Dani led them to the next side of the building, the one opposite the shimmering rainbow. Some of the colors bled around the elevator structure, stray bands of subdued prettiness that rode the glass overhead. But once they reached the far side, the spectacular view was just a throbbing memory. Now they were overlooking the dark side of Drenard, the sky bursting with stars and fuzzy galaxies.
A thick swath of unbelievable density let Cole know they were looking toward the center of the Milky Way, right along the width of the galaxy. Billions of pricks of light stood out; he could even see the glow of a pink nebula, the color of planets forming. The sight made him feel a long way from home and choked him up inside. One hand went to the cool glass while his thoughts warped back to Earth.
The two men fell quiet again, Dani giving Cole a minute to absorb it all—or perhaps the Drenard was taking a moment for himself.
It was the human that broke the mental silence:
“Beautiful,” he thought, unable to know the soothing purr this word translated to in Dani’s head.
“Beautiful, yes. And even more dangerous, my friend. Nothing lives on the surface. Well, almost nothing. The fire on the other side fuels the life of our planet and drives many of our customs with its ancient and inhospitable landscape. Over here, we find the absence of everything. Just powerful winds which are nothing more than the air being sucked from the cool low pressure to rush toward the rising heat.
“I brought you up here so you could look at yourself, Cole. And to give you an honest answer to your sage question. Up here, my boss will not hear and there is no guard to trust with a secret.” He turned to face Cole. “You are very much like a Drenard,” he thought. “You have a hot side and a cold side and you use them to balance one another. I feel your anger, mostly when you dwell on the well-being of your friends. And I also feel your patience, which you use to temper yourself. I believe you are one of the few of your kind that is trying to live on a line, just as a Drenard must.”
Dani turned from Cole to gaze at the stars, then his eyes drifted down to the planet’s surface. Cole looked as well, out over the shadowed land as black as ruined Glemot. His own voice was clear in his head as Dani thought: “The question you should have asked, Cole, and that I would not have been allowed to answer, is this: what is fusion fuel made of?”
Cole rolled this around in his mind for a moment. “You’ve gotta be kidding,” he thought to Dani.
The alien nodded slowly. “It’s the start of a path, young friend, and one that leads far over the horizon. You can’t see the end from here because of the long walk. Now let’s get below before my superiors become suspicious.”
He turned and walked back across the roof, leaving behind a confused and disappointed human.
And not for the first time in his life, nor in that same spot, Dani thought.
Quietly.
9
On the long ride back down, Dani explained the circumstance of their captivity. They would not be allowed to leave Drenard. Ever. But their stay would be made as pleasant as possible until they died of old age. If Anlyn woke and verified their story—or other evidence came to light that absolved Parsona’s crew of her disappearance from Drenard and the condition in which she returned—the friends would be allowed to visit with one another. Until then, they were to be kept apart to prevent collusion of any sort.
Cole took this as well as he could. The idea of not leaving Drenard didn’t sting as much as it might have. It would be disastrous for Molly, who was now on a quest to find her father and do her ship’s bidding, but all Cole wanted was for his friends to be safe, to find a place where they could stop running long enough to catch their breath. Perhaps they had found just such a spot there on Drenard, the home of their enemy.
He knew this feeling would waver over the years to come. It would not be easy to convince Molly to stay put and remain safe, rather than rush off and get killed in another wild adventure, searching for her lost past. In a way, the Drenards would be doing him a favor by forcing her to remain there. It would probably take an entire race of powerful beings to buttress Cole’s will if she asked him to leave, to break out of another prison and go on the run once again.
Cole glanced over at Dani and hoped he wasn’t thinking too loud.
They stepped out of the lift and turned to the long, carpeted hallway. Cole forced safer thoughts to the surface: “I have to ask about the red band,” he thought to Dani.
“I’m afraid I won’t be able to assist you in their duplication. There are few secrets my people guard more closely than their operation. And that’s saying a lot.”
“Of course,” Cole conceded, “I’m actually more interested in the philosophical underpinnings. Theories of universal language acquisition were long ago crushed on Earth. Linguists found—”
“Your linguists know less than nothing,” Dani interrupted. “Besides, the answer you are looking for has more to do with biology—with the reason all forms in this galaxy are almost identical.”
Cole saw an opening for more answers and pressed the point. “You said something about this before—”
Dani made a gruff coughing sound. “Excellent attempt, but I was merely deducing what you didn’t know.”
They arrived at Cole’s room; the bars were still up. Dani opened the door and held out his hand, his eyes focused on Cole’s forehead.
He didn’t want to give it up, the band or the line of questioning. “Why are we so similar?” Cole thought.
He watched the fingers in the outstretched hand curl into a blue fist. Dani fell silent for a moment, looked up and down the hall, then relayed a cryptic answer: “I have become an expert, as much as a Drenard can, on your planet Earth. What fascinated me the most was the way its plates move, how they shift continents over time. Where once, they were bunched up, now they are far apart.” Dani paused and scanned the hallway. “Our galaxy—even our universe is like this. It wasn’t long ago that things were much closer—in a strange sense of the word.
“Information used to flow back and forth between worlds, even between galaxies. Sometimes it still does. Take the pouched mammals on your Southern continent: they are unique, but similar to the other fur-covered animals elsewhere. Information was shared, but eventually those plates grew apart. For the same reasons, our galaxy is dominated by common forms.”
Cole looked at Dani’s fist, then met his gaze. “You’re talking about homology. Divergent evolution. But how is that possible? How, over such vast distances—?”
Dani peered down the hall and thought to Cole without looking at him. The words came soft, like a mental whisper: “Are you familiar with extremophiles?”
“Yeah,” Cole answered, “small organisms that live in acid, or deep in the crust, or around thermal vents.”
“Keep your thoughts soft. Yes, but you have it backwards, friend. We are the extremophiles. We live between the cold and hot, up in the wild weather and under an assault of radiation. A thermal vent is safe by comparison, a stagnant niche. Our planet, like your own, is dominated by invisible creatures, smaller than one of our own cells. They rule the universe, much as your genes rule your own behavior.”