After this incident, Ugo became even colder and more secluded, if that was possible. It seemed he could no longer control his impatience, and any attempt to start a discussion—no matter how harmless—distracted him from his thoughts, doing nothing but to further annoy him. In the end, Gill gave up trying.
Mapu was approaching fast. Several days had passed since they started to fly in the deep night, and in the meantime, Gill had the chance to try one of the devices on the bridge—helped, of course, by the nasty jure. They were indeed printers; after selecting an item on the display, the device delivered the desired object in one of its drawers. This time, the Grammian technology managed to impress him with the hundreds of trinkets listed in the virtual catalogue. He had no clue about their usage or how to recharge the device, but one of them was a drawing of an orange mush in a tray, so he ordered it without delay. Very soon he had to concede that the taste was utterly disgusting—pretty much like eating hot sand. Yet the food was remotely edible, and he survived his first contact with the Grammian cuisine.
Gill made his nest in a corner of the bridge; he pulled the fluff from several pods in the walls, undoubtedly the resting abodes of the Antyran “guests” on the ship. It didn’t even cross his spikes to crawl inside and nap in the narrow tubes; the Grammians had a total lack of decency to sleep in such conditions! The more he understood them, the more he disliked their kind. They resembled the world that Baila wanted to turn Antyra into: a dull, sorrowful, guilty existence where the individuals ended up crushed and turned into simple cogs of a giant, odorless machine. They only needed a generation. A single generation of younglings raised in the temples, following the prophet’s canons, as they had tried before the Kids’ War.
For a while, Ugo ordered him to use various displays in the cockpits, until he gave up. The jure didn’t tell him what he was looking for, but Gill figured out in the end that the abomination was searching for a way to access the ship’s logic neurons. As it seemed, in terms of artificial intelligence, the Grammian technology was either extremely rudimentary or hidden in unreachable places.
“Analog circuits,” Ugo concluded, spiteful. “These creatures are awful,” he exploded before abandoning the search.
One morning, as he glanced at the display wall on the bridge, he saw the white-yellow star of Mapu glowing brighter than on the previous evening. It was no longer just a little star lost in the frigid darkness of space but a real ball of fire! And with all the pressure of the hideous dead hanging on his ganglions and the looming end of their forcible fellowship, he felt a wave of joy to be part of such a historic event, to be the first Antyran to reach the strange realm of another form of intelligent life!
A realm that—he was pretty sure—would turn out to be nothing less than the craziest lands conceived in the dreams of the ancient aromaries intoxicated by the nifle’s chimeras!
Somewhere to the left, he spotted a gray planet draped in a slight greenish tint and traversed by wide, brown stripes.
“Ugo, we’ve arrived! Look at the planet!” he exploded, his voice trembling with excitement.
“That’s not Mapu,” the grumpy jure replied.
Ugo wasn’t enjoying the view, which didn’t surprise Gill at all. “For seeing the foul-smelling88 black whirl with my own eyes, I came to realize that, although I was walking the shores of life, my kyi had crossed on the other side,” he recalled a quote from “The Weird and Wondrous Adventures of Mythical Azaric” tale, narrated by Laixan. Indeed, death is a terrible thing… how it must change one’s smell going through such an experience, he thought, remembering Sandara’s words that the jure wasn’t always a monster and that his decay began after he lost his kyi.
“Mapu has oceans like Antyra. This is a gaseous planet,” Ugo bothered to explain to him.
As they approached, Gill realized the enormity of the world, which resembled the realm of the damned Kaura but in different colors. The clouds looked more opaque, and even from a distance, he could see several huge storms, busy tearing apart the rotting face of the planet. Some cyclones in the contact areas of the bands were larger than the monstrous Belamia—frankly, they seemed larger than the whole Antyran desert planet. Nothing could live in such a place.
The display wall framed two small white dots orbiting the realm of storms: two satellites locked in eternal ice, resembling Antyra I before Zhan closed it in the belly of Beramis.
The ship left the gray planet, closing in on the central star.
Soon, the view of another planet pumped the blood in his spikes, but he realized it didn’t fit Ugo’s description: it was a reddish-brown ball wrapped in an opaque mist, a global storm that blurred its arid surface. It was hiding from view like a female tarji, he thought, amused, remembering the ridiculous robes they used to drape their bodies in their often hopeless attempt to hide the presence of the tail bump.
He was hungry, but he decided to ignore the calls of his stomachs because two other worlds appeared on the screen. The one on the right, closer to Mapu’s star, was shining in a gloomy yellow-brown light that didn’t promise anything good. On the other tail, the playful glimmer of a tiny blue-green crescent in the center of the display was calling them with the hypnotic mirage of a life-giving ocean.
“This is it!” he exclaimed, mesmerized by the view.
“Stop! Stop the ship!” ordered Ugo. Without waiting for Gill to comply, he stopped the movement of the vessel.
“What happened?” asked Gill. Then he saw the frantic flow of messages at the bottom of the display. The Antyran translation warned them that the ship was receiving signals from the planet’s surface!
“Video streaming. Mapu has video streaming!” the jure exclaimed.
“The Grammians are here, too? We have to turn back to the Federals!”
Gill tried to touch the navigation table, but Ugo blocked his hands.
“No, wait! Checking…”
Still controlling his limbs, Ugo forced him to enter a Grammian cockpit and press the buttons of its display. The jure was moving so fast that Gill had no time to read most of the translated texts scrolling in front of his eyes.
“Are you going to tell me what is happening?” he finally exclaimed, irritated.
“They’re neither Grammian nor Federal. The compression technology is archaic.”
“Archaic?”
“Even more primitive than Antyra’s. But something else is… strange.”
Ugo paused as if he couldn’t believe what he just read. Then he continued, “It’s not a single language.”
“What?” Gill exclaimed, perplexed. “Mapu’s civilization has reached radio transmissions without being unified?”
“They’re… hundreds. At least hundreds,” he added, hesitating.
“Hundreds of languages? It can’t be. The sensors must have gone mad…”
Gill couldn’t imagine such a planet. It was as if on a single world, on a single surface, all the civilizations of the galaxy crowded together—or better yet, the civilizations from dozens of galaxies. He got dizzy just by thinking about the implications of such a discovery. In an instant, Mapu became the most interesting world in the universe, even without the presence of the Sigian destroyer.
“Can you put them on the screen? What’s in the transmissions?”
“I’ve no idea, and I don’t want to know!” Ugo replied.
Gill’s curiosity had grown to the size of Eger’s glacier. As an archivist, he would have given anything for the chance to discover the knowledge and habits of the world he had imagined countless times during the last few days. He forgot all his problems, charmed by the alien messages scrolling on the display.