Ugo could have locked him alone in a cave—much safer and more convenient. But no, he had to bring Urdun into his path… Suddenly, driven by a premonition, he recalled the details of his meeting with Ugo. On Zhan’s eye! He didn’t have to search much because he immediately remembered a weird detaiclass="underline" before the seemingly enraged architect had cut the holoflux, he had stared at Urdun, luring him to notice the old Antyran and ask the proper questions that would bring him into the virtual world! The subtlety with which the architect planted the seed of connection betrayed a capacity to predict possible futures far beyond anything he could have imagined… Gill felt he had very few advantages—the most important being, of course, that he smelled the trap into which he had fallen.
He deeply inhaled the virtual air, filling his chest, while his kyi feverishly explored the few possibilities he had in search of a saving crack. Returning to Urdun, could he be sure that the old Antyran was knowingly helping the jure? Well, why would Ugo leave an Antyran who was not under his control, even if a prisoner, alone with Gill? In extraordinary circumstances, no help may prove to be what it seems, he told himself, remembering Alala, who made him believe she wanted to mate with him, although it should have been obvious that Antyran females don’t think of mating when the world is ending…
He wasn’t going to take the bait for the second time. Yes, the old haggard was playing very convincingly, but Gill’s nostrils had smelled the stink of the trap laid by the mirages of the semantics. Threat. Friendship. Promises. Threat. The four-step cycle would close, and then the attack would follow…
Could it be that the jure believed him so naïve as to miss that Urdun was his Antyran? Perhaps yes; Ugo had no way of knowing about Gill’s passion for the legendary Guk caste, the most coveted discipline for the smell-kyi of the ancients, declared heretical at Zhan’s arrival and altogether wiped out in the days of the godly invasion. He had no way of knowing this because Guk had disappeared from the collective memory of the Antyrans. For twelve hundred years, dust and oblivion fell on the ancient scrolls, yellowed and eaten by weather and time, but in the last century, scholars had found the remains and hosted them in the tower’s storage rooms. It took decades for the restoration experts to painstakingly piece together the crumbles until the archivists finally had access to some of the most hidden secrets in their vaults, like the books for smell and logic written by the legendary aromary Laixan—true masterpieces of the ancient world.
After all, Gill had no idea how many archivists had read them and truly understood their meaning, how many had a passion for the logic algorithms like he did. As far as he could figure, some important archivists—Antumar among them—used to scorn Guk as one of the many ridiculous castes of antiquity. That was the reason why they didn’t try to go beyond the dusty covers eaten by rukkus. And the ones who did had no intention of being ridiculed by their peers, so they kept it secret.
At first, he didn’t realize its efficiency, either—certainly he didn’t dream about the depth of the world he had stepped into. But he started to study it with the naïve impetus that by becoming a Guk disciple, he would become the keeper of a code that would give voice to the hunger for heresy inside him… that he would start a fight with something deeper than death, a fight with the forgetfulness of the hidden universe smelled by the legendary aromaries of antiquity.
In time, as he studied and practiced the ancient aromas, he discovered that Guk was in fact a science concealed as a caste; it was the logic of words handled with mathematical algorithms—it was a learned habit of estimating reality through mathematical algorithms triggered by the harmonics of the routine aromas. Thus, he found out how the smell-kyi could lead to the logic of semantics, to what the Antyrans called ikkla—the smell instinct that sniffed the hidden meaning “behind the words.” And the logic of semantics was precisely the tool that wouldn’t let him overlook the cascade of realities revealed by the few words dropped by Urdun.
After reaching the elementary conclusion that a jure—especially of Ropolis—wouldn’t let the smallest detail around Gill happen “at random,” he finally understood that he had entered into an even more dangerous fight than the one against the prophet. His only chance of escape was to smell the exit hole in the web of mirages spread around him.
“I’ll find a way to get out of here,” he murmured, mostly to himself.
“Why don’t you calm down?” Urdun chided him in a friendly tone. “If you have a bit of patience, you’ll be contacted…”
“Maybe beyond the ravine…”
He walked toward one of the ravines bordering the meadow. As he approached, he realized that a constant rumble came from its bottom. It took him a while to get used to the darkness, and then he spotted the thorny spheres… An eternal river of giant siclides was flowing through the valley! Totally absurd! But very effective.
That’s how they keep us isolated, he thought. The walls were almost vertical and couldn’t be descended. But even if he jumped, with the risk of breaking something—if you could break something in a virtual world—the siclides would have been an impenetrable barrier; they didn’t look anything like the ones around Alixxor. They were much larger and studded with three-inch-long thorns, promising a traumatic disconnection for any mad Antyran trying to cross their path. Yes, he became convinced, he wouldn’t pass through there. Maybe the creek…
“You can’t cross the creek,” shouted Urdun, guessing his plan. “The water is acid—better not try. Understand it: you can’t leave the meadow; it’s your prison. You have water to drink under this tree if you’re thirsty. You can eat flowers or chew grass if you’re hungry. The grass is edible and never ends. Provided, of course, you have a feeding tube inserted in your shell,” he said, smiling briefly.
Shell… the word was occasionally used as a metaphor, but this time it surprised him. For these Antyrans, the shell meant more than a metaphor—they used shell to refer the physical body left on Ropolis. For them, the virtual world was more important than the real one; they had fallen into its slavery, slaves of a drug that dispelled all other aromas…
He was stuck there, too, so the wisest thing would be to disconnect, jump back into his “shell,” and defend the Sigian artifact from nasty surprises. However, he was sure that Urdun had the mission to keep him in the virtual realm so that Ugo could confront him on familiar ground, a ground so alien to Gill.
“Urdun, you told me you invented the licants. Are you an architect?”
The glimmer in the old Antyran’s eyes told him his deduction was right.
“You’re a prisoner like me?” Gill asked, deciding to press him further.
His companion lowered his eyes.
“I was an architect and helped with this… they had… I was supposed to get on the council, but they involved me in—”
“If you’re an architect, it means you know how to contact the others,” Gill said, cutting into his garbled rambles rather abruptly. “Tell me how to do it!”
“Gill, have patience; they’re going to contact you.”
“Ugo. Ugo’s going to contact me. And I’ve nothing to say to him,” he snapped angrily. “I’m going to disconnect; there’s no point in staying here any longer,” he exclaimed, grabbing the suckers connected to his head spikes. He supposed that if he pulled them off in the virtual world, he would cut the contact; otherwise, why would they exist here, too? “There’s a holophone in the dome. Maybe someone’s calling me, and I’m wasting my time here with you!”