From the northern side, the size of the buildings became even more obvious: the stone terraces were built one on top of the other, climbing to dizzying heights. He walked around the walls and reached a group of stairs on a platform. Without waiting for Ugo’s approval, he climbed them with running jumps, his curiosity being attracted by the place with the force of the maelstrom between the Twin Rocks in the Malikan Strait.
He remembered the place. Something whispered that he was there in another life… the life of the Sigian inside the bracelet. A small artificial cave whose ceiling was lined with a wire mesh opened in his path. He climbed some stairs, turned left in the corridor, and reached the room where he had seen the milky ray from the ceiling. He looked up and saw that the hole was still there—1,250 years hadn’t changed anything! Well, the curved stone in the center of the room was missing.
Ugo didn’t hurry him to leave—perhaps he was also curious to see the cave.
“The light falls vertically only two times in a year: the days when the Sigians arrived and when they left,” the jure said. “This is not our cave.”
Gill went outside and saw another small artificial hole opening high in the nearby wall. On the ground level there was a large cave, partially obstructed by various metallic objects, and another hole on its right, blocked by a metal gate. But the cave in front of him appeared to be the destination of his feet, controlled by the jure. The left wall was artificial, made from neatly arranged boulders, while the right one was dug into bedrock. A large pile of rocks collapsed from the ceiling filled much of the cave.
“Push them aside,” Ugo ordered impatiently.
Without waiting for him, the jure took control of his hands. He was moving much faster than Gill could have done it. He rolled the boulders in the distorted space nearby, and they disappeared several feet away. After he finished, he took the laser lens from the belt and burned an opening in the rocky ground. With a loud bang, the stone fell into the gap underneath, and Ugo-Gill jumped into the darkness. He landed on his feet in a vaulted gallery about twice his height. Here and there, large rocks collapsed from the walls blocked his way, but he had no difficulty opening a path through them. Many corridors wound like a maze in his path, the majority leading southward to the ancient city. Not even the thermal sight of his suit could unravel the damp darkness at their ends. The main gallery was going eastward, toward the Sigian destroyer…
As they approached the hill, the corridor widened and descended at a slight slope. He soon reached a wall full of finely carved bas-reliefs. The path turned to the left, but Ugo stopped him in front of the sculptures. Kirk’an was carved here, too, looking at an ovoid in front of him—the Sigian destroyer about to be buried. Another square retold the story of the monkey. From both sides of the wall, the unknown animal resembling a llandro was gazing at Gill—the same one carved on the richly decorated pyramid in the center of the ruins. Two other sculptures got his attention: the golden grinding machines from the bracelet’s memory.
A small crack between the rock blocks, widened by the earthquakes of the last millennia, was the only indication that something was beyond them. He looked through the opening, and indeed, he saw a huge room. Since he could look inside, it made no sense to cut the stones. Gill carefully pulled the space beyond the crack, and in an instant, he reached behind the wall, inside the huge excavation.
The destroyer was seemingly there, under a mound of stones carefully stacked on top of it, completely hidden from view. Nearby, the two Sigian golden excavators lay dismantled.
In a corner of the giant room, he could see hundreds of wooden baskets holding unidentified offerings. Among them were rolls of painted fabric and statues depicting Kirk’an, cast in a yellow metal—probably gold. A huge pile of artifacts that would have driven to ecstasy the archivists of any galactic world!
Ugo directed him to a large heap of stones. A menu appeared in the upper part of bracelet’s grid, and the center symbol began to blink. With a loud thundering followed by a thick cloud of dust, the rocks collapsed, and a golden ramp slid down to him. Inside the ship, a diffused light lit up. Without hesitation, he ran inside. He had finally reached the Sigian vessel!
His joy was overshadowed by the imminent ending of the journey in the company of the living dead. What was the abomination going to do to him?
He entered the bridge, which looked exactly like he remembered: golden walls able to turn into displays, fighter cockpits in a semicircle around a low table, the translucent distortion sphere on the table… no cosmic map, no driving system. He immediately figured out that he had no way of flying it; none of the Sigian’s memories had told him how to do it…
Ugo’s attack came without warning: he suddenly felt he couldn’t move his limbs or tail. After a brief moment of useless struggle, the numbness became so intense that he fell to the floor. The monster’s straps caught his ganglions in a death grip.
“Ugo, you monster, what are you doing? Are you killing me?” he babbled, barely breathing.
“Don’t be stupid. How am I to move in the ship if you’re dead? I’ll give your limbs back after I’m done.”
The pain became atrocious, as if thousands of thorns were flowing through his head like a deadly twister.
This time his mind wasn’t clouded by controlled delusions—maybe the bracelet didn’t have enough resources, as the jure readily admitted it. He had to wait, paralyzed, for Ugo to finish Uralia’s transfer.
Soon, it became clear why the abomination tortured him like that. The jure most likely didn’t need his neurons to transfer Uralia—the bracelet should have been able to communicate with the ship’s interfaces without such intermediaries—but he paralyzed his movements so that Gill couldn’t stop the process. It would be a disaster if he managed to disconnect the bracelet during the transfer—especially near the end, when the monster would move his hideous algorithms. Breaking the contact might kill him…
Suddenly cheered by the happy prospect, he decided to resist the savage assaults.
Unfortunately, despite his un-Antyran efforts, after a while, it became clear that his endeavor was bound to fail; he tried to babble a curse, but he passed out, missing an ideal opportunity to rid the universe of the monster.
After some time, the terrible pain stopped. As he had promised, Ugo finally released his ganglions. For the first time after many days, he felt his kyi free, truly free from the shadow of the hideous parasite.
“Ugo! Ugo, where are you?” he shouted.
No one replied. He scrambled to his feet, wobbling, and dragged himself to the nearest wall to lean on. He looked around as if he expected the incarnation of the virtual monster to appear from somewhere.
“When are you going to kill me?” he shouted hoarsely at the surrounding nothingness.
There was no sign of pseudo-life. He calmed down, wondering what to do next. It was pretty clear he couldn’t drive the Sigian ship without the jure’s help, and somehow, he doubted that Ugo would help him fly to the aliens. It crossed his kyi to go out of the catacombs, reach the Grammian vessel, and try to steer it to the Federals.
But regardless if he could make it or not, everything was lost! Ugo would fly the destroyer and hide in a crack for a while… and then, on a nice morning, the universe would wake up changed. The new god, greater than all the gods from time immemorial, would reveal himself. Whatever face he would give to reality, nothing would be the same anymore. Any sentient creature of the galaxy, including the present-day-Ugo, would find it impossible to fathom the magnitude of the change.
But Gill had no hope that the individuality of the billions and billions of beings eaten by the metamorphosis would be preserved in one form or another. After all, what reason would Ugo have to keep them alive—and especially, what reason would the creatures have to want to live? Most likely, the god would crush them like a bunch of parasitic dolmecs. Their feeble, ephemeral shells would have to make way for the purity of the virtual monster, for the technological singularity evolved at the end of the metamorphosis. The age of biological creatures would end in all the worlds of the universe…