“We might steal the remaining four fragments from under the very noses of their owners, and deliver them to the humans – wrapped in an encouraging note, perhaps? With a little luck, we might pull off that escapade without giving away all our secrets. Some, perhaps, but not all.”
Spreading her arms wide, she turned to face the first and second tiers, and the observation galleries below them. “As our respected Isik has courageously risked so much to set the humans on this course, surely he will not forsake them now?”
Surna’s followers rapped the supporter bars with their knuckles, laughing appreciatively. It had been a decent speech, Karteeb conceded. Surna hadn’t ladled on the sarcasm, as she might have done a few months ago, letting context add meaning to her words. She was learning fast.
But she couldn’t touch him.
“Your counsel is most persuasive and heartfelt,” he responded, his tone calculatedly patronising. “I perceive your commendable empathy for the humans, as well as your concern for our ends. But I must remind you: ‘a light grip shows a sure hand.’ We have taken no improper risks, acting only to introduce the human factor into the equation. As a result, the unproductive equilibrium is-”
“No … improper … risks?” Surna cut in, liberally dousing each word in delicious contempt. “What of our plant on the human vessel?”
Karteeb ordered Xerpa to remove the audio enhancement from Surna’s chair. Traditionally, only a single interruption should be tolerated. More might be allowed at the discretion of the Isik, but no-one would think less of him for withholding this privilege.
“I appreciate your concerns, and the frequency with which you express them.” That barb drew an appreciative murmur from his own followers. “However, it is quite beyond the humans’ level of technology to detect our plant. Our leading technologist, Thriv of the fourth tier, has given us her assurances on this” - it couldn’t hurt to make sure the finger of blame would be pointed elsewhere if anything did go wrong; Thriv, to her credit, didn’t so much as flinch when he named her - “and further, even if they did somehow discover our actions, they are unlikely to be able to convince any of the colonies. Their stories would surely be dismissed as the artifices of untrustworthy aliens.
“In summary, your concerns are unfounded, but appreciated. Please continue to share them, if only for the excitement they provide.”
Karteeb could have spun his retort out with a little more rhetoric but preferred not to compliment Surna by giving her any more of his time. He scanned the list of prospective speakers once more, though he again knew perfectly well which one he would select.
“Ah, Permeel of the second tier is due a turn in the spotlight. Show us the right path, respected elder.”
Permeel rose to his feet. He was, indeed, the elder of Karteeb and most everyone else gathered here; gaunt and frail, wizened and wrinkled, but still with as much inner spark as ever. His voice, when he spoke, was husky but strong, and he needed only a few words to build up a full head of steam.
“Honoured Isik, respected colleagues, what madness has gripped us, that we should abandon our most precious duty so recklessly? Oh, what a mercy it is that Queen Chivu perished before she could see the warped and corrupted branches that have sprung from the seed she planted! Are we not as parents to the colonies? Parents do not hide from their young, they nurture, they drive – aye, drive to destruction, perhaps, but how much sweeter a fate is that than to lie contentedly in squalor, with potential never realised. These humans are no different, a child race in need of guidance. I say unto you all, let us lurk behind a veil of secrecy no more! Let this be the catalyst to much needed change. Ours has been an error four hundred generations in the making, but it can be undone in a heartbeat. Let us be bold! Let us reveal ourselves to the galaxy! Let us show a myriad eyes the wonders we have wrought! Hear me…!”
He continued along that vein, never repeating himself, never letting his stream of rhetoric be dampened or slowed. His followers – all young fanatics, all from the first tier – hammered the railings and roared their approval.
Isik Karteeb sat back and enjoyed the show. It was no coincidence that he had chosen Permeel to follow Surna. The veteran’s diatribes were always so memorable as to completely steal the thunder from whoever had gone before – Surna might as well have never spoken for all the long-term impact her words would now have.
Karteeb wondered whether she understood his little tactic.
Mostly, though, he wondered at Permeel’s passion. Why did the old man bother? He was no fool; no-one here was. He must realise there was no future in espousing a policy of radical interventionism. There would always be enough idealistic young adherents to maintain Permeel on the second tier, but never enough to lift him to the third.
Why bother? Why attempt to resuscitate a dead philosophy?
Perhaps at his age, he no longer cares …
Was that all there was to do in one’s later years? Perform for cheap thrills? The idea was a bitter one, and quite ruined the Isik’s enjoyment of his skilful handling of Surna. His own winter years might be spent in the futile search for cheap thrills, anything to distract him from the process of death.
Unless the matter with Chitana could be brought to a head before then.
Karteeb winced. He would have intervened on the human’s behalf if he could possibly have justified it. As it was, he could only sit back and watch, as ever, from afar. Gatari was going to prove a much greater challenge than Ramira.
It could be the end for Hunter and her crew.
PART FOUR – GATARI
I
… The alien freak show has reached Gatari.
As exclusively revealed in these pages, the alien captain, who claims to be here on a peaceful mission from a planet called Rerutha, has already engaged in a bloodbath battle with a group of Legans, before feeding money and secrets to our greedy Ramiran cousins.
Now their ship is in orbit about our planet. A Government spokesman claims that our leaders are engaged in ‘mutually beneficial talks’ with the aliens. We ask: WHY?
What we know about these ‘peaceful visitors’ is far from encouraging. It seems that they are all women, the males of their species being used as a food source, save for a few kept alive to reproduce. They have on their ship an army of sex robots, in near constant use to sate the crew’s perverted appetites.
The women themselves are said to be quite hideous in appearance, near hairless, weighed down by colossal breasts, which can only be supported by the use of anti-gravity (see our artist’s impression of how this may look on pages 22 to 25), and possessed of broad, flat foreheads. It is scientifically provable that this skull shape is unlikely to allow proper development of the parts of the brain that allow empathy and compassion.
Our message to the government is simple – get rid of these creatures …
– Translated extract from the Gataran Daily Bellow, Winter 4th edition
“Welcome, Miriam! Welcome to Toro station, brave traveller from a distant mote of light! What a joy it is to see such wondrous and different blooms of life with my own eyes.”
“You are most gracious, Minister Nomichufu. Our meeting is all the sweeter for having been so long delayed.”
The minister touched a finger to her brow in apology. “Highly regrettable, highly regrettable. Of course, it would have been much quicker to let you land on the planet itself, but your safety is paramount for us, and there are sections of the population – a very, very small minority – who have some rather backward views about alien visitors. I offer an ocean of apologies. And please, call me Nomi.”
The Bona Dea had been in orbit for over three months; they’d been kept waiting while the Gatarans had rigged a means to safely dock the human vessel with one of their own space stations. Hunter hadn’t been particularly impressed with these people so far. She accepted the reasons why her ship wasn’t allowed down to the surface but had found communication with the planetary government to be slow and frustratingly limited. I
n contrast to their dealings with Ramira, there had been very little give and take, the Gatari scientists simply requesting specifications when they needed them. It took multiple requests from Hunter before her own science team had been allowed to inspect the plans for the miniature corridor that now connected ship to station. They had also been permitted no contact with the Gataran prime minister, save for a brief pre-recorded greeting played for them shortly after they arrived, and even contact at the ministerial level had been irregular and inconsistent – Nomi was one of a half dozen who’d spoken with them. Further, they’d now permitted only the captain to leave the confines of her ship, citing ‘security concerns’.
The station itself was visually striking. It reminded Hunter of models she’d seen in classrooms showing molecular structure, a number of brightly coloured spheres connected to each other by grey cylindrical tubing. It was also colossal – the tube she now stood in was about ten metres high, and the larger globes looked at least twenty times that in diameter.
“Nomi, I must commend your people for building such a magnificent structure in space. It’s the first of its kind we’ve seen in this part of space and dwarfs my own people’s accomplishments in both conception and execution.”
“A delightful compliment, Captain, I shall pass it on to our engineers. The good fortune of our Kerinian cousins may have given them a status of pre-eminence amongst the colonies, but they do not and cannot match our sense of aesthetics.”
The Gataran minister was, as far as Hunter could judge, middle-aged. Her skin was pale, her hair dark blonde and cut close where visible. Eyes of a rich navy blue looked upon Hunter with curiosity. The detail that really stood out, though, was the clothing she and her little welcoming committee wore. In contrast to the minimalist styles of Lega and Ramira, here were bright, gaudy fabrics in elaborate patterns that might easily have graced a catwalk on Earth. The minister herself wore leather shoes, cream trousers with light ruffles running along the seams, and a blue buttoned shirt with the collar worn up. Hunter, for whom haute couture had always been something of a guilty pleasure, found the effect impressive.
She was somewhat less taken with the woman herself, feeling her friendly, almost obsequious manner to be put on and excessive. There was a tension behind it, something she’d seen before in inexperienced businessmen who were trying to close the deal of their lives.
Proceed with caution, she thought. But don’t be cynical. A few nerves are natural when meeting aliens for the first time, and it’s not her fault we’ve been kept waiting for so long.
“I look forward to seeing whether the inside is as beautiful as the outside,” she said aloud.
“Then let us delay no more!”
The party moved to the end of the cylinder, where Nomi touched a series of buttons and a door swept upwards with a soft whir. Hunter found herself gasping at the artificial vista which greeted her, even though it largely matched her expectations.
She was inside a hollow sphere, the length of two football fields across. Inevitably, Matan anti-gravity was in effect – the structure would hardly have been practical otherwise – and the entire surface was in use. Hunter saw tidy lines of buildings here and there, complete with roads on which Gatarans could be seen driving little buggies. Open-air restaurants were in evidence, adults eating while watching their children play in nearby swimming pools. Many of the buildings didn’t have roofs; why should they? It was hardly likely to rain. Dead across from where she stood was what appeared to be a sprawling office space, though it was hard to tell at this distance. Full-grown Gatarans looked like insects that had been dropped into a maze as they moved about their desks.
Movement below caught her eye. A small aircraft had taken off; as she watched, it rose up to the centre of the sphere, flipped over and eased to a landing on a point far above.
This use of anti-gravity puts even the Legan ship to shame, thought Hunter, her gaze gliding from one area to another. There must be thirty acres of surface area in here. Our omnidirectional gravity technology pales by comparison. How could they have built all this, and yet never have developed anything helpful like the KSD? Frustrating.
Nomi was watching her with amusement. “You are not the first to be stunned by the scope of Gataran design. Boast though they may, the Kerinians have created nothing so breath-taking … and unlike theirs, our structures serve a purpose. We’re learning a lot about the nature of space up here, revolutionary scientific research. In time, I believe that we’ll develop interstellar transport like yours. Though hopefully more reliable.”
The minister smiled meaningfully; evidently, she knew about the state of their KSD. Hunter hadn’t asked Haji to keep it a secret, and in principle she didn’t mind the Gatarans knowing, though something about Nomi’s manner continued to put her on edge.
“I’d like to talk with you about that.”
“I thought you might. But first, let me show you more of the miracles of our technology…”
* * *
The tour went on for several hours, but there were no more moments with the same impact as that first look inside a sphere. The design was actually quite repetitive, with the cylindrical passages all appearing identical, and the spheres varying only in size and content.
There were over four thousand residents of the station, and Hunter was introduced to several dozen of them – scientists, mostly, eager to talk about their work. The flowery and poetic language employed by Nomi proved to be typical of all her people, which left Hunter struggling to understand all that they said, especially when they touched on technical matters. Still, she recognised the passion for knowledge and understanding that she had searched for when forming her own crew.
It appeared that the Gatarans had embarked on a major initiative to conquer space. Hunter, remembering the “Space Race” from her own planet’s history, guessed that this was an attempt at one-upping their Kerinian rivals. Nothing wrong with that motivation, she decided, if it drove them onwards and upwards. Perhaps Haji’s view of this society as hedonistic and declining would soon need to be updated.
On the whole, she enjoyed the tour, but there was one disturbing incident. They encountered some graffiti scrawled along the inside of one of the cylinders, the words painted in an angry red. Nomi quickly ushered Hunter in another direction, but not before she had read the message:
Gatari dara Gatarigadi
Nochisade dara Nochigadi
Kriki dara Sogadi
Hunter could translate this without difficulty:
Gatari for Gatarans
Foreign worlds for foreigners
Death for aliens
She was beginning to realise why the Bona Dea landing on the surface would not have been a good idea.
* * *
“Now, Captain, let us speak of the dream that called you here.”
“Gladly.” Hunter’s previous attempts to steer the conversation in this direction had been politely deflected.
Perhaps the Gatarans preferred to talk business over dinner. They were seated at a restaurant table back in the first sphere they’d entered, which seemed to be primarily used for leisure. The captain was reluctantly eating meat for the first time in decades, as there were no vegetarian options on the menu. Diplomacy first, principles second …
Their waiter, interestingly, was a robot, the first Hunter had seen amongst the Matans. It was crude compared to their own ACMs, a silent, metal marionette with visible joints and seams. She guessed that the Gatarans were capable of better efforts, but perhaps their species’ past experience with artificial intelligence had put them off, having indirectly led to their exile from Mahi Mata.
“I should inform you that we know of your quest already,” said Nomi. “You wish to unite the six fragments: audacious, quite audacious! What might you offer us for ours, I wonder? I’m afraid that we would have no interest in your space-jumping technology – unlike our Ramiran cousins, we prefer to do our own work.”
“An attitude that does you credit,”
replied Hunter, choosing to ignore the dig at Ramira. “We have other goods to barter with, though. I’m sure that something will take your fancy…”
The captain ran through her list of remaining assets. Nomi didn’t seem fully attentive, though her gaze remained fixed on her human guest. She knows full well she’s not going to accept anything I offer, Hunter thought. This is just a little pantomime before she makes me an offer.
This proved to be correct. Nomi briefly pretended to think about Hunter’s list, then slowly flicked her wrist in a gesture of polite negation.
“I’m very sorry, but you have no treasures we’d value enough to trade our fragment for. But what a profound tragedy, were we to dispatch you from our space empty-handed! If only there was a way ...” She rapped the table abruptly. “Ah! An idea has come to me!”
Hunter tried to conceal her smile. I suspect that it came to you several weeks ago …
“If you can’t trade for our fragment, then perhaps you can play for it.”
“Play? What would the game be?”
“Oh, no mere game. A test! A test of mind, heart and body. The Zakazashi.”
* * *
“So, what’s a Zakazashi?” asked Annie.
“You’ve really fallen behind in your language studies,” replied Hunter. “Kazashi means maze or labyrinth, with an implication that said labyrinth exists as a trial rather than for recreation. Za had a few different uses but is equivalent to the Latin prefix omni in this context.”
“Okay, so what’s an omni-labyrinth?”
It was meeting time once again, with most of the crew packed into the room. If Hunter had known how often this would be happening then she’d have requisitioned a bigger table.
Amygdala Page 13
