The Sigian Bracelet

by George Tome

  But first, he had to clean his body in a hot bath sprinkled with plenty of exotic flavors, to flush the cold stink of death from his nostrils. He grabbed the bracelet to pull it off his forearm, but to his astonishment, he realized he was in trouble. Again. His hearing had almost fully recovered, so he couldn’t miss the deafening noise in the room… or the feeling that the bracelet tightened around his arm as if it was animated by a life of its own.

  Suddenly, all the horrors of his narrow escape from the cavern-turned-tomb flowed back into his veins, numbing him. At first, he couldn’t accept the source of the sound. He looked through the windows with his hearts shrunk, expecting to see Baila XXI’s jets surrounding the dome. Nobody was outside. He had heard the noise before. No doubt it came from… the bracelet! Suddenly, he remembered Tadeo’s worried face. He had a bracelet on his arm. Surely, he had tried to pull it off, and then the noise became louder, followed by the explosion.

  If the blast wasn’t Baila’s masterpiece, then what were these artifacts? Certainty took the place of bewilderment: he had a devastating bomb on his forearm—and one about to explode! How could it work after so many years?

  Overcome by despair, he sank into the nest, burying himself in the flabby fluff as if it could protect him from contact with reality. He had no idea what to do. He couldn’t think of anything else except that Tadeo had died in a gigantic blast from trying to get rid of the bracelet. He had to fight the panicked rush to wrest it off his arm. Most certainly, he wouldn’t die alone. He would take along a big chunk of the city’s outskirts.

  He began to examine the bracelet bitterly, without holding much hope of finding something to avoid the catastrophe. His eyes noticed the three-rayed star. He remembered that it was actually a button.

  “Why didn’t it cross my tail? The bracelet’s symbols!”

  He quickly pressed the star, and indeed, a console opened. The eight symbols resembled the ones on the small object in the skeleton’s fist! The small rod might have been some sort of activation key! Maybe the gods memorized the code before it self-destructed—that’s why it melted in Ernon’s hand! Shaking uncontrollably, he typed the four symbols on the console, hoping to hear the noise disappear. But as soon as he entered the last one, the buzz doubled in intensity.

  The ceiling seemed to have fallen on his shoulders. He had to gather all his resolve to avoid getting drowned in the river of death in which Tadeo’s discovery had thrown him.

  Maybe the code was from a different bracelet, even though he found it on the same god from whom he got the artifact. Or maybe it didn’t work for a thousand different reasons.

  It crossed his spikes to recall the nine essential Guk aromas in the focusing harmonics, but he chased away the bad idea. If he couldn’t solve the puzzle quickly, he’d be long dead before he smelled the stalker’s path.

  Why not try typing them again? Maybe he didn’t press them properly… After all, it was the only thing he could think of. Between two heartbeats, he moved his hand to repeat the sequence, but he stopped at the last moment. What if he typed them in the wrong order? The key had a small handle; the reading direction was pretty obvious—from right to left, as Antyrans were used to. The only detail was that the gods were not Antyrans. What if they used to read from left to right?

  Driven by instinct, he pressed the symbols in the opposite order. As soon as he pressed the fourth button, he closed his eyes, waiting for the blast. Instead of that, the murderous noise disappeared!

  When he realized he was still alive, he finally dared to take a breath of air, overwhelmed by a joy impossible to describe in words… a joy that only someone returned from the land of dead could experience!

  His next thought was to throw away the sinister piece of metal. The object was far too dangerous to be handled by anybody. He made up his mind to throw it into the ocean right after the refreshing bath.

  As Gill grabbed the bracelet to pull it off his arm, darkness fell. He felt a huge pressure squeezing his temples, and a bloody mist covered his vision. Suddenly, he started to fall into the night with the speed of lightning, convinced that something went wrong, that the bracelet was killing him.

  In the next instant, a swirling storm of images began to flow in front of his eyes. When they slowed down a bit, he recognized them. They were memories. His memories. A lot of memories from early childhood he didn’t even know he could still remember came to life in the inner eye of his amazed kyi. Is this the way death’s supposed to happen?

  Amused, he went through a childish quarrel and his first tail-fight with the neighbor’s boy, who became his best friend. Other not-so-amusing memories were of his family’s narrow escape in the middle of the night from a town on Antyra II called Bodris. It was a peaceful little rural town in appearance, if not for the nearby coria—their never-ending source of problems, especially after his parents refused to send him to their communal dome to fulfill his ritual education. That was a crime too heinous to be overlooked in their small community, far from Alixxor and the worldly laws enforced by the monstrous bureaucracy called Shindam.

  “Careful with the doorstep,” his father whispered just as Gill tripped and dropped the aromatic seed box on the stairs.

  It was the one thing he cared about most—and an easy choice for an Antyran, one might say—so he wanted to preserve it by all means. Now, due to their haste and his usual clumsiness, it lay broken into countless pieces. Worse than that, the heavy, round seeds rolled over the metal stairs and down the street, making an awfully loud noise on the titan walkway, its plastoceramic protective quilt peeled away a long time ago.

  Another bitter taste… the grueling rite of passage that all kids had to face on their second pledge. He heard again his parents’ anxious advice on how to rub the tail after he picked his sex,14 a ritual that kept him bedridden for several weeks.

  His first teenage experience of being in love surprised him with the intensity of the almost-innocent passion that only a youngtail could possibly feel. They weren’t simple memories; he practically moved back in time to the same state of mind he had in those moments. He felt enthralled by her fondling and caresses, by her long, thin fingers touching his face, eyes, gills. Then the taste, the tender taste of her spikes as she offered them to be licked, for the very first time in her life.

  His whole life swirled maddeningly fast in front of his eyes, and yet he had enough time to live, to feel everything, to draw the connections he made back then. He felt almost grateful to be allowed to remember all this, even though he had to die at the end.

  The kaleidoscope of images began to fade. Then, just as he started to regret that it all ended, came the tastes—metallic, bitter, sweet, and sour—then sounds of every tonality banged inside his skull. His excitement was soon replaced by discomfort, and he wished to reach the end of everything so that he could finally die. However, something puzzled him: he was feeling the nest. He lay in his nest, his tail coiled around him, and he was feeling the softness of the fluff.

  While he tried to make sense of the discovery, he became conscious of a foreign presence in his kyi. And then he understood: the bracelet of the gods was scanning his neurons, activating each synapse to find its use. Stop it! he shouted in his thoughts. The artifact must have heard him because the swirl stopped, and the blackness fell again around him.

  He could talk to the bracelet!

  The terror disappeared as if it never existed, replaced by awe. Soon, a strange language whispered in his head. Apparently, the bracelet was trying to talk by activating his hearing neurons, but the sounds made no sense. They sounded something like, “Ifikia e uosa dunae etsu!”

  “Any chance you speak Antyran?” Gill asked aloud.

  Something changed because after several more dissonant attempts, he saw images.

  “Here we go again,” he said with a sigh, exasperated.

  However, as new shadows began to take shape in his vision, he noticed a change. The memories were not his!

  He was looking at a large
, red-orange blob, which seemed to be alive and moving! As the image gradually gained in clarity, Gill realized it was an unknown species: a tall being with eerily white skin and hypnotic yellow eyes placed in sockets a bit larger than them, clothed in a red-orange suit. It had a broad face with pronounced brow ridges, lowered cheekbones, and a mouth bounded by pale, thin lips. Scores of vertical furrows wrinkled its face, a few even reaching the upper lip. Some white hairs grew on its skull, sparser than the ones on the beard and just as small.

  The creature was in a room that strikingly resembled the inside of a spaceship, its walls being forged from a golden metal. Gill could see several other beings similar to the first one, off to its left, squirming around in their red-orange spacesuits—visibly agitated. The gods all appeared tall and dignified. They looked a lot like soldiers and wore golden bracelets on their forearms. A martial smell permeated the air.

  Gill became convinced that he was looking at the beginning of the end of the old Antyran world—the godly invasion, which happened 1,250 years ago! The Book of Creation Inrumiral told the story of the cruel Baitar Raman, the one who unified all the ancestral warring kingdoms of Antyra under his sarpan15 and whose cruelty managed the notable performance of awaking Zhan from the sleep he had been in since the beginning of the universe, drained of vigor after giving birth to the world.

  He recalled a quote from Inrumiral 2.6: Zhan’s second awaking:

  Without delay, they burned and melted everything: the caves and the temples of the fake prophets, the fortresses, the glacier towns, the catacombs of perdition. For seven days and seven nights, a great fire purified the Antyrans so estranged from His Kyi! Raman’s capital became a handful of ashes, and the same happened to the other big cities of the world. Those who escaped with their puny lives were taught how to follow Zhan’s way and build magnificent pyramid temples—all through the voice of their first true prophet, Baila the First.”

  It was true that watching them through the eyes of a modern Antyran—and an accomplished archivist on top of that—he couldn’t silence the thorn of heresy that itched him to think of things that shouldn’t be thought of, to see that the gods were nothing more than mortal beings similar to Antyrans. And above all, he couldn’t quell his suspicion that much more lay hidden beyond the firewall than Zhan’s godly realm.

  He turned his head to take in the whole room but noticed, annoyed, that he had moved his own head in the nest while the bracelet’s vision remained fixed on the same spot. Look to the left, he requested, with no result. Then he saw one of his hands: it was alien! The bracelet memorized the images received by the eyes of its wearer!

  A wall unexpectedly morphed into a huge display, and the beings gathered near it in solemn silence. Great sorrow could be read on their alien faces—and particularly so in their hypnotic eyes. They’re angry they have to punish us, he concluded, as it was written in the book of Creation.

  “Amba etsu ni kipota! No hawez kuffa pano ni hajo!” a creature mourned in its babbled language.

  And then came the first surprise: he understood the god’s saying! He actually understood its meaning, even though the language wasn’t Antyran! How could the bracelet learn Antyran so quickly?

  The second surprise was what the god actually said: “Our home is lost! And we can’t die along with it!”

  Gill had the feeling that his reasoning was rotten, that something didn’t add up. The creatures didn’t seem poised to launch an invasion of Antyra because something serious was about to happen in front of their eyes, something that had nothing to do with Raman’s punishment.

  “Our world is attacked!” shouted the creature entwined in his kyi.

  On the display wall, a planet slowly rose into view: the gods’ homeworld. “I see it for the last time,” whispered his alter ego.

  The planet didn’t resemble any of the Antyran worlds. A reddish sun—at dusk from their point of view—was shining over a mostly desert world. It had beautiful tall mountains, shallow seas, and a few gigantic plateaus, rising more than six miles above the desert floor. The plateaus were surrounded by deep valleys invaded by green, lush vegetation.

  Even though the god had already moved his worried eyes from the green valleys to check the menacing depths of space from where the attack was about to come, it took a while for Gill to notice that there was no firewall around the world. In fact, there was nothing there but a pitch-black immensity. Or maybe there was something? At first, he thought that his eyes were playing tricks on him, but then he became sure he saw a glimmer of light. A small, white light glittered on the firmament of darkness. Then he saw one more, and another one, and another one. When the god turned his head further away from the twilight, Gill couldn’t stop an exclamation of surprise: “On Zhan’s eye!” Scores of lights—thousands or even millions—flickered in the black abyss. Could they be the windows of the diamond castles in the sky, the homes of the gods, as the ancient legends often described them?

  The god looked again at his homeworld—this time toward the planet’s dawn—when another star rose above the curvature. A world with two stars! Why not? Suddenly, the possibility that the countless lights in the sky were stars just like Antyra (albeit seen from a much greater distance) didn’t seem so absurd to him. What could be absurd after today’s morning?

  The gods watched the planet beneath, and the thought that they would never see it again overwhelmed them. Gill felt the suffering of the bracelet wearer in the most empathetic way and found it hard not to feel shattered himself. His neurons hosted two kyis now: one awestruck by the things discovered, the other witnessing a terribly tragic event. The gods were living the end of their world!

  The first creature he had seen—apparently their leader—broke the silence, shouting an order in the alien language. Everyone on the ship started to run. In that moment, the vision became blurry again, as if the bracelet had problems streaming it.

  The next images flickered wildly. They were too blurry for Gill to discern anything. Each time the image lost clarity, the bracelet compensated with a horrible brackish metallic taste.

  Suddenly, they were in the middle of a huge space battle. He was again in the command room of the gods’ spaceship, and the walls, floor, and ceiling disappeared, turning into huge displays on which he could watch, unhindered, the blackness of the surrounding space. And not only that—because an incredible spaceship was standing in front of their vessel, a monster as big as a large city. But if its size amazed him, the way it moved was even more unbelievable; it was able to instantly jump distances greater than its whole length!

  In other scraps of images, Gill could tell that the gods were angry and fighting. They, too, moved very fast—sometimes so fast he found it impossible to follow them.

  After that, he only received a few clear memories. The gods had landed on a wet, torrid planet boiling under the searing rays of a chubby white star. A weird city of impressive stone pyramids painted in white or red stretched on a large plateau, crammed between several hills swallowed by lush vegetation. The gods, still dressed in their red-orange suits, wore bundles of strange scales with long tails16 on their heads. They lay on a stone platform covered by a wide canopy made of giant leaves. All of them watched a huge dust cloud rising from a rocky hillside. On a wooden table nearby, Gill saw some golden breads waiting obediently to be eaten. They had a cross sign cut in the middle of the top.

  The whole hillside was already excavated. Through the dust cloud, Gill could barely glimpse the two elongated machines—made from the same golden metal as the spaceship—churning the rocks furiously. They had two large wheels at their back, a long, thin body, and a wide front supported on two broad, articulate paws. Their jaws were breaking the rock into pebbles while a pair of telescopic arms ripped the larger stones off the hill’s wall.

  After another jump in time, he saw an army of pygmies, covered in the same weird scales, rebuilding the hillside to hide a strange construction raised in the excavation. The structure was a stone temple, partly
covering a… golden spaceship! Even though he couldn’t make out the details due to the distance and the dust raised by their hustle, it wasn’t hard to figure out that the savages didn’t look anything like the Antyrans.

  Then came another storm of metallic taste. He blinked, surprised by the deep silence inside his kyi. He was now in a narrow cave, most likely dug by natives. Its purpose appeared to be ritual because right in the middle of the cave there was a hyperbolic stone. The starlight projected a milky beam of light on the stone through a hole in the ceiling.

  In another memory, the gods were crowded inside a small ship, trying to outrun some invisible enemies coming from behind. The images became blurry again, and the metallic taste flooded his taste buds. Before long, Gill couldn’t bear it.

  “All right, enough for today! Stop it!” he shouted to the bracelet.

  The presence in his head disappeared, and he woke up in his nest—thoroughly wet. The bracelet was still on his arm and didn’t show any intention of doing something criminal in the near future. Should he try to take it off, or keep it on his arm? He decided to try to take it off. He pulled it slowly, anxiously, expecting to hear the deadly buzz. But to his great relief, it didn’t happen. The bracelet came off easily.

  CHAPTER 4.