by George Tome
Gill had no doubt that if they disconnected him, he’d fall into reality and escape. But… that could only mean the female wasn’t working for Ugo! Otherwise, she could have just kept him prisoner until the arrival of the jure. Her intention was to bring him before the Parhontes Council, exactly where he wanted to go.
“Wait! I don’t have a sphere!” he yelled, deciding he couldn’t miss perhaps his last chance to meet the parhontes. “If you disconnect me, I’ll wake up to reality!”
“What do you mean you don’t have a portal? Are you kidding?”
“I don’t have a portal! Why don’t you understand that?” he screamed, exasperated by the pain in his arms. “Aiii! Listen, can you ask your brutes to stop sq—”
“Who are you?”
“Gillabrian.”
“Gilla…” she began. “Ohh!” She opened her eyes widely. “Gillabrian, the one chased by Baila?”
“In spikes and tail!”
She became speechless for a moment, not knowing what to say. Obviously, she wasn’t prepared for a surprise of such magnitude. She quickly regained her posture and exclaimed, in a softer voice this time, “On Zhan’s eye, what are you doing here?”
“I’d like to know who I’m talking to,” he replied, angered by her lack of manners—even though, still being her prisoner, the palm ritual didn’t necessarily apply in his situation.
“Sandara,” she said, flinching, surprised by his tone. She realized he read her hesitation, so she asked him again sternly, “Gillabrian, tell me, what are you doing here?”
“Hiding from the prophet, what else?” he exclaimed, grimacing in pain, needles of numbness running through his tortured arms like burning phosphorus.
“Incidentally, I run the Games Registry,” she replied gravely, as if the function meant something important in the virtual world. “That’s why I was alerted when you entered this island illegally. I hope you realize that after Baila’s nice hologram of your… tail, I checked the city’s records. I know you’re not Ropolitan, and you can’t just be here. How did you get into the city?”
Under the unrelenting squeezing of the AIs, he couldn’t think anymore—now, when he needed more than ever to weight his words. The grah female appeared utterly indifferent to his suffering. Indifference—no, more like revulsion—was an entirely expected thing from a grah. They never displayed any sign of pain, no matter how great was their suffering. That was why in the old times, the grahs weren’t taken prisoner, and they didn’t take prisoners, either. There was no point in torturing them because they never betrayed their kin. They ended up being fed for free—an inconceivable generosity, considering the frugal resources of their frozen world…
In a desperate effort, he tried to ignore the torture by calling the harmonics of the pathkeeper’s aromas in his olfactory memory. The process began slowly at first, but then it caught speed. He sensed his pulse accelerating like the cold tide of the morning while he mechanically repeated to himself: “Pain is a detail at the edge of my kyi… I’ll let it pass through me… It won’t taint my shadow…”
As soon as he smelled the keeper’s path, he felt his ability to withstand pain growing like the billows on Gondarra’s shoreline during the worst rage of the vardannes.
Sandara was naturally curious about how he entered the city. Again, the same question he couldn’t answer. Yet, something was telling him he might have a better chance with her than with the jure.
He understood her caution that made her call him on his full name. However, he didn’t smell the kind of reaction that a tarji would have shown to a repulsive tainted by Arghail’s breath. She wasn’t affected by the tarjis’ fervor, he thought. After all, the grahs knew best what it meant to be repulsive.
Gill had the feeling he could see the lights of her synapses blinking frantically, trying to understand the implications of his presence in the mining city. He didn’t believe she deceived him like Urdun, pretending to be surprised by his presence in the virtual world. Yet Ugo was the city’s jure, and the Ropolitans were supposed to obey his orders…
He decided to tell her a brief version of the truth, hoping that the smell-kyi would guide his instinct to find out if Sandara would betray him to the icy shadow. It was a huge risk, but he had already started the avalanche. At this point, he could only hope that he had picked the right knot…
“I ran out of Alixxor hidden on a troop transport and sneaked into Ropolis in the middle of the assault. I was captured by your soldiers and taken to the jure.”
“Ugo!” her voice was undoubtedly loaded with the tonalities of an undisguised disgust.
“Ugo locked me in a cave with an old Antyran called Urdun,” he continued, encouraged by her exclamation. “I connected and woke up on a glade… I managed to run away, and now I’m chased by the jure’s shadow trying to break into my head!”
“The abomination betrays us in full view!” she exclaimed, surprised.
After a few seconds of silence, she went on with the interrogation.
“Did you see a sphere when you connected? Like the one behind me?” She pointed to the object.
“There was nothing except Urdun in the meadow on Tormalin.”
“Ahh! Tormalin, the prison island. All right… let him go,” she ordered the two brutes who held him, finally seeming to notice his grimaces. “Wait here,” she said, watching him indifferently as he rubbed his arms to restart the blood flow.
“Wait, don’t go!” he begged her. “What about me?”
“I can’t stop the game,” Sandara insisted. “Without a sphere, you can’t follow me to Rabinda, the portal island.”
“Why can’t I exit the game?” Gill tried to learn more, afraid that he was going to lose his only friendly contact in the imaginary world without having the certainty that the female would return before Ugo’s next attack.
“You can’t get out of a game unless you disconnect. But you’ll wake up in the real world,” she explained, exasperated. “I can’t find you there!”
Gill started to understand why the grah females had never been renowned for their patience.
“You don’t wake up in the real world?”
“Never from the games, and always from the other islands. But some of us, the kaura, can’t return to the shells. They would die.”
Kaura, where did he hear the word? In Urdun’s mouth, he remembered. Forbat “betrayed the kaura dead.” Again, he felt the deep waters hidden behind the words, waters he couldn’t fathom… Let’s see what Forbat has to say about this.
“Kaura are the intubated shells,” he said, voicing his reasoning. “Urdun is one of them.”
“The intubated, as you say. They can’t disconnect from the living realms, but they can do it from the games because they won’t be sent into consciousness. Even if a kaura ‘dies’ in a virtual battle, the sphere throws him back to Rabinda.”
“And how can I get my portal?”
“Not from a game or a prison island. If you set your foot on a normal island, it will appear by itself.”
“But—”
“Gillabrian, I have to go now!”
“And leave me in this place?”
“I have to warn the council, and I can’t help you from here. Why don’t you understand?”
“Of all the islands, I had to land in a game,” he said with a sigh, disheartened.
“It’s hard not to land in one. We have more games than you could possibly imagine. Ancient legends, space fleets, and innumerable oddities float on Uralia’s skies. The games are everything for us!”
“The games are everything for us!” The words so casually thrown by the grah female had the effect of increasing his revulsion toward the terrible metamorphosis he witnessed. Could it be that the Ropolitans didn’t see the hideousness into which they slowly turned with each feeding tube inserted into the “shell,” with every passing moment spent in the bixan’s grip, with the fake security given by the world of mirrors where they were masters? That, all while the real ships a
rmed with real laser lenses and real fusion bombs gathered on their planet’s orbit, ready to launch another attack on Baila’s orders… “Smoke is smoke and stone is stone, and the first never defeated the second,” Gill thought, recalling the words of the aromary Laixan. The absurdity of the situation pained him, and he couldn’t understand what kind of insane transition could happen so insidiously to elude everyone’s nostrils.
“How can the games be everything for you?” he exploded. “You’ve thrown your bodies in stinky cellars like useless trinkets! You barely escaped Baila’s attack and rushed to get stoned again. Oh, if I saw it clearly, even in the heat of the battle, some of you were in a trance!”
“You have no right to judge us, Antyran, as long as you don’t understand our world,” she reproached him bitterly. “You’re so convinced that you can tell the real from the imaginary, that you can say which one is which? You say you saw the lower galleries, the filth and darkness in which we abandoned our shells? Then you should know we believe that Uralia is the real world, and Ropolis is the nightmare to which none of us wants to go back!”
Her words didn’t surprise him; he already guessed that from the few hints at hand. Still, as far as he remembered, problems never solved themselves by just turning a tail at them, no matter how bad they smelled. Surely not a problem named ‘Baila’.
“It was far from my intention to criticize you, and if I offended you with my foolish words, I apologize,” he said, curbing his fervor, remembering that he needed her help. “I only wonder what sense has the dream when your shells are lying in damp caverns? Why do you spend time on illusions instead of changing the real world?”
“We change it, but from here.” The grah female let a trace of a smile curl her lips. “The real world, as you call it, is run from the islands. Most of us don’t have to go back in our shells. And the games… are not illusions. Each year, the city’s positions are played in the games. You want to become the jure, you have to win the battles. The architects compete to create the smartest AIs, and the winners become parhontes. Each struggles to win—that’s how we find the best of them.”
He understood. For the first time, he understood. His kyi’s nostril suddenly propelled him to a new level of awareness; the implications of the competitions, the way the winners were selected, made him smell one of the best-kept secrets of the Ropolitans, undoubtedly their most formidable weapon…
“That’s why you created this world? To sift kyis?”
“Not only that. To play is to learn, and we play the whole life. That’s why the games are so important for us. That’s why cheating is penalized with the most severe punishment. That’s why only the council has the codes to stop a game in progress.”
Sandara’s words made him remember the remarkable way in which they defeated the prophet’s brutal hordes—the army of trance soldiers led by Ugo from one of Ropolis’s simulations… But a disturbing thought insinuated in his kyi: Did the rebels in the twisted crane who sacrificed themselves to shoot down the transporter know what they were doing? Or it was an order of the cruel jure, and they had no means of refusing it?
Everything revolved around Ugo…
“And Ugo…”
“He’s the best strategist. He always won the jure competitions.”
“And never lost a battle?” Gill exclaimed incredulously.
“Very few. Forbat beat him several times, but not enough to—”
Sandara stopped abruptly and looked at a tiny transparent screen woven into the sleeve of her tunic and exclaimed worriedly, gesturing with her hands, “Ohh, you keep talking, and someone… has joined the game.” She looked angry. “I’m going to the council.”
“Sandara…”
“Gillabrian! Shut up and wait for my return,” she said, frowning at him.
She disappeared in her sphere, followed by the four artificial intelligences. In a few moments, the glade reabsorbed her without a trace, as if she had never been there.
Gill was still waiting in the glade—with no indication that the grah female would return anytime soon—when he saw a reflection of light on the hill in front of him. Then another one. He couldn’t be mistaken; someone was taking position atop the hill. The other player, without knowing that Gill’s presence happened due to an accident, was rallying his troops to launch an assault on his position…
The female’s absence began to worry him. He couldn’t understand for the sake of his tail why it was taking her so long to reach the council. He sensed more and more acutely the foreboding that soon, he’d see a torrent of enemy soldiers raining down the hill.
How could he oppose them? He only had the pack of chameleons, which—he was pretty sure—wouldn’t be overly excited to fight a frontal assault, especially if they were fighting according to the legends… Seeing—or more correctly, guessing—the outline of the chameleons’ fragile bodies, he had no doubt that this was the case here; they used to surprise their enemies with an unexpected shower of sharp-edged stones, but once discovered, they had no chance of fighting the enemy blades. Indeed, the stories described them as the greatest tarcaneers, and only their speed when running away from the battlefield exceeded their skill in handling the tarcan.74 After all, he wasn’t certain they would even fight for him, judging by their lack of initiative when he was caught by Sandara.
He bent down to take the Brocat of Loyalty, which he had dropped in the grass during his scuffle with the AIs. One of the dwarves—apparently, the same one who gave him the claws in the first place—approached him while the rest of them put their hands in the grass.
“Why did you betray me?” he barked at the chameleon.
Without saying anything, the dwarf bowed his head in the dirt.
“Well? Your tongue dried out?”
“No, Your Greatness!” he shouted in a strange accent that Gill had never heard before.
“Then why did you abandon me?”
Again, no answer. The dwarf avoided his eyes, guilt carved on his mug.
“Will you follow me in battle?”
“Order and we’ll obey, Your Greatness!”
His only chance to find out if the chameleon was telling the truth would be in the heat of battle. Gill hoped he didn’t have the “opportunity” to learn the truth…
“What’s on the hill over there?”
The dwarf turned to look at it, and then he smiled with another one of their idiotic grins, without saying anything.
“What island is this?”
“Island, Your Greatness?”
“Yes, island. What is the name of the game?”
“Game, Your Greatness?”
He started to get annoyed. Obviously, he wasn’t going to get on the same tail with the creature, so he decided to abandon the inquiry before he lost his rag. The chameleon had no clue where he was; he only had the purpose of serving in a game. As Gill could see, their interface was even more primitive than the one of the flour dealers. The creatures probably needed something like that; a consciousness, even limited like the one of the Alixxoran AIs, would have stopped them from dying that easily for dubious purposes, such as entertaining some bixan addicts…
The enemy is approaching, he thought, agitated. I have to do something! He had the impression that the suspicious hustle moved in the bushes at the base of the opposite hill, close to the river. It didn’t look like a charging army, though—it was more likely a defensive formation using the camouflage of the abundant bushes growing near the water.
The view pleased him. The other Antyran seemed cautious and maybe was waiting for him to attack first. Let him wait, he thought. Each moment was flowing in his favor, giving Sandara the time to stop the fight before it began.
As he was worriedly spying the thicket on the other hill, it suddenly crossed his kyi that he couldn’t have only chameleons. Nobody goes to war with only chameleons—what kind of game would that be?
“Do I have other troops apart from you?” he asked the dwarf.
“Yes, Your Greatness!�
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“Where are they?”
The chameleon pointed his transparent hand toward the outskirts of the nearby tekal forest.
“The grahs and the orzacs are awaiting your orders, Master!”
The grahs and the orzacs! The greatest soldiers of antiquity! He gazed at the trees on the hilltop without seeing them, but if they were there, they probably hid from the enemy spies behind the thick bushes, waiting for a sign from him.
With such soldiers at his disposal, he felt more relieved because he knew all too well how they fought, their weaknesses and strengths. If necessary, he could arrange them in a defensive formation to delay the unknown player until the arrival of help. His vast knowledge, his passion for ancient history could prove a priceless advantage if he had to lead an army, even in a dream island in the sky…
The land was ideal for cavalry maneuvers and for all sorts of traps. Gill imagined the countless battles that took place on the island, staining the beauty of the meadows and tekal woods with sticky blood, the cries of anger and death rattles of those fallen in battle, the stench of the moulans launched in devastating charges, the deadly rain of trilates.75
“The smell of time never disappears. You sink it in the ocean of oblivion and believe it lost forever, only to find it sprouting on the reef of memories,” said the aromary Laixan. Gill’s box of childhood fantasies—the one he thought closed forever after the traumatic passage ritual—opened, and he became a child again…
He felt the recessive memories coming like waves from another life, overwhelming him with their hallucinatory aromas, the game island becoming a bridge between his childhood inhibited by the sex-choosing drug and his current wriggling between the two worlds—without knowing where the border of dreams began.
He didn’t have to be an aromary to find the water of the deep memories that lent him the strength to get there. After all, that’s why he walked through the gates of the Archivists Tower: he loved ancient history, he dreamed its legends countless of times in his childhood days. As an archivist, he would have given anything to play such a game, to live on his tail the stories he imagined so many times…