Toroca’s tail swished in sadness. How could it have gone so wrong? He’d sought knowledge, only knowledge, and instead had found death.
There hadn’t been a war amongst Quintaglios since the time of Dasan. Toroca had thought his race had outgrown such foolishness, had evolved in spirit and morality as well as in physical form.
But no. The Quintaglios were as bloodthirsty as they’d always been. Instinctive killers, killers to their very cores.
The Face of God continued to set, its apparent movement caused solely by the Dasheter’s own motion through the water.
Toroca watched the Other ships, illuminated from the front by the setting sun behind him and from the back by the light reflected from the sliver of Face. It was some time before he realized what was happening, but soon there could be no mistake. Several of the ships on the left and right of the wall of pursuing vessels were turning. He could see them sideways now instead of bow-on. And soon, he saw their sterns. They were going back! They were heading for home!
Of course, thought Toroca. They worshipped the Face of God and did not want to travel beyond its purview. Perhaps no Other ship had ever sailed onto the back-side hemisphere before.
Two more ships were turning now.
Toroca glanced up at the lookout’s bucket atop the foremast. Somebody was up there, but his back was to Toroca, scanning the waters ahead of the Dasheter. Babnol was crossing the deck behind Toroca, though. He called out to her. She looked up, her strange nose horn casting shadows fore and aft in the light of the setting sun and the setting Face. “Please get Captain Keenir for me,” he shouted.
Babnol bowed concession and hurried across the joining piece to the Dasheter’s other hull. Moments later, old Keenir came thundering toward Toroca, his giant stride carrying him quickly across the deck.
“What is it?” called the captain, his gravelly voice full of concern.
“The Others!” said Toroca. “They’re turning back!”
Keenir put a hand up to shield his eyes. “So they are,” he said, sounding disappointed.
“They must be afraid to sail out of sight of the Face,” said Toroca. He looked at the captain, hoping the oldster would catch the irony. When Afsan had taken his pilgrimage voyage aboard the Dasheter, Keenir had supposedly had a similar fear, for no Quintaglio ship had yet sailed beyond the Face in the other direction.
“Perhaps we should turn and give chase,” said Keenir.
“What?” said Toroca. “Good captain, they have weapons; they could sink us. Let them go.”
Keenir was quiet for a moment, then nodded. “Aye, I suppose you’re right.” The Face of God slipped below the horizon, although the sky was lit up with Godglow. But then the captain pointed. “Look!”
Toroca turned. A few of the Other ships had given up and gone back, but most of the attack force continued in hot pursuit.
“I guess their fear of sailing beyond the Face wasn’t that great,” said Keenir.
“Maybe,” said Toroca. “Or maybe, since they’re in the right, most of them believe their god won’t forsake them even if they sail beyond its view.”
The captain grunted. Night came swiftly.
The images in the nine windows continued to change every forty beats or so: red blobs, tailless bipeds, strange reptilians, stilt-legged creatures, other things Novato couldn’t begin to categorize.
And occasionally an oasis in all the madness: something familiar, Dybo’s ruling room.
Still, it was too much to absorb, too much to take in. Floating in midair in front of the bank of windows, Novato’s eyes glazed over, the windows becoming just nine squares of colored light flashing in front of her eyes, hypnotic, spellbinding, flashing, flashing…
She shook her head violently, trying to gain control of her faculties again. She decided to not look at the windows, to avert her gaze for a while, to concentrate on something—anything—else.
To the left of each window were three vertical strips of glowing characters that changed each time the view in the window changed. The first and second strips were gibberish in the ark-maker’s, script, but the third was a simple diagram. In almost all cases it consisted of a single large circle at the top with a series of smaller circles trailing off below it. In every set, one of the smaller circles was white instead of red. The design seemed vaguely familiar to Novato, and she finally realized what it meant when the lower right window displayed the inside of Dybo’s palace again. Beneath the big circle was a series of three small dots, then three big dots, and finally two more small dots. Rather than one of these being white, though, a tiny white point was glowing next to the second of the three big dots.
It was a chart of the solar system, Novato realized, grateful at last to have something else she recognized, something her mind could grasp. The big circle was the sun. The three small dots close to it represented the inner rocky worlds of Carpel, Patpel, and Davpel. The string of big dots were the three gas-giant worlds, Kevpel, the Face of God, and Bripel. And the final sequence of two small dots was the outer rocky world of…well, Gefpel, of course, and…and…a hitherto unknown eighth planet. The single white point next to the Face of God represented the location this window was looking in on—the Quintaglio moon.
She looked at the other windows, and her mind made the glorious leap. All of them were solar system maps—but of other solar systems, alien solar systems, solar systems never even dreamed of before this moment.
There were the strange bipedal reptiles again: the string of dots indicated that they lived on the fourth planet of a system of eleven worlds. And the beings with the seven pairs of stilt legs: the second planet of five. Novato was shocked to see that almost all of these creatures lived on small planets, rather than on the moons of giant worlds. The upper right monitor switched back to the world of the bizarre red globs that seemed to work in cooperation with other lifeforms. Incredible: that world had two large circles at the top of its display—two suns.
Although the view in the central zero window changed periodically, sometimes showing the black bipeds, sometimes the yellow, and sometimes a third variety that was beige, the little system map always remained the same: a sun circle, four small worlds—the third of which was illuminated—four large worlds, and a final small one.
Novato’s mind was still reeling, still trying to deal with the onslaught of images and information. She realized that the central window never changed to show a different world, but, judging by the system map, simply showed different views of the same third planet. Yet that particular window was connected to all the others by thick black lines. No other connections were drawn between any of the other windows.
She stared at the windows and the interconnecting lines, her brain aching.
And then it hit her.
What she was seeing.
What it meant.
Home.
The world in the center.
It was the home world. The original home world.
The ark-makers had brought life from there to here. That’s what the black line connecting the central window to the one that sometimes showed Dybo’s ruling room indicated.
But the ark-makers had also brought life from the home world to that fourth planet in the system of eleven, to that second planet in the system of five, to the single planet that somehow orbited a double sun, to…
Novato’s whole body was shaking. Floating in the air, she hugged herself tightly.
The home world.
Life scattered from there to stars across the firmament.
It was incredible.
Eyes wide, she watched the windows change, cycling from world to world.
Sometimes, the windows came up black.
Not just night, but solid black.
Novato’s heart fluttered.
Black.
Windows onto nothingness.
Maybe the magic had failed after all this time. These windows were new, of course, but surely at the other end there were eyes of some sort that sent back
these pictures. It had been a long time since the ark had crashed here. Maybe some of the eyes had failed in that time.
Or maybe whole worlds had died in the interim.
Novato’s head pounded. She turned her attention again to the glowing white numbers overlapping the upper left corner of each window. The number that showed when the window looked in on the Quintaglio moon was 27. When showing the other bipedal reptile, the number 26 was displayed. Ah, there were the stilt-legged aquatic creatures again; number 9. The red globs with their city of coral was number 1. She saw four numbers higher than 27, and all them showed bipedal lifeforms covered with brown shag. And the central window always showed the horizontal mark of zero.
Slowly, it began to make sense. Her overloaded mind cleared, the fog lifting.
She’d seen the Quintaglios removed from prominence twice in her own lifetime. First, Afsan had taken them from the center of the universe. Then Toroca had shown they weren’t divinely created from the hands of God. And now—this.
A total of thirty-one different worlds had been seeded with life from the home planet. And, if the numbering was in the order in which the life was transplanted, then the Quintaglios had been moved not first, nor last, but twenty-seventh—twenty-seventh out of thirty-one. No pride of place, just one of many.
Floating there in the vast chamber, she watched, fascinated, as the strange lifeforms were paraded by her. Red globs. Stilt-legged creatures. Intelligent reptiles. Tailless bipeds. Flying things. Crawling things. Things that had twenty arms. Things that had none. Windows cycling from world to world, the light of alien suns raying across her face.
She tried to absorb as much of it as she could.
But eventually she was left numb by it all, unable to take in anything further. The windows became a blur again, just nine colored squares.
She needed to take a break, needed to let her mind sort it all out. She decided to explore, to look at other parts of the vast structure at the top of the tower.
And that presented a problem.
She was too far away from any wall or from the floor or ceiling to reach out and touch it, and so she just floated there in the middle of the cube-shaped room. She tried flapping her arms, like a wingfinger, but that didn’t seem to do any good. She soon realized she was in quite a predicament: she could starve to death floating here in midair, unable to make it back to the lifeboat, which held her food supplies.
But, after a moment, she calmed down, undid the chain that helped hold her sash in place and bit through the leather of the sash so that she had one long piece of green and black material. Cracking it like a whip against the wall containing the bank of windows, she was able to start herself tumbling slowly across the room. She made her way out into a corridor and continued along, kicking gently off walls. Most of what she saw was baffling, but at last she came to something she recognized: one of the ark-maker’s doors, just like the one on the outside of the ark itself. It was a panel twice as tall as it was wide, with an incised orange rectangle with bold black markings on it set into the door’s center.
Novato floated toward it—
—and the door opened. Of its own volition, the door slid aside. Incredible. She’d long suspected this was how such doors were supposed to work, having seen the gears and other equipment inside the ones down below. But they were all dead; the Quintaglios had had to remove orange faceplates from the center of the ark’s door panels, exposing metal handles that could be cranked around by hand. Novato was sure now that those manual handles were for emergencies, when no power was available. That’s why they were kept out of the way behind the orange panels.
Novato’s inertia had carried her right through the door, but to her surprise she found herself hitting a wall almost at once. No…it wasn’t a wall. It was a second door. This was another one of those confounded double-doored rooms.
But surely this door should have opened on its own, too. Oh, well: she’d operated enough of these things manually down below. She extended her claws and flicked back the little clips that held the orange panel in place. It popped forward, revealing the handle.
Novato reached for the handle and began to crank it around—
Suddenly, the door behind her began to slide shut, but her tail was sticking out through it. The door pushed against her tail, but before the pressure got too great it reversed itself and slid open again.
Novato heard—or perhaps felt was a better word—a sound. It was very high pitched, making her teeth rattle in their sockets and her claws itch. The door behind her had reversed again, touching her tail once more.
The sound was cycling back and forth, like a repetitive call.
Novato pulled again on the handle.
And then—
A sliver of blackness down the right side of the door.
A torrent of wind—
Incredible pain in her ears.
Her hands went to the sides of her head, completely covering her earholes.
Blood spurted from her nostrils.
Stars were visible down the black gap.
Stars.
Her skin tingled.
She slammed her eyes shut, inner and outer lids crunched tightly against the pressure mounting within her orbs.
Like a vast storm, air rushed through the opening.
Blood was leaking from her anus and her genital folds.
The evacuating air was pulling her toward the partially open door, but the opening was too small for her to be carried outside.
There was great pain, searing pain, claw-sharp pain…
And then the pain began to subside.
Everything began to subside.
Novato’s consciousness ebbed away…
Chapter 23
Afsan came at once to the ruling room. The Emperor read the leather strip containing Toroca’s message to him. Afsan had Dybo repeat the text twice. Finally, he shook his head. “We don’t stand a chance.”
“Why not?” said Dybo. “My imperial guards are well trained; our hunters have great prowess. Granted, victory will be difficult, but I don’t see why it should be impossible. Besides, if these…these Others are coming here, we have the advantage of fighting on terrain familiar to us.”
“That’s irrelevant.” Afsan’s tail swished. “Consider this: our people are constrained by territoriality. Toroca says the Others are not. We might be able to bring ten or fifteen hunters together, but they can bring a hundred or even a thousand.”
“They’re only bringing forty boats,” said Dybo. “Even a big ship like the Dasheter carries less than twenty people.”
“That’s territoriality again,” said Afsan. “The Dasheter could carry a hundred people if they could be crowded together in multi-bunk rooms like those aboard the alien ark. Those forty ships could contain more people than in all of Capital City. If what Toroca says is correct, they could swarm over us, like insects over dead meat. We will be hopelessly outnumbered.”
“Ah, but we are still true hunters, Afsan. Toroca says these Others need tools to kill animals. We kill with claws and teeth. We don’t need tools.”
Afsan nodded as if Dybo had just made his point for him. “The First Edict of Lubal: ‘A Quintaglio kills with tooth and claw; only such killing makes us strong and pure.’”
“That’s right,” said Dybo.
“Don’t you see, though? The use of tools gives the Others advantages. We have to physically connect with our prey, putting ourselves at risk. They may have God knows what to aid them. Pointed sticks launched through the air, perhaps—when I was battling Kal-ta-goot aboard the Dasheter, I wished for such a thing. Or perhaps they use knives not just to strip and cut hides but actually to perform the kill.”
“I’ve never heard of such things,” said Dybo.
“No. Our religion forbids them. But they may use them. And these tools and weapons could amplify their individual abilities, too.”
“We must learn to do the same, then.”
“Easier said than done. Rec
all the twenty-third scroll: ‘Take not a weapon with you on the hunt, for that is the coward’s way.’ Your brave imperial guards will find it difficult to adopt what they’ve always been taught is a craven approach.”
“So they will outnumber us and be better—what is the word?—equipped?” Dybo looked at Afsan. “Is there nothing in our advantage?”
Afsan leaned back on his tail, thinking. “Well, in his polemic on battles, Keladax once said that the most important thing you on have on your side is moral rectitude: being right in the eyes of God. But even that, I’m afraid, falls to the Others. If I understand Toroca’s note properly, we attacked them first, and—”
“Nothing supersedes my people’s right to survive,” snapped Dybo. “I’d be a poor leader if I didn’t hold that as a sacred truth.” The Emperor’s tail moved left and right. “We are killers to our very core, Afsan. That’s our biggest advantage. That’s why we will be victorious. We kill gladly. We kill easily. We kill for fun. The Others, judging by Toroca’s missive, do not have that trait.” Dybo had a faraway expression, as if visualizing the coming battle. “It’s not often that I can say this, but you are wrong, good Afsan—totally and completely wrong. I know the Quintaglio people.” His voice was determined. “The Others won’t know what hit them.”
Peace. Incredible peace. Calmness, like a still lake. Novato felt no pain, no angst, no guilt, no fear. Just tranquillity, a sense of halcyon simplicity.
And then an image. Like the space tower, with the sun at the top, but not quite. Something similar, yet different. A—a tunnel, with a pure white light at its end, purer and whiter and brighter than the sun itself, but visible without squinting, without pain.
Drifting, as she had within the lifeboat, without weight. Effortless movement. Drifting toward the light, the beautiful, perfect light.
She wasn’t alone; Novato knew that. There were others here, others whom she knew. Familiar presences. Lub-Kaden, the hunt leader from her home Pack of Gelbo. And Irb-Falpom, first director of the Geological Survey of Land. And, and, why, yes, it was! Haldan. Dear sweet Haldan, one of her children by Afsan. And there, a youngster…why, could it be?
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