The Sigian Bracelet

by George Tome

  After a few minutes, he reached the strange road of the natives. He jumped the ditch and landed on a hard, black surface painted with a white stripe right in the middle. It wasn’t made of metal or plastoceramics as he expected—it consisted of pebbles stuck in some other material. He touched it with the sensor on his left wrist and waited for a few moments to sniff the composition. The tiny screen scrolled a long list of complicated formulas, all indicating a mixture of hydrocarbons. A planet that hadn’t exhausted its resources yet, he thought with a pinch of envy. Perhaps tar. If he remembered well, Antyrans used something like that a few hundred years ago, before depleting it.

  “What do you think they use it for?”

  “We can’t stay here,” said Ugo.

  A wild humming erupted in the night, sending ice spikes down his tail. He couldn’t tell the direction of the noise, but the acoustic sensors incorporated in his suit’s fabric showed that the source was coming from behind. He turned around, ready to face the approaching threat.

  “What is this noise? Are they attacking us?”

  He had barely finished the sentence when two powerful lights ripped the darkness, blinding him. A primitive, noisy assault chariot armed with a huge frontal chrome bar—no doubt built to crush the foot soldiers—leaped straight for him. He froze in place, startled by the apparition, but the un-Antyran reflexes of the abomination worked flawlessly this time, too, distorting the space and forcing him to jump out of harm’s way.

  The pilot of the vehicle veered off with a sinister grinding noise and crashed into the ditch on the right side of the road, flipping over. Only then did Gill notice that the “thing” had wheels! He cautiously approached the vehicle, whose lights were still shining, and saw how its occupants—in a state of shock—were trying to break free from the twisted hatch.

  “¡Aaaaiiii!” a creature yelled at the sight of him.

  It started to talk in a weird language, dotted by strange inflections.

  “¡Alfonsito! ¿Qué es lo que muestran? ¡Tengo miedo!”89

  The creature appeared to be a female; she was smaller in stature and stouter than the male beside her. She had a sort of curly black fur growing on her head and wore a blue outfit. He felt a bit disappointed by this because he was hoping to find her covered in the strange scaly things he saw from a distance through the eyes of the Sigian. That would have been awesome. Dressed like that, she lost some of the strangeness that any alien was supposed to flaunt—especially on a first date.

  What he saw wasn’t all that different from the Antyrans, except that any of their parts examined up close didn’t resemble theirs. The female—at least he supposed it was a “she”—had some walloping chest protuberances, their shape being visible through the garments. He didn’t have the slightest idea what their use could be. At first look, they didn’t appear to serve any conceivable purpose and surely hindered her in her daily chores. But the bumps didn’t seem to be a disease or deformity—the other female in the group had a pair of same things on her chest. Their waists were massive, much larger than those of the Antyrans. Otherwise, they had two arms, two feet, and a sort of small trunk on their faces. Yes. And they had no tail.

  The creatures were of different sizes. The second female was almost as stout as the first one, and the male between them had fur even on his face! He displayed a prominent belly, almost certainly pregnant. It appeared that on Mapu, the males were holding the eggs. Or maybe he belonged to a different species related to the females? A detailed examination might have helped him to understand it better, but it didn’t seem the brightest idea to drag them forcefully into his ship. Anyway, Ugo would oppose the slightest transgression from their mission. Along with them were another two beings of smaller stature: their children, missing the ridiculous chest swellings and large bellies.

  “¡El chupacabras!” shouted the other female.

  On hearing the word, the aliens awoke from shock and started to scream like mad, deafening him—their children being the loudest, of course. They immediately fled into the night, still screaming in terror. Gill listened to them for a while—howling through the forest and banging into the trees—before he went to check their overturned vehicle. A thick cloud of steam was coming out of it.

  “What the heck is this chupacabras?” he asked, intrigued.

  If Ugo could have done it, he would have shrugged. But unfortunately, he had lost this ability seven years ago, when he died. Therefore, the jure contented himself with shrugging in his mind.

  When Gill reached the vehicle, he knelt to look inside. He saw a kind of thin wheel used to steer the chariot. It didn’t have an autopilot, which wasn’t exactly a surprise. It looked extremely primitive, missing even an infrared display. He instantly felt admiration for the natives; they needed a big dose of courage—or rather, insanity—to get inside that thing and drive through the night!

  He walked around to the back of the vehicle, and he quickly noticed a pipe blackened at its end, coming from the engine box.

  “Fossil fuels,” concluded Ugo. “We’re leaving—maybe they’ll come back armed.”

  The vehicle was burning hydrocarbons! Stupefied by the discovery, he touched the layer of soot at the end of the pipe and deeply smelled his gloved finger. The helmet’s filter carried the sweetly pungent smell of oil to his nostrils, reminding him how hungry he was—the terrible Grammian menu being, of course, the main reason for his starvation. Reflexively, he brought the finger to his mouth to taste the substance, forgetting that the helmet’s visor prevented him from doing such a thing.

  “Hey! Leave that! We don’t have time for this,” Ugo said, blocking his other hand, which was about to open the visor.

  “Right… easy for you to say—you’re never hungry! You forgot how it feels to be hungry!” he grumbled, enraged by Ugo’s behavior.

  “Move to the ship!”

  Gill glanced back regretfully before entering the ship, which had reduced its brilliance in the meantime—just as Ugo had told him would happen. He took off slowly toward the nearby hills, where he saw a row of white buildings raised on an artificial plateau. His spikes wrinkled with excitement: the place hadn’t changed much! They had a good chance of finding the destroyer still buried where the Sigians had hidden it!

  He turned to the left and flew over an artificial pit dug by the ancient natives—a wide, smooth ditch, perpendicular to two shorter ones at its ends; he suspected that it must have been a place for some religious ritual.

  The ship traversed a dense forest of dwarf trees and came across a river, which had carved a deep valley through the tall hills.

  Very soon, he spotted a flat area to the right bank of the river that they could land on, very close to the platforms of the ancient city. It was secluded, far from roads or modern buildings. With a bit of luck, they might get a pretty good advance before they were disturbed.

  Ugo landed the ship once more, and Gill ran out.

  “Move quickly! The savages will raise the alarm!” the jure ordered him.

  Even though he was moving quickly, he had to stay alert to the traps of the unfamiliar terrain. In a few jumps, he went around the western side of the plateau.

  The dawn arrived, his first dawn on an alien planet. Even though Mapu’s star didn’t rise yet, the first rays heralded its coming at the eastern horizon. Perhaps realizing it had guests, the star prepared a memorable show. Fluffy clouds of all sizes and shapes made their way into the sky in an explosion of color, as if they were on fire. Only their lower part was lit by the invisible star; the rest remained a purple-gray. Right at the horizon, Gill saw several small discoidal clouds. For a brief moment, he had the feeling that they were sparkling ships looking for him, but it was only the play of his excited imagination.

  He stopped to admire the view, convinced that he had never witnessed something so beautiful. The purple mist on his home planet, Antyra I, hid the clouds at dawn and dusk—clouds that, anyway, didn’t look like the ones from here. On Antyra, they usually appeared
from the ocean as a compact wall and furiously poured a days-long deluge, washing the bacteria from the sky until the whole ground became purple. After that, they disappeared as if they never existed. Of course, the purple bacteria had the ability to sense the approaching storm and quickly divided into spores, going airborne as soon as the ground dried out. Thus, the little seeds were ready to be reborn and feed on the siclides’ pollen lifted into the atmosphere by the dust devils of the vardannes.

  Unfortunately, he had no time to admire the scenery—they were quickly losing the advantage of darkness. He jumped the steep slope of a ravine and landed on an alley overlooking the pyramids.

  “Xochicalco,” whispered Ugo. “We’re getting close.”

  As soon as he came out of the trees, the huge stone terraces that connected the city’s squares appeared in front of him. He climbed them faster than the shadow of a nifle, helped by the distortion grid and by Ugo’s impatience. Right in the middle of the central square was a temple different from the others, a bit higher and covered in well-preserved bas-reliefs. Surely he hadn’t noticed it through the Sigian’s eyes—it was presumably built after their departure.

  On seeing the sculptures, he felt a shiver. They were so bizarre that he couldn’t help but wonder what they represented. A deep, straight line framed a couple of allegorical animals dressed in ovoid scales,90 meandering on the walls like the whirls of a raging river. For a split second, it crossed his kyi that they were llandro, but the Mapu monsters lacked the long, poison-spitting fangs and the swarm of ridiculous feet. True, they had a sort of stylized mane. On Antyra, there were no legless creatures; therefore, Gill had no way of knowing if such a thing could live for real or was just a legend. He couldn’t imagine a land critter unable to walk on feet—it would be impossible to avoid predators.

  What is this world? he asked himself, troubled by what he was seeing. Could it be that Antyra’s nightmares and legends are coming to life on Mapu? A loud alarm shrilled in his hearing gills, for his archivist training allowed him to spot details carved in stone that would have eluded other, less-experienced nostrils, details that told him that Mapu91 wasn’t entirely foreign to the ritual violence born of religious customs perverted over time. He had no tangible proof of that, but the temple seemed to hide a ghastly secret. He wanted to understand the sculptures, to make the stones talk and shout the horrors witnessed, to learn the reasons of the ancients who built the pyramids on the hilltops, to find out if his archivist premonition was true. Cruelty, unrestrained cruelty…

  Ugo also became interested in the bas-reliefs—a surprising thing considering his earlier behavior.

  “Look,” he exclaimed, amused.

  He turned Gill’s eyes toward a sculpture, in truth, quite a stylized carving, but he could still recognize the image: Kirk’an! An alien, on the pyramid’s bas-relief! He wasn’t mistaken; it had the same outline and beard as the Sigian commander.92 He was holding a strange prisoner on a leash, perhaps another intelligent species of this planet.

  “A monkey,” said Ugo. “The Sigians were shocked by the present of the natives; they thought it was sentient, and for a while, they tried to communicate with it. But it’s just another animal.”

  Kirk’an’s image repeated on several walls, in different postures. Gill noticed the small, disk-shaped bread cakes with a cross in the middle, offered as food.

  Suddenly, Ugo made him turn.

  “I heard something!”

  An unknown creature took off from a tree in a noisy fluttering of wings. Gill followed its graceful flight until it disappeared, hidden by the dense canopy. Even though it only lasted a few seconds, the chance of witnessing the freedom of movements that only a creature of the skies could experience filled him with awe. The first such animal he saw in his life! On Antyra, the flying lizards had been long ago pushed to extinction by the zeal of the tarjis, for the imaginary guilt of going over the vitrified cities and becoming Arghail’s eyes…

  Gill woke up from dreaming when he noticed the hill behind the terraces. Finally, he was looking at the place where the Sigian destroyer had been buried 1,250 years ago! And the richly decorated pyramid was erected on the place where the Sigians had once dined on a stone platform!

  Anxious to reach the hill, he followed a dirt trail near another temple, and in a few jumps, he approached the whole square from the northeast. The ancient natives had built some truly monumental structures on the hilltop, an incredible achievement, considering their primitive tools. They reminded him of the ancient Antyrans who also raised temples and huge cities of ice or rock using only the strength of their arms—and the muscles of their moulans, of course.

  From the northern side, the size of the buildings became even more obvious: the stone terraces were built one on top of the other, climbing to dizzying heights. He walked around the walls and reached a group of stairs on a platform. Without waiting for Ugo’s approval, he climbed them with running jumps, his curiosity being attracted by the place with the force of the maelstrom between the Twin Rocks in the Malikan Strait.

  He remembered the place. Something whispered that he was there in another life… the life of the Sigian inside the bracelet. A small artificial cave whose ceiling was lined with a wire mesh opened in his path. He climbed some stairs, turned left in the corridor, and reached the room where he had seen the milky ray from the ceiling. He looked up and saw that the hole was still there—1,250 years hadn’t changed anything! Well, the curved stone in the center of the room was missing.

  Ugo didn’t hurry him to leave—perhaps he was also curious to see the cave.

  “The light falls vertically only two times in a year: the days when the Sigians arrived and when they left,” the jure said. “This is not our cave.”

  Gill went outside and saw another small artificial hole opening high in the nearby wall. On the ground level there was a large cave, partially obstructed by various metallic objects, and another hole on its right, blocked by a metal gate. But the cave in front of him appeared to be the destination of his feet, controlled by the jure. The left wall was artificial, made from neatly arranged boulders, while the right one was dug into bedrock. A large pile of rocks collapsed from the ceiling filled much of the cave.

  “Push them aside,” Ugo ordered impatiently.

  Without waiting for him, the jure took control of his hands. He was moving much faster than Gill could have done it. He rolled the boulders in the distorted space nearby, and they disappeared several feet away. After he finished, he took the laser lens from the belt and burned an opening in the rocky ground. With a loud bang, the stone fell into the gap underneath, and Ugo-Gill jumped into the darkness. He landed on his feet in a vaulted gallery about twice his height. Here and there, large rocks collapsed from the walls blocked his way, but he had no difficulty opening a path through them. Many corridors wound like a maze in his path, the majority leading southward to the ancient city. Not even the thermal sight of his suit could unravel the damp darkness at their ends. The main gallery was going eastward, toward the Sigian destroyer…

  As they approached the hill, the corridor widened and descended at a slight slope. He soon reached a wall full of finely carved bas-reliefs. The path turned to the left, but Ugo stopped him in front of the sculptures. Kirk’an was carved here, too, looking at an ovoid in front of him—the Sigian destroyer about to be buried. Another square retold the story of the monkey. From both sides of the wall, the unknown animal resembling a llandro was gazing at Gill—the same one carved on the richly decorated pyramid in the center of the ruins. Two other sculptures got his attention: the golden grinding machines from the bracelet’s memory.

  A small crack between the rock blocks, widened by the earthquakes of the last millennia, was the only indication that something was beyond them. He looked through the opening, and indeed, he saw a huge room. Since he could look inside, it made no sense to cut the stones. Gill carefully pulled the space beyond the crack, and in an instant, he reached behind the wall, inside the hu
ge excavation.

  The destroyer was seemingly there, under a mound of stones carefully stacked on top of it, completely hidden from view. Nearby, the two Sigian golden excavators lay dismantled.

  In a corner of the giant room, he could see hundreds of wooden baskets holding unidentified offerings. Among them were rolls of painted fabric and statues depicting Kirk’an, cast in a yellow metal—probably gold. A huge pile of artifacts that would have driven to ecstasy the archivists of any galactic world!

  Ugo directed him to a large heap of stones. A menu appeared in the upper part of bracelet’s grid, and the center symbol began to blink. With a loud thundering followed by a thick cloud of dust, the rocks collapsed, and a golden ramp slid down to him. Inside the ship, a diffused light lit up. Without hesitation, he ran inside. He had finally reached the Sigian vessel!

  His joy was overshadowed by the imminent ending of the journey in the company of the living dead. What was the abomination going to do to him?

  He entered the bridge, which looked exactly like he remembered: golden walls able to turn into displays, fighter cockpits in a semicircle around a low table, the translucent distortion sphere on the table… no cosmic map, no driving system. He immediately figured out that he had no way of flying it; none of the Sigian’s memories had told him how to do it…

  Ugo’s attack came without warning: he suddenly felt he couldn’t move his limbs or tail. After a brief moment of useless struggle, the numbness became so intense that he fell to the floor. The monster’s straps caught his ganglions in a death grip.

  “Ugo, you monster, what are you doing? Are you killing me?” he babbled, barely breathing.

  “Don’t be stupid. How am I to move in the ship if you’re dead? I’ll give your limbs back after I’m done.”

  The pain became atrocious, as if thousands of thorns were flowing through his head like a deadly twister.

  This time his mind wasn’t clouded by controlled delusions—maybe the bracelet didn’t have enough resources, as the jure readily admitted it. He had to wait, paralyzed, for Ugo to finish Uralia’s transfer.