by George Tome
He pulled the black edge, with no results.
“Ernon! Give it to me at once!”
Ernon pressed on the black star, and with a click, the sheath went off. Four golden symbols, engraved on the object, became visible. As far as Gill could remember, all were among the buttons on the bracelet from the other lab. Ernon turned the object to the other side, but it was all black.
Suddenly, crying out in pain, he dropped it on the floor.
“Will you please take care?” Gill reproached him angrily. He then leaned to snag it.
“It burns!” Ernon exclaimed, checking his hand for blisters.
Gill touched the object, but he couldn’t take it; the metal was hot and began to smoke. He managed to turn it to memorize the signs, right before the artifact turned into ashes.
Hoping for better luck this time, he ran to the holophone to call Tadeo. However, his boss was still checking the bracelet on his forearm, and the deafening sound hadn’t disappeared. On the contrary, it had doubled in intensity.
“I hope it’s not jamming,” Gill mumbled, suddenly panicked.
Ernon looked at him, worried as well.
“If it’s jamming, it can only mean the temples are—”
He didn’t finish his sentence. Both of them ran out of the door, shoulder to shoulder, to reach Tadeo’s lab. As soon as they stepped into the corridor, time stopped. Gill couldn’t figure what happened, and yet he realized that the image in front of his eyes—the string of lights in the corridor—was the last thing that had reached his memory. The bulbs kept lighting; he didn’t feel any pain; everything was fine—the only problem was that no other image appeared… The corridor and the bulbs had become frozen inside his head.
Yet the more he looked at them, the more they changed. Reality began to distort around the periphery, and despite his best efforts to keep at least this image alive, the lights turned purple, became dimmer and dimmer. With his last shred of lucidity, he understood that he had witnessed a terrible explosion, which probably blew him to pieces. He couldn’t think of anything else than he didn’t want to die… but the time bubble around him—stopped for a split second by the blast—started to flow inexorably again.
Gill had no idea how long he had been unconscious. As soon as he opened his eyes, dazed and confused, the pain returned—an encouraging sign that he was still alive. The explosion had thrown him back into the lab, so now he was somewhere in the room, immersed in a pitch-darkness and an even deeper silence. Only a few random short circuits threw flashes of light while the thick smoke and dust slowly suffocated him.
The lab was utterly destroyed. The once-shiny room, full of scientific equipment, was now filled with piles of rubble, shards of metal, broken pipes, and severed cables. On top of that, a huge rock had fallen from the ceiling.
“Ernon!” he shouted as loud as he could.
To his astonishment, he realized he couldn’t hear anything. His lips were moving, yet no sound was coming out of his mouth. The blast had deafened him!
“Ernon!”
He tried to get back on his feet, but a terrible pain spiked his every muscle, forcing him to drop back to the floor. And just when he thought it couldn’t possibly get worse, the mischievous lab started to spin around like a poisoned guval,11 without giving a damn that its occupant didn’t enjoy the ride.
After a while, the spinning in his head stopped, which was a good thing. The bad thing was that the flashes thinned out—an ominous sign that he was about to get swallowed by complete darkness. This prospect helped him find unexpected strength, especially after he remembered the depth to which the elevator had brought them. First, he had to find his companion.
He started to look around feverishly. He saw something protruding from beneath the huge rock that had crashed to the floor: one of Ernon’s feet. Gill turned his head in another direction, filled with horror. Alone in the collapsed cavern, maybe the only survivor of the huge blast!
He didn’t let his misfortune drown him, although his chances to escape alive seemed ridiculously small. His biggest enemy was fear… Fear, which could cloud his eyes and make him overlook possible escape routes or step over the path of being-alive. Hoping that at least his sense of smell wasn’t gone, he recalled the nine primordial Guk aromas in the tranquility harmonics. He finally got to his feet and staggered out of the room, only to find that his advance was blocked by huge rocks that had fallen from the ceiling. The rescue teams would have to dig for dozens of days to reach him—or, more likely—his decomposed remains…
Someone very clever must have slipped a fusion bomb into the base, someone sent by the temples. They moved faster than anybody could have predicted. Of course, the temples never acted directly because they didn’t want to start another civil war. At least not yet, according to the Shindam’s line of thinking. Those who usually did the killings were fanatics from the “Zhan’s Children” coria—under Baila XXI’s direct orders. The Shindam never openly blamed the prophet, although they would have liked more than anything to be able to.
As he was fumbling in the dark through the piles of rubble, he finally spotted his portable scanner, miraculously still working. Sighing with relief, he turned it on and started to explore the remains of the lab, using the light of its display. Not that he was hoping to save something of his tools—the microtomograph had disappeared without a trace, along with the god’s bones, buried under the rock fallen from the ceiling. He noticed something shiny under some twisted shards of metal, and he immediately recognized the golden bracelet—apparently unscathed—coming out from under the rock, still fixed on the god’s forearm. He gently pulled the artifact off and tried to tug the bones free. They were stuck and likely to break, so he decided to abandon them to the rescue teams, if they ever reached the room.
What could he possibly do except wait for a slow, painful death? Just as he was about to abandon all hope, he saw the ventilation shaft in the wall, hidden under electrical wires and pieces of ceiling hanging from the roof. The shaft had a reasonable diameter. He could easily crawl inside if it wasn’t clogged by debris.
Gill effortlessly pulled the grill loose, its attachment weakened by the shock wave. As he was about to climb onto the tunnel’s edge, he realized he had nowhere to put the god’s bracelet he was holding in his right hand. He didn’t want to abandon the artifact, so he pulled it onto his right forearm under his antistatic sleeve—pretty much in the same way the gods used to wear them. He pushed the scanner into the tunnel, and then, groaning in pain, he managed to pull himself in.
The passage didn’t appear to be blocked by rocks; after several feet, it turned vertically. He rose up, trying to light the black well with the scanner. Predictably, it went up as far as he could see inside it. He didn’t have the slightest idea how much he had to climb, although judging by the elevator ride, it wouldn’t be fun. He touched the shaft’s wall and discovered that it had a slippery surface, without asperities to support him. His only chance was to lean his back against the wall, press his feet on the opposite one, and climb with the help of his hands.
The very thought of being buried so deep galvanized his muscles, giving him the power of ten Antyrans. He hung the scanner around his neck and started to climb.
Just as he suspected, the progress was very slow, and he had to make huge efforts to avoid slipping back into the abyss. A couple of times, he propped himself up with his short tail, but after a few seconds, the pain became unbearable. In this way, he advanced inch by inch.
Gill had the feeling he climbed for an eternity, although he realized he had traveled maybe one-tenth of the distance before him. And he had already passed all the cracks made by the blast, which helped him rest his hands. Soon, the torture became so great that he was tempted to quit—and fall into the abyss. A thought crossed his spikes that he should try to slip down to the base of the tunnel, although he knew all too well that right at the moment when he would need to control the slide, his exhausted muscles might fail, sending him to his dea
th.
Suddenly, he smacked his head on a metallic object—a disabled fan propeller. Despite the uncontrollable shaking, he managed to get his hands around two blades, and with his last drop of energy, screaming in pain, he pulled himself through the fan. Finally, he had somewhere to rest!
Gill looked at the darkness above him and decided it wasn’t such a bright idea to keep climbing. After all, technicians would occasionally need to fix the rotor’s engine, and to do that, they had to be able to reach it. With renewed hope, he pounded the metallic walls to find the access door. On the third bang, the plate made a hollow sound, betraying an opening. He propped his back against the rotor and bashed the door with all the force of desperation. The door flung open on the very first hit.
He landed in a narrow hallway; the stairs were carved out of bedrock—most likely one of the escape routes. He started to climb them, stumbling from exhaustion. Even at this distance, they were cracked by the force of the blast. After a few more yards, he had to pass a pile of rubble collapsed from the ceiling that almost blocked the path.
In the end, he reached a door. He rammed it with all his remaining might, but it only opened a couple of inches. By stretching his fingers through the crack, he found that a huge rock was blocking it—most likely the collapsed ceiling. There was no way of going past it, but at least he was close to the surface. He closed the scanner and dropped to the floor, leaning his back against the wall.
After a while, he began to hear distant noises, a sign that his hearing was slowly returning. Soon, the door opened, and the lights of a rescue party flooded him. The shadows told him something, but he couldn’t understand. They finally figured out he was in shock; two of them lifted him gently from the floor and laid him on an inflatable stretcher.
The chubby rescue air-jet took off for the nearest recovery dome while the healer inside began checking his wounds. Above the stretcher, a swarm of sensors flickered in different colors, searching for wounds to his internal organs. It’s OK, he thought, comforting himself. The Shindam doesn’t work with anybody. Over time, the healing of the body went tail to tail with the kyi’s mending. No wonder that Zhan’s temples enjoyed a monopoly over the recovery domes. But in the last century, the Shindam had challenged their grip, and some of the recovery domes in Alixxor became safe enough to be used even by archivists.
The healer, holding a portable scanner in his left hand, rubbed a gash on Gill’s forehead to make sure his skull wasn’t broken; he glued a patch of artificial skin over the gash and gently checked the back of his head.
“Does it hurt?”
Gill was about to faint from exhaustion—and the prospect didn’t bother him at all—when he remembered, horrified, the object hidden on his forearm: the god’s bracelet! He quickly touched it to make sure it was still there. But with the same speed, he remembered something else: they had been betrayed. And as far as he knew, Baila XXI, the prophet, wouldn’t be happy with only the skillfully collapsed cave where the Shindam’s secret base stood. He’d send his spies to sniff the crumbles. Maybe the Antyran bent over him was working for the temples… Who knows?
The Antyrans liked to say that reality’s grooves take the shape of the gods’ will—the most fatalistic tarjis even pretended that Zhan was the one deciding their every single breath—but by now, Gill was pretty convinced that the huge stupidities that brought him here were his and only his. He didn’t listen to his dad when he advised him to become a flour carrier. What a carefree life he would have enjoyed! Entirely eventless, except for the regular flights between Antyra I and II… and the female temptations swarming around the domes of the visitors. But no, he had to become an archivist, to atone for the cowardice of his parents, who ran away from their home on Bodris. He made another monumental mistake when he tried to save the bracelet instead of getting rid of it while he still had a chance! He could have just left it underground or given it to the security team that dug him out of the rubble. Now he had nowhere to hide the compromising artifact, considering that they were heading to a rescue dome where the holoscanners of the healers would find it in an instant…
It crossed his spikes to throw the bracelet in a corner when the operator wasn’t looking. Of course, that would be another foolish thing on his already-long list. As soon as they found it, they’d figure out who threw it away. His only chance was to hide the bracelet and make sure no one would ever find about it. Not even his fellow archivists or the Shindam’s officials—unable to protect their most hidden secrets, as he had the occasion to learn on his very tail. Then, at the first opportunity, he would throw it into the ocean and run as far as possible from the temples, hoping they’d never connect the dots between his insignificant name and Tadeoibiisi’s fateful expedition.
Misreading Gill’s panicked look, the operator picked up a hormonal spray to sedate him. When he approached the stretcher, Gill hit him violently on the hand, sending the tube to the floor.
“No hormones!” he shouted with a glow of madness in his eyes.
“Hey! Have you lost your smell?” the healer yelled and stepped away from the stretcher, afraid that he might get attacked.
“I don’t want ’em!”
“Calm down! We’re almost there!” the healer exclaimed.
The shuttle landed on the jet-port of a rescue-recovery dome12—a building with the appearance of a weird hive, welded together from hundreds of hemispheres stacked one on top of another, in a seemingly disordered way.
He was immediately transferred to a comfortable nest, surrounded by all sorts of devices. When asked for his name, he replied, “Ernonhafir.”
Before leaving the room, the healer connected a string of sensors to the skin of his chest, directly through the holes of his torn tunic, without stripping him down. It seemed he smelled that Gill was ready to fight if the Antyran tried to touch his clothes.
“I’m bringing the resonance ring,” he told him from the doorstep.
As soon as Gill was alone in the room, he pulled the interfaces off his skin, convinced that the healer wouldn’t come back alone. He had no time to spare; the disconnected sensors raised the alarm anyway, and the healers would rush in at a moment’s notice. He leaped to his feet and cautiously opened the door to check the corridor. There were only a couple of healers escorting a pair of sick, old Antyrans, but they’d surely notice him if he tried to run away. Across the corridor, however, was the incubator—a dome with a controlled atmosphere, where the future moms hosted in the domes were keeping their eggs to hatch under their tender supervision.
Taking advantage of a favorable moment, he crossed the corridor and entered the hatchery, followed by the whining of the disconnected sensors. The room had several rows of purple eggs carefully placed in small nests set on tripods. The infrared lights suspended above warmed the eggs, while a device hidden underneath gently rolled them on all sides.
He set the holophone on closed circuit to check his own hologram and immediately regretted it, seeing how wrecked he was. However, he would have been a bit ungrateful to complain, given that he was still alive. The others weren’t so lucky.
After washing his face in the fountain embedded in the wall and mopping the dust from his shredded clothes, he looked again down the corridor. Some healers passed his door, running, apparently searching for him. Soon, the hallway was empty all the way to the elevator. He left the hatchery, trying to act as normal as possible, and reached the elevator platform without incident.
“Hey! What do you think you’re doing? Back to the ward!” a massive female shouted down the corridor.
The elevator arrived just in time. Ignoring the screaming female who was running after him, followed by some male healers, he jumped on the platform and pressed the button to descend to the main ground floor hemisphere.
Once outside of the building, he ran to the nearest magneto-jet station. The jets lay folded and parked vertically on their snouts to take up the smallest space possible among the lush plants surrounding the buildings. He touched
his hologram to the sensor of one of the vehicles, and the jet slid horizontally on a magnetic pillow, extending its entire length. He had no intention of driving in his sorry state, so he lay in the back seat. In a few moments, the magneto-jet took off.
“To the western bypass,” he ordered the artificial intelligence in charge of the vehicle.
All the magneto-jets had artificial intelligences, although many Antyrans chose to disengage them and drive the jets themselves, following Baila’s rules against Arghail’s corrupting technology.
Cloning, augmentations, and implants of any kinds were banned by the Shindam under the prophet’s pressure. The tarjis took pains to impose their point of view in the most physical way possible, zealously thinning the number of scholars interested in such research.
But the artificial intelligences were a different story. In an act of courage touching insanity, the Shindam introduced intelligences in jets to reduce the number of road accidents. Of course, it helped that the AI architects fled to Ropolis,13 which happened to be the only place in the three inhabited Antyran worlds where the long arm of the temples hung helplessly.
“You don’t look so well! Are you OK?” exclaimed the artificial intelligence in a worried voice, stopping the whirl of his thoughts. “I’m going to call a healer and drive to—”
“Drive where I said if you don’t want to be shut down!” he reproached it angrily.
“I will follow your order,” replied the program, slightly offended by his threat.
He decided to let the annoying program drive the vehicle. Therefore, he was forced to stoically endure the AI’s chatter about Karajoo’s traffic madness until they reached his dome on the city’s outskirts. After he left the magneto-jet, the vehicle turned around and glided to the nearest magneto-jet station. With a deep sigh of relief, he stepped inside his dome, happy to finally arrive home.
CHAPTER 3.
As soon as Gill reached his dome, allotted by the Archivists Tower, he looked around to see if he was really alone. He opened the small door leading to the flour vault and stuck his head among the sacks piled in the usual mess, and then he carefully searched the two rooms of his small house. Happy with the result, he dropped into the artificial fluff of his nest—of course, after pulling his tail from its back pocket and comfortably coiling it around him. He didn’t have the slightest intention of falling asleep because he had to study the bracelet—the bracelet of the gods! He felt carried away by his success—all sorts of crazy ideas swarmed in his head at the very thought of owning something that didn’t belong to Antyra’s world, an object from a fallen god…