Enigma

by C. F. Bentley

  “We’re ten klicks from where Laudae Sissy and I landed,” Jake said to everyone and no one. “Everyone keep an eye out for the spiny plant called blue hooks by the survey team because of the color of the foliage and the hook on the end of each spike. The botanists list it as Thorn of God. If it pricks you, the sap will give you hallucinations.”

  Adrial didn’t care what Jake had to say. She tried to listen to the ambassadors but caught only a hushed word or two.

  “Building site.” “Water cleared.” “Open and level.” “Need Workers to farm.”

  She heard enough to surmise that Telvino directed General Jake to the site selected for building the new CSS headquarters.

  General Jake set the shuttle down so smoothly that Adrial couldn’t tell the moment they stopped flying and came to rest dirtside.

  “Okay, everybody. We’re prepared to spend the night. Ambassador Telvino and I will set up the plasfoam shelters with the help of our Military guards. The tents will become quarters for the construction crews later. While we are here, no one, absolutely no one, goes anywhere alone.” He looked directly at Admiral Marella as he barked out the orders.

  “You will have a minimum of three in each party. You may explore no more than one hour’s walk in any direction; then you must return or call in. Anyone absent for more than two hours and ten minutes will be considered missing and injured. We will commence search and rescue procedures at that time. False alarms will result in confinement aboard the shuttle. If I send the ‘all in’ signal, I mean it. Everyone back to base camp with all due haste. The comms will guide you back.” With that announcement he handed comm units to everyone, including Adrial and Mac.

  A thrill of pride ran through Adrial. She’d never been trusted with expensive equipment like this before. No one had cared about her presence or absence. Or noted it.

  Laud Gregor looked at the unit with disdain.

  Doc Halliday slapped it onto his wrist. “You’ll wear it and abide by basic safety rules, or I handcuff you to this seat for the duration,” she said quietly. “I need to collect plants for analysis of potential medical purposes. I’m with Laudae Sissy and Adrial.”

  “I shall join you, honored Physician.” Mac bowed formally.

  A flare of jealousy, hot and prickly, flashed through Adrial. She needed Sissy to herself. If she had to add a third, she wanted Laud Gregor with her. Sissy would cling to Adrial rather than acknowledge Gregor’s presence.

  “Laud Gregor, you may stay in camp with General Devlin and myself,” Ambassador Telvino said. “I know you need to rest.”

  “That leaves Lord Lukan and a Military with Admiral Marella.” General Jake smiled at the woman. He looked smug and nasty. The Military wore a Harmony uniform, boasted an ennobled red square caste mark, and carried a blaster and several bladed weapons. He’d not recognize the admiral as his superior. “Pammy, I trust you to take good care of the ambassador and not go off on your own private mission.”

  “Jake . . .” she said on a low note of warning.

  “I don’t care how well trained you are in wilderness survival. You stay with your group. I’m in charge. Violate the rules, and you’ll suffer the same restrictions as Laud Gregor, handcuffed to the least comfortable jump seat in the shuttle.”

  “I don’t think I like you anymore, Jake. You’re too much like me.” Admiral Marella spat. “You think too much. I hired you for your beauty not your brains.”

  “Sorry, Pammy. You got both.” He flashed her one of his heart-melting smiles.

  Now Adrial understood why Sissy loved him. If she had time for love, Adrial might just flirt with him a bit herself.

  “Jake, leave the Military in camp and come with the ambassador and me,” Admiral Marella said mildly. She shifted her posture to emphasize her sensuality.

  “Rules are the pilot stays with the shuttle.” Jake turned his back on her and began pointing out to the lowest-ranking Military the crates of equipment he needed outside.

  “And when did our beloved Jake find so much interest in rules and safety,” Telvino muttered. “I liked him better when I could bust him back to enlisted and slap him in the brig.”

  Interesting. Adrial filed that bit of interplay away for examination later. She noted Mac taking careful note as well.

  Then Doc Halliday interrupted her musing by grabbing her hand and dragging her toward the hatch that slowly swung upward. “Come on, we’ve got a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it in.”

  “Jake, I am going to explore that cliff line to the west. It looks like it might contain caves,” Sissy said excitedly.

  “An hour out and an hour back. No more. Or I come looking for you in a temper. And you know you don’t like me when my temper is up,” General Jake replied. His fingers twitched nervously on the grip of his belt dagger.

  Adrial sidled away from him. She’d known too many Law who liked playing with knives. Most of them didn’t care who or what they found for a target. She had the scars to prove it.

  “Before we separate, we need a moment of prayer,” Sissy announced.

  Adrial barely heard her voice, yet the intent of the words imbued her with numinous sense of immanence she’d been seeking for so long. So very long.

  Sissy stood tall with arms spread, palms out in blessing. Despite her petite frame she suddenly dominated the scene, a glowing tower of divine authority. “Gods above and below, Goddess all around us, we ask Your blessing in this grand enterprise of exploration to found a new home; a place where worlds may share their plenty with those who lack; where peoples at odds with each other can negotiate compromise.”

  As she bowed her head, Laud Gregor sighed with weary impatience.

  Adrial elbowed him to silence. Then they both stared in openmouthed awe as a benign aura glowed around Sissy’s head.

  “She has found what I seek,” Adrial whispered.

  “How do I fight that?” Gregor added. His face crumpled in regret. “I’ll find the tricks and gadgetry she manipulates. If I can’t control her for the good of Harmony, I’ll prove her a false prophet.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Sissy barely heard Doc Halliday and Mac discussing strategy for gathering more plant samples. She wandered toward an intriguing shadow on the cliff face a few yards away.

  Low-growing shrubs tugged at her pant legs. Clouds of pollen rose with her passing. She reveled in the subtle fragrances, so much gentler and more comfortable than the constant citrus tang to the artificial air on the station.

  She sneezed heavily and didn’t mind. The new filter should handle these pollens.

  “Mac, will you climb that tree and gather samples?” Mariah Halliday stood at the base of a towering tree with frothy fronds for branches. “I need new bark from slender limbs, older and thicker bark from the trunk, new and mature leaves. You know how I like them labeled.”

  He’d gathered and labeled hundreds of plants in the last half hour, moving swiftly up and down trees, across branches, and through shrubbery more quickly and easily than any human.

  Mac obliged by scrambling up the tree and disappearing into the blue-greenery. He seemed very comfortable for a person who’d never walked dirtside before. She longed to share with him the joy of new vistas from the top of the tree.

  Sissy let her fingers roam over inscribed marks that had been smoothed and rounded by intelligent hands around the arch of the natural cave. Tiny frissons of energy shot from her fingertips to her mind. Her heart pounded loudly in her ears. Air moved sharply and shallowly through her lungs. She forgot her need for an inhaler in her excitement.

  A familiar series of curves and lines seemed to jump out at her from the jumble.

  “Harmony,” she breathed. “Harmony is here. And a new one . . .” She traced again and again the name of a companion Goddess, or possibly an augmentation of the simpler glyph for Harmony.

  She placed her palm flat against the markings and closed her eyes in bliss. From one heartbeat to the next she shifted from here to there, no
w to then.

  She saw herself inside a small cavern within the cave, lying flat on one of seven stone ledges arranged in a circle.

  She’d been there before.

  Seven flat rocks defined another circle at the center. Seven smudge pots on ledges sent the heady smoke of the Thorn of God upward in lazy spirals. The roof caught the smoke and pushed it back downward. She breathed deeply and dreamed of soaring high above the island continent upon her own feathered wings.

  The Seven Gods joined her and whispered secrets into her mind.

  You have come back at last to complete the sacred rituals. Soon we will have fledglings, specially blessed by the Gods to help our empire grow.

  A benevolent and dreamy haze descended upon her mind and body. The energy of the universe reached out to enfold her, welcome her, send signals of this ceremony all across the galaxy to any receptive mind, sharing in the good luck and blessings. Her back arched in ecstasy, and she knew that new life began within her. She reached for her life mate in gratitude.

  “Sanctuary,” Adrial said, jolting Sissy back to reality. “Sanctuary grows out from Harmony, or Harmony grows in the core of Sanctuary; no two scholars agree. See how you can remove these few lines, and your Goddess becomes the center.” She too stood entranced, fingers and chin trembling with excitement.

  Sissy shook with the shock of abrupt separation from her vision. She couldn’t seem to pry her hand away from the sigils carved into the living bones of the planetary Goddess.

  “These marks are very old,” Doc Halliday remarked. “We aren’t the first intelligent beings to come here, but none have been here for a long, long time.” She held up a gadget with a tiny screen. She’d used it before on plants. A very different graph appeared, with rising and falling lines in many different colors. Many more colors and lines than had appeared for plant study.

  “What does this tell you?” Sissy asked, desperately trying to keep her teeth from chattering. She couldn’t share her vision with these two. It was so intense, so right, and yet so wrong. She felt empty at the knowledge that she had participated in that ritual only remotely. No life blossomed in her womb.

  She forced herself to study the information on the screen. Before Laud Gregor found her and elevated her to High Priestess, she’d spent most of her life from the age of twelve assembling interstellar navigation units. She knew how to read graphs and pictures. Written words took more work for her.

  “I’m reading the elemental components of the rock, the algae, moss, and the natural aging patina. Combine them all and I can estimate that carving was done about one thousand Earth years ago.”

  “That’s a long time.” Sissy whistled through her teeth. More than three centuries before the original inhabitants of Harmony left Earth to found a new culture based on their religion. They were considered a not very respectable cult on Earth.

  Worship of the Seven Gods had become the basis of a stable and peaceful society. Until recently. But like most artificial constructs (including the genetically engineered caste marks), eventually the social system of seven castes had begun breaking apart.

  Mac swung down, gripping a branch about twice Sissy’s height from the ground with his four lower limbs. He dropped a neat packet at Doc Halliday’s feet. Then he disappeared back into the tree.

  “One thousand Earth years ago was just after the time the Marils first ventured into space from their home world,” Adrial added, as if she hadn’t noticed the slight interruption. She continued feeling the writing. “These are consistent with the culture and religion of that time.”

  “How do you know so much?” Sissy asked. Suddenly she wasn’t certain she should trust this woman. She seemed more alien than Mac with her ethereal thinness, her elongated fingers, oddly slanted eyes, and that nimbus of moonlight-pale hair floating around her head.

  “I’ve bounced from planet to planet, studying the Messengers of the Gods. I had to learn to read their language and understand their religion—which is very history oriented. They revere their ancestors because they have joined the Gods in death.”

  That struck a chord within Sissy. How many funerals and Grief Blessings had she celebrated as she returned the dead to Harmony’s womb so they could join with the Goddess? Every year her family made the long and arduous journey to the funerary caves to make offerings to the dead.

  A breath of air passed her on its way inside the cave.

  The caverns breathed, just as on Harmony.

  “I need to go inside the cave. In here I can find my way back to Harmony through Sanctuary,” Sissy said. She set her chin and took the first step beyond the archway before Doc Halliday grabbed her arm.

  “That’s not a good idea. Abandoned caves are ideal lairs for large animals of prey, small poisonous bats and insects, and who knows what else,” the physician said, clucking her tongue. Her fingers gripped Sissy’s arm so tightly she felt bruises rising.

  “There are ghosts here,” Adrial said. She backed off rapidly, waving her hands in front of her face as if brushing aside a hunter’s net or invisible spirits. Her entire body shook, and sweat broke out on her face. “Evil ghosts, hungry to rob you of your soul to replace the ones they lost.” She turned and began running back the way they’d come. Her breath caught like sobs, or the beginning of screams of pain.

  Mac dropped down in front of her, holding yet another packet. “General Jake says we must stay together,” the alien said firmly. “But I agree, our time here has nearly expired. We should return to base camp.”

  Sissy’s comm unit began vibrating and beeping urgently. “All in,” scrolled across the tiny screen, pulsing urgently.

  Jake. Her heart lifted at the thought of him. Her life mate. The one she needed in order to complete the sacred rituals of Sanctuary. Then her mood sank as she realized she’d have to forgo exploration of this cave. Gently she kissed her fingertips and touched them to the markings. She sighed in regret as she turned to retrace her steps to base camp.

  She heard an echo of that sigh from deep within the cave.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Gregor picked his way around the rough circle Jake and Telvino had drawn as the boundary of base camp. Dirt and rocks, a few scrubby plants. His nose twitched with the need to sneeze out the dust.

  Untamed and uncivilized. In his mind’s eye he pictured a replica of the Crystal Temple gracing the center of the little plateau, with acres and acres of cultivated fields in the river valley below. He imagined the scent of mint and new-mown hay on the gentle breeze. Like a painter adding details, he embroidered the fragrance with a touch of salt from the nearby sea and cedar from the stand of trees at the perimeter of the camp. The vision became more real than the bleak vista before him. He stood entranced, gazing inward and smiling.

  A magnificent retirement home took shape in his imagination, there, on the edge of the river. Close enough to keep an eye on the politics of this new alliance, far enough away to have peace and quiet when he wanted it. And fish in the river. He wanted to spend hours of every day just sitting in a little boat, or on a dock, with a line drifting in the clear water.

  “A perfect sanctuary,” he said.

  “Huh?” Jake looked up from where he set a complicated frame for an ugly temporary shelter. “Did you call this place Sanctuary?”

  Telvino and the Military paused as well.

  “Yes, I guess I did,” Gregor admitted. “A place of peace and protection from the harsh realities of war and mixing with aliens, where the real work of forging alliances can be made.”

  “That’s not exactly what Laudae Sissy said. But close enough. She’s been calling it Sanctuary since we came here the first time.” Jake shrugged and returned to his work layering sheets of inert plastic over a basketwork frame.

  A Military held the final sheet of catalyst ready to lay over the top. Once in place, the two substances would do something to produce heat and foam, quickly expanding and then hardening into a solid insulated dome.

  Ugly. No craftsman
ship. No reverence for harmonizing the elements. But practical.

  Gregor expected little else from the CSS. Godless creatures with no soul. Allowing each individual to choose his or her own God and method of worship or to choose to ignore all Gods. He shuddered at the thought. They invited Chaos and Discord. No wonder they were at war. Harmony had maintained peace since the beginning of time by imposing order and structure upon all the castes.

  A frisson of energy rippled through the ground and up through his feet. As if the Goddess awakened and stretched.

  Sissy calls us.

  Huh?

  “That larger structure should go ten feet to the left,” Gregor told Jake.

  “Can’t. The soil is too soft there, too close to the embankment. One good rain will wash it all down into the river,” Jake replied absently. He wove two lengths of plastic framing into a third.

  “The harmonious esthetics are out of balance. But I can’t expect CSS barbarians to understand that.”

  Jake and Telvino ignored him.

  The CSS manages an alliance that crosses fifteen member worlds and fifty trading alliances. You barely hold together seven, a feminine voice whispered. She sounded like Sissy, but the accent was wrong.

  He dismissed the idea as fatigue preying upon his overtaxed body.

  “I need to sit, Ambassador Telvino.”

  “Two choices. Pull up a convenient rock or go back inside the shuttle,” Jake said distractedly. He studied the instructions for stretching a frame for a larger structure.

  Telvino buried his nose in the same diagram, ignoring Gregor as much as possible.

  “Hrmph,” Gregor snorted. He pulled out his handkerchief and dusted off a flat rock. A curiously flat rock. He hadn’t spent much time out of doors in other than precisely laid out and maintained landscapes, but he thought rocks should be rougher and rounder in the wild.

  Bright sunlight glistened against the spot he’d cleaned. Curves and lines jumped out at him, like ancient writing in the funerary caves.