After that, he only received a few clear memories. The gods had landed on a wet, torrid planet boiling under the searing rays of a chubby white star. A weird city of impressive stone pyramids painted in white or red stretched on a large plateau, crammed between several hills swallowed by lush vegetation. The gods, still dressed in their red-orange suits, wore bundles of strange scales with long tails16 on their heads. They lay on a stone platform covered by a wide canopy made of giant leaves. All of them watched a huge dust cloud rising from a rocky hillside. On a wooden table nearby, Gill saw some golden breads waiting obediently to be eaten. They had a cross sign cut in the middle of the top.
The whole hillside was already excavated. Through the dust cloud, Gill could barely glimpse the two elongated machines—made from the same golden metal as the spaceship—churning the rocks furiously. They had two large wheels at their back, a long, thin body, and a wide front supported on two broad, articulate paws. Their jaws were breaking the rock into pebbles while a pair of telescopic arms ripped the larger stones off the hill’s wall.
After another jump in time, he saw an army of pygmies, covered in the same weird scales, rebuilding the hillside to hide a strange construction raised in the excavation. The structure was a stone temple, partly covering a… golden spaceship! Even though he couldn’t make out the details due to the distance and the dust raised by their hustle, it wasn’t hard to figure out that the savages didn’t look anything like the Antyrans.
Then came another storm of metallic taste. He blinked, surprised by the deep silence inside his kyi. He was now in a narrow cave, most likely dug by natives. Its purpose appeared to be ritual because right in the middle of the cave there was a hyperbolic stone. The starlight projected a milky beam of light on the stone through a hole in the ceiling.
In another memory, the gods were crowded inside a small ship, trying to outrun some invisible enemies coming from behind. The images became blurry again, and the metallic taste flooded his taste buds. Before long, Gill couldn’t bear it.
“All right, enough for today! Stop it!” he shouted to the bracelet.
The presence in his head disappeared, and he woke up in his nest—thoroughly wet. The bracelet was still on his arm and didn’t show any intention of doing something criminal in the near future. Should he try to take it off, or keep it on his arm? He decided to try to take it off. He pulled it slowly, anxiously, expecting to hear the deadly buzz. But to his great relief, it didn’t happen. The bracelet came off easily.
CHAPTER 4.
Now that he had found out what happened in the secret base, Gill had no reason to hide anymore. The temples had nothing to do with the blast, so it made no sense to draw attention to himself with a precipitous disappearance. It would be a remarkably good idea to go back to the Archivists Tower and make sure that nobody smelled the connection between his tail and Tadeo’s untimely demise.
After a relaxing steam bath, he glued a pile of synthetic skin on the wounds ignored by the rescue operator following their little quarrel. Once the skin grafted, he decided he had done all that he could to hide the damage, and he was good to go. But before driving to the Archivists Tower, he checked the holophone. With great relief, he found that the holofluxes didn’t stream anything about the blast, which was the best “no news” he had received in ages! If only the Shindam would finally do something right and hide the incident from Baila’s nostrils…
He had to hurry; it was almost noon, a usually calamitous time to drive on the magneto-highways bypassing the city’s outskirts because of the midday vardannes,17 which usually brought wave after wave of migratory siclides18 along. The Shindam’s officials didn’t do much to block the siclides—the main reason being, of course, that the migrations couldn’t reach the altitude of the flying jets they were entitled to use but also because they pollinated the acajaa fields around Alixxor, which made any idea of stopping them highly unpopular.
Of course, the Shindam could have just covered the magneto-highways with transparent ceilings to allow the siclides to run over, as they did in a few places. Unfortunately, in the last decades, the indifference of the “insatiable llandros” had reached grotesque proportions. The poor and dull living, the gray domes, the cracked facades, the roads with the protective cover peeled off—all became a pervasive reality, where goods were poorly made and scarcer by the day. No wonder that, year after year, Baila’s power base increased with each Antyran slipping into almost-poverty.
Every time Gill looked at the huge silhouette of the Archivists Tower growing in the distance, he felt a bit of excitement, but this time it only reminded him what their world could have been if the Shindam had done its job. It started well, some 652 years ago, when the council wrestled the power from the hands of Baila IX during the brutal rebellion known as the Kids’ War19—but from that point on, things went from bad to worse. Before long, the Shindam became a huge bureaucracy, oppressive with the innocents and coward up to the ridicule with the temples’ provocations.
As he reached the city’s center, Gill found that the tarjis were on the move again—this time toward the pyramids. The heavy stench of the moulans20 ridden by some of the pilgrims permeated the air. And as if their foul odor was not enough, the beasts relieved themselves all over the place, soiling the streets.
Soon, the magneto-traffic came almost to a standstill, “helped” by the armored chameleons parked at the main crossroads. The military vehicles were ostensibly there to ensure the security of the pilgrims, but the pretense didn’t fool anyone: the Shindam’s Council nurtured a visceral fear of Karajoo and the millions of tarjis who arrived from the three inhabited worlds—a whole army at Baila’s disposal, right in the middle of the capital! Among them were the prophet’s most trusted followers, the fabled tarjis living in corias.21
Once inside the Archivists Tower, Gill climbed the emergency stairs instead of taking the main elevator, hoping that nobody would notice his late arrival. He sneaked into his research dome without the slightest intention to work, despite the huge pile of materials waiting on the examination table; his thoughts invariably whirled around the god’s bracelet and the secrets still locked inside.
Before he had even sat down, the door opened to the wall, and a tall Antyran entered the room. It was an old archivist named Antumar; he had been a good friend of Armondengava—one of the researchers killed in the blast.
“Where’s Tadeoibiisi? By any chance, did you see him?”
“Tadeo? Err… I believe he’s on an expedition. I’ve no idea where,” he lied unconvincingly, surprised by Antumar’s appearance.
Gill could read Antumar’s frowny face like a scroll. To Arghail with Ibiisi’s entrails! He’ll get us all in trouble, he seemed to curse in his mind.
Sometimes Antumar said that in a loud voice, too, convinced that Tadeoibiisi’s curiosity would bring Baila’s wrath upon their spikes. In his youth, Antumar never ventured to ask the questions the reckless adventurer Tadeo had asked—sometimes in company better to be avoided—nor dared to visit places that no Antyran should ever visit. As Antumar grew old, all courage left him. His only concern was now to retire from the Archivists Tower—“alive if possible, thanks for asking”—and move to Antyra II in a nice little dome on the oceanfront, far from Alixxor’s maddening bustle.
“Mmm… very strange,” mumbled Antumar while inching toward the exit. “That’s what I thought myself, but then I saw Alala in his archive. I thought Tadeo was back.”
“Alala? Alala is aliv… archive? She’s in Tadeo’s archive?” babbled Gill.