“The air in the ravine is breathable,” Jalisa said.
They dropped past the tops of the trees, and Lucien noticed a third type of pedestrians walking on the blue-skins’ side. These people were perfectly dark and featureless. They looked like walking shadows. They were also more numerous than the Faros, and they trailed behind them in huddled groups, as if imitating the shadows that they appeared to be.
“I wonder who or what those shadows are?” Addy asked, breathing over his shoulder.
Lucien glanced behind him to find her and everyone else crowding the cockpit to peer out the canopy.
“The blue-skins are obviously the rulers,” Tyra said.
Lucien nodded. “They were the ones who contacted us, so I’d say that’s a fair bet.”
“Not just because of that. Look at the buildings on the green-skins’ side of the ravine.”
It was hard to see past the trees now, but Lucien could see that the green-skins’ side was dirty and run-down looking, while the blue-skins’ side was better-maintained and more orderly. Also, the landing pads were on their side.
“Racial discrimination,” Tyra suggested.
“What is that?” Brak asked.
“Another form of slavery,” Tyra said.
“I kill the slavers, and eat out their hearts!” Brak boomed.
“No one’s killing or eating anyone,” Tyra said. “In fact, Brak, you’d better stay with the shuttle.”
He gave no reply as the shuttle touched down.
“Let’s go meet these Faros,” Tyra said.
“Brak is going,” Troo said.
“I thought I made myself clear?” Tyra replied. “The Gor stays.”
“No, I is meaning to say that he is leaving the shuttle.”
“He’s what?” Tyra demanded. “Damn it! Brak! Get back here right now!”
Lucien turned to see Tyra running back to the shuttle airlock. The inner doors were already closing with Brak inside.
“Brak!” Tyra yelled again.
Lucien jumped up from the pilot’s chair and ran with the others to the airlock. The doors finished closing just as Tyra reached them. She banged on them impotently with her hands. “Get back in here right now, or you’ll be tried for treason!”
Brak bared his black teeth at them as he put on his helmet. The doors didn’t cycle back open. Instead, a red light went on beside the control panel and they heard locking bolts sliding between the doors. Then came a hiss of decontamination jets firing.
Tyra pounded the doors with her palms once more. “I never should have allowed that brute to join our team!”
“What does he think he’s going to do? Kill them all?” Addy asked, shaking her head.
Tyra put her ear to the inner doors, listening. “The outer doors just opened… and shut.”
They heard another blast of decon jets hissing, and then a chime sounded and heavy bolts slid aside as the doors unlocked. Tyra waved the airlock open and stormed inside, but Brak was gone.
“Let’s go!” she said.
The others grabbed their helmets from overhead racks in the cabin and then joined her in the airlock. Lucien started back to the cockpit to get his helmet, but Jalisa had already grabbed both his and hers. The air in the ravine was breathable, but it could still contain dangerous pathogens.
“Thanks,” he said, accepting his helmet from her.
“Hurry up!” Tyra ordered. As soon as they were all in the airlock, she cycled it, and the inner doors slid shut. The lights inside dimmed to a bloody red and a warning blat reminded them to put on their helmets before decontamination.
Lucien slid his helmet on and sealed it around his neck. A few seconds later decon jets blasted them from all sides, misting the air with glittering clouds of moisture. Then the crimson lights snapped off, and the outer doors parted, revealing a blue-skinned alien waiting for them on the landing pad.
This Faro looked identical to the one they’d spoken with over the comms, but now he wore flowing gray robes and a strange, forked headpiece made of luminous gold. The forks rose vertically from his forehead, and black tufts of coarse black hair adorned the tip of each of the three tines. A crown? Lucien wondered.
Other luminous gold accoutrements adorned the being’s attire—an arm band, greaves, sharp golden claws for fingernails, and a golden goatee with a slightly curling tip. He also had a sword sheathed on his back.
Lucien wondered how much of that attire was ornamental, and how much of it served a useful purpose. The Faro’s clothes seemed archaic in the context of his people’s obviously advanced technology.
Behind the alien, a group of shadow people lay scattered across the landing pad, unmoving, in an awkward tangle of limbs that suggested broken bones.
Lucien grimaced, wondering if that was Brak’s doing. The Gor was nowhere to be seen.
Tyra walked down the landing ramp first, reading the situation at a glance. “I’m very sorry for the behavior of my crew mate,” she said. “He will be severely punished once we find him. Are they… dead?” she asked, staring at the shadow people.
The blue-skinned alien regarded them stonily. Its glowing blue eyes bored into theirs. Abruptly he smiled. “Don’t worry, they are only slaves, but yes, Brak will have to be punished.”
So my name’s not the only one he knows, Lucien thought.
“I understand if you feel the need to punish him yourselves,” Tyra said slowly, stopping a few feet in front of the alien. “But if possible, I would prefer that you allowed us to administer our own sanctions.”
“Forget about Brak. Join me for a walk in the gardens. We have much to discuss.”
Tyra hesitated before picking her way past the shadow people to join the alien. Lucien followed, noting that the shadow beings were completely featureless. Their clothes, if that’s what they wore to give them their appearance, weren’t clinging to them as a jumpsuit would, but flowing and shapeless. It was impossible to see who or what they were.
“Don’t fall behind,” the Faro intoned in his silken voice. “I wouldn’t want anyone to get lost.” The alien chuckled lightly, and Lucien shivered.
Chapter 17
Lucien walked next to Tyra while she walked beside the alien with his name. If the gold crown on that alien’s head was anything to go by, he might be the king of the Faros. King Faro, Lucien decided.
They passed other blue-skinned Faros on the street, each with their own cadre of shadow people, but none of them had glowing eyes like the one leading them through the ravine.
“You asked how I know so much about you,” King Faro said.
Tyra nodded, and Lucien watched the alien carefully. A group of other Faros walked by, chatting amongst themselves in an alien language that Lucien didn’t recognize. Clearly Versal wasn’t their native tongue, but this alien seemed to speak it fluently.
King Faro went on, “Besides your considerable quantum comms pollution of the universe, which makes for easy eavesdropping, our species have a long history together.”
Tyra regarded the alien curiously. “How’s that?”
“We’re all genetically related to the Etherians. The Faros were created by Etherus just as humans were, but unlike you, we weren’t created to give rebellious Etherians a taste of freedom. We were immortal from the start, and our job was to keep the peace in the universe. We were the Army of Etheria. Those of us with blue skins were what you would call the officers, while the green-skinned Faros were the enlisted.”
“From the way you’re speaking in the past tense, I assume something must have happened to change the status quo,” Tyra said.
The alien’s lip curled in a sneer. “Yes. Something. It began peacefully enough. We had a vote in Etheria: should the universe be free, or should it be rigidly ordered and organized into Etherus’s notion of paradise?
“Can you imagine? Trillions upon trillions of star systems with billions of sentient species, and all of them the same, all of them incapable of doing anything interesting! We were peaceke
epers and soldiers in a universe where peace was to be its default setting. We were redundant!”
Lucien had to admit King Faro had a point there. “So why not re-assign the Faros to a different role?” he asked. “In fact, why create your people at all if the universe was supposed to be a peaceful paradise?”
King Faro glanced at him. “We were supposed to be explorers more than anything, and even a peaceful universe has some degree of conflict. We were to mediate those disputes.”
“I see,” Tyra said. “But you envisioned a universe with more… chaos?”
“Chaos is the result of true freedom, and all sentient beings crave freedom, even if they have never experienced it. They might not like it when they make bad choices and they get hurt, but they all like the thrill of danger and chaos.”
“So what happened with the vote?” Tyra asked.
“You don’t know?”
“We know what Etherus told us about the Great War and the rebellion, about the rebels being given human bodies… but that’s it.”
“Ah, but nothing about the Faros? Typical Etherus, only sharing things on a need-to-know basis. Of course, he’s the one that gets to decide who needs to know what.
“As you may have guessed, the Faros wanted a free universe, but we weren’t allowed to vote. The Etherians voted, and the majority decided in favor of Etherus’s boring, so-called paradise. That was to be the end of it.” King Faro grinned. “Or so they thought. The Faros might not have had a vote, but Etherus was wrong to assume that meant we didn’t have a voice. We injected some welcome chaos into Etheria.”
“You mean you started a war,” Tyra said. “The Great War?”
“It wasn’t just great, it was magnificent.” The alien licked his lips with a black tongue. “The streets flowed with blood.”
“That doesn’t sound magnificent,” Lucien said.
King Faro looked straight at him, his blue eyes bright and intense. “The Etherians are fools. Few will admit it, except perhaps for you humans, but they secretly reveled in the chaos. They’d never felt so alive as when death was knocking at their door. Yes, we killed a few of them, but Etherus resurrected every last one of them. So where was the harm in having a little fun? No harm. Just some welcome excitement after eons of tedium.
“But Etherus didn’t see it that way. When the dust settled, he threw us out of Etheria, and he marooned the Etherians who’d fought with us on Noctune and various other worlds in the ruins of the galaxy that used to be called Etheria. Eventually they evolved into what you called Gors and Sythians.
“After the war, he moved his faithful people to another galaxy in the center of the universe, and all of the Etherians who’d voted in favor of freedom, whether they’d fought with us or not, were linked to human bodies to give them a taste of the freedom they’d voted for. But it seems like that taste wasn’t enough, because here you are, still human… still tasting.” King Faro grinned and his black tongue flicked out over his lips once more. “Delicious, isn’t it?”
Lucien suppressed a shiver.
“He took his faithful people to the center of the universe?” Tyra asked. “So there is a center?”
“And an edge, or a rim, yes. I’m surprised you haven’t already figured that out. Why do you think you can’t reach Etheria, why it remains ever out of your grasp?”
Tyra was speechless.
“Now you know,” the alien said. “Have I answered your questions?”
“You mentioned a treaty to do with the red line…” Tyra said.
“Yes, I won’t hold you to that, since you didn’t come here on Etherus’s authority. The treaty was designed to give humans a relatively safe playground, to put a limit on the chaos.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Tyra replied.
“The Faros were exiled beyond the red line. Humans, Gors, and the now-extinct Sythians were left inside of it, along with a vast host of other species that evolved more naturally, without any genetic relation to the Etherians. Its all free and chaotic, just as we dreamed it could be, but Etherus reserves the right to intervene inside of the red line. Beyond it, the Faros are in charge.”
Lucien smiled. By now Tyra had to be feeling chagrined. This alien was independently verifying everything Etherus had told them—with a few previously-unknown details about the Faros.
“What does that mean exactly—in charge?” Tyra asked, glancing around at the shadow-people trailing meekly behind all of the blue-skinned Faros.
King Faro stopped walking and turned to face her. The rest of the crew were watching the alien warily. Garek especially. He looked terrified.
“You’re afraid that we are the bad guys in all of this?” King Faro gave them a charming smile. “I’m not a blood-thirsty barbarian. You need to remember that when we started the Great War in Etheria, we knew that the Etherians were impossible to actually kill. It was just a game.”
Tyra looked as skeptical as Lucien felt. “Who are the spiders we saw in the holograms before coming here? And who are these shadow people walking behind the Faros? You said they were slaves. How can you condone slavery, yet claim to value freedom?”
Lucien felt a surge of respect for Tyra to see the way she was staring down this alien warlord, heedless of the potential consequences. Clearly her skepticism wasn’t reserved solely for Etherus. She was an even-handed cynic.
King Faro’s smile faded. “You are remarkably closed-minded for a faithless scientist. Having a change of heart? Perhaps you’d like to go running back to Etherus, to hide behind your red line in a boring universe. That’s what it will become, you know. What do you think the Paragons are? They’re the new Faros. And the so-called Etherian Empire?” King Faro sneered. “He’s doing it again, imposing his will and his boring notions of paradise. Right now it looks like a good idea, but just wait. Wait until it all becomes like Etheria, an unending, perfectly predictable kingdom of tedium. He’s boiling you all in it, incrementing the tedium so slowly that you don’t even notice.
“You think because we believe that chaos and freedom are desirable that we are all savages? We have rules to live by, and laws that govern us, just as you do.”
“You haven’t answered my question about slavery,” Tyra said.
“If you create something, are you not entitled to do with it as you please? The potter can do what he likes with his clay.”
“Are you saying that you or your people created your slaves?”
King Faro smiled. “I did, yes.”
Tyra blinked. “Let me see if I have all of this figured out. You’re telling us that Etherus really is God—”
“That depends how you define god. You might also call me god.”
Tyra cocked her head at that. “How so?”
King Faro’s smile became enigmatic. “Please continue your summary.”
Tyra hesitated, and Lucien peripherally noted that they were drawing a crowd of blue-skinned Faros and their shadowy entourages.
“All right…” Tyra said slowly. “You’ve validated everything Etherus has ever said to us, implied his deity, and now also your own, and you’ve tried to convince us that chaos is a good thing, because without it we would find life bland and uninteresting.”
“A succinct summary,” King Faro said.
“I’ll agree that the chaos which freedom brings can be good in limited doses, but the fact remains that slavery is in direct conflict with your stated ideal of freedom.”
Lucien became aware of the crowd once more. They shuffled their feet and murmured to each other in their alien language. He wished he knew what they were saying.
King Faro just went on smiling at them. “Freedom and power are synonymous. Having power gives us the freedom to do as we like. What do you think your capitalist monetary system is? Just another form of slavery. It’s a system of funneling riches—or power—into the hands of a few people at the top of the food chain. Start throwing money around and watch how people trip over each other to do your every whim.” King Faro laughed
and licked his lips. “Power is the most delicious fruit! You might say that it is the forbidden fruit.”
Tyra stared at the alien in shock, speechless. “Slavery and capitalism are not the same at all. Capitalism gives everyone an equal chance to succeed. It gives people hope and a way out. There is no way out of slavery.”
“Hope and a way out? Tell that to the poor. Ask them how much hope they have, and where they’ve found a way out. At least our system doesn’t make empty promises, and we treat our slaves well. They never have to worry about suffering because they can’t make a living for themselves.”
By this point the crowd had completely encircled them, blocking any possible route back to their shuttle.
Lucien took Tyra’s arm and began backing away from the alien. “Thank you for taking the time to explain all of that to us…” he said, “but we need to go.”
Tyra nodded stiffly, and looked away from King Faro. Finally, she noticed the crowd gathered around them.
“Where are you going?” King Faro asked.
“Back to our ship,” Lucien replied.
“You’re not going anywhere. You’re all now slaves of the Farosien Empire.”
Chapter 18
“Slaves?” Tyra echoed, more indignant than ever. “Are you threatening us?”
“No, I’m merely stating a fact,” the alien said.
“You’d need an army to stop us from leaving,” she said.
Lucien glanced around at the gathered crowd of Faros. “What do you think they are?” he whispered.
Tyra glanced at him, then back to the alien. “I don’t see them holding any weapons, or wearing any armor. But we, on the other hand, are all heavily armed and armored.”
King Faro looked amused. “What makes you think I need an army to detain you? I’m perfectly capable of doing that myself.”
“With that little dagger on your back?” Tyra challenged.
Lucien frowned, wondering the same thing. But still, how much did they know about these Faros? If they were a race of ancient warriors who’d been quantum-jumping around the universe since before humans had figured out how to make fire, maybe it would be better not to goad them. Lucien was about to say as much to Tyra when the alien drew its “dagger.” The blade looked like glass, transparent and shimmering with some kind of energy field.
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