“Does it hurt?”
Gill was about to faint from exhaustion—and the prospect didn’t bother him at all—when he remembered, horrified, the object hidden on his forearm: the god’s bracelet! He quickly touched it to make sure it was still there. But with the same speed, he remembered something else: they had been betrayed. And as far as he knew, Baila XXI, the prophet, wouldn’t be happy with only the skillfully collapsed cave where the Shindam’s secret base stood. He’d send his spies to sniff the crumbles. Maybe the Antyran bent over him was working for the temples… Who knows?
The Antyrans liked to say that reality’s grooves take the shape of the gods’ will—the most fatalistic tarjis even pretended that Zhan was the one deciding their every single breath—but by now, Gill was pretty convinced that the huge stupidities that brought him here were his and only his. He didn’t listen to his dad when he advised him to become a flour carrier. What a carefree life he would have enjoyed! Entirely eventless, except for the regular flights between Antyra I and II… and the female temptations swarming around the domes of the visitors. But no, he had to become an archivist, to atone for the cowardice of his parents, who ran away from their home on Bodris. He made another monumental mistake when he tried to save the bracelet instead of getting rid of it while he still had a chance! He could have just left it underground or given it to the security team that dug him out of the rubble. Now he had nowhere to hide the compromising artifact, considering that they were heading to a rescue dome where the holoscanners of the healers would find it in an instant…
It crossed his spikes to throw the bracelet in a corner when the operator wasn’t looking. Of course, that would be another foolish thing on his already-long list. As soon as they found it, they’d figure out who threw it away. His only chance was to hide the bracelet and make sure no one would ever find about it. Not even his fellow archivists or the Shindam’s officials—unable to protect their most hidden secrets, as he had the occasion to learn on his very tail. Then, at the first opportunity, he would throw it into the ocean and run as far as possible from the temples, hoping they’d never connect the dots between his insignificant name and Tadeoibiisi’s fateful expedition.
Misreading Gill’s panicked look, the operator picked up a hormonal spray to sedate him. When he approached the stretcher, Gill hit him violently on the hand, sending the tube to the floor.
“No hormones!” he shouted with a glow of madness in his eyes.
“Hey! Have you lost your smell?” the healer yelled and stepped away from the stretcher, afraid that he might get attacked.
“I don’t want ’em!”
“Calm down! We’re almost there!” the healer exclaimed.
The shuttle landed on the jet-port of a rescue-recovery dome12—a building with the appearance of a weird hive, welded together from hundreds of hemispheres stacked one on top of another, in a seemingly disordered way.
He was immediately transferred to a comfortable nest, surrounded by all sorts of devices. When asked for his name, he replied, “Ernonhafir.”
Before leaving the room, the healer connected a string of sensors to the skin of his chest, directly through the holes of his torn tunic, without stripping him down. It seemed he smelled that Gill was ready to fight if the Antyran tried to touch his clothes.
“I’m bringing the resonance ring,” he told him from the doorstep.
As soon as Gill was alone in the room, he pulled the interfaces off his skin, convinced that the healer wouldn’t come back alone. He had no time to spare; the disconnected sensors raised the alarm anyway, and the healers would rush in at a moment’s notice. He leaped to his feet and cautiously opened the door to check the corridor. There were only a couple of healers escorting a pair of sick, old Antyrans, but they’d surely notice him if he tried to run away. Across the corridor, however, was the incubator—a dome with a controlled atmosphere, where the future moms hosted in the domes were keeping their eggs to hatch under their tender supervision.
Taking advantage of a favorable moment, he crossed the corridor and entered the hatchery, followed by the whining of the disconnected sensors. The room had several rows of purple eggs carefully placed in small nests set on tripods. The infrared lights suspended above warmed the eggs, while a device hidden underneath gently rolled them on all sides.
He set the holophone on closed circuit to check his own hologram and immediately regretted it, seeing how wrecked he was. However, he would have been a bit ungrateful to complain, given that he was still alive. The others weren’t so lucky.
After washing his face in the fountain embedded in the wall and mopping the dust from his shredded clothes, he looked again down the corridor. Some healers passed his door, running, apparently searching for him. Soon, the hallway was empty all the way to the elevator. He left the hatchery, trying to act as normal as possible, and reached the elevator platform without incident.
“Hey! What do you think you’re doing? Back to the ward!” a massive female shouted down the corridor.
The elevator arrived just in time. Ignoring the screaming female who was running after him, followed by some male healers, he jumped on the platform and pressed the button to descend to the main ground floor hemisphere.
Once outside of the building, he ran to the nearest magneto-jet station. The jets lay folded and parked vertically on their snouts to take up the smallest space possible among the lush plants surrounding the buildings. He touched his hologram to the sensor of one of the vehicles, and the jet slid horizontally on a magnetic pillow, extending its entire length. He had no intention of driving in his sorry state, so he lay in the back seat. In a few moments, the magneto-jet took off.
“To the western bypass,” he ordered the artificial intelligence in charge of the vehicle.
All the magneto-jets had artificial intelligences, although many Antyrans chose to disengage them and drive the jets themselves, following Baila’s rules against Arghail’s corrupting technology.
Cloning, augmentations, and implants of any kinds were banned by the Shindam under the prophet’s pressure. The tarjis took pains to impose their point of view in the most physical way possible, zealously thinning the number of scholars interested in such research.
But the artificial intelligences were a different story. In an act of courage touching insanity, the Shindam introduced intelligences in jets to reduce the number of road accidents. Of course, it helped that the AI architects fled to Ropolis,13 which happened to be the only place in the three inhabited Antyran worlds where the long arm of the temples hung helplessly.
“You don’t look so well! Are you OK?” exclaimed the artificial intelligence in a worried voice, stopping the whirl of his thoughts. “I’m going to call a healer and drive to—”
“Drive where I said if you don’t want to be shut down!” he reproached it angrily.
“I will follow your order,” replied the program, slightly offended by his threat.
He decided to let the annoying program drive the vehicle. Therefore, he was forced to stoically endure the AI’s chatter about Karajoo’s traffic madness until they reached his dome on the city’s outskirts. After he left the magneto-jet, the vehicle turned around and glided to the nearest magneto-jet station. With a deep sigh of relief, he stepped inside his dome, happy to finally arrive home.
CHAPTER 3.
As soon as Gill reached his dome, allotted by the Archivists Tower, he looked around to see if he was really alone. He opened the small door leading to the flour vault and stuck his head among the sacks piled in the usual mess, and then he carefully searched the two rooms of his small house. Happy with the result, he dropped into the artificial fluff of his nest—of course, after pulling his tail from its back pocket and comfortably coiling it around him. He didn’t have the slightest intention of falling asleep because he had to study the bracelet—the bracelet of the gods! He felt carried away by his success—all sorts of crazy ideas swarmed in his head at the very thought of owning something that didn’t belong to Antyra’s world, an object from a fallen god…