your helmet here. You'll bake your brains in that thing. We've got an appointment with the sam-alruk." James turned the mask over in his hands a few times, admiring the intricate filigree etched into it. Then he donned his head covering and stepped out into the blazing sun with me. ----- continued at link below