Trace the Stars

by Nancy Fulda

  “It is beautiful,” Seramasia said of his navigation system. “Have no fear, my friend. It will work, and it will save us all.”

  “Do you know this,” Anduval begged, “or is it merely a hope?” He was no longer sure if he dreamed or if Seramasia had indeed transcended and now communed with him through a mind-touch.

  “I see the future, frail one. I see all things. I see your love for me, and it is not nearly as great as my love for you.” Her voice trailed off. She glanced to the side and down, and Holy Mother Seramasia suddenly disappeared.

  Anduval woke in his room. It had not been an hour since he had gone to sleep. His eyes still felt gritty, and were probably bloodshot.

  Every bone in his body ached from fatigue.

  For years he had been afraid of failure, but the dream had comforted him. Yet he worried that it was false comfort.

  Was it a dream, he wondered, or did Seramasia really appear to me?

  It was possible for a powerful holy mother to send dreams to her subjects, to communicate from a thousand miles away.

  He raced down from his bedchambers, past the crèches in the human quarters, and took the grand corridor to the royal chambers. He entered through the old dining hall and reached the closed door to the meditation chambers.

  There, a trio of skraal courtiers guarded the chrysalis. Twisted ropes of bone, yellowing with age, still bound the holy maiden. The chrysalis only vaguely hinted at the shape of the woman sleeping within.

  The skraals leaped to readiness.

  “Halt!” one warned. All three held disruptor rods—pale white rods that emitted a killing jolt.

  Anduval stood for a moment panting, staring at the egg-shaped chrysalis in disbelief. He’d expected to see it cracked open, the new Holy Mother standing resplendent and glorious.

  But it had only been a dream, and now he felt the fool.

  “Any movement?” Anduval begged. It was not uncommon for the queen to grow restless inside her chrysalis, to stir for months before it opened, even to cry out to her courtesans or speak briefly.

  “She sleeps deeply,” a courtesan answered, “and moves not at all.”

  Of course it was just a dream, Anduval thought.

  It was too early for her to emerge from her chrysalis. She would still be deep asleep, comatose.

  Even when she does awaken, he thought, Seramasia will not be a vessel of light. She will not be glorious and powerful. She will come out of her chrysalis with a hardened skin, nothing more.

  Two days later, an emergency meeting was called in Magus Veritarnus’s laboratory. The skraal lords in charge of palace security were there, along with dozens of guards. Tallori stood at Anduval’s side.

  “The cycor are coming,” the magus said. He flipped on the screen of his workstation, which took up one vast wall. It showed an area of space—a bright star like a glowing world, with tens of thousands of lesser stars beyond.

  Static played, and suddenly there was a loud squeal that seemed to emit from the star.

  “That squeal is a signal burst,” the magus said. “A cycor warship sent a message to its command center. They are coming to Danai.”

  One of the city guards asked, “How long will it take to get here? It looks as if they are far away.”

  “The drone scout that discovered our world relayed our whereabouts,” Anduval explained. “It sent a message burst, similar to the one that you heard. That message traveled at light speed to the star that you see. The warship received the message, and then sent out a report of its own before moving out. That ship will be racing toward us now, at near the speed of light. It will take only a day or two to reach maximum speed.”

  “So you’re saying that we have four years?” the guard asked hopefully.

  “I’m saying,” Anduval corrected, “that the cycor learned of our position two years ago, and set out immediately. Depending upon their speed of acceleration, they will attack shortly—within days.”

  Suddenly, up on the screen, there was a distortion in the star field. A dark blur erupted, as if a planet had formed, and immediately began to enlarge.

  A cycor ship was approaching quickly.

  “Well,” the magus said in resignation, “here they come.”

  The world was about to end, and he had given up. After all of their preparations. Yet Tallori could not give up hope so easily.

  She thought frantically. It would take years still to build a worldship. Most of the components for the prototype had been completed, but the hull was a thousand miles away, being towed across the ocean by sailing ships, while the drive system was scattered over the southern half of the continent. It would take weeks to gather the parts, assemble the prototype. And even when it was completed, it would only be able to carry the elite of the planet, three or four hundred people.

  But we’ll never finish it, she realized.

  Heart pounding, she looked to Anduval, and realized that everyone was staring at him, waiting for an answer. But Anduval had none.

  “We must hide,” Magus Veritarnus said. “Tell the people everywhere to seek out their assigned shelter—deep in caves or bunkers, wherever they can! They will need food to last a year, at least.”

  Anduval studied the approaching doom and then turned and strode away. Tallori followed him back to his personal quarters, her mind racing.

  The palace was about to become a madhouse. The simple farmers at the edge of Shadowfest would rush here for safety, hoping to gain entrance. The smarter ones would bring animals and food to eat, whatever they could carry.

  But the palace wouldn’t be able to hold them all. It might be able to protect a few thousand, but it couldn’t hold the hundreds of thousands who would come.

  The skraals would be forced to drop the shield walls and block all entrances.

  Tallori’s heart pounded, and she imagined that it sounded like the drumming of closed fists upon the shield wall doors. She imagined her mother and father, trying to break into the palace, crying out for help.

  She found Anduval kneeling on the floor in his spartan quarters, staring at the wall. There were storage containers built into the wall for his personal effects, a toilet, a sink, and a bed low to the floor. Nothing else. The baths and commissary were down the hall.

  She knelt beside him. “What can we do?”

  He shook his head slowly, staring at the wall as if at some private horror. “Nothing,” he said. “We can hide, but the gravity field emitted by that ship is too large. If they even draw close, they could siphon off our atmosphere or rip the crust of the planet apart. They won’t even need to use weapons.”

  “Can we fight them?” Tallori asked.

  Anduval shook his head.

  He turned, and there was infinite pain in his eyes. “I’ve failed you, Tallori.”

  A shock of fear pierced her, more powerful than anything she’d ever felt. The skin on her forehead tightened, and the hair rose on the back of her neck.

  “I love you, Anduval,” Tallori said.

  He nodded slightly, as if to say that he knew.

  “Will you kiss me?” she asked in a small voice.

  Tallori was only twelve and a half, far too young to marry. But she had been in love with him for nearly four years, and she did not want to die without having felt the touch of lips against hers.

  If I’m going to die, she thought, I want to die in his embrace.

  Hesitantly, Anduval reached out and stroked her face.

  He was not the kind to lie to her. If he kissed her, she knew, it would be an admission of what he felt.

  He leaned close. Their lips met, and she wrapped her fingers in his long hair. She leaned into him, so that she felt his heart thrilling, and just enjoyed the taste of him.

  Anduval pulled back and said, “You deserve better than I can give you. You deserve a full lifetime of love.”

  Tallori shook her head. “This will have to be enough,” she whispered, when the door to his room burst open.

  Cessari stood in t
he doorway, a disruptor in hand. “You have failed,” he said coldly. “You shall be the first to die.”

  With superhuman speed he attacked, aiming the disruptor rod. Anduval shoved Tallori aside, out of harm’s way.

  A burst of electricity arced across the room, a bolt of violet lightning. It struck Anduval’s silver headband. Sparks flew; Tallori smelled a rush of ozone.

  Cessari let out a trumpeting call, a skraal cry of pain, and collapsed to the floor.

  The skraal lay convulsing.

  Tallori gaped at Anduval in wonder.

  He stepped closer to Cessari, and the skraal’s muscles all clenched simultaneously. His mouth flew open, his oral-dactyls spasming, and his eyes jiggled. His head turned up and to the side, while his legs and arms curled in. He gasped, struggling with every fiber of his body to breathe.

  “I told you I would protect myself,” Anduval said. He removed the silver headband, pulled free the platinum leads that hooked into his nerves, and threw the device down upon the skraal.

  Cessari went completely rigid and quit moving, a gray-green effluvia exuded from his pores.

  He stopped breathing, stopped moving.

  Tallori was confused. She stood, staring down at the skraal. “What . . . what did you do?”

  “I built a skraal brain-wave interface into my headband,” Anduval admitted. “It had no power source, but it was designed to accept the electrical impulse given off by a disruptor. When Cessari shot me, the electric charge overpowered the interface, which shattered his brain.”

  The skraal consort was dead, his life fleeing as smoothly as a candle going out.

  “He could have hit you,” Tallori said. “How did you know he would use a disruptor? All he had to do was crush you like a bug.”

  “He brought a disruptor when he threatened me earlier,” Anduval said reasonably.

  He stood for a long moment, peering down at Cessari.

  The skraals would be angry. Tallori had never heard of a human killing a skraal. They were faster, stronger, smarter than humans. They were biologically superior.

  Anduval had only acted in self-defense.

  She wondered what his punishment might be.

  Suddenly the floor began to rumble, and in the halls, a warning horn sounded. Tallori looked around, wondering if there was an earthquake or if this signaled the beginning of an attack.

  “They’re closing the blast doors,” Anduval said, “sealing the palace.”

  It had not been fifteen minutes since the warning had gone out. The people who lived in the nearby forests hadn’t had time to reach the palace. Tallori’s mother and father probably hadn’t even learned of the danger yet.

  Suddenly Anduval’s eyes lit up, and he shouted, “There is one thing that we can do!”

  He turned and raced down a hallway toward his laboratory, and Tallori struggled to catch up. She found him at his console, where he grabbed the navigation system—a ball of crystal shot through with wires of gold and silver and veins of turquoise and crimson.

  Anduval sprinted to the holy maiden’s meditation chamber and found that the doors had been thrown wide open.

  The skraal courtesans knelt before her chrysalis, that great mass of yellowing bone.

  One of the skraals was pounding upon the chrysalis as if to break it with his fists, while the courtesans all chanted in reedy voices like woodwinds, supplicating in their musical tongue, “Waken, O Holy Mother! Waken, O Bearer of Light!”

  But all of their pounding, all of their prayers, would not waken Seramasia, he knew. It was too early for her to waken, perhaps months or years too early.

  He strode to the base of the chrysalis and held up the orb, as if to show it to Seramasia. But in fact, he only needed to get it near her skull.

  “Back away,” he shouted to the skraal supplicants. “Get back, all of you!”

  Confused, the skraals began to retreat. Anduval pressed the power switch on his navigation unit and pleaded, “Wake up, great lady. Behold the danger. Our enemy approaches.”

  He held the device near. He knew what it should do. Active sensors down in his laboratory were constantly mapping space for a light year in every direction.

  Sun, planets, moons, and meteors—all would be thrown up against the backdrop of space.

  And the image would pierce the holy maiden’s mind, show her the advancing threat. Even in her deepest sleep, even in her comatose state, Anduval hoped to reach her.

  Whether Seramasia could do anything to stop the cycor, he did not know. Most probably, if she became aware of the danger at all, she would only be able to shrink away in horror and despair.

  Magus Veritarnus stood at his console. He peered up at the star field and struggled to come to grips with his imminent death.

  The cycor ship had grown large. It was less than a tenth of a light year distant, according to the sensors. He could see it clearly, a large dark orb rushing toward them.

  Inside that orb was a black hole, sucking all light and matter into it—all but the cycor warship, a silver needle that floated ahead of the great pearl.

  The cycor ship defied the laws of physics as the magus understood them. It should have been sucked into the black hole.

  Ah, he thought, but there you have it. Death is a mystery. Should it not come in a mysterious fashion?

  He watched the field growing steadily. The warship was slowing, decelerating at fifty G’s. Yet still it seemed to be rushing upon them.

  In a heartbeat, the whole ball shifted, as if making a course correction, and a puff of blue smoke issued from the silver needle as if something had exploded.

  Instantly, the ship disappeared.

  For a long moment, the magus merely stood, heart pounding, unable to accept his good fortune.

  A malfunction, he thought. That is the only explanation—a mechanical failure aboard the cycor ship.

  The black hole had turned and was veering away. It would bypass Danai entirely and exit the solar system in a matter of hours.

  In the hallways, warning horns were still blaring.

  But suddenly a new sound arose, a clarion call like a thousand flutes and oboes, a song sung by skraals only upon transcendence of a holy maiden.

  She has left behind her pharate form and ascended to imago, the magus realized.

  Magus Veritarnus whirled and rushed to worship at the feet of the new holy mother.

  Seramasia broke from her chrysalis. She did not do so with a pounding of fists, with kicks or shouts. Rather, a fierce light sprang up, playing through the corded ropes of bone, sparking in hues of gold and green.

  After a tenth of a second, the chrysalis burst outward. Seramasia crouched within the effluvium, blazing with a light so fierce that Anduval was forced to cover his eyes with his arm. Tallori shouted in awe.

  Every bit of Seramasia was as clear as crystal. Every bit of her was filled with light whiter than the sun. Not in ten thousand years had such an imago taken form.

  “Holy Mother!” Tallori cried out, breaking into tears.

  The skraals raised their voices in triumph, singing to the goddess in a symphony of praise.

  “Fear not,” Holy Mother Seramasia called out. “The cycor threat has been overcome!”

  From all through the palace, people came running—skraal teachers and physicians, the old human women who mopped the floors, the chefs and servants.

  The people broke into song, their hearts breaking with relief and joy.

  Last of all came the magus, striding through the halls, his black robes flowing out behind him. Amid the shouts of praise and wonder, he clapped Anduval upon the back, and whispered in his ear, “Should we thank the god who saved us, or should we thank you—the man who made the god?”

  Anduval glanced at his mentor and smiled in satisfaction. “Our world is full of enough heroes,” he said. “Let Seramasia take the praise.”

  That day, the parts to the prototype of the worldship came together.

  The hull that was floating out at s
ea, towed by a great-masted sailing vessel, broke free of the cords and rose slowly into the air. Two thousand miles away, the propulsion systems cracked through the roofs of their warehouse. From all across the world, pieces rose into the sky and raced through the heavens until, at last, they rested in the blue skies above Shadowfest.

  When the pieces had all fitted themselves together, the ship hovered in the sky. At sunset, Anduval found himself rising up through the dense foliage as easily as dandelion down borne on a summer wind.

  A blast of wind greeted his upturned face.

  Seramasia floated above him, a great light in the sky, while Tallori and the magus and dozens of technicians and scientists from the palace rose up to meet her.

  Stores of food floated up as well: great casks of water, sacks of grain, all of the fruits and vegetables of the field, and all things that might appeal to a skraal.

  At the edge of the world, a sliver of red sun straddled the horizon, an ember among darkening ash.

  Down below, the sounds of the jungle rose up from Shadowfest—the squeals of colossal boars, the rumbling call of a growler, the shrieks of flying reptiles.

  Anduval reached the hovering ship and entered the threshold, wondering what to do.

  He felt a touch in his mind and heard Seramasia’s voice. “Be at peace, my truest friend, and rest, for we have far to go.”

  Anduval took Tallori’s hand when she arrived, and he felt content. Together they walked through the ship’s corridors and up to the navigator’s console.

  Holy Mother Seramasia was at her seat, resting easily. As the ship smoothly accelerated out of orbit, she peered up into the field of stars displayed on the console above.

  The ship veered and set a course—not for the far dark reaches beyond the borders of the galaxy, but toward the void at the galactic center.

  “Of course we cannot run,” Anduval whispered aloud, for he too had been touched by a dragon’s dream, and the dragon dreamt of vengeance.

  On the dry days on Danai, the damselflies take their maiden flights, rising into the summer morn in all their glory.