Most of the station chambers were empty, unadorned, sterile metal, but in one dark room not much larger than a closet they found an astonishing mural. When Shelud and Dale shone their lights inside, they saw that the walls had been painted with dense, tangled foliage, bright leaves and lush fronds, close trunks of crowded and immense trees. It looked like a swatch of pristine worldforest. Shelud stared with awe, running his fingers over the images imprinted on the walls. The worldtrees were unmistakable—but how?
Most of the chambers and bulkheads were bare metal, with no colors at all. He didn’t understand this particular vibrant painting.
In a secondary module on spoke three, they discovered a vault where the angled walls were divided into interlocking triangular sections, enameled in bright primary colors. Each colored section was studded with raised designs, embossed symbols that tapered down to the triangles’ points, and unmistakable stylized patterns of worldtree fronds… but why here, in a sterile space city far outside an uninhabited solar system?
Shelud ran his fingers down the vertex of a triangle marked with a frond, touched the raised alien letters. He pressed harder, hoping the language might respond in a tactile way. When he depressed the point, he felt the enameled plate vibrate and grow warm. Then the panel itself dissolved into a projected image.
He gasped and snatched back his hand. Dale hurried over, and they both watched the image sharpen into the face of a parchment-skinned alien unlike any species Shelud had ever seen. The creature was small-statured and hairless, its head round and craggy, like a crudely formed boulder. It had large black eyes surrounded by jutting orbital ridges. The voice droned out incomprehensible words in an even, soothing sound, like a professor giving a lecture.
A grin filled Dale’s face. “You and I just discovered a new alien race!”
“At least the remnants of one,” Shelud said.
Astonished, Shelud remembered where he had seen something like this: During the Elemental War, when the first giant treeships had come back from deep space, one of them had held a mysterious pilot, whose alien features had fused after millennia, becoming part of the tree’s heartwood. The pilot came from a forgotten race that had been connected with the worldforest. Long ago.
This creature looked similar. Could they be the same race?
Such a discovery was too important to keep hidden. When Dale confessed to his father that they had been exploring, he acted tentative and nervous. When Olaf began to rebuke Dale for wasting time and effort, Shelud insisted that he had encouraged Dale to search, because the worldforest had asked for details about the original builders and any cultural artifacts they had left behind.
After Dale and Shelud explained what they had discovered, Olaf could not keep the other Roamers from investigating their mysterious new home. Curiosity seekers and treasure hunters crowded into the library chamber, pressing enameled triangular plates and watching the projected images. All the recordings showed a similar lecturing alien, perhaps even the same individual. But since the Roamers could not understand the language, the records meant little beyond the novelty of observing a new alien race.
Despite Olaf’s disapproval, clan Reeves could not keep this great discovery a secret. Shelud reported the exciting news through telink, spending hours with his treeling to explain the treasure trove of knowledge aboard the empty city they had named Okiah.
Back in the Confederation, numerous xeno-archaeologists were fascinated, and offered to send large teams to complete the exploration “in a professional fashion,” but Shelud honored his promise and refused to reveal the location of the space city.
“I won’t have swarms of strangers picking our place apart,” Olaf grumbled. “We came here. We took the risk, and this is our home.” The clan leader did, however, grudgingly allow exploration parties to continue the investigation, provided their work did not suffer. And Shelud reported the findings.
Pursuing an idea, Shelud brought his treeling into the library chamber. Although humans couldn’t understand the alien language—not yet—he thought the knowledge might exist somewhere in the vast verdani mind. He depressed the point of an enameled triangle, playing a report while his mind was connected to the worldforest and all the ancient knowledge there. The strange-sounding alien language droned in his ears.
To Shelud’s delight, the worldtrees understood.
As the green priest played the alien records, the verdani mind passed information back to him—not a word-for-word translation, but a basic summary of concepts. Listening to the unfolding story, he was filled with wonder…
Later, he met with the Roamer families in an amphitheater chamber for a small clan convocation. Beside him, Dale Reeves listened with bright eyes, as Shelud said, “They called themselves the Onthos, a quiet and passive race that inhabited a dozen star systems. The Onthos did not conquer worlds, did not build a vast empire. The verdani were aware of them ages ago.”
“What do the records say?” Olaf asked. “Why did the Onthos build this city so far from any planet?”
“The Klikiss preyed upon their race in a swarm war. The Onthos were attacked on their planets, wiped out on one colony world after another—the Klikiss destroyed anything in their way. The Onthos were nearly exterminated, and the survivors fled here. Over the years they built this refuge fortress far from any planetary system the Klikiss might be interested in, living where they would not be hunted. They took in refugees from their devastated Onthos planetary colonies. This was their last hiding place.”
“If this city was their sanctuary, then where did the aliens go?” asked Dale’s wife, Sendra.
“That part isn’t in the records,” Shelud said.
Dale suggested, “That was thousands of years ago. After the Klikiss left on their swarming, maybe the Onthos didn’t need to stay here anymore. They wouldn’t have to hide.”
“Then why haven’t we found any trace of these aliens anywhere else in the Spiral Arm?” asked another Roamer. Shelud still didn’t know everyone’s name.
“We haven’t explored every planet in the Spiral Arm,” said Bjorn, the head spacecraft engineer.
“It doesn’t matter.” Olaf Reeves was impatient with the discussion. “The important thing is that this city is empty, and we’ve claimed it as our own clan’s sanctuary. Now that the mystery is solved, we can focus on other things.”
Shelud didn’t think the mystery was solved, and numerous questions remained. Countless chambers remained to be explored, including one entire spoke of the derelict city.
Four days later, Shelud and Dale went to one of the last main modules in the only remaining spoke left to explore, the most remote section on its extended axis. Prominent pink triangles were painted on the entry hatch. Unlike the colorful triangles in the library module, these were crude. The electronics of the hatch had been damaged, so Dale had to work for an hour before he could force the barrier open.
Inside, they found the bodies.
SIXTY-EIGHT
OSIRA’H
Adar Zan’nh flew his warliners back to Ildira at top speed, bearing the only survivor of the Kolpraxa.
After rescuing Tal Gale’nh from the command nucleus of the blackencased ship, the uneasy scout team was anxious to depart, fearing the return of the Shana Rei. Zan’nh insisted they remain long enough to scour the ship’s log computers, but all systems had been wiped clean. Gale’nh was the only one who could say what had happened, and he had fallen back into an overwhelmed silence. There were no other survivors.