by Wen Spencer
"Even after all these years as a translator?"
"Telling lies to a child is like pouring concrete over it. Even when it knows the truth, it can't escape that mindset that the lies created. You tell a child that it's ugly, and it doesn't matter what it sees in the mirror, it will believe the lie for the rest of its life."
That explained how he much he hated what he was.
* * *
I should tell him , Paige thought. She hadn't told him about her family when she first rescued him, thinking that it would otherwise cause dominance issues. It was clear, though, he was deeply prejudiced against the very thing that he was. What her family was. What she was.
If she told him, though, would he look at her with disgust? Should she even want him if that was how he felt?
The Yamato had been a troop carrier. It's attachment of troop landers had long been salvaged and turned into boats. The lander bays and launch tubes were rented out as warehouses. The expensive ones overlooked the bay with access to the water. Ethan had rented the cheapest; second to the last bay on the far end of the landslide row. Landside was the widest street in the city, cobbled with two meter square stones cut from coral beds. On one side, Yamato created a duralloy cliff and the bays five stories up with cantilevered cranes to lift up material. On the other side were the tall, narrow houses with shops occupying the first floor. Unlike the stores of Georgetown, which had a normal door leading into the dim interior, the Ya-ya stores had walls that would fold back, opening up the entire store to the fresh air. The weather was fair, so the stores had extended out into the street, showcasing goods in movable display racks.
While the other warehouses had elevator platform rigged from their cranes. Ethan's workshop was only accessed by a series of wooden ladders leaned against the Yamoto's hull.
"Up the outside of the ship? Why?" Turk eyed the ladders. "The fighter bays have airlocks."
"The ship was being illegally gutted by the people renting the warehouses." Paige led the way up the first ladder, which was more like a very steep set of stairs up to a wide ledge in the ship's hull which seemed to be used as footpath to another part of the ship. The stairs seemed communal, and despite their flimsy appearance were sturdy and well-made. "City council had a host of fears, from deliberate sabotage to their remaining weapon systems to the accidental damage to the ship's structural system, so they locked everyone out."
Every twenty feet there was a ladder from the first ledge up to wooden landings built into the old torpedo hatches. Each landing studding the mile long hull was shared by three fighter bays. The landings were twenty feet long but only three feet wide, allowing only one person at a time to climb up onto them and move to the next ladder.
Turk studied the landing overhead and said, "I'll go up first."
The last ladder was rickety to the point of being frightening. Turk caught hold of Paige's wrist and hauled her up into the bay when she reached the top, proving that she wasn't the only one rattled by the ladder.
"I should have just come up alone," he growled, "and lowered the crane cage."
"Hindsight is everything," she said.
"We're using the crane to get back down."
Considering she'd made the mistake of coming in a kimono, that was fine with her.
The workshop looked like a civ nest, minus the spidermites. Disassembled spaceship parts were heaped into piles. Some of the equipment came from human ships, but most were of alien origin. She could differentiate between the technologies because of the racial style. Obnaoians machines tended to be transparent, wispy things. Theirs were the most fragile of spaceships—like so much fairy dust—that did not survive the ocean well. Minotaurs built on a massive scale and had a great love of the color black. Their machines were large and clunky as if idea of "compact" never entered into their minds. Humans liked streamlined equipment, often with molded covers that fit the machine perfectly. Even dissembled, she could tell which parts belonged to which race. Very few of them, though, seemed to be related to warp engines. She couldn't tell what the original machines had done while assembled and working. Nor could she tell—yet—what Ethan might have been making with the merger of the various machines.
Paige drifted through the mess, poking into everything, trying to glean enough information that her ability might kick back an answer on Ethan's secret projects.
Some of Ethan's crew had lived in the warehouse alongside of the equipment. With the husks of the gutted machines standing in for walls, they created several sleep alcoves. The sleeping pallets were gone but traces of their owners remained. The largest alcoves reeked of Minotaur. The smallest had Obnoaian mystic symbols painted on the wall. And course, there were human-sized sleeping areas.
Ethan's handwriting covered the countless scraps of paper littering every surface. Each was a shard of a Rosetta stone of whatever they were working on. In two or three languages and often accompanied with complex mathematics and diagrams, Ethan obviously had been the language hub. Some of the notes were clearly about warp engines, but there were other machines and research scattered in among them. She gathered the papers together as she found them. Mikhail might be able to use them to recreate some of Ethan's success with Fenrir's engine.
There were several cleared areas; signs that Ethan or Hardin had taken things away. The basics of day to day life. Tools. And whatever they'd been building. Judging by the dust on the floor and the lack of footprints, no one had been in the warehouse since before the explosion at Fenrir's Rock.
Despite all her skills, Paige never understood Ethan. What moved him? Why he was so different from her? As they shared parents and upbringing, they should have been much alike. He seethed at the world for reasons he could never make clear, even to her. Whereas she been able to chose a direction for her life and pursue it, Ethan always seem to flounder in aimless misery.
Obviously, the seraphim had given him a direction to go. But what did the seraphim tell him? How did it lead to warp engines?
Turk was studying a map taped to the wall. More of the Rosetta shards were taped around it.
"What's that?" The intensity of his focus on it drew her to his side. It was a map of the Fenrir Archipelagos. A circle been drawn around Fenrir. A radius line from the smallest to the largest was labeled "r=10.5 kilometers."
Turk touched one of the scrap pages. It was one long equation that filled the paper. "This is a warp field equation. Given a known engine size and distribution of mass, what is the radius of the resulting field? This calculates out how much area would warp with Fenrir's engine."
It was one thing to know that Ethan had created a machine that Hardin perverted into mass destruction. It was another to learn that Ethan knew perfectly well what Hardin intended to do and yet continued working with the man. It was like Turk had punched her in the stomach. She gasped out in pain and horror.
"No! I can't believe that idiot would have purposely triggered a warp field next to Fenrir's Rock. That couldn't have been the plan."
Turk eyed the map. "The radius listed here is much larger than the result of the equation. I think the map is showing the range the engine needed to be outside of when triggered. This was supposed to be the necessary safety zone."
Did it make it any better than Ethan had at least given thought to the danger before leveling an entire landing? That he hadn't originally planned on killing hundreds of people? Killing members of their own family?
What was Ethan trying to do? She sat down to sort through the papers she'd collected. She sensed that there were two different directions to Ethan's work. One led to the warp drive and the destruction of Fenrir's Rock. Hardin figured prominently in those plans. The other work focused on the seraphim. Ethan had built something that looked like a spider web using obnaoian phase shields. She scanned the workshop. There was nothing that looked close to it among the machines that were left. Near the back of the warehouse was a void in the clutter that matched the machine's footprint. Ethan still had the device then—was still listen
ing to whatever the seraphim was telling him.
Turk's comline buzzed quietly and he tapped it. "Commander Turk here."
Commander Turk.
"Sir, this is Rabbit. Hillary . . ." The little tom started.
"Hillary-chan!" Hillary called in the background.
"Hillary-chan," Rabbit corrected himself to use the endearment. Did he even know what he was calling her? Did Turk? Probably not. "Hillary-chan says that the Hak is stirring."
"We'll be right there," Turk answered without even glancing at her.
* * *
It took nearly thirty minutes to race to the island, but even then the Hak took another ten minutes of shifting almost imperceptibly in its shell before emerging. By then Mikhail had rejoined them and they'd fully updated him on what they'd found at the workshop.
"I know this is slightly late to ask," Mikhail whispered, "but how do we know we're talking to one that can answer our questions?"
"It's considered that when you ask the universe a question, the entire universe answers." Seeing that Mikhail didn't understand, Paige rephrased. "That this is the Hak that we chose is part of the universe answering."
"But you chose it," Mikhail obviously wasn't getting the zen of her answer. "Doesn't that somehow negate the universe's answer?"
"I'm part of the universe," Paige wondered if this was how the Hak felt when they talked to her. It was clear to her, but Mikhail obviously has having trouble following the logic.
With a quiet rustle, its plastron lowered slightly, revealing part of its scaled legs folded back inside its shell, and its hard beak. It breathed out through the small nostrils on the top of its beak, sending the cherry petals swirling away. The blast brought Paige its smell of old leather and the scent of the air after a thunderstorm. It made her arms prickle as the fine hair on them stood up.
Mikhail came alert, excitement clear on his face. Paige motioned him back, trying to caution him with a look and hand gesture to be quiet and patient.
The Hak sat for several more minutes in its half-open position, and then, slowly, emerged from its shell the rest of the way. The Hak's eyes were always startling, dark with a flare of white ringing the black pupils. It slowly blinked at them. When it spoke, its voice was like static on a radio tuned to a dead station. "I am awake."
It was the ritual greeting.
"I am yet asleep." It took her months to learn how to make the clicks and pops and hiss of their language. "I wish to be awakened."
"Open your eyes and awaken."
She had had hours to consider how to pose this question and yet it still seemed daunting. One reason the priest hadn't picked names for the Hak was because they didn't seem to use them. "There are beings that move among us. We can not see them clearly. We can not touch them. We can not hear them. We do not know what they are and we do not know how to speak to them."
Slowly, the Hak's eyelids lowered to slits. For a panicked moment, she was afraid it was about to go back to meditating, which was not unheard of after someone asked a Hak a difficult question.
But then it answered. "Those you speak of are bodhisattvas."
In Buddhist terms, bodhisattvas were enlightened beings who were not yet a fully awakened Buddhas. They were more like saints than angels, if one had to translate it to Christian terms.
"They are awake?"
"They are no longer in the manusya realm but they can be seen."
Manusya meant human, but it did not automatically mean that the seraphim had been human, just that they once existed in the same realm as humans. The Hak confirmed that the minotaur and obnaoians were all in the human realm too at one point in time. The tiryag-yoni or animal realm was considered a lesser realm than the human realm, but humans could still see animals. Above the realm of humans there was the realm of the asura or demigod realm and the deva or god realm.
The Hak claimed that they were Buddhas and existed in the deva realm. Being that hundreds of years had gone by since the island had been discovered and in all that time, the Hak had never died or reproduced, eaten, drank or—for months at a time—not even moved seemed to support that claim.
"Can you talk with them?" Paige asked.
"We hear them and understand them," the Hak said. "They can not hear us. They can not understand us."
"I can hear you."
The Hak tilted its great head and eyed her closely. "Can you?"
This is what she hated about the Hak. One moment she was sure where she stood in the conversation, and the next moment she was lost in a sea of philosophy.
"I hear something," she said carefully.
"You hear echoes of the truth. You see shadows of the truth. To see my true form and hear my true words, you would need to be enlightened. This world would not be an egg for you, trapping you as it protected you."
"I think that the bodhisattvas are attempting to speak to . . .me." She wasn't sure what difference it would make if she kept to the total truth, but the slight change was easier to communicate.
The great head dipped as if to nod. "As each race has their own voice and their own words, they have their own course to enlightenment. We the Hak each found our own way, swimming alone. Your people swim in a school, never as one, but rarely alone. The ones that speak of were once one, moved as one, were becoming enlightened together as one. But then they were divided into two, and madness followed. The bodhisattvas seek to save their race which has sunk from the manusya realm, to the tiryag-yoni, to realm of the preta, and now dwells in the naraka realm."
Paige sat stunned the information, trying to grasp it. An entire race sinking into oblivion of unreason? Was this what the seraphim were talking to Ethan about? Somehow she couldn't imagine him struggling to save another species. It seemed almost too selfless of him. And what could Ethan possibly do to save an entire species? Perhaps the seraphim were beginning to realize that they'd made a bad choice, which was why they were now focusing on Mikhail. "Do they want me to save their people?"
"They are desperate for someone to hear them. They are seeking your people out for help. They are still new to the demigod realm; their powers are too limited to save their people. They have realized that your people listen well enough to catch echoes."
"If you can hear them, why haven't you helped them?"
"To help, one must be heard as well as listen. They stand close enough to you to hear your echoes."
She wasn't sure how well the seraphim understood the human via their echoes. And what did they expect Ethan/Mikhail to do to save their race? While it might be maddening to try to figure out what the seraphim told Ethan via the Hak, currently they were the only ones available to ask. "There are some of us trying to help these bodhisattvas. Did you act as an intermediate between them and us?"
"That was a mistake. Truth can be distorted by too many voices. Our attempt to help has made things much worse."
While she wasn't sure that the Hak were truly gods, there was something very frightening to have one of them admit that they made a mistake.
"Worse how?"
The Hak closed its eyes and retreated ever so slightly into its shell. Paige struggled not to think 'no, no, no' at it. There was no real proof that thoughts could influence the Hak, but you could never be sure with them. Peaceful thoughts. Peaceful thoughts.
"A stone thrown into an ocean makes small waves that disappear quickly. A stone thrown into a puddle, disturbs the entire puddle."
Oh that did not sound good. "This place is the puddle?"
It slowly tilted its head and blinked. "This is the first of puddles from which all puddles were made. To throw a stone into this puddle is to throw a stone into all puddles."
"Maybe I shouldn't try to help them." Certainly her life would be much simpler if she just ignored all the people that needed help.
"Time is an ocean with many shores. You can let the tide take you where it will, or you swim where you desire. The one thing you can not do is stand still."
* * *
Mikhail sa
t mesmerized by the Hak as Captain Bailey spoke to the alien. Sleeping, it had seemed like a great rock. Awake, though, the Hak was a different creature. Mikhail was filled the profound sense that there was more than he could see, something huge and ponderous, focused onto them. He understood why the natives considered the turtles holy; he wasn't even religious and yet he felt awestruck.
He was amazed too that humans had ever learned enough of their language to carry on a conversation. Their language was like listening to a star's electromagnetic waves. The air distorted slightly, like that of an energy shield. And as Captain Bailey spoke with the alien, the cherry blossoms that had been floating down stopped in midair, and then the pea gravel started to drift upwards. Captain Bailey ignored it all, focused intently on the alien. Toward the end, she too began to drift upwards while still kneeling in front of the alien. Communing with it.
Then the great turtle finished speaking, blinked its eyes that looked like solar eclipses, and withdrew into its shells. Bailey was the first thing to settle onto the ground, then the pea gravel, and lastly, the cherry blossoms.
"What did it say?" Mikhail asked.
"I'm not sure," Captain Bailey was still frowning, focused inward, trying to understand what been said to her. Mikhail waited. "According to the Hak, the seraphim are the bodhisattvas of another race."
"Are what?"
"Are bodhisattvas. Those who are enlightened are Buddha. Those who delay their own final and complete enlightenment in order to save others out of enormous compassion are called bodhisattvas."
"Apparently something has happened to their race, the Hak didn't say what, but it's de-evolving. It's moved through the realm known as the hungry ghost. It means they're sentient beings with the insatiable hunger for a particular substance. Usually it's something disgusting like dead bodies or feces. It's always bizarre. They're now in the naraka realm or in English, hell."
"Literally?"
Paige threw up her hands. "Who knows?" She recounted then in detail what the Hak had told her.
