Gill felt the floor splitting under his feet.
“How… you erased… what did you erase? Ugo, did you erase the Sigian’s memory?” he exploded, feeling an uncontrollable urge to physically crush the abomination’s skull. The Sigian destroyer was lost forever!
“The important things are in my head,” the jure said with a mischievous joy in his voice, hinting that he had seen the rest of the memory. Any plan Gill might undertake in the future had to include the jure…
The bitterness of his rage was pushing him to blow up his bracelet for the simple pleasure of knowing Ugo was dead for good, along with his hallucinatory virtual world. But beyond the skin of anger, Gill thought he sensed something: Ugo annoys me on purpose! The tone of his voice, the lack of the slightest trace of empathy, wasn’t coming from the degeneration of Ugo’s kyi like it seemed at first smell. They were meant to push him to lose his cool and act impulsively. He would give Ugo a good excuse to torture him, as he did to Baila’s initiate, to break his will and show him that the jure controlled his every muscle!
The path of violence was the most efficient conditioning since time immemorial, the fastest path to malform a kyi. The Gondarran assassins didn’t get their reputation as “tail smashers” for nothing! It surprised him somewhat that Ugo didn’t just torture him without pretense, which could only mean that the avatar wasn’t all that unscrupulous, despite his mad essence. Even a dead being like him was still following the causality of reasons, Gill realized, amazed, and he memorized the idea in a corner of his kyi to think of it at a better time.
He could feign he was still angry and step on the path of torture laid by Ugo. That would allow him to pretend to be crushed, to allay the monster’s vigilance before hitting him at the right moment. But he realized that Ugo must have discovered the secrets of the Guk canons in his kyi, the harmonics of the pathseeker… Maybe in seven hundred years he had enough time to learn a thing or two if he was interested.
Until now, he couldn’t smell any residual traces of Guk control in the abomination’s voice, but he had to be carefuclass="underline" the jure proved full of surprises even before knowing his ganglions. Ugo would torture him gladly and smell the precise limit of his taming. Then he’d most likely torture him again and again with great ardor, until he broke him for real. Gill had no more chance of deceiving the jure on the path of a brutal reality than in the one where he already was. Therefore, he decided to decline the demonstration of violence so kindly offered.
In the calmest voice possible, he asked, “You mean the virtual world works in the bracelet? May I connect to Uralia?”
“You’re clueless with these things, which doesn’t surprise me at all,” Ugo replied, as arrogant as usual, but he didn’t use his voice inflections to provoke him—a sign that he accepted the truce for now. “I can barely exist myself. Uralia’s code is where the bracelet keeps the video-somatic records. For the time being, we won’t memorize anything,” he added mockingly.
He dropped on the floor, his back against the wall, and grabbed his head spikes in disbelief. Ugo was mad, but he found a way to save Uralia. From far away, a thought began to take shape: Uralia was a world just like Sigia, destroyed by the same Grammian hysteria. And just like Sigia, it found refuge in his bracelet. He no longer had a world to save, but two. No matter how much he hated Ugo for what he had done, he understood him. That’s my problem, he thought. I understand everyone. I even understand Baila. The transfer was the masterpiece of a very smart Antyran. A mad, unscrupulous genius—and on top of that, dead. Hmm, speaking of dead…
“Ugo, what’s with the dead avatars? Are they also—”
“Saved? Yes, on Kaura.”
“Sandara…”
“She’ll be the first one I delete after I rebuild Uralia.” He laughed cynically.
Suddenly feeling sick, Gill got to his feet, deciding to end the discussion.
“How is this ship driven?” he asked, more to himself, convinced that Ugo, familiarized with the Sigian technology, wouldn’t have a problem using the alien devices. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have mowed down the whole crew.
He was in a large oval room, no doubt the ship’s bridge. The walls, curved on the inside, had three bends up to the ceiling, looking like a set of increasingly smaller tori piled one on top of the other. Gill had to admit that they didn’t look that bad, being made of a strange organic material of brown color, shining as if it was wet. It had thousands and thousands of bumps of all sizes, and one of the walls was in fact a display where he could see the stars. The artificial gravity, quite similar to that on Antyra I, radiated directly from the floor, allowing him to stay upright easily.
Only then did he realize the large number of Grammian bodies around, mostly of the muscular version, identical to one another. Ugo had outdone himself with the massacre.
The ship didn’t appear to be a large class, certainly not a destroyer like the ones seen in the memory of the Sigian god, yet the aliens were surprisingly many for such a small place. He wondered how they managed to rest.
In one of the walls, he saw a series of niches arranged in bundles and closed by transparent lids. He realized with a glance that they were the nests where the Grammians slept. The austerity, taken to such extremes, said much about their society. A world able to force its troops to sleep in such awkward pipes for months and months at a time most likely didn’t care about their lives. He imagined a colony of licants willing to sacrifice to the last for the common good, for their acronte. Hmm, good question—who’s your acronte?
Two neural probes similar to the one in which he had been immobilized were mounted in wall niches, right next to the nests. He wasn’t at all curious why the Grammians needed so many probes on their ships.
Apart from the probes, other devices whose usage he couldn’t even guess also hung on the walls. The strangest was a kind of cabinet with four bumps connected obliquely to its sides—a pile of smaller and smaller folders, on top of which lay a flat display. It might have been a futuristic printing device—much more advanced than the rudimentary printers built by the Antyrans. The Shindam forbade them, fearing that the architects could easily convert them to print cloned organs. Most likely, such devices were used heavily in the cloning clinics hidden in the lowest levels of the mining city.
The interesting thing was that all the instructions on the Grammian machines were bilingual, in the strange Grammian symbols as well as in Antyran! After all, the ship had hosted several Antyran initiates before Ugo squeezed the life out of their kyis—no wonder the gods took the caution to translate the buttons. Maybe they even trained the Antyrans to drive their ship!
In the end, he realized why the Grammian architecture disturbed him so much. It wasn’t the weird material used to build the walls… The problem was that the ship’s interior looked pretty much identical to the one glimpsed in the alien hologram that Baila had shown him. In 652 years, the Grammians hadn’t changed anything? He found that hard to believe. Maybe… maybe it was only a matter of design—maybe the ship’s functions were improved. However, the appearance was the easiest to change, and such rigidity seemed unthinkable to him. It was as if the Antyrans would still field orzacs and moulan slingers in their armies like they did during the Kids’ War. Of course, he knew nothing about the Grammians and their technology, but as an archivist, he had a good understanding of the evolution of a civilization. Again, he felt a cold shiver at the feeling that beyond what he or the Sigians or anyone else was thinking about the Grammians, something much darker was lurking in the shadows…
Right in the room’s center, three rows of cockpits faced the display wall; over half of them were occupied by dead Grammians. The cockpits were fitted directly into the floor, their occupants fastened in a rigid rubber seal that left only their arms to hang outside. The creatures were working on their displays when Ugo attacked them. Death came so quickly that not even a bit of surprise could be read in their frozen eyes.