[←35]
During Raman’s reign, the Guk science reached its peak. Its disciples used the harmonics of the nine primordial aromas to search the stalker’s path, which they invoked whenever they had to make a choice. The same aromas, in different harmonics, triggered ikkla, the logic of semantics.
[←36]
By far, sakka was the most fearsome innovation of the rebels in the Kids’ War, and it was quickly copied by the temples. Each moulan carried three Antyrans to handle the huge slingshot tied to its biggest horns; one of them reined the beast while the other two armed the bomb in the harness and pulled the sling as far as they could. The phosphorous projectile usually burst into flames in the air after losing its folded skin, exploding with a blinding light in the enemy lines. Everyone touched by its fiery breath was turned into a walking torch, unable to extinguish the flame even if he jumped in a river, until the reaction was over.
[←37]
Orbital platforms.
[←38]
The biggest glacier in the Antyran world, born from the thick ice cap that covered the upper plateau at an altitude of over nine miles. From there, Eger proudly descended down to the Alixxoran plains, cutting a parallel—albeit, much larger—valley to the one where Alala’s dome stood.
[←39]
The righteous used to say that “one has to look into the eyes of evil to taste its corruption.”
[←40]
The ribbed tubes were some ninety feet high and between six and nine feet in diameter, slightly thicker at the base. They were formed by the intermittent eruptions of muddy water mixed with volcanic ash and gases, in an age when the snow cover was much larger than in Gill’s time. The warm jets cut easily through the ice, the ash forming an insulating lining that, in time, became as hard as stone. In the time between eruptions, the seemingly eternal cold regained its reign, and the heavy ice pushed the whole structure upward. This way, drop by drop, the outcrops grew from the battle of the eternal enemies: water and fire. It took them hundreds of thousands of years to reach the current heights. After Beramis melted the ice caps away, these bizarre tubes remained behind as a remembrance that the Antyran world wasn’t always as friendly for life as it had become.
[←41]
Over the prior six centuries, the Bailas had made a habit of cursing Alixxor for its role in defeating the temples during the Kids’ War and for hosting the Shindam’s buildings. They threatened that the gods would burn the city to the ground, pretty much like they did with Raman’s capital.
[←42]
The biggest flowers in the Antyran world. Their red, fleshy petals sometimes reached ten feet in length.
[←43]
Small, mobile buildings, often found in the large intersections. Most were made of metal and resembled the head of an old, grumpy Antyran. They could be easily carried around and placed as needed, to distribute the latest discourses of the prophet, the ritual aromas for the night’s incantations, or the seeds to be smelled before the first
meal. They were much more accessible than the pyramid temples, where everyone had to stand in endless lines to get anything.
[←44]
The Red Wall or the Red Scarp was a vertical wall over fifteen hundred miles long, born on the same day as the crater that held the planet’s ocean. A fossil tectonic plate, tensed by the planet’s cooling, snapped during the comet’s impact and sunk over four miles lower than the other plate.
[←45]
The capital of the mining world.
[←46]
The crevice took its name from the color of its walls, as the rock contained rich copper–cobalt deposits and other complex ores.
[←47]
A monolithic tower-city raised on the oceanfront thirty miles south of Alixxor, Gondarra Tower reached three thousand feet in height and was supposed to become the home of over half a million Antyrans. In the acronte’s vision, it was meant to symbolize the architecture of the future, a world with breathtaking cities built in the middle of lush forests or deep in the Roch-Alixxor valleys. Yet the exorbitant resources swallowed by the project doomed it to be the first and last city of its type, just another damaging utopia, the kind in which the Shindam was never in short supply while the ordinary Antyrans struggled in poverty and the dilapidated state of the infrastructure about to crumble, sinking at each step into the maze of an ever-larger bureaucracy.
[←48]
The jets were designed to join and form a floating stage.
[←49]
Also known as the “Walking Fire,” it was a tunic woven from platinum threads and coated with tiny black diamonds pressed into the material. According to the dogma, Zhan himself gave it to the first Baila 1,250 years before, when the prophet received the gift of divinity.
[←50]
The fortuitous presence in the quadrant of the roadworking planet-ship Lacrilia allowed a Rigulian ambassador to arrive on Alixxor in a mere ten days, rather than the two months it would have taken from Rigulia.
[←51]
“Your smell will always find the path if you don’t let your fear enshroud it with its insidious stench,” the overjoyed Guk Master Ramayaloga used to say a long time ago, during a time when Antyrans still indulged in calling themselves overjoyed.
[←52]
Ever since the architects had announced the development of the first “intelligent” programs, Baila had forbidden the use of the “corrupting” AIs.
[←53]
The fusion reactors, although embedded in a strong metal–ceramic matrix and stuffed with countless safety systems, managed, in extreme situations, to explode in a rather spectacular way if the core plasma droplet, heated to tens of millions of degrees, escaped its magnetic cage.
[←54]
The mysterious “fire-of-the-ice” in the old mythology.
[←55]
Over the centuries, the fear of Arghail’s corruption had turned into a worldwide nyctophobia, with most of the adult Antyrans avoiding darkness at all costs (not that they had to face it very often).
[←56]
A snakelike creature, its belly covered in thousands of small protuberances that allowed it to slide quickly over muddy ground.
[←57]
A large aquatic insect protected by an armor of bony scales.
[←58]
Relays were of course pointed into the future because the recipient’s light appeared in the sky as it was many hundreds or thousands of years ago. As usual, the irony of the sarkens was totally unwarranted. Even the simplest conversation required an awful lot of orbital math to find the galactic position of the target in its future to synchronize it with the present of the ones transmitting the flux.
[←59]
Lacrilia was a small but very active red dwarf star, able to blow some of the largest coronal mass ejections in the whole quadrant.
[←60]
The lasers on the ceiling pointed to the nearest exit during emergencies, but they could also blind any attacker in case a boarding party was trying to take over the spaceship.
[←61]
When Ropolis became the capital of the mining world almost thirty years before, the crevice was sealed along its length, except for the central square of the city, where the Antyrans had built the elevators and underground trains.