by L. Brown
“Those—?” A bit incredulous, Dahkaa leaned closer in. “Are warriors?”
“They’re students,” corrected Logaht, his fourteen fingers now probing various scenes. “Adolescents trained not to fight, but learn.”
A flick of his blistered finger opened a new image, a distortion of light and shade mingling into an office, a glowing computer on a cluttered desk.
“You—?” Garth tried to follow, un-puzzle the sight. “You’re hacking my school?”
“Hacking?” asked Dahkaa.
“Their computers, you’re breaking in?” pressed Garth.
“Crude,” said Logaht. “Inept and crude, the primitive’s path.” Then waving his hand as if wiping away dust, he peeled back layers of the virtual desk until uncovering an object in a drawer, something rectangular and flat. “So instead—” Refining his movements, Logaht revealed a binder titled Transcripts. “To avoid detection, we’ll peek between atoms for evidence, some proof you warrant our faith.”
“He has mine,” said Dahkaa, starting to yawn. “So, I believe we’re just wasting time.” But when a transcript page shimmered into view, Dahkaa peered at the name, at Smith, Garth. “Tell me, David, there’s a reason you changed your name?”
“I never changed a thing, I’ve always been Garth.”
“So perhaps,” ventured Logaht, “his mother changed it to hide him, keep him—?”
Mat images quivered, began to distort.
“Something?” asked Dahkaa.
“Someone,” answered Logaht. “But given the weak signal, he watches from a far surveillance.”
“He’s watching?” Dahkaa shouted, now springing up.
“As much as he wants the boy, he’ll watch everything. But if we’re quick—”
“Then hurry, show us the deeds of the son of Kel Vek!”
His scabrous fingers now slashing the transcript image, Logaht scraped to the page beneath, a matrix of subjects and results.
“Those letters,” said Dahkaa. “They have meaning?”
Garth swallowed. “The ‘D’s’?”
“They call them grades,” Logaht explained. “Soundings of his academic depth.”
“Which is?” asked Dahkaa.
“Shallow, by the look.”
“They’re mid-terms,” said Garth. “They don’t count.”
“Depending on the class—” Logaht read from a footnote. “They determine thirty to fifty percent of the grade.”
Feeling a prickly heat, Garth pondered how this could happen, how in a Greenland cave, two aliens now mocked his grades.
“And that?” Dahkaa pointed to two subjects marked with an ‘I.’ “Those letters mean—?”
“Intelligent,” said Garth.
“Incomplete,” said Logaht. “It means he gave up.” And then, to Garth, “No interest in the study of French?”
“None.”
“Or the horn?” asked Dahkaa.
“That was also French.”
Piqued now, showing some clench, Dahkaa glared at the transcript. “Anything else?”
“Only this,” Logaht answered, gesturing to a paragraph of text. “It’s a summary, though perhaps we’ve seen enough?”
“Read it,” said Dahkaa.
“But if he’s watching—”
“Read it!”
“In summary,” Logaht began, “because Mr. Smith shows no interest in academics, athletics, or activity of any sort, because he prefers his world of pulp—”
“His what?” asked Dahkaa.
Logaht held up the Superman comic, then continued to read. “And because he excels only in apathy, the boy reminds of not just a lost ship at sea, but a vessel lacking any destination or course. To the point, Garth Smith just doesn’t care.”
Seconds passed, the fire crackled, but Dahkaa never moved, never looked at ‘Smith, Garth.’ He made no comment, not with his mouth, but as he slowly left the cave, his hobnails scraped.
In a gunship far off even darker than the cave, threads of light pierced an alien gloom. It didn’t lack for activity, this lair of the Wraith, but it did lack for life, the being in chains floated alone. Almost alone, for the illuminated wire joined to his head ported his mind to the gunship’s as well, to sensors and data and scenes from Australia passing below. Buildings and beaches, buses and trains and cars — wherever the trail of the small V-craft led, the gunship followed, and though the Wraith knew most were deceptions, one track had to be real. But as soulless circuits in the mirthless hum scanned faces and bodies, as the automated search sifted Aussies from Darwin to Hobart to Brisbane to Perth, the Son of the King was nowhere found.
Frustrating, yet he wasn’t surprised, the Wraith never was. At least not anymore, he’d lived too long and seen too much, surprise marked you as either naïve or inept. True, Dahkaa and Logaht had the boy, had stole him at the station nearly from his grasp, but that was just noise, a random event. They couldn’t leave this world unnoticed, could never ascend unseen, so the Wraith played the odds, just waited for Dahkaa and Logaht to make their inevitable mistake.
Which arrived as a sound, a faint, frantic tone. Something had tripped a detection alarm, and as a dim red glow bled through the mesh hiding his eyes, the Wraith watched his surveillance pay off.
A tenuous trail on a virtual earth, it started in Detroit, the location of the boy’s school, then led across the North Atlantic to Greenland, to a peak near its eastern shore.
Brooding between boulders in the wind-whistled heights, Dahkaa’s face reflected the auroral play overhead, the northern elations of light. Yet the dance of color, the electric greens and blues didn’t claim his gaze, he stared instead at the faint gray moon.
“So.” Garth shivered a few feet behind. “That’s the end of it, we’re done?”
Dahkaa ignored, just eyed the moon.
“I mean,” Garth continued, “now what; you’ll just — take me home?”
Dahkaa replied with an exhale, a long, misty breath. Then said, “I must.”
Wanting to holler, jump up and cheer, Garth pulled back to a nod of the head. “Okay,” he said. “Then whenever you’re ready, just — I’ll be inside.” His nightmare unwinding, Garth turned back to the cave.
“It’s always the same?” asked Dahkaa.
Pausing, Garth looked back.
“Your moon,” said Dahkaa, still staring above. “It shows the same face, never turns?”
“Never,” Garth answered. “At least not to us, that’s all we see.”
Waiting for acknowledgement, Garth got only silence, Dahkaa seemed as far as the stars. Places, Garth realized, no earthbound native had ever seen, so though he shivered, stamped his feet, a flaring curiosity suddenly seized.
“And you?” Garth asked, stuffing his hands into his coat. “Your world, you also got a moon?”
“We have two.”
Instantly intrigued, Garth’s questions quickly queued up. “Wow. Amazing. But really, everything’s amazing, this whole thing’s been, I don’t know, beyond belief. Even just our talking, you know? I mean, how’s your English so good?”
“I studied.”
The answer pierced, cut to Garth’s indifferent quick. Telling himself to leave, to just wait in the cave with the other vanquished carcass, Garth turned away. Yet curiosity persisted, refused to cool, and wouldn’t every unasked question seed a lifelong regret?
“Those moons,” Garth began, now turning back. “They look like ours?”
“Oh—” Looking tired, a man on a journey nearing its end, Dahkaa rubbed his eyes. “In some ways, but just as our world is different, so are its moons. And while the larger marks our months, the lesser counts our nights.”
“You mean, your days?”
“I mean our nights, we have no days,” said Dahkaa, pulling out his straight blade knife. “Not on my side, and because our planet refuses to turn, because the Cold side freezes in ceaseless night while the Hot side burns with endless day, we call our world C’raggh.”
A fricati
ve clash graveled with brogue, C’raggh boxed the ears. “Huh,” Garth managed, suddenly grateful for a world smart enough to turn. “Sounds nice.”
“C’raggh means ‘cursed,’ both Hot side and Cold ravage man and beast, and nothing about it has, is, or ever will be nice,” Dahkaa replied, now stabbing a drift. “And though a thin strip of green divides our extremes, that agreeable exception has seeded uncounted wars, and therefore, our most pleasant spot? We call it the Bloodlands.”
Intrigued by a world more cursed than Detroit, Garth moved closer in.
“Though in truth,” Dahkaa resumed, now carving a circle of snow, “all of my world has bled. On the Hot side, Tribes of the Greater Sand have battled the Great Ice Clans since the first throw of a stone, we only have peace when there’s too few to fight.” Carving complete, he lifted the snow, now a semi-round chunk, onto a rock. “But this world’s different, I suppose? Your tribes and clans spill no blood?”
Garth wondered where to start.
“If they do, they’d be the first.” Working like a sculptor, Dahkaa rounded the snow chunk’s corners. “Because like it or not, whatever world we’re from, men fight for the best reasons and also the worst. And sometimes even none, it’s just our nature, who we are. Which means, I suppose, that we’re all just the work of some very angry gods.”
Garth thought a moment. “Gods?”
“Listening to Logaht, it seems every world has them. Not the same ones, of course, the gods of the stars seem as varied as us,” Dahkaa opined. “Which is certainly true in my world, for though my Clans of the Ice have five gods, the Tribes of the Sand worship seven. And then, of course, we have the Worms.”
A term unexpected, it roused images of dog-eared Frank Herbert novels, stories of miles-long monsters with crystalline teeth. “Worms from the sand?” Garth asked. “They live in dunes?”
Dahkaa’s brow showed some crease. “The Worms, David, are people. Who lack, like their namesake, any semblance of spine.” Resuming his work, he smoothed the snow into a sphere.
“Sorry, I — don’t understand.”
“Nor do they, I’m afraid, the Worms of my world have lost their minds. A shame, actually, because long ago, they were our best, our most promising sons and daughters from both Hot side and Cold. But—” Pausing again, Dahkaa pulled out his flask. “Tired of war, the everlasting clash between Tribe and Clan, they left all they had to gather in the Bloodlands, to build a place where everything old would die to the new. Can you guess the result?”
Garth’s answer came fast, traversed a well-travelled path. “They failed?”
“Actually, they prevailed. Ancient oaths were buried, men of the Ice married women of the Sand, and never again did they battle or fight. The Worms simply worked, just built their dream, a city of the mind wrought in stone. And when it was done, they gave it a name.” But instead of saying it, Dahkaa slugged another drink.
“Which was?” Garth asked.
In no hurry, Dahkaa savored the taste on his tongue. “Hala,” he finally said. “The Worms called it Hala, the City of Man. And while Clans and Tribes continued to war, fair Hala prospered, knew only peace. But then—”
Footsteps interrupted, rattled the cave.
“Then came the G’mach,” said Dahkaa, and looking back at the cave, he watched Logaht emerge. Bent with bear meat, great heaping slabs, he lingered at the cylinder, the tall glass tube.
“A race so dominant,” Dahkaa confided, “their machines seemed forged from magic, their power overwhelmed. And so, of course, did their look.”
Garth peered at Logaht. “You mean—?”
“I do,” said Dahkaa. “Logaht’s a G’mach.”
“Was a G’mach!” shouted Logaht, somehow hearing over the wind.
Smirking a bit, Dahkaa nodded to the tube. “Anything?” he shouted.
“Nothing,” Logaht yelled, his owlish eye shimmered by the tube’s azure glow. “Wherever he is, he’s nowhere close!”
But close was relative, and somewhere off the Greenland coast, a bull walrus reclined on an iceberg. King of all he surveyed, a realm about ten yards around, he hackled his whiskers with rising unease. Yet though he tilted an ear and lifted his nose, no sound or scent seemed wrong.
Slammed by a shockwave from a sea-skimming haze, the walrus flipped fin-over-tail into the icy Greenland Sea. His intuition confirmed, he doubted no more and dove for the deep.
Garth watched Logaht haul bear meat to the ramp, the near-invisible bridge to the equally obscure craft. “So G’mach aren’t — human?”
“They were,” Dahkaa replied. “And deep inside, perhaps still are. But once a man joins the G’mach, well — first they alter his flesh, strengthen it for battle and speed — then come the senses, improvements to eyes and ears. And if he passes his test and proves himself fit? Then he receives his reward.”
Waiting for specifics, the blank to be filled, Garth glanced at Dahkaa.
“Ageless, David; when you join the G’mach, you never grow old. You simply progress.”
Trying to follow, Garth wondered if he should ask the obvious, how it would sound. “So the G’mach invaded your world, but you and Logaht — are friends?”
“He changed,” said Dahkaa, apparently convinced. “Unheard of, for a G’mach, much less a Fifth Progress. But—” He eyed the craft, the V-shaped translucence at the end of the ramp. “Be grateful he did, because had he not stolen that ship, had he not flown us here with our King—”
“I wouldn’t exist?”
“Nor would I, he’s saved my life more than once. So if you doubt Logaht? Don’t.”
Wondering how he did it, how Dahkaa trusted a former enemy with the eye of an owl and a face half-tied in mummified wrap, Garth said nothing, just hoped this G’mach would soon be gone.
“But when he first arrived—” Dahkaa scribed a line around the sphere of snow. “When Logaht and his G’mach invaded my world — which was what, two years before you were born? Something like that, but in our first battles, the G’mach fought with honor, used their hands. However, when their new recruits were sufficiently trained? Then they released the disease, and within hours, tribes were decimated, clans destroyed — millions died for a single reason, we refused.”
“Refused — to surrender?” asked Garth.
“Refused to help,” answered Dahkaa. “And though it may sound odd, the G’mach didn’t invade for the usual reasons, they didn’t come for spoils or land. No—” His scribing of the line complete, Dahkaa stopped just short of where it began. “The G’mach came to build, to dig a great trench around our entire world, a moat they filled with a serpent birthed by machines, by monstrous iron brutes immune to our every attack; they can’t be stopped!”
Stabbing a drift with his knife, Dahkaa scared Garth out of his shivering twitch. But as Garth dissected what he heard, something was wrong, that word didn’t fit.
“Serpent?”
“So, it appears,” said Dahkaa, cooling his temper with his flask. “Now, is it alive? No. But if it’s as lethal as Logaht implies, well, there’s good reason the G’mach call their creation a J’kel, it’s the name of some monstrous snake. Lethal and large, kills anything alive — J’kel means ‘destroy.’”
“Devour!” shouted Logaht, his disembodied shout coming from the craft.
“As usual,” Dahkaa sighed, “Logaht is right. For when the G’mach finish it, complete the J’kel’s last mile?” He eyed the snow sphere. “In the world of C’raggh, every living thing will die.”
Wind howled, shrieked the peak and sounded, to Garth, like a warning: don’t ask.
“Die how,” Garth asked.
“Dead is dead, does it matter?” countered Dahkaa. “But if you believe Logaht, which I do, it happens fast. And yet, had the Worms chosen honor over surrender, had they not agreed to help build this abomination, we’d at least have more time. But instead—” He pointed to the snow sphere, to the small gap between the scribed line’s start point and end. “In just forty mo
re risings of our lesser moon, the J’kel’s head will reach its tail. And when it does—”
Saying nothing more, Dahkaa turned away, looked again at the faint gray moon.
“It can’t be stopped?” asked Garth.
“Not without help.”
Sensing subtext, a tossed bait tempting a rise, Garth tried another tact. “Okay, well, if you need another world, some place to live? I mean, there’s plenty of room in Detroit.”
Dahkaa stayed quiet, just listened to the wind and eyed the moon. Then, “We didn’t come to hide, David. We came for you.”
Now Garth went quiet.
“We came, old friend—” Stepping off the ramp, Logaht trudged up the snowy path. “To find the last Savakerrva, the Promise foretold.”
“And so we did,” answered Dahkaa, “so we have done.”
“What we’ve done is find Kel Vek’s son. But as for the rest—”
“The rest he’ll become,” Dahkaa affirmed. “But you believe he won’t?”
“I believe in facts,” said Logaht. “Nothing more or less.”
“And the fact is, this boy was foretold!”
“I was?” asked Garth. Muddled with Worms and G’mach and some ominous creation called a J’kel, he clung to hopes of returning to the Home, to stacks of comics and boxes of rocks.
“I hear your words, Dahkaa,” Logaht began. “But though many things are foretold, few come to pass, and when I look at this boy—” The yellow eye narrowed, flashed a contemptible glint. “It’s not the Promise I see, but a mistake. And I think, old friend, you see it, too.”
“What I see is defeat, for without a Savakerrva, we die in forty moons! Now, do we have another choice, is he not worth the chance?”
Logaht looked at Garth, then turned to Dahkaa and drew a long breath. “Your decision is made, we’ll take him back?”