The Sigian Bracelet

by George Tome

  [←32]

  As a twist of irony, despite the epithet, the prophet was in fact remarkably small. Even more remarkable was that, apparently, all his predecessors had the same diminutive stature, which made the Antyrans wonder how the prophet chose his successor. Of course, the smartest ones kept the thought to themselves; such curiosities smelled of heresy.

  [←33]

  The logic of semantics, triggered by the nine primordial Guk aromas.

  [←34]

  A neural weapon designed to propagate acoustic signals in the inner ear and ganglions to commandeer the vestibular apparatus; the victim becomes captive in a flash and can only move in the direction desired by the attacker. The inductor creates a funnel-shaped cone of paralysis in front of it, to protect the others from an unwanted paralysis.

  [←35]

  During Raman’s reign, the Guk science reached its peak. Its disciples used the harmonics of the nine primordial aromas to search the stalker’s path, which they invoked whenever they had to make a choice. The same aromas, in different harmonics, triggered ikkla, the logic of semantics.

  [←36]

  By far, sakka was the most fearsome innovation of the rebels in the Kids’ War, and it was quickly copied by the temples. Each moulan carried three Antyrans to handle the huge slingshot tied to its biggest horns; one of them reined the beast while the other two armed the bomb in the harness and pulled the sling as far as they could. The phosphorous projectile usually burst into flames in the air after losing its folded skin, exploding with a blinding light in the enemy lines. Everyone touched by its fiery breath was turned into a walking torch, unable to extinguish the flame even if he jumped in a river, until the reaction was over.

  [←37]

  Orbital platforms.

  [←38]

  The biggest glacier in the Antyran world, born from the thick ice cap that covered the upper plateau at an altitude of over nine miles. From there, Eger proudly descended down to the Alixxoran plains, cutting a parallel—albeit, much larger—valley to the one where Alala’s dome stood.

  [←39]

  The righteous used to say that “one has to look into the eyes of evil to taste its corruption.”

  [←40]

  The ribbed tubes were some ninety feet high and between six and nine feet in diameter, slightly thicker at the base. They were formed by the intermittent eruptions of muddy water mixed with volcanic ash and gases, in an age when the snow cover was much larger than in Gill’s time. The warm jets cut easily through the ice, the ash forming an insulating lining that, in time, became as hard as stone. In the time between eruptions, the seemingly eternal cold regained its reign, and the heavy ice pushed the whole structure upward. This way, drop by drop, the outcrops grew from the battle of the eternal enemies: water and fire. It took them hundreds of thousands of years to reach the current heights. After Beramis melted the ice caps away, these bizarre tubes remained behind as a remembrance that the Antyran world wasn’t always as friendly for life as it had become.

  [←41]

  Over the prior six centuries, the Bailas had made a habit of cursing Alixxor for its role in defeating the temples during the Kids’ War and for hosting the Shindam’s buildings. They threatened that the gods would burn the city to the ground, pretty much like they did with Raman’s capital.

  [←42]

  The biggest flowers in the Antyran world. Their red, fleshy petals sometimes reached ten feet in length.

  [←43]

  Small, mobile buildings, often found in the large intersections. Most were made of metal and resembled the head of an old, grumpy Antyran. They could be easily carried around and placed as needed, to distribute the latest discourses of the prophet, the ritual aromas for the night’s incantations, or the seeds to be smelled before the first meal. They were much more accessible than the pyramid temples, where everyone had to stand in endless lines to get anything.

  [←44]

  The Red Wall or the Red Scarp was a vertical wall over fifteen hundred miles long, born on the same day as the crater that held the planet’s ocean. A fossil tectonic plate, tensed by the planet’s cooling, snapped during the comet’s impact and sunk over four miles lower than the other plate.

  [←45]

  The capital of the mining world.

  [←46]

  The crevice took its name from the color of its walls, as the rock contained rich copper–cobalt deposits and other complex ores.

  [←47]

  A monolithic tower-city raised on the oceanfront thirty miles south of Alixxor, Gondarra Tower reached three thousand feet in height and was supposed to become the home of over half a million Antyrans. In the acronte’s vision, it was meant to symbolize the architecture of the future, a world with breathtaking cities built in the middle of lush forests or deep in the Roch-Alixxor valleys. Yet the exorbitant resources swallowed by the project doomed it to be the first and last city of its type, just another damaging utopia, the kind in which the Shindam was never in short supply while the ordinary Antyrans struggled in poverty and the dilapidated state of the infrastructure about to crumble, sinking at each step into the maze of an ever-larger bureaucracy.

  [←48]

  The jets were designed to join and form a floating stage.

  [←49]

  Also known as the “Walking Fire,” it was a tunic woven from platinum threads and coated with tiny black diamonds pressed into the material. According to the dogma, Zhan himself gave it to the first Baila 1,250 years before, when the prophet received the gift of divinity.

  [←50]

  The fortuitous presence in the quadrant of the roadworking planet-ship Lacrilia allowed a Rigulian ambassador to arrive on Alixxor in a mere ten days, rather than the two months it would have taken from Rigulia.

  [←51]

  “Your smell will always find the path if you don’t let your fear enshroud it with its insidious stench,” the overjoyed Guk Master Ramayaloga used to say a long time ago, during a time when Antyrans still indulged in calling themselves overjoyed.

  [←52]

  Ever since the architects had announced the development of the first “intelligent” programs, Baila had forbidden the use of the “corrupting” AIs.

  [←53]

  The fusion reactors, although embedded in a strong metal–ceramic matrix and stuffed with countless safety systems, managed, in extreme situations, to explode in a rather spectacular way if the core plasma droplet, heated to tens of millions of degrees, escaped its magnetic cage.

  [←54]

  The mysterious “fire-of-the-ice” in the old mythology.

  [←55]

  Over the centuries, the fear of Arghail’s corruption had turned into a worldwide nyctophobia, with most of the adult Antyrans avoiding darkness at all costs (not that they had to face it very often).

  [←56]

  A snakelike creature, its belly covered in thousands of small protuberances that allowed it to slide quickly over muddy ground.

  [←57]

  A large aquatic insect protected by an armor of bony scales.

  [←58]

  Relays were of course pointed into the future because the recipient’s light appeared in the sky as it was many hundreds or thousands of years ago. As usual, the irony of the sarkens was totally unwarranted. Even the simplest conversation required an awful lot of orbital math to find the galactic position of the target in its future to synchronize it with the present of the ones transmitting the flux.

  [←59]

  Lacrilia was a small but very active red dwarf star, able to blow some of the largest coronal mass ejections in the whole quadrant.

  [←60]

  The lasers on the ceiling pointed to the nearest exit during emergencies, but they could also blind any attacker in case a boarding party was trying to take over the spaceship.

  [←61]

  When Ropolis became the capital of the mining world almost thirty years before, the crevice was sealed along its length, except for the central s
quare of the city, where the Antyrans had built the elevators and underground trains.

  [←62]

  Those who used a hallucinogenic fragrance called bixan to guide them to unseen places. It was rumored that only bixan could offer a genuine out-of-body experience by poisoning the Tarmon islets, the ganglions that controlled awareness and corporeality.

  [←63]

  The ancients counted in base twenty.

  [←64]

  A heavy chain hammer used to slam the heads of the enemies in a powerful overhead arc—often referred to as the “bone cracker.”

  [←65]

  The ultimate aphrodisiac of the Rigulians, synchronization was an empathetic connection to the thoughts of the hibernating partner with the help of the Corbelian sphere. Their race, renowned for their protocols and rigidity, used the occasion to forget for the moment all the inhibition barriers cultivated for millennia. The ritual allowed the awake Rigulian to dip into the oceans of the most foolish thoughts, the most intimate details shared by the freed mind of its sleeping pair. The creativity nodes buzzed during hibernation, inducing an avalanche of hormones in the awake partner, excesses that endured long after disconnection.

  [←66]

  The year when Rigulians defeated aging. Of course, the first effect was uncontrollable growth because they didn’t expire anymore. As such, the oldest Rigulians—Omal 13 included—displayed wild variations in body size… until they found a way to stop growing, too.

  [←67]

  The rest of the time, however, they didn’t sleep at all, not even during the night—which on Rigulia was around half a year because the planet barely rotated around its axis. More precisely, it took around twenty standard years to make one full rotation.

  [←68]

  Mythical creatures resembling winged moulans.

  [←69]

  The description of how the firewall was created, recited by the prophet from the “Arghail’s Exodus” narrative, contradicted the “Sacrifice of Beramis” litany. Yet because both of them were part of the Book of Creation Inrumiral, they were considered equally valid. The temples never tried to reconcile them, and anyone trying to discuss which one was true risked getting a less-than-warm appraisal for their curiosity.

  [←70]

  The licants felt a foolish pleasure in pecking the skin and moisture of the Antyran beings with their chitinous mandibles, in search of small nutritious fragments. They were particularly attracted by their spikes and gills, but the sticky way they stuck on skin and the lack of manners during lunch forced the ancient Antyrans to avoid sleeping outside, even during the hot summer nights. Of course, the problem was lately solved by the tarjis, who exterminated the licants in the wild on the grounds that they became corrupted after flying over “Arghail’s cities,” the ancient towns incinerated by Zhan.

  [←71]

  True, the archivists found countless proofs that the trees were no mere fabulations. They even found some seeds preserved in ice and had recently managed to revive them in the labs. The species had become extinct after Zhan’s coming with the sudden warming of the planet under the firewall and the draining of the marshes by a growing, hungry population.

  [←72]

  The zabulans, Colhan’s eternal fire-keepers, were bound by the chastity pledge. In order to help them avoid temptations, they were taken early by the ancient temples—three months after choosing a male sex—and mutilated. They had their tails and head spikes cut off, making them repulsive to any Antyran female.

  [←73]

  The Antyrans never wore foot protection, not even when they walked on ice, but they used to put gloves on their children’s feet to prevent them from scratching their chins with the three long claws of the foot when sleeping coiled in their nests.

  [←74]

  The projectile launcher of the chameleons was a cylindrical tube carved from the hardest vein of a tekal heart, sliced lengthwise and reinforced by an elastic band near the pointed end. At the other end, it had a handle on each half of the cleft and a metal cup to hold the projectile—usually a stone or a spiked metal ball dipped in a warhok’s poison. Before use, the dwarves held the tarcanes in bags made from the same invisible fabric as their clothes. They could pull them out quickly and stick the pointy end in the earth. Before their enemies had a chance to figure out what was happening, the chameleons launched a lethal rain over their heads. Legend has it that the deafening clatter of their tarcanes could freeze in terror even the bravest soldiers.

  [←75]

  The throwing axes of the grahs.

  [←76]

  Resistant netting filled with boulders, used to bombard enemies from the skies.

  [←77]

  One of the tasks of the orzac females, aside from taking care of the male’s armor and weapons, was the cosmetics of the moulan’s tail spikes. They were growing all the time and had to be regularly groomed; otherwise, the orzacs could have the nasty surprise of not being able to screw the sheaths on before battle. When that happened, the taunts and insults of their comrades were regarded as even worse than not being able to use the tail spikes during the fight.

  [←78]

  A type of thorny spear.

  [←79]

  Huge axes with long handles.

  [←80]

  The rikanes were loaded in giant catapults, each manned by about twenty soldiers. One catapult could launch up to ten rikanes at once.

  [←81]

  Chitinous creatures the size of an adult Antyran, loosely resembling the underground baskis. The kerats were also mythical creatures that only existed in legends.

  [←82]

  Llandro were mythical snakelike monsters of the old legends. They could walk rather quickly on the tens of tiny feet growing on their lower bodies. Their trunks consisted of chitin rings fused on their chests in a V shape—a kind of natural armor of considerable thickness. On their necks, they had a mane of detachable poisonous spikes they could launch at their enemies. To complete the already-deadly arsenal they bore into battle, their four long fangs could spit a poison more potent than the strongest acid.

  [←83]

  The ancient armies used to fight on three wings—the baitar in the center, the allies on the left wing, and his first ratrap on the right.

  [←84]

  The commander of a large unit of orzacs.

  [←85]

  The legends said that the poison was extracted from a sea-worm living in the abyssal depths of the planetary ocean. The arcanians could only get it from the wonkcs, mythological aquatic reptiles who asked for the platinum weight of the worms in exchange.

  [←86]

  The father-mother of Colhan, buried for eternity in an ice tomb.

  [←87]

  Arghail 12:1: “The birth of the primordial evil. A step through the doorway.”

  [←88]

  The text refers to the water of the dead.

  [←89]

  “Alfonsito! What’s this thing? I’m scared!”

  [←90]

  Feathers were unknown in the Antyran biota.

  [←91]

  The first contact of the Sigians with Terra took place 1,400 years before on the Chilean coast. They found a group of Indians called Mapuche. Mapu means “earth” in the Mapudungun language; therefore, they used the same word for the planet. The Grammians knew it as Terra—this being the name used by the whole Federation.

  [←92]

  Gill couldn’t even dream of the nefarious consequences the arrival of the Sigians had on the Aztecs, who associated Kirk’an with their feathered serpent god, Quetzalcoatl. The change originating in Xochicalco was a turning point in the Mesoamerican religious dogmas: Quetzalcoatl had lost his appearance as a feathered serpent and became Sigian, easy to confuse with a human. Several hundred years later, Moctezuma was convinced that the white gods had returned and didn’t attack Hernando Cortes when he could have crushed him—hence his empire was easily conquered. A civilization disappeared due to this little incident.


  [←93]

  The Antyran name for black holes.

  [←94]

  The temples had never been able to suppress the Ijmahal death ritual, so they morphed it—with great success—into the “Guide of Light” litany in the Book of Creation Inrumiral. No one but the archivists had the original ritual as it was gathered by Laixan in his writings from the memories of the mythical Azaric. According to Azaric, the text was much older, being transmitted orally by the ancient aromaries since time immemorial.

  [←95]

  The drughira was a long, heavy mace with metal nodules. It was the main weapon of the wandabian fighters.

  [←96]

  A Rigulian ship’s commander.

  Table of Contents

  THE

  SIGIAN BRACELET

  CHAPTER 1.

  CHAPTER 2.

  CHAPTER 3.

  CHAPTER 4.

  CHAPTER 5.

  CHAPTER 6.

  CHAPTER 7.