The more he thought about it, the more he convinced himself that the capital would be the best hiding place. What mad Antyran chased by the temples would hide right under their tails, in a city teeming with electronic eyes and invaded by armies of tarjis?
Moreover, in Alixxor, he could find food and a place to sleep. At the thought of a night spent in a fluffy nest scented with the fragrance of walsala, he quickly decided what to do next.
When he realized the flood of refugees wouldn’t end anytime soon, he gathered his courage and started to walk toward the capital, which was covered in black clouds of smoke from the burning Shindam’s Towers. One of the tallest buildings, the Tower of Planning, was engulfed in flames to its full height. Under the strong gust of the vardannes, it turned into a giant flaming sarpan stuck right in the hearts of the city. Surely the faithful wouldn’t miss the symbolism.
He was wearing the bracelet, activated, on his forearm, ready to use it at the slightest sign of danger. But nobody looked at him, the refugees being too sunk in their own misery to notice something else.
As he reached the same spot where he had stopped in the night before, he saw that the first barricade was gone. The security chameleons were gone, too, undoubtedly captured by the tarjis.
Gill walked to a large intersection. He knew that all sorts of nasty devices were hidden in places like these, things like chameleon holophones or retinal scanners, used by the Shindam to spy on Antyrans under the guise of keeping order. Lately, they had disabled the holophones because they could easily follow anyone from the space platforms, but they kept the retinal scanners. Their artificial intelligences could recognize anyone of interest and raise the alarm for the eyes in the sky. However, after yesterday’s events, Gill was pretty sure that all the AIs had received a warm “invitation” to delete themselves, which hopefully meant that nobody could use the scanners anymore…
He sneaked along the deserted streets, glued to the walls or hidden under the huge petals of the raag42 flowers growing by the roadside. His search for a hideout didn’t fare well because all the domes he scouted, although empty, were locked by their owners, who were hoping to return when things got back to normal. It made no sense to try to break in—he would only manage to trigger an alarm, and that was precisely the last thing he wanted at the moment.
The district was packed with statues of moulans, some likely holding the dead animals inside. Gill recognized the district of the flour carriers. True, the custom had lately been adopted by plenty of other Antyrans, who adorned their domes with miniature holograms or tiny statues scented with various fragrances stinking of greasy fur. But here, he could see them everywhere, some big, some only a couple of inches tall, some gathered in veritable herds of dozens of statues. Most were cast in very bright, black ceramic alloys—even the tallest, which easily reached twice his height.
“The haughtier the Antyran, the larger the moulan,” was one of the carriers’ sayings. And each statue had its own personality, its own posture: sleeping, eating, or flexing its tail in defense. Even the ceramic tiles of the pavement were painted in their image.
A “scrawny dome” 43 appeared in front of him. Gill startled at the sight and sped up, stung by the thought that the sharers could be inside, spying him through the smoky eye of the building. There’s no one around but me, he told himself.
A large building made of hemispheres stacked one on top of another appeared on the left side of the road. Finally, his luck changed! They were guest domes, connected to one another by transparent glass tubes. Some rooms were fully opaque, while others had transparent shapes on their walls, configured this way by their guests.
Even from a distance, he saw some doors left open. After yesterday’s madness, it seemed that the guests had fled as fast as their tails could wobble, without bothering to lock the rooms.
In one of the domes near the entry platform, Gill found a hologram key abandoned on the floor. Great! Now he had access to the food store!
He quickly checked the whole building to make sure it was empty, and then he jumped in front of the holotheater.
Just as expected, he couldn’t find a single holoflux, even in the smallest cities, still under the Shindam’s control. Some channels showed the huge crowds on the pyramids waiting to receive the morning orations, whereas others paraded the Shindam’s officials who had been arrested by the tarjis. Surely it was only a matter of time until the acronte’s sorry mug would join them. In both Antyra I and Antyra II, the arrests were flowing like a torrent.
Not a single word about Antyra III, which didn’t surprise him at all—the temples had no time to reach the planet yet. Maybe they had no intention of invading it anytime soon, what with the mountain of problems piling on their tails.
By the second day of his stay, Gill had started to play with the bracelet to reach the other memories of the dead Sigian. But each time he activated it, the space grid popped in. No mental order, no matter how resolute, could convince it otherwise.
One of the strange virtual symbols on the top of the grid-in-the-eye might have led to the Sigian’s memory, but he couldn’t risk pressing them mentally by chance, without the slightest clue what they were supposed to do. He couldn’t risk losing the grid, not with Baila on his tail.
Therefore, he was forced to stay hidden in Alixxor, wearing a bracelet he couldn’t read, waiting for the return of the gods…
But even if the gods didn’t rush to show themselves, other changes appeared. On the eighth day since the opening of the skies, the wall of fire became such a distant memory that many wondered if it had really existed. In the middle of the summer, the weather became noticeably cooler… and the massive ice caps, which not long ago had scarred the face of the planet, threatened to show their ugly cracks again. The specter of famine was now grinning at the Antyrans so used to the abundance of their lands, warmed by the godly fire…
The first hit was Antyra II, a planet colonized only seventy years before. The Antyrans had known for some time that it had a breathable atmosphere and a desert climate, thanks to the images taken by their rudimentary telescopes, but they had to wait for the development of the first fusion engines to colonize it.
The native life on the planet could hardly be called multicellular, the most complex being salia, the vein of the desert. All the beings reproduced by cell division, for the world hadn’t discovered sex. The only ocean of the world, Orizabia, flooded the bottom of a huge archaic crater known as the Valley of the Stars, and the colonists built their settlements around it, on the gentle slopes leading to the water. The rest of the planet was the kingdom of the most unforgiving desert imaginable, where rain had not fallen since time immemorial.
The hot climate was a great boon for agriculture. With modern irrigation and artificial rain seeded by bacteria, the planet’s production became the main source of food for the Antyrans on the three planets. Before long, the farming communities—especially the tarjis—became a power the Shindam couldn’t ignore.
A monstrous storm, the strongest storm conceivable, reigned over the ocean. Its name was Belamia, Zhan’s daughter, and her greatness was eclipsed only by the fire belly of her brother. Around the eye of the storm, the winds became supersonic; thick clouds, dragged by her rage to a fifteen-mile altitude, could finally drift away from the storm, bringing rain to the crater slopes.
Belamia was fed by a stream of hot air, blowing steadily from the planet’s equator to the poles. The Red Scarp44 diverted the winds to the Orizabia depression, feeding the eternal cyclone.
The storm may have been eternal, and its rains used to fall with the regularity of a precision device, but all this changed in a matter of days. The cooling of the winds during nighttime disturbed the subtle mechanisms that held the storm in place, and with each day, Belamia became more unstable, under the terrified eyes of the planet’s inhabitants. Predictably, it didn’t take long for the disaster to strike. At one point, Belamia got out of its womb and touched the shores, sharing a small taste of Zhan’s revenge.