“But we still don’t even know why they crashed!” Cordar said, waving his hands in the air. “What if somehow the people of this planet knocked them out of the sky? And now you want to go among them?”
“Cordar,” she said. “Don’t be ridiculous. You know as well as I do that these people have nothing that could knock a rangership from orbit. You’re looking for excuses to keep me here, to keep me safe, but I’m the best qualified among us, and you know it.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and exhaled in a huff. “Then I’m coming with you,” he said. “I won’t let you go alone.”
Neka laughed and touched her hand to his pale cheek. “Oh Cordar,” she said. “You couldn’t be more conspicuous if you walked into their royal gardens and tried to plant one of your purple Forsaran ferns. I am darker-skinned than most of these people, but not so much that there won’t be others like me. Your pale skin would make you a magnet for attention.”
“He’s right, though,” I said. “I don’t feel good about sending you alone.”
“Your size would make you stand out just as much as Cordar’s skin,” she said.
“What about Sid?” Cordar said.
I shook my head. “We need him here with Reacher.”
“What then?” Neka said.
“I know we can’t shrink me down to size, but maybe there is something we can do about Cordar’s skin. Adjet?”
“Right,” she said, taking her cue. “As the palest member of our motley team, I make Cordar look like he was born on a planet with three suns.”
Cordar barked with laughter at that. Adjet flashed him her winning smile.
“Even the single sun here on Eaiph is dangerously bright for me,” she continued, “which is why I came up with this.”
She held up a light wand in her right hand and stuck out her left forearm. She turned on the wand and passed its light over her forearm, demonstrating to the rest of the crew what she had already shown to me.
Cordar’s eyes went wide and his jaw hung open.
Xayes hurried toward her, leaning close to inspect her skin with his modified eyes. “My grandfather-”
“Graxes Ben Or,” Adjet said.
He looked up at her in surprise.
“This is based on his work. I wanted to wait to show you and Xander until I had it perfected, but pausha asked me to bring it to this meeting.”
Xander came and stood next to his brother. “Remarkable. Grandfather would be impressed. But, as you said, this is focused on UV protection, and your skin looks more purple than brown. That doesn’t really solve the problem of helping Cordar to blend in.”
“You’re right. It’s not camouflage. But the principles are the same. I am sure we can get it there.”
“Can you control it at will?” Xayes asked, his eyes flashing with excitement.
“Not yet. But I’m working on that too.”
“Are there any risks?” Neka asked.
Before Adjet could respond, Cordar jumped in. “I don’t care what the risks are. I’ll do it.”
Adjet saw the concern in Neka’s face. “Don’t worry,” she said. “The risks are minimal. The twins will help me finish what their grandfather started, and when we are ready, you and Cordar will walk among the people of Eaiph without fear.”
19 The Sagain
“The Sagain call it Lunnana-sin,” Neka told me, pointing up at the moon. “The great eye of the Architect who first built the world.”
I raised my eyebrows at the word Architect. Neka nodded and said, “I know. A strange coincidence. But it is the closest translation.”
Neka’s three months had turned into more than six, and in that time, she and Cordar had learned much about these people of Eaiph who called themselves the Sagain, who carried the genetic imprints of Forsara in their blood.
“Maybe it is not a coincidence,” I said.
“Maybe not.”
Dawn was approaching. We were sitting outside, on the shore of Manderlas, watching the solitary moon climb in a high arc, rising above the inland mountains, a slim crescent shining pale yellow with the reflected light of Soth Ra.
Neka pointed at the last remaining star in the morning sky, “That is Nindaranna. Daughter of Lunnana. They revere her as a goddess of birth and death because she wanders the sky in the morning, and again in the evening, a harbinger of the dawn and the darkness.”
“Nindaranna,” I said, feeling the word on my tongue.
“You’ll get there,” she said, smiling at my pronunciation.
“Thanks, Nekadrumon,” I said, looking down at her and raising my left eyebrow.
She laughed. “I like the sound of that,” she said. “Did you know that Viziadrumon asked me to be his amanuensis for a time? You also apprenticed with him, yes?”
“I did. Thanks to Saiara. I wouldn’t be here without their faith in me. It’s no surprise he took you on though. You’ve always been a teacher’s darling.”
“Hey!” She threw a fistful of sand at me.
I nonchalantly brushed the sand from my torso. “The twins have been busy while you and Cordar were gone, little darling,” I said, affecting a professorial tone.
She scowled. I pretended not to notice. “They have been working with Reacher to chart the skies. As you can probably tell from the quality of its light, Nindaranna is not actually a star,” I said, doing a better job with the planet’s name this time. “It is, for the majority of its orbit, the closest planet to ours. It shines so bright because it is encased in thick clouds of sulfuric acid and carbon dioxide. It is a blazing hothouse of a world.”
“Oh great and wise teacher,” she said with irony, “I am so very grateful for your illuminating lesson. But actually,” she pretended to pick some sand off her tunic, “Xander already told me all of this, so maybe you need to work a little harder to keep up.”
She looked up at me, victory in her eyes. We both broke into laughter.
“Nindaranna sounds like the Province of the Damned,” she said, after we had both settled down.
“It does, doesn’t it? Thank Eledar that the old beliefs about the afterlife are just fairytales and superstitions now. The universe can be terrifying enough without thinking that we might end up somewhere worse when we die.”
She sliced the air with her hand, palm towards the sand. “That may be true for us, but it isn’t for the Sagain. Xander told me about another planet; the one the Sagain call Ne-uru-gal.”
“Ne-uru-gal?”
“The red planet.”
“Ah. Why do they call it Ne-uru-gal?”
“He is the lord of their underworld, wandering the night sky. He watches over every living being, and at the moment of your death, he is there to meet you. If you prove worthy, he lets you pass into the Quiet Lands. If not, he sends you through the Fiery Gates, down to the underworld… Very few are allowed to pass into the Quiet Lands.”
“That sounds like an awful job. He must be in a perpetually foul mood.”
Neka chuckled. “No doubt.”
“But our initial readings actually indicate that Ne-uru-gal is not nearly so bad as Nindaranna. The planet is essentially a vast desert. With some intensive terraforming, it could actually be made habitable. But it’s hardly worth the effort when we are here on Eaiph.”
She nodded. “This land is Yeshept,” she said, using the word from the old tongue of Eledar. “A place of great and sacred gifts. The twin rivers feed the soil, life flowing from the mountains in the north, down through lands of Kkad, to Sagamer in the south, where the waters come together at the warm, inland sea.”
“And we’re doing everything we can to unlock those gifts,” I said. “But I can’t help coming back again and again to the same questions: Who are the people of this planet? Where do they come from? If Saiara and her team had been successful, we would see some sign. But you and Cord have found nothing.”
She shook her head. “No. We haven’t. The creation myth of Lunnana-sin, the eye of the Architect, is provocative, bu
t I have found little else to validate it as any more than an interesting coincidence.”
I sighed.
“But that doesn’t mean we won’t find something, Orenpausha. It’s been more than four hundred years since the first ship crashed here on Eaiph. That is a long time, even for us, with our gift of longlife. If there were survivors from the crash, who knows how far afield they traveled in those centuries? They may have long ago left the Sagain behind.”
“I am grateful for your optimism, Neka. But you’ve learned their language, and you’ve broken bread with them. You’ve read their histories, and you’ve seen their art. There would be some sort of trace if they came here, wouldn’t there? Where else can you look?”
“You’ve much to learn about understanding other cultures, pausha. This is barely a beginning,” she said. “Let me go deeper. There is still so much we don’t know about these peoples. They are so remarkable.
“They build from the mud of the earth, packing it into hard bricks, baked and hardened in the sun. Then they use reeds and weeds, rolled and bound together, to fill in the gaps. It would sound laughable if what they built with these simple materials was not so impressive. You have seen the atmospheric images of the Zigguarat en Sur?”
I nodded.
“The staircase to the heavens,” she said. “They say it is the place where Lunnana-sin stepped down to sow his seeds amongst the Sagain, and they built their greatest city, the city of Sur, from that spot.
“On the longest day of each year, the orbit of the moon is in perfect alignment with the windows on the far side of the temple. And on those rare occasions when the moon is full on that longest of days, it is a most auspicious moment for the Sagain. The last time it happened, twenty-two years ago by their calendar, it coincided with the birth of the son of their king.”
I looked up again at the morningstar, Nindaranna. It had climbed into view above the mountains just a few minutes after the moon, the eye of Lunnana-sin, bright and steady. I imagined an invisible thread running from the bottom tip of the crescent moon down to the planet, pulling it along in its orbit. It was a simplistic idea, but it occurred to me that this was how every myth is born, stories and fantasies filling in the gaps between theories and knowledge.
I looked back at Neka. “You should ask Xander about Nindaranna’s path through our skies. If you imagine the sky as a two-dimensional surface, the orbit of the planet forms a beautiful, symmetrical pattern above us.”
“I love how the twins drive each other forward in their pursuit of knowledge,” she said. “Their command of the esoteric enriches us all.”
She smiled and looked down at the ground like she was searching for something. After a few quiet moments, she said, “It is difficult to put into words. The myths and religion of these people are woven together in a complex, nuanced fashion. Their stories are often filled with contradictions. For instance, Nindaranna is revered for her life-giving powers, providing blessings of fertility. Yet she is also a goddess of war, bringing darkness and death.
“The stories about her are beautiful, and highly imaginative, but on the face of it, they seem almost childish in their lack of consistency. In spite of that, I am starting to understand how these seeming contradictions point towards a deep wisdom about the nature of existence. The dark and the light live so close together for the Sagain. Neither one is better or worse. Neither one is good or bad. They are inseparable, blended together, present in every aspect of the universe.
“All of this is evident in the way they live. They are proud of their lineage as warriors, and they claim a vile right as victors to enslave those they conquer. Yet they’ve welcomed me and Cordar, strangers from a very distant land, with hospitality and curiosity, instead of suspicion and fear.
“They thrive off of the twin rivers that frame the borders of their land, but they build towers to the immortal gods out of mud in the middle of the desert, towers they know must one day surely crumble.
“They do not treat women as full equals to men in daily life, yet they worship Nindaranna as one of their greatest deities. And I have read the legends of En Kug-Bau, keeper of the sacred hearth, a woman who ‘bent the swords of Elam,’ and rose to become the queen of the Sagain for a thousand years.”
“A thousand years? That sounds like longlife to me!”
She smiled. “Their ancient kings and queens are revered more as gods than human. The line between history and myth is shrouded. Perhaps, when one ruler died, the next rose to take her name, and so ruled for many generations. Or perhaps it is just a story, elaborated and exaggerated over many lifetimes, until the fabric of their dreams is indivisible from the truth.”
Nindaranna was disappearing in the ambient light of the brightening sky, hints of purple and orange kissing the clouds, and the sliver of the crescent moon was shifting from pale yellow to a faint white, speckled with the blue of morning.
“I cannot wait to meet them,” I said to her.
She took in a deep breath. “When you and the rest of the team step in, Orenpausha, everything changes. Everything. Maybe there is a reason why whoever came here before us left no obvious signs. Whether it was Saiara’s team, or someone even further back than that, maybe they knew that it was, at the very least, unfair to meddle.” She did not look at me as she spoke, she just kept staring up at the dawning sky.
“It might even be worse than that,” she continued. “Maybe they realized that interfering was dangerous. There could be some factors we haven’t considered, factors that could put everything we are trying to build here at risk.”
“That may be true, Neka, but it is too late to turn back. Think about it. An earthquake rattles the whole land. Then two strangers who speak with an odd accent come from some distant city that no peoples here have ever heard of. If the Sagain are as advanced as you say, they will send explorers to search for where you and Cordar came from.
“And if they have not been this far east yet, they will come soon enough. They will see our island from the shores of the sea. An island that did not exist before. What will we do then?”
She sighed. “You’re right,” she said. “I know you are. But it doesn’t make it easier. We are so far ahead of them. Much too far. Their culture will get mangled and torn apart by the implications of our existence if we move too quickly. Cordar and I still have so much to learn.”
“We will give you all the time we can. You must use that time to prepare them. We cannot avoid this encounter, but better if it happens on terms we can manage than for some intrepid pathfinder to stumble upon us.”
“Yes, Orenpausha. We will keep you and Reacher apprised of our progress as often as possible.”
“Excellent, Neka. I believe in you. We would not have made it this far without you.”
I stood up and offered my hand to her. She took it, and I helped her up. We turned our backs to the ocean and the moon, and saw a figure approaching us.
When I recognized her, I waved and called, “Adjet! Good morning.”
She waved back. When she was close enough, she said, “Good morning to you, Orenpausha.” She smiled, a wide, beautiful, toothy grin. “And to you, Neka. I thought I might find you two here.”
“We were talking about the people,” I said. “The Sagain. About what comes next, now that Neka and Cord have spent some time among them, learning their language and mores.”
“That, as it turns out, is exactly what I came to talk to you about.”
“You have thoughts on the matter?” I asked.
“More than that. They’re already here.”
“What?” Neka reached out and grabbed Adjet’s arm. “What do you mean?”
“There are four of them, camped on the far side of the ridge.” She pointed across the water to the far shore, and the hills beyond.
Neka’s eyes met mine, wide with disbelief. “I must go to them,” she said.
I nodded. “Go,” I said.
She was off, running across the island back to the headquarters we
had established around Reacher, urgency in her voice as she called up Cordar on her transponder.
I turned to Adjet and asked, “How long have they been there?”
“No more than a day, I think. But you’re going to want to see this footage. They spotted one of our explorer drones.”
* * *
I reversed the holo and played it back from the start. Four men of the Sagain, crouching around the remains of last night’s campfire, stoking the embers back to life. The sun has not risen yet. The heat of the day is still hours away. They are wearing long, hooded flaxen cloaks to keep the sun from their bare torsos. One of them looks up at the sky and sees the drone. He shouts to his companions. They turn as one, following his pointed finger. The holo was taken from the drone’s perspective. It makes it seem like the Sagain are looking right at us.
“This footage was captured, what, an hour ago?”
“Just about.”
“So where are they now?”
“They are still there.”
“Do they have a way to cross the waters here to the island?”
“No. They would have to build a boat, and from what we can tell, they did not come prepared for that.”
“I wonder what their plan is?” I touched my hand to the back of my head, running my fingers through my hair. “Reacher,” I said, “where are Neka and Cordar now?”
“They just took off in the hopper. They are circling out, giving the Sagain a wide berth. They will land in a concealed spot and approach on foot from the west, coming up on them from behind.”
“Can you get me through?”
“You are connected.”
“Neka? Cord? Can you hear us?”
“Yes, pausha, we hear you,” Neka said.
“What’s your plan here?”
“We don’t really have one. For starters, I just want to keep them on the mainland. That is why we are coming from behind, so that they won’t connect us to the island.” She paused. “Hopefully.”
“When you meet with them, try to get as much information as you can. If possible, get them to turn around, or, at least, to head in another direction. Contact with the Sagain is inevitable, but maybe it doesn’t need to happen today.”
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