“Death final. Not dead. Not final.” The Mokari said, proving it could finally understand him—but obviously only in the most literal sense. “What you?” it asked.
Lucien struggled with the clipped phrases of the Mokari. Clearly universal translators weren’t a panacea for language barriers.
“What am I?” he suggested.
The Mokari chittered. “Yes. What you?”
“I’m...” Lucien trailed off, noting that his holoskin was still active. He touched a hand to each of the glowing golden bands on his arms to deactivate the holoskin, and his true human features re-appeared.
The Mokari screeched and glanced sharply at Addy. “False skins. Evil Faro magic. Why use? Not Faro.”
Suddenly Lucien found himself wondering the same thing. After the dubious welcome they’d received while disguised as Faros, it seemed like they’d have had better luck greeting the Mokari as humans to start with. He glanced at Katawa, who lifted the top of his shadow robe to reveal his over-sized gray head.
The Mokari took a quick step back, and almost fell off the ramp. It had to flap its wings to regain its balance.
“Gray god!” it chittered, bowing its head and kneeling before Katawa.
Lucien glared at Katawa. “You almost got us killed for nothing! The Mokari obviously hate the Faros, but not other aliens, and they do recognize your species.”
The little gray alien blinked its giant eyes at him. “I was mistaken. I apologize.”
The Mokari raised its nightmarish head and snapped its jaws at Lucien, glaring at him with one red eye. “Respect gray god. Or death.”
Lucien scowled. “Of course.” He turned back to Katawa and mimicked the Mokari’s submissive posture, all the while fuming inside.
“How do you know about us—the gray gods?” Katawa asked.
“Many songs.”
“Your songs about us are very old, some as old as ten thousand years,” Katawa objected. “You should have forgotten by now.”
“Some songs old. Some songs new. Songs still sung. Gray gods recent. Hard forget.”
Katawa nodded and turned to Lucien. “My people were here recently. That explains why I heard of a Mokari legend about us that is only one hundred and sixty years old. The implication is that my people stayed here in the Gakol System for a very long time.”
“If that’s true,” Lucien said, “and the Grays left because the Faros found them here, then the Faros must know these Mokari songs, too, and that means they’ve already followed them to wherever they lead.”
Katawa turned back to the Mokari. “Have the Faros heard your songs?”
“Not worthy listen. Why gray god return Mokar?” The Mokari asked, its head canting from side to side.
“I returned to hear your songs about the gray gods, and of the one who flew with them among the stars.”
The Mokari tossed its head. “You seek others like you.”
“Yes,” Katawa replied.
“Not see Gray Gods for many suns.”
“What does that mean? Many suns?” Addy asked.
“Many years,” Katawa replied. Nodding to the Mokari, he asked, “What is your sound?”
The Mokari threw back its head, and uttered a loud cry. Lucien guessed that the question was analogous to what is your name?
The Mokari’s sound was impossible for him to repeat exactly, but Katawa gave a good approximation. “Aakee?”
The Mokari canted its head to one side and nodded once.
“Can you help us, Aakee?” Lucien asked.
The Mokari glared at him for an uncomfortably long second, then turned back to Katawa. “Come gray god. We sing. You listen. We eat. Our honor you stay.”
Katawa smiled. “My honor to listen,” he replied.
Aakee turned and walked down the ramp, back to the waiting ranks of his fellows. Katawa followed, and the rest of them trailed a few steps behind. The Mokari parted for them as they approached. Garek deactivated his holoskin to avoid ruffling their feathers—so to speak—and Brak lifted the top of his robe to reveal his skull-shaped head. The Mokari saw Brak for the first time and screeched at him. He roared back, and they spread their wings in agitation. They watched him, red eyes glaring and heads cocking every which way.
Brak bared his black teeth in a grin. “I like these Mokari,” he said. “They want to eat me, and I want to eat them. It is good to be among like-minded beings.”
Lucien frowned. “If you say so.”
Garek glanced at them. Between his bald head and scarred face he looked fearsome enough that he seemed to fit right in with the Mokari’s eat-or-be-eaten culture. “We should go back for our exosuits,” he said in a low voice.
“And leave Katawa alone with the Mokari?” Addy asked.
“He seems to be able to handle himself,” Garek replied. “They think he’s a god. They’re not going to eat him. We’ll catch up.”
“Your suits will anger the Mokari and make them more likely to attack you,” Katawa said. “False skins, remember? Stay. They will not harm you as long as you are with me.”
“For someone who’s never been here before, you seem pretty confident of what to expect,” Garek replied.
“I have met their people before, on other worlds. One of them shared the same master with me. He was an assassin. I was a doctor. We used to share meals together. That is how I first heard of their legends and songs.”
“A killer and a healer became friends,” Garek said. “Sounds like the proverbial lion and the lamb to me.”
“The what?” Addy asked.
“Am I the only one who’s read the Etherian Codices?”
“If we were faithful enough to do that, we wouldn’t have left the Etherian Empire in the first place,” Addy replied.
“Katawa, what exactly do the Mokari legends say about you?” Lucien asked, while keeping an eye on the unending lines of Mokari to either side of them. Aakee seemed in no hurry to get wherever he was going. They walked past one mud-grass mound after another, heading for one of the larger mounds on the plateau.
“They say that we are the creators of their world, that we created the Mokari suns and the stars, and that we control fire, wind, and rain.”
Garek snorted. “I wonder how they got that impression.”
Katawa glanced at him. “Legend says that when we came here with the Etherian Fleet, we made the stars fall. Mokar still bears the scars of that incident. Since then, the Mokari have a healthy respect for us.”
“Falling stars, huh?” Garek mused. “I bet that was just—”
“Let’s talk about it later,” Lucien said, cutting Garek off before he could poke a hole in the Mokaris’ beliefs. “We came to listen to what the Mokari have to say.”
“Yeah...” Garek nodded, while watching the serried ranks of Mokari to either side of them. “Point taken.”
They could all guess what falling stars meant. There had been a battle and the debris had rained down over Mokar—or maybe one of the Etherian ships had experienced a critical failure after reaching orbit that resulted in it falling from the sky and breaking up in the atmosphere. Whatever the case, the devastation had obviously been significant enough to trigger Mokari superstitions.
Later on, taking one or more of the Mokari on board the Etherian ships had probably only reinforced their ideas about the Grays’ deity. If the Grays had arrived on Earth and taken primitive humans into space, whole religions would have sprung up around them, too.
Aakee reached the mud-grass mound that was their destination and disappeared through a large circular opening near the ground. More circular openings pocked the outside of the mound at various heights for windows or possibly higher-level entrances.
They passed inside the mound and found the floor padded with dried grass. The structure was huge. Dozens of mud-grass chairs adorned the space, each of them piled high with dried grass. Aakee went to sit on one of them. He folded his legs and wings, seeming to shrink into himself as he settled into the chair.
Mokari came
streaming in on all sides—some swooping in through circular holes in the dome-shaped ceiling, others walking in at ground level. The other Mokari joined Aakee, quickly occupying all of the empty chairs. Katawa went to what was roughly the center of the room, and took a seat in one of the few remaining chairs, leaving Lucien and the others to stand around him. Katawa glanced their way and gestured for them to sit.
Lucien did as he was told, and promptly winced as his bruised ribs reminded him they were there. Addy and Garek sat on either side of him, but Brak remained standing, despite a scathing look from Katawa.
A few moments later, the Mokari began to sing. It started with just one of them raising its head to the ceiling and exhaling with a sound like a flute. Then another joined in, and another, followed by a dozen more. Their voices rose and fell in perfect, melodic harmony.
To Lucien’s surprise, his translator began assembling lyrics in his brain, and a kind of story emerged.
Mokar is all.
One nest. One people. One sky.
Sky is torn.
Stars fall and fires burn.
Life is lost and ashes fly.
Death and sadness.
Gods appear from sky. Gray as smoke. Tiny.
Mokari lifted up, higher than sky.
Sky turns black.
Stars bright and many.
Mokar small.
Mokar gone.
New nests. New peoples. New skies.
Everything different.
All is new.
Mokari see.
Mokari know.
Mokar not all.
Gray gods return.
Death no more.
Life forever.
Life for all.
Death no more.
Life forever.
Life for all.
The song went on, speaking about how great and wonderful the gray gods were.
“What the is all that krak supposed to mean?” Garek muttered.
Lucien shook his head. “I can’t make sense of it.”
“I can,” Addy said.
Both of them turned to her.
“Well—I think I can,” Addy said. “They’re talking about how the Mokari thought their world was the only one, and they thought their people were the only people. Then the Grays came, raining fire on their world—debris maybe?”
Lucien nodded.
Addy went on, “A bunch of them died. Then one or more of them got to ride in the Grays’ spaceships. They went up to space, above the sky, and traveled to new nests. They got to see new skies and meet new peoples. Then they returned to Mokar and the Grays made all of the Mokari immortal—that’s what the chorus means: death no more, life forever, life for all.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Lucien said. “If you’re right, then the Mokari weren’t always immortals. I bet that’s even news to Katawa.”
“I don’t see how any of this helps us,” Garek said, shaking his head. “Katawa basically told us all of this already, and he didn’t need to spend half an hour singing about it,” he said, jerking his chin at the alien a cappella group. They were busy still singing the Grays’ praises.
“Maybe we’ll get some kind of clue if we keep listening,” Addy said.
“Yeah, or we’ll go deaf,” Garek replied, wincing at the growing volume of the Mokari’s voices.
They were starting to sound shrill.
Lucien gave his attention to the lyrics once more, hoping Addy was right. They were singing something about magical keys and blue devils, which Lucien could only assume were the Faros.
He listened for a while longer, then turned to Addy. “Translation?”
“They’re talking about how the Grays suddenly left them after the blue devils came, but they left a... magical key to open a doorway to a new nest—another world. The key was hidden in the underworld to keep it safe. The Mokari were supposed to find it after the blue devils left....”
Addy stopped to listen some more, then continued with her summary, “The key was supposed to open the doorway to bring the Grays back, but none of the Mokari who went into the underworld to find it returned, and the key was never found. They say that Death found them, and the underworld is where Death went after the Gray Gods sent it away.”
“So all we have to do is go into their underworld and find this key?” Lucien asked. “I’m assuming their underworld must be a physical place. Maybe a network of underground caves or caverns?”
“Must be,” Addy said.
“So why haven’t the Faros gone down there themselves and found the key?” Lucien asked.
“Who says they haven’t?” Garek asked. “That magical key probably leads the way to a quantum junction that goes to whatever planet the Grays went to next, but Katawa told us that the Grays became slaves of the Faros, so the Faros obviously found them there.”
Lucien frowned. “I guess so.”
“Like I said, this trail is colder than space,” Garek said.
The songs ended, and several Mokari came in carrying shadowy, foul-smelling burdens. One after another they dropped their burdens in the center of the room, piling them high. A sound like swarms of flies buzzing filled the silence, and one of the Mokari chittered: “Eat!”
At that, the Mokari bounded out of their chairs and fell upon the shadowy pile with enthusiastic chittering and screeching. Wet tearing noises followed.
The foul smell grew fouler, and Lucien’s guts clenched. The smell was so bad that he grew dizzy and had to stumble outside before he added to the stench with the contents of his stomach.
Addy burst out after him. “Whew!” She fell on her hands and knees outside, gasping for air. Then her body heaved, and she did throw up. Lucien stumbled over to hold her hair—but then he remembered she didn’t have any.
It was dark outside, and the air was cooler now. The warmer sun had sunk below the horizon, while the more distant one still hung high overhead, a dim orange eye, casting everything in a flat, reddish gloom. It was hard to see more than a few dozen meters, and only a handful of stars were visible. Mokar’s twilight had begun.
Lucien heard feet trampling the grassy floor of the Mokari dwelling, and he turned to see Garek and Katawa emerge from one of the circular doorways.
“Well?” Lucien asked, his eyes on Katawa. “You ready to go chasing the next rumor?”
“Not until we go to the underworld and find the key,” Katawa said.
Addy s and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “You didn’t hear us talking in there? The Faros must have already found the key. How else did they find and enslave your people?”
“You do not understand—the key leads to the lost fleet, not to my people. My people were found and enslaved, but the fleet was never found. Only the caretaker knew where it was hidden, and he has made himself to forget.”
“How do you know that?” Addy asked.
“Because I am the caretaker.”
Lucien blinked in shock. “You?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you really frekked yourself over,” Garek said.
“That is anatomically impossible,” Katawa replied, his huge eyes blinking slowly.
“He means all of your precautions have made your life difficult,” Addy said.
“Oh. Yes. I thought you knew this.”
“I do... I was re-stating the problem for effect,” Garek said.
“Do humans all waste their air by repeating what is already known? Perhaps I am not the only one who has a problem remembering things.”
Garek’s eyes narrowed to slits, and he looked away. Lucien followed his gaze, out over the dark emerald river swishing through the Mokari village, past the black cliffs, and out to the hazy red sky.
“Come, we must rest,” Katawa said. “The Mokari will not take us to the underworld until morning.”
“Why not?” Addy asked. “Is it far from here?”
“Yes, but that is not why. Twilight is dangerous on Mokar, even for the Mokari. They live in the mountains for good reason
.” Katawa left them on that note, heading back to the Specter.
“How do you know all of that if you’ve never been here?” Garek called after him, suspicious as ever.
“It is in the ship’s databanks!” Katawa called back, his voice muffled by the swishing of the river.
“You still don’t trust him,” Lucien said.
“I trust him about as far as I can fly by flapping my arms,” Garek replied, and started after the little alien.
Lucien turned to Addy. “Where’s Brak?”
She looked around. “I don’t know... Brak?” she called.
A moment later he emerged from the Mokari’s dwelling, rank with the smell of raw, gamy meat. Flies, or the Mokari equivalent, buzzed around him while he munched on a giant leg or arm of something.
“Uck!” Addy said as he stopped beside them. “I’ll see you back in our quarters, Lucien,” she said, and took off at a run.
“What did I say about sampling the local cuisine?” Lucien asked.
The leg fell dramatically from Brak’s mouth. “I could not resist. The smell was too much.”
“You can say that again,” Lucien said.
Brak grinned and held the leg out to him. “Try some. It is like nothing you’ve ever tasted.”
Lucien’s guts clenched in warning. “I’ll pass,” he said. He was starting to feel dizzy again. “I need to go,” he managed, and then turned and ran after Addy. To his horror, Brak came running up beside him, still munching.
“Throw that thing away!”
Brak grunted. “Fine.”
Something wet and noxious hit Lucien in the side of the head, almost knocking him over. “The frek...!”
“You say to throw it away,” Brak replied.
“Not at me!” His cheek itched maddeningly where the meat had hit him. He scratched it, and his fingers came away sticky and smelling like rotten krak.
Lucien’s head spun with the smell, and there was no getting away from it now. It was stuck to him. “You did that on purpose!” he accused, breathing hard through his mouth.
“Maybe, yes,” Brak admitted, and let loose a booming laugh.
“You’d better watch your back,” Lucien warned.
“I will watch my front, also,” Brak replied, and laughed again.
Chapter 25
Dark Space Universe (Books 1-3): The Third Dark Space Trilogy (Dark Space Trilogies) Page 42