The tarjis and initiates remained on their knees, their heads bowed in the dust. None dared to raise their puny eyes to glance at the godly presence, the shadow of their vehicles stretched over the park being enough to fill them with awe. The ships were too big to land on Alixxor, especially around the pyramids surrounded by Zhan’s trees.
They stopped above Baila’s platform.
“My path is your path,” Baila recited from the Book of Creation Inrumiral, “and my judgment is nigh. My sons! As it was foretold, I return among you!”
Slowly, Baila’s platform rose into the air.
“Look at us and rejoice,” he exclaimed, “for the New Sacred Book will be revealed!”
Amid the murmurs of the astounded tarjis, who on his invitation dared to raise their eyes from the dirt, the platform carrying the prophet disappeared into the belly of a spaceship. Immediately, the two Grammian vessels climbed in the sky. The delirious tarjis burst into thunderous cheers, escorting their flight to the orbit. Baila had ascended to the gods to plead their cause!
***
Omal 13 raised one of his arms to better support the weight of his hams on the edge of the mud pool in which he dabbled. A floating device suspended above his head sank its tentacles in the middle of the pool, then gently retracted them, spreading the hot mud on his back amid the delighted grunts of the ambassador.
“Blue light,” he mumbled to the reddish iridescences of the ceiling, which changed as he requested.
The red color had started to annoy him, although the Rigulians used it to increase their vitality—it reminded them of Garima’s rising—the red dwarf star heralding the end of hibernation. But now the red ceiling was clouding his mind by constantly reminding him that he didn’t hibernate for so long. With a long sigh, he waved the tentacled device to disappear, and the floating vat, submerged in the hot mud in which he was resting, rose out of the pool. Another floating sphere, a tad larger than the Corbelian ones, came by and sprayed a viscous liquid on his skin until it washed away all the mud stains. Thus prepared, he floated into another room.
“No time to entangle,” he told the Corbelian sphere nearby as if he had to justify to it. “Anyway, Sirtam won’t say anything new. Start a transmission to Lacrilia,” he ordered.
Immediately, the sphere began to flicker in red hues.
“Sirtam 4, the Grammians made contact with Antyra,” Omal 13 said, jumping into the subject. He was again wearing the rigid official mask. “I would like to tell you more about this, but unfortunately, I don’t know much, either. I’m stuck at the system’s outskirts, and the native holofluxes are dead. I’m curious what excuse Baila will use now to keep me here. My feeling is that they want to keep me out of the talks.”
Despite the official posture, someone knowing him better would have noticed the trace of disappointment in his voice. Sirtam wouldn’t have any trouble to spill in his mud the natives’ aversion for them, using the logic of the protocol that Omal 13 already violated several times. He’d end up parked in some remote corner of the Federation for the next two or three hundred years, until they forgave his failure. Surely Bantara 21 wouldn’t rejoice at the news when she woke up. She would have to decide whether she would follow him in exile or search for another bond.
He cleared his throat and continued.
“The Grammians promised me a visit in a few days. I told them about the sarken probes and that we’d soon find the distorter’s position. I need your instructions if the Antyrans won’t give the artifact peacefully. As you know, I recommend the invisible kralls. Make sure you have a full team, just in case. End of transmission.”
***
“Ha-ha, I’m a genius, right?” Ugo laughed in Gill’s head. “Aren’t you happy I saved your tail from the Grammians?”
“Maybe I didn’t forget you handed me over to them,” he barked. “What are you doing in my bracelet?”
“Ho-ho, we have a problem with that,” the monster said with a satisfied giggle.
“I don’t see why I should be happy in your presence. I wouldn’t honor you with the palm ritual even if you’d were the last Antyran alive in the whole universe! Oh, please excuse me—I forgot you’re already dead! The most despicable dead I’ve ever met!”
“And you’ve seen nothing yet,” replied Ugo in a threatening voice. “Who do you think you are to remind me of the palm ritual? You forgot you blocked my expansion? I should have killed you for that. You’ve no idea how much harm you caused. All my plans—gone on the winds of the vardannes!”
“No one but you truly wanted the expansion. You saw what the parhontes chose when they had an option. The abomination—”
“Shut up! You have no idea what you’re talking about!” the jure shouted, angered, the impact of his words hitting him like a tarcan projectile. “A singularity is no abomination—only a primitive like you could believe that. The singularity would have changed the world! I might have ended wars, famines, and coldness. Nobody would have had to work ever again. I could have offered Uralia for all the Antyrans, in this reality!”
It’s going to be a long day, Gill thought. Was Ugo-of-the-bracelet still able to sip his most hidden thoughts? He saw no point to asking the jure about it because he had no intention of believing him.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Gill continued coldly. “What are you doing in the bracelet?”
“Since Ropolis was supposed to be destroyed, with you handed to the temples, we decided to delay your transfer a bit, to save what we could of Uralia. So we kept you in Kaura for five days.”
“I spent five days in a coma?” Gill exclaimed, stupefied. No wonder he was feeling so weak!
“Five days for you, seven hundred years for me. I used all our resources to discover the secrets of the bracelet.”
Ugo’s tone had the simplicity of a trivial feat, but beyond his words hid the enormity of seven hundred years. Of course he did it—Sandara told him that Ugo was the god of time. The parhontes gave him the codes of the virtual world, so he had accelerated centuries at his disposal to make the jump to the Sigian technology, aided by the collective intelligence of the artificial creatures… the dream inside a dream. He remembered the brown glacier, the entangled worlds. I was a tool. He tried in vain to imagine what the jump must have meant and how the architect was changed by the new reality, the new knowledge learned. However, it looked like seven hundred years was not enough to heal his madness.
“Your bracelet—or, dare I say, ours—is truly fascinating!” said Ugo. “I never imagined there’s something so complex in the whole universe.”
“Take your dreams off the bracelet,” Gill snapped. “Otherwise, I’ll disconnect it right now, and you’ll have to talk alone.”
“Just try it,” the abomination exploded. “Think you’ll succeed? You’re going to disconnect when I let you and not a moment earlier,” he said menacingly.
Despite the burning desire to fight him, Gill felt compelled to believe him this time—he had seen the little demonstration with the initiate, ruthlessly efficient even without the intimate knowledge of his synapses. He parasitized me for seven hundred years! the thought kept ringing in his kyi like an echo, and Gill couldn’t restrain a shiver of awe.
“You’ll be happy to know that I used your connections as a bridge to copy Uralia into the bracelet’s memory,” continued Ugo haughtily. “Most of your neurons survived the process—”
“What?” Gill exclaimed. “How could you copy—”
“Molecular memory. Huge capacity! I saved all the important stuff. I had to erase the previous memories, though.”