by George Tome
No building, no matter how well designed, could survive a supersonic wind able to lift boulders the size of a spaceship like they were specks of dust. Where Belamia touched the beaches, it left behind a shiny sandblasted bedrock, and a three-hundred-foot-high storm surge washed away the remains. The rain turned into a deluge, washing the crops into the ocean. The beaches, Antyra’s definition of paradise a mere week before, turned into an inhospitable place for life.
Millions of refugees flooded the few remaining spaceports. However, no vessel hurried to pick them up because on Antyra I, things weren’t going much better. The Antyrans were convinced they were living in the end of times, so they crowded in the sacred neighborhoods to be protected from the unbearable corruption of the “last hour.” They turned their faces to the forgotten father, their temples wet with fear and remorse, painfully aware that in the short time left at their disposal, they couldn’t turn the tides of the allotted doom. It didn’t matter that the whole world was on the brink of collapse, it didn’t matter that there were no interplanetary flights; it didn’t matter that the food supplies were dwindling and that much of the harvest was floating around Antyra II’s stratosphere, blown there by Belamia’s anger…
On top of that, Baila XXI spent most of his time perched in the highest murra tree, holding endless speeches, instead of seeking solutions to prevent the chaos and starvation.
The evening spread its deceptive veil of darkness over a torn-apart world, the eighth since Beramis abandoned them, and the first stars rose in a way that was again becoming familiar to the Antyrans. It was almost the end of the workday for Engis, one of the operators of the Mirra spaceport. His mission was to handle the interplanetary traffic in the sector, but in the last eight days, the traffic had ceased to exist. Since most Antyrans had basically moved to the temples, nobody was working anymore. No one but them.
Surprisingly, even though the deep-space radars remained silent, Engis had plenty of work on his tail: he had to track the orbital platforms controlled by the initiates. Normally, their traffic was handled by the relay station in western Alixxor, but the base was deserted and seemingly burned to the ground.
Engis finished checking the flight parameters and saved them in his report. He was about to leave the room to meet the initiate running the spaceport when he saw a diamond-shaped formation entering his sector. There were sixteen bright-orange dots, moving at lightning speed in Antyra’s space!
Although the space radars couldn’t see much from such a distance, Engis realized at a glance that they couldn’t be Antyran. Their flight formation and tremendous speed were signs they had to be something else. Trembling in awe, he pressed a button, raising the alarm in the whole base.
The gods were returning to their children!
CHAPTER 8.
The merciless, unbearable heat was coming from the hell of fire. The star rays burned like lasers, and even the best spacesuit could only briefly protect someone insane enough to walk in broad daylight on the charred surface of Antyra III.
Although the Antyran star was a puny white dwarf, its mass barely larger than a red dwarf, from the closeness of the planet’s orbit, it shone brighter than anyone could imagine. And a year had only fifteen Antyran days.
No coincidence, Antyra III also rotated around its axis in fifteen days because it was tidally locked to the star. Therefore, a day on the starlit side lasted a bit longer than eternity. The almost nonexistent atmosphere was unable to dissipate the terrible heat from the lighted surface, bathed in red lakes of molten sulfur, to the dark side, where a billion-year-long night hid an eternal ice cap.
Even though the planet was the very definition of hell, its wealth attracted the Antyrans like a magnet. As soon as the technology allowed it, the inquisitive kyis found a way to colonize the world. The twilight ring, a penumbra between night and day, was the ideal place to start. Not far from the water source of the ice cap and bathed in the eternal light of the star-rise or star-set, several mining towns were built on two large plateaus on the eastern and western edges of the daylight side. In this shadowed area, the temperatures remained tolerable, allowing the surface settlements to grow under huge domes, silvery on the outside and transparent on the inside.
A serious problem delayed the colonization for over forty years. The farming world of Antyra II already had large, thriving communities when the Antyrans made the first clumsy attempts to plant their boots in Antyra III’s dust; the reason was that the planet had a marked oscillation, due to which the twilight ring moved all the time, causing headaches for the first foolhardy Antyrans. Viewed from the towns, the star dawned, rose, dawned again, and then rose once more from the same eastern or western horizon.
The only solution was to build two orbital belts between the settlements and the hell of fire, where they could shield the starlight as needed by the colonists.
With all this titanic effort, the real metropolis wasn’t built on the surface but deep inside the planet. The surface dome of Ropolis45 didn’t seem bigger than the others; in fact, it looked smaller and more meager than every other one. But that was just a shallow impression; from the spaceport, the visitors were brought deep underground by the spiral trains, their tracks closely following the Blue Crevice46 in which the mining city was dug. Only there did the real city reveal itself in front of the amazed eyes of the onlookers.
Seven billion years before, shortly after the formation of the Antyran star system, maybe the wind was blowing the dust on the world’s plains and plateaus; maybe the waves were rippling the surface of a primordial ocean. But the paradise didn’t last long: a weak gravity field, an orbit closer and closer to the heat inferno, and a devastating impact vaporized everything, leaving behind a burned crust and easy access to the metal-rich core—the only major source in the whole Antyran system. Five billion years before, a minor planet had tangentially collided with it. The hit must have been terrible, with Antyra III actually being broken into several large pieces, welded back together by their gravity. Because the planet was already mostly solidified by then, the impact and joining of the fragments gave rise to huge cracks and holes scattered everywhere. The one that hosted Ropolis was mapped by probes down to 150 miles below the surface, but others surely exceeded it. The legend told of an ocean gurgling furiously at the bottom of the deepest caves, hidden from the rest of the world. Of course, it was only a legend; no one saw it or smelled it, not even the countless hologuided devices sent over time on detailed mapping expeditions. But the alleged tremors of the monstrous tidal cataracts pouring back and forth through the ancient cracks were sometimes felt even on Ropolis. Many believed in the ocean’s existence, and not only the lay Antyrans: lots of scholars from the recently burned Tower of Matter thought that its tidal force, fed by the world’s slightly elliptical orbit, was the main reason of the planet’s wobbling.
***
On the second day since Engis had raised the alarm, the godly ships arrived near Antyra III. Ropolis had already reached its third star-set that day when the fleet rose in the sky in place of the star; the ships, flying in rhomboidal formation, could even be seen with the naked eye.
Their presence near the mining world was a bit puzzling, to say the least. Everyone expected them to rush straight to Alixxor, to join the fight against Arghail’s children before the hungry mist of the night could swallow its rich harvest of kyis. Instead, they wasted two days wandering aimlessly through the Antyran system. Of course, nobody dared to voice their thoughts—it would have been the greatest sacrilege to question the godly reasons. Surely they had good motives to do what they were doing.
Finally, after they passed over Ropolis and some other domed cities without stopping, they turned their ships back to Antyra I.
In the ten days since the opening, the temples had regained everything they had lost in the last six centuries of heresy. The Shindam was thoroughly disbanded, its structures thoroughly demolished as if they never existed. The tarjis even burned the Gondarra Tower,47 the greatest p
roject of the council. Everything that reminded the Antyrans of their sinful past was destroyed, burned and forgotten—at least on Antyra I and II. Ropolis was the only large city spared from fire because the temples didn’t have time to deal with it. Yet.
The tarjis on Antyra II displaced by Belamia’s anger started to be evacuated to Antyra I. According to Baila’s order, everyone was required to provide them food and shelter. Only they were supposed to be saved; the others who had the misfortune to survive the worst-imaginable storm were forced to gather the crumbles of the lost harvest and store them in the large silos of the temples.
On the second day of anxious waiting, the holophones finally announced that the gods were returning to Antyra I, their trajectory bringing them over Alixxor. The news spread like wildfire among the tarjis, who shouted and raised their hands in the air, elated that the moment they were waiting for all their lives had finally arrived.
The weather for the day was expected to be just right for Zhan’s arrival. True, the morning was a bit chilly for the time of the year, and this alone should have been enough to worry the Antyrans, so used to the warmth of the firewall… but few were thinking about glaciation.
After descending from orbit, the godly ships stopped some twenty miles above the western plains, close to the former military spaceport. Right away, hordes of tarjis rushed to the meeting place, some on foot, some riding their moulans, some flying in the air-jets captured from the Shindam’s bureaucrats. Many were holding skillfully decorated aromatic bowls, with coal embers buried under the scented seeds.
The air quickly became saturated by scented wisps of colored smoke, tangled in spectacular patterns above the crowd.
The first tarjis jumped the ditches bordering the farmland and stormed the tall grasses that reached up to their chests, stomping them under their feet. Now and then, one could hear the sound of the acajaa plants scattered among the grass snapping under the onslaught, followed by the angry shouts of the unlucky Antyrans splashed by the sticky juice.
The moulans became harder and harder to restrain; they had to be jostled and bridled with loud shouts to resist the urge to take a snack from the juicy leaves waiting to be tasted.
In less than an hour, millions of Antyrans flooded the plains below the space fleet. Several high-altitude clouds were hiding the ships, but everyone was looking upward. They knew the gods were there, and everyone felt the sacred energy flowing from the sky.
The crowd wasn’t as disorganized as one might think at first smell. The initiates were running feverishly among the tarjis, yelling orders. Soon, the crowd formed a perfect disk, the moulan riders placed on the outskirts. They left a square opening in the center, flanked by several rows of individuals who appeared to be soldiers—most likely agents, mixed with the deadly assassins of the corias. Obviously, Baila didn’t want to take any chances. All their murra rikanes had triple banners, depicting the wealth of things granted by Zhan at the creation of the world.
Hundreds of tarjis dressed in their humble prayer robes came forward to lay fragrance bowls on the grass in front of the first rows.
The prophet’s air-jets, lavishly adorned with murra leaves, hovered over the eastern side of the square. When they stopped, Baila walked on the flying platform,48 his silhouette clearly visible despite his diminutive stature.
The prophet was dressed in a thin, white mesh top that skillfully concealed his tail. Obviously, he couldn’t meet the gods in such shabby clothes. He raised the most ceremonial robe he had, the “Black Flame,”49 which gleamed unbelievably in the morning light. With ritual moves, he pulled it over his mesh.
The tarjis quickly imitated him: they pulled their beautiful white cloaks from their belt pouches and put them over the prayer robes. For a brief moment, when the star appeared through the clouds, their clothes shined so brightly they almost couldn’t be looked at.
Finally, the moment they all waited for arrived: Baila XXI, the prophet who wiped out the Shindam’s shadow in less than a week, was here to greet the gods!
“Children of the light,” the prophet thundered over the plains, “Glory to Zhan the great!”
Electrified, the tarjis began to chant in unison: “Glory! Glory! Glory!”
“My children, victory is ours! We won the war with the Shindam, and the gods are smiling on us again!” he shouted, raising his arms to the sky. “You, who honored the seal of the covenant, will take the light from Zhan’s own hand. He is going to reward you for your loyalty beyond your wildest dreams!”
Long cheers boomed over Alixxor. Even though Gill was far from the plains, he could hear the shouts like the thunder of a distant storm.
The prophet waited patiently for the noise to subside—which took a good several minutes—and turned his face to the holophone.
“I have a word for you, too, my little unbelievers,” he said, smiling ominously, “you who defiled his holy light and worshipped the god of darkness. Don’t be afraid that he forgot your reward! His eye will bring it to you!”
The tarjis exploded in laughter.
“Zhan, is a bit… upset,” the prophet said with a sigh, pretending to feel pity. “Or rather, he’s angry. Very angry. And how could he not be? He was sleeping so well!”
He gazed to the sky, searching for the tacit approval of the god.
“Now look around!” he commanded, making a broad move with his murra staff. “He made everything! After such a burden, he fell into a deep sleep, and no one was allowed to wake him. No one, you hear me? But Arghail tempted the kyi of his servant, Raman the fool. Raman will suffer in eternity for his betrayal!”
Of course, there was a slight inconsistency in the story: Raman couldn’t possibly “betray” a religion that didn’t exist in his times—and that arrived with a rain of fire, burning him to death in his sumptuous palace. Luckily for Baila, nobody seemed to be bothered by such irrelevant details.
“Today, after a thousand years, we broke again the Sacred Law. My sons, who knows what heinous crime was committed this time? Who can tell me why Zhan had to awake again and open the skies?”
He paused, waiting for an answer from the crowd. Predictably, it didn’t come.
“Maybe you can tell us, Your Greatness!” Baila exclaimed, emphasizing the title with derision.
He made a sign to the troops on the right side of his platform. The crowd immediately split, and Regisulben, the Shindam’s acronte, was unceremoniously pushed into the square.
He was dressed in tattered clothes and looked emaciated, a barely recognizable wreck wobbling on his feet. His hands and ankles were tied up, which was an excessive measure given that he could barely drag his feet and was wearing a proximity collar around his neck. The tarjis shouted and smacked their lips in repulsion.
“Why did you follow the darkness, Your Greatness? What madness pushed you to defile the holy land of Alixxor and bring Arghail here?”
Regisulben appeared confused and quite unaware of his sorry situation. Most likely, the temples had drugged him to rob him of his dignity. Without a word, he fell on his knees and bowed his head to the ground.
There was a moment of silence, cut short by Baila.
“Take him away! You’ll be the first to suffer the vengeance of the gods!” he exclaimed scornfully.
Two initiates grabbed him by his arms, dragging him back into the crowd.
His excessive humiliation was a message for the few remaining loyal subjects of the acronte, to show them that the Shindam ceased to exist. From now on, the future belonged to Baila.
“My sons, the moment you’ve all been waiting for has arrived!” Baila raised his arms to the sky and crossed two murra staffs over his head. “Behold, I come before you,” he began, reciting the first words of the “Happy Pledge,” his eyes closed in the Sacred Trance.
Hearing the verses, everyone fell to their knees, bowing their heads in the dirt.
“I’m floating down on shiny rays, braided from fire and water. My children! Forsake your wasteful ways and look
inside yourselves, in the corner where the star-seed made its nest… And you will find me… For I was there since the beginning of time, craving for your thirsty gaze. Let there be peace in your quest for ardor.”
The crowd suddenly exploded in loud shouts. Surprised by the disturbance, the prophet opened his eyes, not knowing what was happening. He glanced at the skies, and then he saw them: the huge bellies of the godly ships appeared through the clouds!
Slowly, one of them approached the ground, while the rest hovered above the plains. This made sense, considering that no matter how large the square was in the middle of the crowd, there was no room for more than one of them.
The ship looked truly otherworldly. Almost two-thirds of the body consisted of a thin tube welded over a thinner semitube, both having a strikingly irregular surface. The whitish rhomboidal texture of the hull resembled the worn scales of an old llandro, covered by bizarre veins twisted in all sorts of wrong angles. On its nose, it had six ovoid balls in constant motion and pierced by sharp spikes, connected by strange conduits.
The thin body gave way to a series of increasingly larger swells, the same veins running on all their length. At the back of the ship, another six shaking ovoids like the ones in the front, but huge, were anchored to the vessel’s body by several opal-blue metallic claws. A layer of prisms joined in complicated angles covered them.
From up close, the amazed Antyrans could see how the space continuum entangled in the deformation front was greedily torn by the smaller ovoids and turned into a green mist. The mist trickled along the veins of the fuselage to the ovoids in the back, covering them in a jellylike emerald cloud that grew or shrunk, became more intense or pale, fluctuating every moment to keep the ship stable under the morning breeze of the vardannes.
When the ship reached close to the ground, the irregular bumps slid one on top of the other and shrunk the ship’s length while the ovoids in the back rotated vertically, moving around the swells in a smooth motion. Finally, the long tube in the middle of the assembly rose vertically. The whole vessel looked like a strange plant from an alien world.