by George Tome
The barriers of semantics lay in details, and Gill knew it better than anyone. The less Baila found about what happened in the valley, the more chances he had to live another day. He was feeling bad for having to “tempt” the agent to take his own life, but the Antyran had seen him using the grid.
After he reached the narrow valley, he quickly jumped around Alala’s dome, using the bracelet to hide his moves. He had no desire to find out if there were any agents lurking nearby, and he needed to reach his magneto-jet to return to Alixxor. The Shindam had to be saved by all means, if only to prevent the temples from taking over the orbital platforms and the retinal scanners hidden in many public areas.
Gill was a bit worried that Regisulben might ask him to hand over the bracelet. Since he had no intention of doing so, the Shindam most likely would step on his tail, too. He’d be forced to run to Antyra III and hide in Ropolis, the capital of the mining world—the only town where both the temples and the council had a purely symbolic presence. He had no clue how to get there and how the architects of the artificial intelligences would greet him. However, it couldn’t be worse than in Alixxor.
Gill raised his head slowly over the pile of snow. At first, he couldn’t find the agents in the parking lot, but then he saw them about six feet behind his jet. It looked like he couldn’t get any closer without being noticed. He pulled back stealthily, taking great pains to avoid any noise. He had to find a way to distract them long enough to reach his vehicle,
Looking around, Gill quickly noticed several gray boulders flanking the icy path leading to the dome. The hardest part was to pull them out of the ice shell, but after a few hits, he managed to dislodge one of impressive size. He approached the parking lot with the stone in his arms.
It seemed that the strange disappearance of the air-jet had confused the agents, judging by their frantic calls for reinforcements. After swinging the boulder a few times, Gill threw it upward as hard as he could. It might have fallen right at his feet, were it not for the distortion grid. The rock reached a foot from the ground, and… disappeared.
The chatter of the two agents was rudely interrupted by a huge rock, seemingly coming out of nowhere, which landed right on the head spikes of one of them. With a short gasp, the Antyran collapsed on his back like a broken decoy. The loud cracking sound left no doubt that the blow had broken his skull.
The other agent leaped back, rushing to draw his laser. He looked upward, astonished, but the evening sky was clear, and nothing announced this new form of precipitation. What just happened under his very eyes defied logic, although he should have expected that. Baila had told them that the final battle with Arghail had begun; no wonder that stones were falling from the sky at the order of the god of darkness!
The agent jumped sideways, checking for danger, while he opened his transmitter to report the incident. Before talking, however, he looked upward, right when the second boulder thrown by Gill was about to reach his head spikes. The massive rock promptly smashed his face. Without a sound, he spun on his heels and fell facedown over the first agent.
Without even wasting a glance on them, Gill ran to his jet to leave the place before the reinforcements arrived.
In his rush, he ignored all the speed limitations—but since the artificial intelligence was disconnected, no one could protest the offenses.
It became darker, as much as the firewall allowed, yet the streetlights in the city weren’t working. Only the three great pyramids in the center were magically lit by the rivers of fire carried by the tarjis.
The road to the town was empty, unlike the exit lanes blocked by abandoned jets. Gill couldn’t storm his way into the city without being noticed. The last thing he wanted was to rush into the barriers—Baila had surely warned the tarjis about his arrival. Besides, he had a better chance of sneaking on foot behind the circles, with a little help from the bracelet…
And there was another “small” problem: he had no idea where exactly the acronte was hiding… but he had a guess.
Once he reached close to the city, he looked for a good spot to abandon his jet. He saw a refuge on the magneto-highway and slowed down, but then he spotted a small farm trail nearby. The flashing sign in the left corner of the windshield advised him that the alley was magnetized. He drove until his jet was hidden from the main road, and he parked it behind some thick bushes.
As he started to walk toward the city, Gill greedily breathed the scented air of the fields, tempted to lie down and sleep right there, on the ground. He felt he had no energy to keep going, but he had to do it: the future of Antyra depended on him. Or, at least, the future of its rotten government.
Gill walked a good distance without using the grid, afraid that someone might see a jump. After passing the first domes on the outskirts, he saw the first barricade a thousand feet away, and he was amazed how large and organized it was. He quickly hid behind a building, feeling pretty dejected that he might never find a way to cross the circle unnoticed.
He thought his eyes were playing tricks on him, as he had the feeling that the darkness was getting thicker around him. Exhaustion’s to blame, he thought wearily. In that very moment, something made him raise his head… and he froze in a silent scream, for what he was seeing was the end of the world!
Everywhere around the star system, the holy body of Beramis unraveled like rotten fabric, ripped in irregular stripes. In some places, the dying flames got tangled, and for a brief moment, they became even brighter than the old barrier. The stripes seemed to stretch to infinity, sucked by the hungry immensity of space, and Gill had the overwhelming feeling that the whole Antyran universe was disintegrating.
He wanted to find out if Baila would really follow through on his threat and open the skies for him. Well, his “brilliant” curiosity was handsomely rewarded. A Sigian bracelet was discovered, and it didn’t matter that it was on the arm of an archivist hostile to the Antyran gods, as long as the Sigians themselves couldn’t escape their fate. What chances did he have without the resources of the Sigians, without a way to fly to Mapu? The smartest thing would be to destroy the bracelet right now, he thought again. But he knew he couldn’t do it. Not until he saw the river of shadows.
The crowd on the first barricade finally noticed the frightening phenomenon. The tarjis fell on their knees, raising their arms to the sky. One by one, they began to mutter the covenant.
The Shindam’s troops abandoned their chameleons, finally seeing what a mistake they had made to fight Baila. In a few moments, they disappeared like a flock of licants scattered by the vardannes.
This madness ends right now! I’m going to sleep, no matter what, Gill decided. With the gods about to return to Antyra, Regisulben was finished anyway. Soon, the gray spaceships would appear from the depths of space, and no grid would be able to protect him from their wrath. How could he fight an alien invasion alone?
Alixxor was probably the worst place to hide, as they’d likely arrive there first, but Gill was unable to think clearly anymore. He turned back and walked slowly to his jet.
He reached his vehicle almost in the dark, the first true night after more than 1,250 years. He changed the shape of the chair so that he could nest inside comfortably, then pulled his tail from the back pocket. Just before closing his eyes, he looked one more time at the sky through the open hatch. Suddenly, through the last throbs of the dying halo, he saw a point of light. Then another one, and another one. As the time passed, more and more appeared, some bright, some barely visible. For the first time in 1,250 years, the stars were rising!
CHAPTER 7.
Blink… blink… The red eye squinted when the tachyon signal reached the probe. Blink… blink… The message was recorded and relayed almost instantly to the closest world, a rail-planet around Lacrilia.
The red eye was in fact a bright-red sphere spinning frantically inside a mindlessly complex lattice. If a hypothetical observer might have had the chance to examine the black device that hosted the sphere, he may have f
ound that it wasn’t just black but a black darker than the darkest depths of the universe. The strange cover was built to absorb the photons from the entire light spectrum and convert them into matter to avoid detection. It was a spy probe of unbelievably advanced technology!
The eye worked for the next few hours, faithfully relaying everything it detected. The signal came from a point in space where no star existed, so it could only be a ship or a spying device of some galactic civilization. Nothing should have been there; the area was far from any galactic highway or inhabited planet. Despite that, the place wasn’t exactly devoid of interest, proof being the very presence of the probe in that forsaken corner of the universe.
The red eye scanned the point of origin over and over again, trying to glimpse the source of the transmission. But it could only find that the signal was modulated in a peculiar frequency, largely unused by the builders of the probe or by any other known world, and surely encrypted.
The expansion of the firewall surprised it like this, and no conversion mechanism could save it from cremation. Its cover avidly drank the three-million-degree heat wave like it was designed to do, and the probe exploded in the sea of fire. Just before dying, it managed to transmit that last piece of information.
Had it not been destroyed like that, the red eye would have seen something right at the point of origin, where there was nothing a moment ago: a new star was shining in the galaxy. Its name was Antyra!
All the morning, Gill watched wave after wave of belated refugees running from Alixxor. They were walking on foot, holding hands to avoid getting lost in the crowd. Most of them didn’t carry much luggage, their only concern being to run as far as possible from the city damned41 by the prophets.
Of course, their fear was irrational, Gill thought. Alixxor had the great pyramids, the murra trees, the million tarjis roaming the streets, and above all, Baila was there. No gods in their right kyis would open fire on the city and kill them all. In fact, Alixxor was probably the safest place in all of Antyra…
The more he thought about it, the more he convinced himself that the capital would be the best hiding place. What mad Antyran chased by the temples would hide right under their tails, in a city teeming with electronic eyes and invaded by armies of tarjis?
Moreover, in Alixxor, he could find food and a place to sleep. At the thought of a night spent in a fluffy nest scented with the fragrance of walsala, he quickly decided what to do next.
When he realized the flood of refugees wouldn’t end anytime soon, he gathered his courage and started to walk toward the capital, which was covered in black clouds of smoke from the burning Shindam’s Towers. One of the tallest buildings, the Tower of Planning, was engulfed in flames to its full height. Under the strong gust of the vardannes, it turned into a giant flaming sarpan stuck right in the hearts of the city. Surely the faithful wouldn’t miss the symbolism.
He was wearing the bracelet, activated, on his forearm, ready to use it at the slightest sign of danger. But nobody looked at him, the refugees being too sunk in their own misery to notice something else.
As he reached the same spot where he had stopped in the night before, he saw that the first barricade was gone. The security chameleons were gone, too, undoubtedly captured by the tarjis.
Gill walked to a large intersection. He knew that all sorts of nasty devices were hidden in places like these, things like chameleon holophones or retinal scanners, used by the Shindam to spy on Antyrans under the guise of keeping order. Lately, they had disabled the holophones because they could easily follow anyone from the space platforms, but they kept the retinal scanners. Their artificial intelligences could recognize anyone of interest and raise the alarm for the eyes in the sky. However, after yesterday’s events, Gill was pretty sure that all the AIs had received a warm “invitation” to delete themselves, which hopefully meant that nobody could use the scanners anymore…
He sneaked along the deserted streets, glued to the walls or hidden under the huge petals of the raag42 flowers growing by the roadside. His search for a hideout didn’t fare well because all the domes he scouted, although empty, were locked by their owners, who were hoping to return when things got back to normal. It made no sense to try to break in—he would only manage to trigger an alarm, and that was precisely the last thing he wanted at the moment.
The district was packed with statues of moulans, some likely holding the dead animals inside. Gill recognized the district of the flour carriers. True, the custom had lately been adopted by plenty of other Antyrans, who adorned their domes with miniature holograms or tiny statues scented with various fragrances stinking of greasy fur. But here, he could see them everywhere, some big, some only a couple of inches tall, some gathered in veritable herds of dozens of statues. Most were cast in very bright, black ceramic alloys—even the tallest, which easily reached twice his height.
“The haughtier the Antyran, the larger the moulan,” was one of the carriers’ sayings. And each statue had its own personality, its own posture: sleeping, eating, or flexing its tail in defense. Even the ceramic tiles of the pavement were painted in their image.
A “scrawny dome” 43 appeared in front of him. Gill startled at the sight and sped up, stung by the thought that the sharers could be inside, spying him through the smoky eye of the building. There’s no one around but me, he told himself.
A large building made of hemispheres stacked one on top of another appeared on the left side of the road. Finally, his luck changed! They were guest domes, connected to one another by transparent glass tubes. Some rooms were fully opaque, while others had transparent shapes on their walls, configured this way by their guests.
Even from a distance, he saw some doors left open. After yesterday’s madness, it seemed that the guests had fled as fast as their tails could wobble, without bothering to lock the rooms.
In one of the domes near the entry platform, Gill found a hologram key abandoned on the floor. Great! Now he had access to the food store!
He quickly checked the whole building to make sure it was empty, and then he jumped in front of the holotheater.
Just as expected, he couldn’t find a single holoflux, even in the smallest cities, still under the Shindam’s control. Some channels showed the huge crowds on the pyramids waiting to receive the morning orations, whereas others paraded the Shindam’s officials who had been arrested by the tarjis. Surely it was only a matter of time until the acronte’s sorry mug would join them. In both Antyra I and Antyra II, the arrests were flowing like a torrent.
Not a single word about Antyra III, which didn’t surprise him at all—the temples had no time to reach the planet yet. Maybe they had no intention of invading it anytime soon, what with the mountain of problems piling on their tails.
By the second day of his stay, Gill had started to play with the bracelet to reach the other memories of the dead Sigian. But each time he activated it, the space grid popped in. No mental order, no matter how resolute, could convince it otherwise.
One of the strange virtual symbols on the top of the grid-in-the-eye might have led to the Sigian’s memory, but he couldn’t risk pressing them mentally by chance, without the slightest clue what they were supposed to do. He couldn’t risk losing the grid, not with Baila on his tail.
Therefore, he was forced to stay hidden in Alixxor, wearing a bracelet he couldn’t read, waiting for the return of the gods…
But even if the gods didn’t rush to show themselves, other changes appeared. On the eighth day since the opening of the skies, the wall of fire became such a distant memory that many wondered if it had really existed. In the middle of the summer, the weather became noticeably cooler… and the massive ice caps, which not long ago had scarred the face of the planet, threatened to show their ugly cracks again. The specter of famine was now grinning at the Antyrans so used to the abundance of their lands, warmed by the godly fire…
The first hit was Antyra II, a planet colonized only seventy years before. The Antyrans had kn
own for some time that it had a breathable atmosphere and a desert climate, thanks to the images taken by their rudimentary telescopes, but they had to wait for the development of the first fusion engines to colonize it.
The native life on the planet could hardly be called multicellular, the most complex being salia, the vein of the desert. All the beings reproduced by cell division, for the world hadn’t discovered sex. The only ocean of the world, Orizabia, flooded the bottom of a huge archaic crater known as the Valley of the Stars, and the colonists built their settlements around it, on the gentle slopes leading to the water. The rest of the planet was the kingdom of the most unforgiving desert imaginable, where rain had not fallen since time immemorial.
The hot climate was a great boon for agriculture. With modern irrigation and artificial rain seeded by bacteria, the planet’s production became the main source of food for the Antyrans on the three planets. Before long, the farming communities—especially the tarjis—became a power the Shindam couldn’t ignore.
A monstrous storm, the strongest storm conceivable, reigned over the ocean. Its name was Belamia, Zhan’s daughter, and her greatness was eclipsed only by the fire belly of her brother. Around the eye of the storm, the winds became supersonic; thick clouds, dragged by her rage to a fifteen-mile altitude, could finally drift away from the storm, bringing rain to the crater slopes.
Belamia was fed by a stream of hot air, blowing steadily from the planet’s equator to the poles. The Red Scarp44 diverted the winds to the Orizabia depression, feeding the eternal cyclone.
The storm may have been eternal, and its rains used to fall with the regularity of a precision device, but all this changed in a matter of days. The cooling of the winds during nighttime disturbed the subtle mechanisms that held the storm in place, and with each day, Belamia became more unstable, under the terrified eyes of the planet’s inhabitants. Predictably, it didn’t take long for the disaster to strike. At one point, Belamia got out of its womb and touched the shores, sharing a small taste of Zhan’s revenge.