by George Tome
After this incident, Ugo became even colder and more secluded, if that was possible. It seemed he could no longer control his impatience, and any attempt to start a discussion—no matter how harmless—distracted him from his thoughts, doing nothing but to further annoy him. In the end, Gill gave up trying.
Mapu was approaching fast. Several days had passed since they started to fly in the deep night, and in the meantime, Gill had the chance to try one of the devices on the bridge—helped, of course, by the nasty jure. They were indeed printers; after selecting an item on the display, the device delivered the desired object in one of its drawers. This time, the Grammian technology managed to impress him with the hundreds of trinkets listed in the virtual catalogue. He had no clue about their usage or how to recharge the device, but one of them was a drawing of an orange mush in a tray, so he ordered it without delay. Very soon he had to concede that the taste was utterly disgusting—pretty much like eating hot sand. Yet the food was remotely edible, and he survived his first contact with the Grammian cuisine.
Gill made his nest in a corner of the bridge; he pulled the fluff from several pods in the walls, undoubtedly the resting abodes of the Antyran “guests” on the ship. It didn’t even cross his spikes to crawl inside and nap in the narrow tubes; the Grammians had a total lack of decency to sleep in such conditions! The more he understood them, the more he disliked their kind. They resembled the world that Baila wanted to turn Antyra into: a dull, sorrowful, guilty existence where the individuals ended up crushed and turned into simple cogs of a giant, odorless machine. They only needed a generation. A single generation of younglings raised in the temples, following the prophet’s canons, as they had tried before the Kids’ War.
For a while, Ugo ordered him to use various displays in the cockpits, until he gave up. The jure didn’t tell him what he was looking for, but Gill figured out in the end that the abomination was searching for a way to access the ship’s logic neurons. As it seemed, in terms of artificial intelligence, the Grammian technology was either extremely rudimentary or hidden in unreachable places.
“Analog circuits,” Ugo concluded, spiteful. “These creatures are awful,” he exploded before abandoning the search.
One morning, as he glanced at the display wall on the bridge, he saw the white-yellow star of Mapu glowing brighter than on the previous evening. It was no longer just a little star lost in the frigid darkness of space but a real ball of fire! And with all the pressure of the hideous dead hanging on his ganglions and the looming end of their forcible fellowship, he felt a wave of joy to be part of such a historic event, to be the first Antyran to reach the strange realm of another form of intelligent life!
A realm that—he was pretty sure—would turn out to be nothing less than the craziest lands conceived in the dreams of the ancient aromaries intoxicated by the nifle’s chimeras!
Somewhere to the left, he spotted a gray planet draped in a slight greenish tint and traversed by wide, brown stripes.
“Ugo, we’ve arrived! Look at the planet!” he exploded, his voice trembling with excitement.
“That’s not Mapu,” the grumpy jure replied.
Ugo wasn’t enjoying the view, which didn’t surprise Gill at all. “For seeing the foul-smelling88 black whirl with my own eyes, I came to realize that, although I was walking the shores of life, my kyi had crossed on the other side,” he recalled a quote from “The Weird and Wondrous Adventures of Mythical Azaric” tale, narrated by Laixan. Indeed, death is a terrible thing… how it must change one’s smell going through such an experience, he thought, remembering Sandara’s words that the jure wasn’t always a monster and that his decay began after he lost his kyi.
“Mapu has oceans like Antyra. This is a gaseous planet,” Ugo bothered to explain to him.
As they approached, Gill realized the enormity of the world, which resembled the realm of the damned Kaura but in different colors. The clouds looked more opaque, and even from a distance, he could see several huge storms, busy tearing apart the rotting face of the planet. Some cyclones in the contact areas of the bands were larger than the monstrous Belamia—frankly, they seemed larger than the whole Antyran desert planet. Nothing could live in such a place.
The display wall framed two small white dots orbiting the realm of storms: two satellites locked in eternal ice, resembling Antyra I before Zhan closed it in the belly of Beramis.
The ship left the gray planet, closing in on the central star.
Soon, the view of another planet pumped the blood in his spikes, but he realized it didn’t fit Ugo’s description: it was a reddish-brown ball wrapped in an opaque mist, a global storm that blurred its arid surface. It was hiding from view like a female tarji, he thought, amused, remembering the ridiculous robes they used to drape their bodies in their often hopeless attempt to hide the presence of the tail bump.
He was hungry, but he decided to ignore the calls of his stomachs because two other worlds appeared on the screen. The one on the right, closer to Mapu’s star, was shining in a gloomy yellow-brown light that didn’t promise anything good. On the other tail, the playful glimmer of a tiny blue-green crescent in the center of the display was calling them with the hypnotic mirage of a life-giving ocean.
“This is it!” he exclaimed, mesmerized by the view.
“Stop! Stop the ship!” ordered Ugo. Without waiting for Gill to comply, he stopped the movement of the vessel.
“What happened?” asked Gill. Then he saw the frantic flow of messages at the bottom of the display. The Antyran translation warned them that the ship was receiving signals from the planet’s surface!
“Video streaming. Mapu has video streaming!” the jure exclaimed.
“The Grammians are here, too? We have to turn back to the Federals!”
Gill tried to touch the navigation table, but Ugo blocked his hands.
“No, wait! Checking…”
Still controlling his limbs, Ugo forced him to enter a Grammian cockpit and press the buttons of its display. The jure was moving so fast that Gill had no time to read most of the translated texts scrolling in front of his eyes.
“Are you going to tell me what is happening?” he finally exclaimed, irritated.
“They’re neither Grammian nor Federal. The compression technology is archaic.”
“Archaic?”
“Even more primitive than Antyra’s. But something else is… strange.”
Ugo paused as if he couldn’t believe what he just read. Then he continued, “It’s not a single language.”
“What?” Gill exclaimed, perplexed. “Mapu’s civilization has reached radio transmissions without being unified?”
“They’re… hundreds. At least hundreds,” he added, hesitating.
“Hundreds of languages? It can’t be. The sensors must have gone mad…”
Gill couldn’t imagine such a planet. It was as if on a single world, on a single surface, all the civilizations of the galaxy crowded together—or better yet, the civilizations from dozens of galaxies. He got dizzy just by thinking about the implications of such a discovery. In an instant, Mapu became the most interesting world in the universe, even without the presence of the Sigian destroyer.
“Can you put them on the screen? What’s in the transmissions?”
“I’ve no idea, and I don’t want to know!” Ugo replied.
Gill’s curiosity had grown to the size of Eger’s glacier. As an archivist, he would have given anything for the chance to discover the knowledge and habits of the world he had imagined countless times during the last few days. He forgot all his problems, charmed by the alien messages scrolling on the display.
“It looks similar to Antyra some two or three hundred years ago. We’re going forward,” ordered Ugo.
“If they have radio, maybe they can detect us.”
“They’re still primitives. Most likely, they haven’t discovered nuclear power yet. I doubt they’re able to fly.”
He changed the course on the floating t
able using Gill’s hands.
“We’re going around, though,” Ugo said after a brief moment. “We’ll approach from the dark side.”
They started to move again, more cautiously this time. The crescent of the ocean-planet thinned, obscuring the glare of Mapu’s star.
Each time he touched the navigation table, a series of values appeared in a circle around his finger. By watching Ugo’s movements, he learned that he could adjust the ship’s speed by rubbing another finger on this circle and increasing or decreasing the numbers. The system looked so simple that Gill had no doubt he could use it alone if Ugo would ever give him the opportunity.
At one point, the jure had him touch the surface of the table twice in quick succession, thus grabbing the space continuum and pulling it. When he released it, the ship jumped through the deformed space like the Sigian destroyer, briefly surrounded by a weird fog. In a single jump, they reached the planet’s orbit! That was how the Grammians controlled the space… much more rudimentary than the Sigians’ method. It was hard to believe they had defeated them. The Grammians’ strength lay in numbers and fanaticism. Surely their war losses must have been terrible, but they probably didn’t care much about this small detail.
The dark side of the planet approached quickly, surrounded by a few scattered star rays and a tiny strip from the disk of a gray satellite hidden behind the lit face. Soon, the darkness became bigger than the whole screen, hiding everything. As far as he could tell, they were approaching rapidly. Was Ugo doing it on purpose to avoid the rudimentary sensors of the natives, or were they about to crash and get buried under a mountain of earth like Kirk’an on Antyra II? He had the vision of his skeleton discovered after hundreds of years… someone would pull the bracelet from his arm and try to wear it…
It looked like he wasn’t meant to see the alien world from orbit. Only when they arrived close to the surface could he glimpse a river of lights blinking in the distance—maybe huge pyres lit in the middle of the settlements by savages dressed in skins, he thought. Ugo pressed some buttons on the cockpit and switched the image on the display wall to infrared, the details of the unknown planet finally coming to life.
Gill saw the smooth, greenish surface of an unknown sea or ocean. A shore was visible as a thin line of sand blocking a string of large, shallow lagoons. He would have loved to see their details, but Ugo was running the ship in total disregard of his wishes. Suddenly, he noticed some lights on the sand, maybe the same ones glimpsed from up high.
“Look there,” he exclaimed enthusiastically. “Drive closer!”
“Don’t move!” the monster shouted while he paralyzed his arms.
If Gill had any doubts about the fate Ugo planned for him, now was a good moment to give up on them. The abomination didn’t exert the smallest effort to hide his hostility. He still depended on Gill’s carcass, but he could smell his trophy so close!
The continent was covered in vegetation, no doubt of that. What struck Gill were the squares—patches of forest, patches of crops—all betraying organization. Here and there, he briefly surprised moving dots—agile shadows defying the darkness to hunt for prey or join a wild mating game. Even in the dark, Mapu was pulsing with a life stranger than anything he could imagine…
Undoubtedly, the world had progressed since the Sigians’ visit. Maybe the Grammians had assimilated them, too, like they did with the Antyrans. But they hadn’t been locked inside a firewall, which was an encouraging discovery. With a bit of luck, maybe they’d find that the natives had never been contacted by alien civilizations.
They flew over countless mountain ranges crossed by deep, curved valleys. Sometimes, small settlements glimmered in the night. He reached the conclusion that the regular lights couldn’t be pyres; they were a primitive form of street lighting—apparently electrical! They had discovered electricity, which was not that surprising; they had radio transmissions, after all. Along some of the valleys, he spotted dark trails, which might have been primitive roads. He imagined savages dressed in skins, carrying piles of strange food on platforms hauled by monstrous creatures with three crests and eight feet… He could barely wait to see them up close.
As they flew toward the interior, the areas became more arid. Even though he didn’t get to glimpse all the details, the shrubs became smaller and scarcer on the thirsty ground. Their ship reached a wide river meandering through the hills, dotted by sandbanks along the riverbed. As far as he could see, the area was extremely dry—barely a handful of shrubs grew in the barren wasteland.
After a while, they stumbled upon a plateau bordered by vertical ravines. By now, they had flown a long way from the coast, and there was no trace of natives anymore. Creatures of the sea, they seemed unadapted to a life far from the ocean, in the middle of a desert, where they would have to use irrigation to grow food, perhaps a concept alien to them. Who knew how the Sigians carried so many of them to bury their destroyer…
But just as he was hovering over another small river, he saw a road. It seemed he was wrong—the primitives were able to live far from the coastline!
Gradually, the scenery changed. More and more hills and mountains scrolled under his hungry gaze, their valleys covered by lush forests. Soon, he came across a flat, sandy area flanked by trees of an unidentifiable species—pretty much like all the living things of the strange world. In the middle of the flatland, the plants were obviously seeded by natives. The nearby pentagonal patch was made of carefully sown plots bordered by a pipe. Primitive irrigation, he realized, fascinated. He glimpsed three larger and three smaller dwellings along a sandy road above them, but to his regret, they disappeared before he had time to see them better.
Not far from them, a much larger settlement appeared on the left side of the screen. Hundreds of strange square structures crowded along streets, arranged in a gridlike pattern. Over a great distance around it, parceled fields were growing all kinds of unknown plants.
The spaceship flew over an elongated rectangle of artificial origin, which had white stripes painted on all its length. Another narrow road covered by the equally bizarre material ran parallel to it.
The area was now packed with settlements, crops, and luxuriant forests. He even hovered over a sizable lake. Ugo touched the navigation table without saying a word, and the ship turned to the right. Other towns, roads, forests, and cultivated hills came into view. He saw a small lake and, not far from it, another one. Around them, he could glimpse a scattered settlement stretching over a considerable distance along a main road. As they hovered above six long, identical buildings, Ugo stopped the ship.
“We’ve arrived.”
“What do you mean we’ve arrived? Where are the pyramids?” Gill exclaimed, surprised. He struggled to find a trace of the ancient buildings, but he couldn’t see anything familiar. Have they been destroyed? he asked himself, his spikes wrinkled with anxiety.
“On the hills in front of you,” answered the jure.
Ugo lowered the ship’s altitude over one of the few areas without trees, not far from a road. Good landing spots seemed scarce due to the rich vegetation invading the land up to the horizon.
“I want you to check what’s with that road,” the jure ordered him. “Maybe we can leave the ship here.”
They landed with a strong jolt, and Gill pulled on a black Antyran exoskeleton he found in an alcove near the sleeping tubes. This way, he would be spared from breathing the unknown germs infesting Mapu’s atmosphere. Too bad he couldn’t use the invisible armor suits of the Grammians to move unnoticed, but they didn’t fit him. Moreover, he had no idea how to operate them and wasn’t at all curious to sniff the contents of the brown atmosphere puffed by Zhan’s children. The armor suits were still stuck on the floor of the ship’s bridge—missing, of course, their Grammian tenants, extracted with great labor through the rear opening, who were now floating, stone-cold frozen, somewhere in the interstellar space.
As he stepped out, he noticed the ship was glowing like hot metal. Their
approach must have been visible from a great distance, despite the tremendous speed of their vessel.
“Plasma trapped in the shield,” replied Ugo to his unspoken question. “It will go out soon.”
Gill didn’t ask how the abomination knew such things; it was obvious that he had learned many of the gods’ secrets in seven hundred years.
The world had a dense atmosphere, enriched by strange, un-Antyran aromas. His helmet’s filter allowed the hypnotic fragrances to pass unhindered after blocking the dangerous particles. As he avidly inhaled the planet’s air, he couldn’t help but think that even the legendary Antyran aromaries couldn’t melt essences close to the ones smelled here. They didn’t have the privilege to smell the unbelievable texture of combinations, the many surprises hidden in peripheral nuances—from sweet to bitter, stinging ones.
Each and every fragrance would have caused a stir in an aromary dome, and he could smell hundreds!
The strange vegetation was rustling under his feet. The optical spectrum had changed into a more comfortable one, now that he was watching the world through an Antyran helmet and not a Grammian display. Although it was still dark, the colors somewhat resembled the ones during daytime. The plants were an intense green, and Gill was convinced that it wasn’t an artifact of the helmet’s visor but their natural hue!
Bizarre species filled him with awe at every turn. He would have liked to camp in that place for months, to dip his nostrils in the odors of the ground walked on for the first time by the feet of an Antyran, to harvest its fragrances in a unique collection of flavors unmatched in all the history of the aromaries.
Gill turned his eyes to the sky, longing for the purple bacteria so widespread on Antyra. Somewhere at the horizon, the planet’s moon was rising over the hills, lighting the surroundings. The atmospheric moisture hid the details of its arid surface. Another desert world, he concluded, judging by its color.