The Sigian Bracelet

by George Tome

Two neural probes similar to the one in which he had been immobilized were mounted in wall niches, right next to the nests. He wasn’t at all curious why the Grammians needed so many probes on their ships.

  Apart from the probes, other devices whose usage he couldn’t even guess also hung on the walls. The strangest was a kind of cabinet with four bumps connected obliquely to its sides—a pile of smaller and smaller folders, on top of which lay a flat display. It might have been a futuristic printing device—much more advanced than the rudimentary printers built by the Antyrans. The Shindam forbade them, fearing that the architects could easily convert them to print cloned organs. Most likely, such devices were used heavily in the cloning clinics hidden in the lowest levels of the mining city.

  The interesting thing was that all the instructions on the Grammian machines were bilingual, in the strange Grammian symbols as well as in Antyran! After all, the ship had hosted several Antyran initiates before Ugo squeezed the life out of their kyis—no wonder the gods took the caution to translate the buttons. Maybe they even trained the Antyrans to drive their ship!

  In the end, he realized why the Grammian architecture disturbed him so much. It wasn’t the weird material used to build the walls… The problem was that the ship’s interior looked pretty much identical to the one glimpsed in the alien hologram that Baila had shown him. In 652 years, the Grammians hadn’t changed anything? He found that hard to believe. Maybe… maybe it was only a matter of design—maybe the ship’s functions were improved. However, the appearance was the easiest to change, and such rigidity seemed unthinkable to him. It was as if the Antyrans would still field orzacs and moulan slingers in their armies like they did during the Kids’ War. Of course, he knew nothing about the Grammians and their technology, but as an archivist, he had a good understanding of the evolution of a civilization. Again, he felt a cold shiver at the feeling that beyond what he or the Sigians or anyone else was thinking about the Grammians, something much darker was lurking in the shadows…

  Right in the room’s center, three rows of cockpits faced the display wall; over half of them were occupied by dead Grammians. The cockpits were fitted directly into the floor, their occupants fastened in a rigid rubber seal that left only their arms to hang outside. The creatures were working on their displays when Ugo attacked them. Death came so quickly that not even a bit of surprise could be read in their frozen eyes.

  In front of the cockpits on the right side was a large, thin table floating two feet from the floor. Three silver, metal-like costumes stood around it, their visors wide open. In each of them was a Grammian shot in the face, but strangely enough, they still stayed upright, only with their heads bent sideways or forward. Then Gill saw the fourth Grammian. His face could be seen—as much as the visor allowed—yet his body was invisible. Touching the air, he discovered that it must have been a mimetic costume like those of the other three, with the camouflage on.

  No doubt the strange equipment was used not only for invisibility but as an exoskeleton to augment the movements of its wearer. Luckily, the visor of the Grammian was open—otherwise, Ugo might have missed him.

  The Antyran researchers never managed to build cloaking suits—they could only cloak the Shindam’s chameleons, albeit not from up close and not for all wavelengths.

  The Grammians undoubtedly enjoyed an advanced cloaking technology, yet their entire technological prowess was no match for the Sigian bracelet driven by the avatar of a dead Antyran. Gill pushed the invisible suit, but he couldn’t budge it from the spot. It was firmly anchored to the floor.

  The dark green, polished surface of the floating table felt like water when he touched it, with small waves forming under his thumbs. Bright dots appeared on it, creating a 3D map of the sky. A galactic map! Here, too, the texts were translated into Antyran.

  Suddenly, the green distortion grid disappeared for the first time since it had turned on in Alala’s dome. Another star map started to scroll inside his eyes, the names being written in unknown symbols—most likely Sigian, as they resembled the ones on the bracelet. The scrolling froze when the image on the table overlapped with the one in his eyes.

  “Ugo, I have to reach the Federals. They’re somewhere at the outskirts. How do I get there?”

  “We’re going to Mapu.”

  Obviously, the abomination intended to find the destroyer hidden on the primitive planet, but Gill’s plan was a bit different. He had to meet the Six Stars and tell them about Sigia, about Antyra’s civil war, about the Grammian gods who hid Antyra in a distortion some 1,250 years ago.

  “We’re not going to Mapu. Only the Federals can help us!”

  “Don’t make me force you!”

  “Ugo! If you dream that I’m going to let you—”

  “Let me? Remember, I’m in your head! At your slightest foolishness, I’m taking over.”

  “And for how long can you control me?” Gill exclaimed, feeling again pinched to fight him.

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t try to find out. We shouldn’t go anywhere near the Federals.”

  “Why not?”

  “You don’t know their relationship with the Grammians. Don’t forget, they came to meet the Sigians in Antyra’s orbit.”

  “But they didn’t meet.”

  “Don’t be so sure. The Grammians closed Antyra in a space distortion to trap the Sigians and hide our world. Then, as the Six Stars reached the meeting place, the Grammian ships made contact with the Federals…”

  “Did you see that in the bracelet’s memory?”

  “Grammia’s fleet was already in Antyra’s sector before the arrival of the Federals. I believe, in fact, I’m pretty sure, that the Grammians pretended to be the Sigian envoys to hide their crime. Don’t forget that the Sigians didn’t tell the Rigulians much about them. It wouldn’t be unthinkable…”

  “You’re saying that Grammia is allied with the Six Stars?” he asked incredulously.

  “Do you see any other explanation? If the Grammians had attacked the Federals, too, they had enough time—more than a thousand years—to sort it out. It doesn’t matter what happened, but you risk landing in the jaws of a guval.”

  Gill doubted that the recent arrival of the Grammian ships in the Antyran system was missed by the Rigulian fleet at the outskirts. Therefore, it was logical that the two worlds knew each other. After all, either Ugo was right that the Grammians made the contact instead of the Sigians or it happened otherwise—the point was that they had more than a thousand years to meet.

  But his Guk training allowed him to smell the weakness in Ugo’s reasoning… The jure ignored what the Grammians hid from the Federals! When Gill had woken up in the Grammian neural probe, Baila had said that he was keeping the “visitors” on Antyra’s outskirts—the guests undoubtedly being the Federal messengers. And when the envoys from the Six Stars landed in the western Alixxoran fields, they revealed their astonishment at Antyra’s sudden appearance. They asked why the Antyrans had remained hidden for such a long time… and Baila’s answer was to run away like a coward. He ran from the meeting because he had expected someone else: the Grammian gods! Yes, the Grammians were hiding things from the Six Stars—the biggest secret being that they had closed Antyra behind a firewall some 1,250 years ago! That was why it was vital to reach the Rigulian Federals and divulge the betrayal of their so-called allies!

  “We’re going to the Federals,” Gill said, trying again. “You heard what Baila said—that he keeps them at the outskirts. They’re not exactly Grammia’s allies. I’ll take the risk. The Six Stars know nothing about Sigia, and we have to tell them—”

  “You may assume whatever you want; I will not. We’re going to Mapu.”

  Ugo was Ropolis’s jure, their most skillful strategist—therefore, he should understand better than anyone that Grammia was deceiving the Federals. Then why did he ignore it? He had, of course, another reason to avoid the aliens: the abomination!

  “You’re scared. You’re afraid they’ll discover
your nature. No alien would accept the existence of a—”

  “The little star on the right. Touch it.”

  Seeing that Gill made no move, Ugo said, “All right, I’ll do it myself.”

  Against Gill’s will, his hand pressed the little star. Immediately, the display wall focused on it, and the ship turned to move to the new course. Gill’s hand kept touching the table, chasing the strange symbols that ran on it. Although the signs alternated quickly, it was clear that they accelerated. Mapu’s little star was now shining right in the middle of the huge display wall.

  CHAPTER 14.

  “The spiky coldness is my nest! Woe to them, lovers of warmth!” Pixihe’s second threat to the Gondarran envoys; an apocryphal fragment from the “Mysteries of the Ussybayales,” carved in a pink granite slab, excavated by Tadeoibiisi from the ruins of a vitrified city whose name had been lost in the mist of time.

  ***

  The hologuided magneto-tractors finished harvesting the last parcels of the acajaa crop on a small farm located at Antyra’s equator, under the worried eyes of the farmer who was watching them from a nearby mound. A cold mist creeping over the fields had forced Colva to wear an electrically heated tunic. Even in his greatest nightmares, he never thought to live such a day… but lo, the end of times had arrived!

  Colva wasn’t the type of farmer who was loyal to the temples. The majority of them had migrated to Antyra II to colonize the fertile soil around the ocean crater as soon as the Antyrans built their first fusion spaceships. In time, they turned the planet into “Zhan’s farm of kyis”—their capital, Palidon, blessed by the prophet to host the violet triangle.

  On Antyra I, the farmers left behind didn’t prove so fanatical like their brethren in the skies, but the disappearance of the firewall “miraculously” helped many of them to find the lost flame of faith.

  Colva’s biggest problem was that the temples kept alarmingly accurate and detailed records about most of the mortals. He wasn’t one of the tarjis, and he had to pay for that.

  He looked hatefully at the two initiates guarding his tractors from the roadside. Their orders were to collect the harvest. All of it. His family wasn’t entitled to a single stem of acajaa, nothing to feed them in the next months.

  Before lunch, his female called him at the holophone to show him Baila’s new edict to confiscate the children.

  “It’s going to be all right,” he whispered, holding her in his arms. “You’ll see; we’re going to make it somehow.”

  But not even he believed what he said. They were living in awful times.

  Everywhere on the continent, from one ocean shore to the other, the same scene was happening in the farms on the temples’ lists. The agents were taking care that all crops were harvested and handed over before the cold ruined them.

  ***

  “How many ships do we have around Antyra I?” Baila asked a hologram of a thin Grammian, whose jelly nodules were trembling all over his body—visibly nervous to be addressed by the prophet.

  Baila wasn’t on a gray ship, as the Antyrans believed. He was sitting, relaxed, on the throne in his secret underground lair. Lots of Grammians in the jelly version were swarming around him, setting strange devices and digging new galleries in the complex.

  “Eight, but two are ready to fly to Ropolis,” the Grammian mumbled hastily.

  “Let them all fly to the outskirts—and fast!”

  “It will be done, Your Greatness. Any particular destination?”

  “Surround the ships of the… Federals. Keep the distance, don’t let them suspect your intentions,” he ordered aloud. “Abrian will surely try to contact them. You have to stop him by all means!”

  The Grammian god lowered his eyes, the jelly nodules of his cheeks swelling even larger, ready to burst. In the end, he managed to master his internal turmoil enough to be able to splutter, “They… they’re going to ask what we are we doing there.”

  “Tell them I sent you to the outskirts, too.”

  “Greatest Baila,” the Grammian dared to respond, “this will make the Federals believe we failed the negotiations with Antyra. They’ll call the kralls or the shadows of the Sernak…”

  “Yes, you’re right,” muttered the prophet. “Tell the Federals you will pay them a visit to share your progress here. It’s a good excuse. And when you board Abrian’s ship, try to use subtlety.”

  “Even if he fights back?”

  “I very much doubt he knows how to use the ship’s weapons, although I don’t understand how he learned to drive it—curse his tail! I want him alive! And the Federals shouldn’t suspect anything!”

  “What if he doesn’t show up?”

  “He’ll appear, all right; don’t worry. Where else can he go? If Abrian reaches the Federals in the next few days, we’re in trouble. I don’t want to rush things.”

  “Two ships are on their way,” said the Grammian after a few moments. “We are already scanning the outskirts.”

  “Very good! We need five days to mobilize our sons. After that, the Federals won’t matter anymore. Finally, we’re going to put diplomacy aside,” he said with a grin, delighted by the prospect.

  “We’ll do as you wish, Your Greatness!”

  “Make sure to give me five days, all right?”

  Without a word, the Grammian fell to the ground, his head resting on his right foot, covered by the flaccid skins of his arms.

  ***

  Gill made another exhausting effort to push the last body through the airlock pointed out by Ugo, then sealed the opening by pressing the moist bump in the wall. With a loud whistle, the bodies were sucked in by the hungry space.

  Although it was difficult to drag the huge number of bodies throughout the ship, he squeezed his spikes and worked stubbornly without complaining or asking for breaks; he had no shadow of intent to “enjoy” the company of the thoroughly dead shells, as he now felt was appropriate to call them. They were the first dead he produced since he learned about Kaura, and the rift opened by the secret of immortality forced him to accept the possibility of segregation-by-death, to think like a Ropolitan. What a waste to die unarchived like this, he thought, wasted like scores of generations before them, ancestors who had no clue what they were living for and why they were dying.

  He felt more relieved now that he had gotten rid of them and didn’t have to glimpse their frozen expressions. Of course, he would have felt even better to throw Ugo out, too, if he could only find a way.

  For the moment, he had to avoid the monster, to conceal his intentions as best as he could, in the hope that the abomination wasn’t reading his thoughts. He knew that the end was near; when they reached the Sigian destroyer, the waters of reality would trickle on another channel. A shapeless way for now, for it made no sense to estimate the keeper’s path by calling the Guk routine-aroma harmonics—not with an entity as unpredictable and corrupt as the jure’s avatar. After all, a seven-hundred-year technological abyss had opened between them, crushing even his faintest hope of estimating Ugo’s purposes. Gill could only smell that the jure had no intention of parasitizing him forever. Would he force him to commit suicide, like he did with the stocky Antyran?

  And yet, he was meant to learn Ugo’s plans faster than he expected. Despite all the disgust caused by the jure’s hideousness, he made the mistake of trying to talk with him, hoping to understand why the Sigian-of-the-bracelet didn’t manage to win Ugo to his side.

  “Ugo, I’d like to ask you something.”

  “Go ahead,” Ugo mumbled grumpily, with the tone of someone forced to abandon some very important stuff to listen to Gill’s gibberish.

  “You lived the Sigian’s memories. You saw how the Grammians destroyed Ariga’s beautiful cities, how they bombed Sigia. Don’t you think we should save their world? Only the Federals can help us,” he said, trying to persuade him. “I could—”

  “You just don’t get it, do you?” the avatar answered in a glacial voice. “After the expansion, Sigia will bec
ome irrelevant. Gill, if you help me, I’ll make you an offer. I’ll give you the chance to become the first one assimilated in the singularity!”

  “So… you didn’t abandon your plan to expand?” he exclaimed, stupefied by the disclosure. And he told it so easily, which could only mean that the abomination intended to kill him as soon as his services wouldn’t be needed anymore. “You want to betray the parhontes? You’re mad if you think—”

  “Aaaargh!” the abomination shouted. “Don’t you dare to call me mad,” he yelled with the intensity of Belamia’s storm. “Ever!”

  The atrocious pain knocked him to the floor. He felt his head squeezed in a grip of fire—each of his neurons thoroughly tortured in unexpected ways.

  “If you kill me, nobody’s going to get you to Mapu,” he managed to mutter as soon as he recovered from Ugo’s deadly squeeze.

  “I don’t care! I’ll turn you into dust,” he hissed, trembling in rage.

  The jure squeezed him a bit more, to make sure Gill got the message.

  “Don’t you understand?” Ugo told him. “When I woke up from Kaura’s sleep, I had a revelation: I’ll be Zhan’s new incarnation. When the parhontes gave me the codes of the world, they knew that the final decision would be mine. What they were hoping for, what plans they had for my tail, all became irrelevant when they set me free. And they killed themselves!” He laughed, suddenly amused.

  It appeared that the abomination then calmed down; the mental claws withdrew from Gill’s ganglions.

  “Don’t provoke me,” he said in a threatening voice. “I can hold you in my grip till we get there.”

  “Don’t count on it,” Gill replied, boiling in anger.

  He began to realize, horrified, who was worse between Ugo and Baila. For different reasons, both wanted to get to the destroyer, but after Ugo moved Uralia and himself to the ship’s memory, he would have plenty of time to expand—especially now that he had the access codes of the virtual world. And with the resources of the Sigian vessel, he’d be able to do it much faster than in Ropolis. Gill had to admit that stopping the abomination was more important than his life, more important than even the rebirth of the Sigians…