by George Tome
CHAPTER 13.
“What god? You see another god besides me? Perhaps the nifle’s playing tricks on you?”
As soon as he uttered the last blasphemy, the heavenly fire consumed the blasphemer. Raman the Cruel, the awakener of the gods, wasted away in smoke and ashes. But all knew that Zhan’s punishment had barely begun.
The Book of Creation Inrumiral 2.6: “Zhan’s second awakening: the wrath of fire.”
***
The fires had faded away some time ago, and the smoke blown in the four corners of the plains seemed to have never tainted the clear air of the capital. However, when viewed up close, the Shindam’s Towers—the ones fortunate enough not to collapse altogether—bore the hideous scars of the indiscriminate pillage and burning they were subjected to.
The outskirts were desolate and empty, suffocated in dirt and piles of putrid vegetal litter, yet Alixxor gradually regained its place as the city of gods. Millions of tarjis were roaming on the grass around the three central pyramids. Many had moved into traditional domes made from moulan skins and bones, unused since nomadic times. They tethered their moulans, painted in ritual colors, near the entrance, feeling that living in this way might mysteriously connect them to Zhan’s aroma and to the one of the forty initiates tortured to death on the stairs of Beramis’s pyramid, at the end of the Kids’ War. Here and there, massive hot-air blowers were set to heat the air on the path of the temple officials and chase away the morning frost, now that the firewall no longer protected them.
Thousands of flags and fragrance bowls surrounded the great pyramids. The bustle around them was in complete dissonance with the dead residential areas around the center. Something had set them in motion to the central square of the city.
“My sons!” shouted Baila from the top platform of Zhan’s pyramid. “Finally, the time has come,” he exclaimed, and he raised his arms, holding the ritual murra staffs, over his head. He turned his awed face to the purple sky.
The coldness made the atmosphere’s color more intense. It was obvious that the purple smog would thicken that year much earlier than usual.
“Come back, Zhan-of-Light, to your sons lost in the night!”
“What? Again?” a mischievous character might have asked, rightly remembering that not long ago, a similar invocation had happened on the western plains… which ended rather abruptly when the prophet abandoned his tarjis to the strange gods in the floating mud vats. Still, in the wretched times that followed, no Antyran felt the insatiable urge to make naughty comments. Antyra’s worlds had been hit by a string of calamities, which convinced the majority of the Antyrans they were living the prophesied end of the world. The cold began to show its fangs; a premature winter threatened whatever crops remained, and most of the fateful Antyrans relocated to warmer areas, driving the sinners out of their cozy nests. The world’s centralized planning had gone down in flames while the temples armed millions of tarjis and initiates with the weapons captured from the Shindam.
What could possibly be worse than that?
“Accept his light inside your kyis! Zhan is great!” the prophet said, continuing his incantation.
Long ovations followed his request. The tarjis gathered tightly around the pyramids to hear his words, while the temple officials stood perched on stands placed on the branches of the sacred trees, like some strange fruits scattered in the canopy.
“Sons of the father, show yourselves to our thirsty eyes,” shouted Baila, dangling his sticks above his head.
A tidal wave crossed the crowd, flinging them to the dirt, spikes first. Above their heads, two gray ships of impressive size appeared in the purple sky, throwing long shadows on the magneto-avenues underneath. Gill would have easily recognized them as the enemies of Sigia, the Grammians, if he had been there.
They were floating lower than the tips of the tallest towers in the northwest of the city, so they had to maneuver carefully to avoid an accident. Their distortion field stretched the space around like a giant lens. The buildings superimposed by it became magnified to the point where even the tiny folds of their glass walls were visible in great detail.
From the ground level, the ships appeared surrounded by a strange mist, as if they were seen through heated air. Glanced from sideways, the distortion was easy to locate around the four engines in the back. Also, a smaller deformation whirled around their bow, where they had a number of small spheres dotted with shiny iridescences.
The tarjis and initiates remained on their knees, their heads bowed in the dust. None dared to raise their puny eyes to glance at the godly presence, the shadow of their vehicles stretched over the park being enough to fill them with awe. The ships were too big to land on Alixxor, especially around the pyramids surrounded by Zhan’s trees.
They stopped above Baila’s platform.
“My path is your path,” Baila recited from the Book of Creation Inrumiral, “and my judgment is nigh. My sons! As it was foretold, I return among you!”
Slowly, Baila’s platform rose into the air.
“Look at us and rejoice,” he exclaimed, “for the New Sacred Book will be revealed!”
Amid the murmurs of the astounded tarjis, who on his invitation dared to raise their eyes from the dirt, the platform carrying the prophet disappeared into the belly of a spaceship. Immediately, the two Grammian vessels climbed in the sky. The delirious tarjis burst into thunderous cheers, escorting their flight to the orbit. Baila had ascended to the gods to plead their cause!
***
Omal 13 raised one of his arms to better support the weight of his hams on the edge of the mud pool in which he dabbled. A floating device suspended above his head sank its tentacles in the middle of the pool, then gently retracted them, spreading the hot mud on his back amid the delighted grunts of the ambassador.
“Blue light,” he mumbled to the reddish iridescences of the ceiling, which changed as he requested.
The red color had started to annoy him, although the Rigulians used it to increase their vitality—it reminded them of Garima’s rising—the red dwarf star heralding the end of hibernation. But now the red ceiling was clouding his mind by constantly reminding him that he didn’t hibernate for so long. With a long sigh, he waved the tentacled device to disappear, and the floating vat, submerged in the hot mud in which he was resting, rose out of the pool. Another floating sphere, a tad larger than the Corbelian ones, came by and sprayed a viscous liquid on his skin until it washed away all the mud stains. Thus prepared, he floated into another room.
“No time to entangle,” he told the Corbelian sphere nearby as if he had to justify to it. “Anyway, Sirtam won’t say anything new. Start a transmission to Lacrilia,” he ordered.
Immediately, the sphere began to flicker in red hues.
“Sirtam 4, the Grammians made contact with Antyra,” Omal 13 said, jumping into the subject. He was again wearing the rigid official mask. “I would like to tell you more about this, but unfortunately, I don’t know much, either. I’m stuck at the system’s outskirts, and the native holofluxes are dead. I’m curious what excuse Baila will use now to keep me here. My feeling is that they want to keep me out of the talks.”
Despite the official posture, someone knowing him better would have noticed the trace of disappointment in his voice. Sirtam wouldn’t have any trouble to spill in his mud the natives’ aversion for them, using the logic of the protocol that Omal 13 already violated several times. He’d end up parked in some remote corner of the Federation for the next two or three hundred years, until they forgave his failure. Surely Bantara 21 wouldn’t rejoice at the news when she woke up. She would have to decide whether she would follow him in exile or search for another bond.
He cleared his throat and continued.
“The Grammians promised me a visit in a few days. I told them about the sarken probes and that we’d soon find the distorter’s position. I need your instructions if the Antyrans won’t give the artifact peacefully. As you know, I recommend the invisible kra
lls. Make sure you have a full team, just in case. End of transmission.”
***
“Ha-ha, I’m a genius, right?” Ugo laughed in Gill’s head. “Aren’t you happy I saved your tail from the Grammians?”
“Maybe I didn’t forget you handed me over to them,” he barked. “What are you doing in my bracelet?”
“Ho-ho, we have a problem with that,” the monster said with a satisfied giggle.
“I don’t see why I should be happy in your presence. I wouldn’t honor you with the palm ritual even if you’d were the last Antyran alive in the whole universe! Oh, please excuse me—I forgot you’re already dead! The most despicable dead I’ve ever met!”
“And you’ve seen nothing yet,” replied Ugo in a threatening voice. “Who do you think you are to remind me of the palm ritual? You forgot you blocked my expansion? I should have killed you for that. You’ve no idea how much harm you caused. All my plans—gone on the winds of the vardannes!”
“No one but you truly wanted the expansion. You saw what the parhontes chose when they had an option. The abomination—”
“Shut up! You have no idea what you’re talking about!” the jure shouted, angered, the impact of his words hitting him like a tarcan projectile. “A singularity is no abomination—only a primitive like you could believe that. The singularity would have changed the world! I might have ended wars, famines, and coldness. Nobody would have had to work ever again. I could have offered Uralia for all the Antyrans, in this reality!”
It’s going to be a long day, Gill thought. Was Ugo-of-the-bracelet still able to sip his most hidden thoughts? He saw no point to asking the jure about it because he had no intention of believing him.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Gill continued coldly. “What are you doing in the bracelet?”
“Since Ropolis was supposed to be destroyed, with you handed to the temples, we decided to delay your transfer a bit, to save what we could of Uralia. So we kept you in Kaura for five days.”
“I spent five days in a coma?” Gill exclaimed, stupefied. No wonder he was feeling so weak!
“Five days for you, seven hundred years for me. I used all our resources to discover the secrets of the bracelet.”
Ugo’s tone had the simplicity of a trivial feat, but beyond his words hid the enormity of seven hundred years. Of course he did it—Sandara told him that Ugo was the god of time. The parhontes gave him the codes of the virtual world, so he had accelerated centuries at his disposal to make the jump to the Sigian technology, aided by the collective intelligence of the artificial creatures… the dream inside a dream. He remembered the brown glacier, the entangled worlds. I was a tool. He tried in vain to imagine what the jump must have meant and how the architect was changed by the new reality, the new knowledge learned. However, it looked like seven hundred years was not enough to heal his madness.
“Your bracelet—or, dare I say, ours—is truly fascinating!” said Ugo. “I never imagined there’s something so complex in the whole universe.”
“Take your dreams off the bracelet,” Gill snapped. “Otherwise, I’ll disconnect it right now, and you’ll have to talk alone.”
“Just try it,” the abomination exploded. “Think you’ll succeed? You’re going to disconnect when I let you and not a moment earlier,” he said menacingly.
Despite the burning desire to fight him, Gill felt compelled to believe him this time—he had seen the little demonstration with the initiate, ruthlessly efficient even without the intimate knowledge of his synapses. He parasitized me for seven hundred years! the thought kept ringing in his kyi like an echo, and Gill couldn’t restrain a shiver of awe.
“You’ll be happy to know that I used your connections as a bridge to copy Uralia into the bracelet’s memory,” continued Ugo haughtily. “Most of your neurons survived the process—”
“What?” Gill exclaimed. “How could you copy—”
“Molecular memory. Huge capacity! I saved all the important stuff. I had to erase the previous memories, though.”
Gill felt the floor splitting under his feet.
“How… you erased… what did you erase? Ugo, did you erase the Sigian’s memory?” he exploded, feeling an uncontrollable urge to physically crush the abomination’s skull. The Sigian destroyer was lost forever!
“The important things are in my head,” the jure said with a mischievous joy in his voice, hinting that he had seen the rest of the memory. Any plan Gill might undertake in the future had to include the jure…
The bitterness of his rage was pushing him to blow up his bracelet for the simple pleasure of knowing Ugo was dead for good, along with his hallucinatory virtual world. But beyond the skin of anger, Gill thought he sensed something: Ugo annoys me on purpose! The tone of his voice, the lack of the slightest trace of empathy, wasn’t coming from the degeneration of Ugo’s kyi like it seemed at first smell. They were meant to push him to lose his cool and act impulsively. He would give Ugo a good excuse to torture him, as he did to Baila’s initiate, to break his will and show him that the jure controlled his every muscle!
The path of violence was the most efficient conditioning since time immemorial, the fastest path to malform a kyi. The Gondarran assassins didn’t get their reputation as “tail smashers” for nothing! It surprised him somewhat that Ugo didn’t just torture him without pretense, which could only mean that the avatar wasn’t all that unscrupulous, despite his mad essence. Even a dead being like him was still following the causality of reasons, Gill realized, amazed, and he memorized the idea in a corner of his kyi to think of it at a better time.
He could feign he was still angry and step on the path of torture laid by Ugo. That would allow him to pretend to be crushed, to allay the monster’s vigilance before hitting him at the right moment. But he realized that Ugo must have discovered the secrets of the Guk canons in his kyi, the harmonics of the pathseeker… Maybe in seven hundred years he had enough time to learn a thing or two if he was interested.
Until now, he couldn’t smell any residual traces of Guk control in the abomination’s voice, but he had to be careful: the jure proved full of surprises even before knowing his ganglions. Ugo would torture him gladly and smell the precise limit of his taming. Then he’d most likely torture him again and again with great ardor, until he broke him for real. Gill had no more chance of deceiving the jure on the path of a brutal reality than in the one where he already was. Therefore, he decided to decline the demonstration of violence so kindly offered.
In the calmest voice possible, he asked, “You mean the virtual world works in the bracelet? May I connect to Uralia?”
“You’re clueless with these things, which doesn’t surprise me at all,” Ugo replied, as arrogant as usual, but he didn’t use his voice inflections to provoke him—a sign that he accepted the truce for now. “I can barely exist myself. Uralia’s code is where the bracelet keeps the video-somatic records. For the time being, we won’t memorize anything,” he added mockingly.
He dropped on the floor, his back against the wall, and grabbed his head spikes in disbelief. Ugo was mad, but he found a way to save Uralia. From far away, a thought began to take shape: Uralia was a world just like Sigia, destroyed by the same Grammian hysteria. And just like Sigia, it found refuge in his bracelet. He no longer had a world to save, but two. No matter how much he hated Ugo for what he had done, he understood him. That’s my problem, he thought. I understand everyone. I even understand Baila. The transfer was the masterpiece of a very smart Antyran. A mad, unscrupulous genius—and on top of that, dead. Hmm, speaking of dead…
“Ugo, what’s with the dead avatars? Are they also—”
“Saved? Yes, on Kaura.”
“Sandara…”
“She’ll be the first one I delete after I rebuild Uralia.” He laughed cynically.
Suddenly feeling sick, Gill got to his feet, deciding to end the discussion.
“How is this ship driven?” he asked, more to himself, convinced tha
t Ugo, familiarized with the Sigian technology, wouldn’t have a problem using the alien devices. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have mowed down the whole crew.
He was in a large oval room, no doubt the ship’s bridge. The walls, curved on the inside, had three bends up to the ceiling, looking like a set of increasingly smaller tori piled one on top of the other. Gill had to admit that they didn’t look that bad, being made of a strange organic material of brown color, shining as if it was wet. It had thousands and thousands of bumps of all sizes, and one of the walls was in fact a display where he could see the stars. The artificial gravity, quite similar to that on Antyra I, radiated directly from the floor, allowing him to stay upright easily.
Only then did he realize the large number of Grammian bodies around, mostly of the muscular version, identical to one another. Ugo had outdone himself with the massacre.
The ship didn’t appear to be a large class, certainly not a destroyer like the ones seen in the memory of the Sigian god, yet the aliens were surprisingly many for such a small place. He wondered how they managed to rest.
In one of the walls, he saw a series of niches arranged in bundles and closed by transparent lids. He realized with a glance that they were the nests where the Grammians slept. The austerity, taken to such extremes, said much about their society. A world able to force its troops to sleep in such awkward pipes for months and months at a time most likely didn’t care about their lives. He imagined a colony of licants willing to sacrifice to the last for the common good, for their acronte. Hmm, good question—who’s your acronte?