A World of Worlds

by ASMSG Authors

  * * *

  She felt they fought her far more than they should have. It was just as well. Most of them made her feel dirty after cohabiting their bodies. Who knew these weak little beings could try to hide such dark secrets from each other in such a crowded place. Infidelities, secret trysts, lies, addictions, rivalries, jealousies... hates...desires.

  “Such petty creatures...they’ve evolved only in body and not in mind. Pity.” Raelmaz thought.

  Only the one whose robe held a different color from the rest and who sat in the high seat seemed an acceptable enough host. He was barely both clear enough and had a high enough vibratory signature that she did not have to open herself to overwrite him, although he could still work harder to raise his rate. It was simple to push his energy back and claim him physically so she could see them through his view.

  Such a strange view, with colors all confused. His reaction at being able to see the way she saw amused her, as did the rest of his thoughts.

  “You might consider me a being of energy. I slide between realities and often exist in more than one plane at once. I do glow and emit a lot of power. I don’t have a solid form by your terms. My race has been called many things by your own. I vibrate much faster than you do as well.” She replied, letting him hear specific words that she plucked from his language centers. “Perhaps for now that will suffice.”

  The captain looked around the bridge for the origin of her voice, which rolled and swelled like thunder through him, before he settled his eyes on the view screen. Her irritation at the rather private area of herself displayed bothered her. When had that gotten so round? She’d have to work some of that back into muscle if she hoped to mate with a male when in her egging cycle.

  “Where would you rather we look then?” The Captain, Zentaur came the name, asked her aloud. The question garnered looks from the crew members, none of whom had heard her speech.

  “It may make you look less insane to speak mentally with me. That is what your people’s ancestors did the last I saw of them.” She replied, sending him an image of where her eyes rested easiest.

  “Switch cameras to area LL1.” It took a moment for him to recognize the view in order to give the command. When he did he saw the head draw back, adjusting itself to where her face could be seen more easily.

  “Even females of my kind prefer to be looked in the eyes and not the rump or breast. No I’ll not say which it was.” Her voice was dry. She had a sense of humor, after all, and it was vaguely funny that the first glimpse the inhabitants had of her did fall into their range of usual attention areas for themselves.

  “Apologies then, Lady.” He thought at her with a mental bow in her ‘direction.’

  Good, they still possessed some of the politeness she had tried so hard to instill in their ancestors.

  “Why are you holding our ship?”

  “To investigate your people, Captain Zentaur. Your jumping between dimensions disturbed my sleep.” Raelmaz replied. “Why are you here, instead of on a planet where you’d been last?”

  “Our planet is no longer habitable, Lady... Do you have a name? I feel odd that you know mine without being told, but I have nothing other than Lady for you.” He lowered his eyes from the screen briefly before looking back up at her.

  The crew looked between their captain and the screen. Their confusion tasted sour in her mouth. So as to not exclude them, she deigned to use her voice, though she was unsure as to whether she could be heard anymore. “I am Raelmaz, a daughter of Arashi-ne-va and Celnes-ja-ranta. Why is your planet not habitable?” Despite her surprise at how loud she was, roared was more accurate a description, she did not clamp her great jaws shut. At least she knew they would hear both through the ship and over whatever speakers they may have had outside.

  “Raelmaz...” He attempted to mimic her accent, though the name fit strangely in his mind and mouth. “Fifteen generations have passed since the ship left, and the logs say that the sun was causing the water to evaporate due to its growth. This ship was one of the first to leave in search of a safe haven for those on board. There was no way to reverse the sun’s growth.”

  “For me, there would have been if I had been remembered. Have you forgotten how to call on your Gods in the reliance on your technologies, again?” She snarled. “Do your people have such short memories as to forget it was stardragons that guided you to the home that you abandoned, and that we told you to call upon us if the stars needed tending? Am I to believe that you forgot how to ask for help?”

  “Yes, Lady Raelmaz. We did. The legends that followed us from other planets painted dragons of all kinds as imaginary beasts, mere fantasies of explorers and those that had been ship bound too long.”

  “Fantasy am I?” She squeezed her coils, passing through the hull until she knew several of them would be in plain view of not only the crew, but others in the living quarters of the ship. “Touch me then, any of you. See how real I am since your kind must see and feel what lies before them.” She trembled a bit in her frustration, her teeth glinting as her lips drew back to display canine teeth.

  Most simply stared as if those coils were that of a lowly venomous snake. One, a blue tinted male, reached tentatively for her but then drew his hand back as if burned before even making contact. She scoffed at his incapacity and flared her head plumage at them, daring any of them to find their courage. The last she’d seen this race they had been braver and worthy to touch her. She could feel herself vibrating faster and faster. If she didn’t calm down she would not be able to stay synced with them period. Then they wouldn’t be able to see her at all.

  Zentaur stepped closer, walking calmly over to where the nearest coil poked through and writhed. Reaching out to touch her he found her to be warm, like one of the heating blankets set on high. The longer that passed with his hand near the warmer she became and the more transparent she was. He tried to lay a hand physically on her, but it pressed into her. Something pressed his hand back out.

  “I said touch me, not enter me, Captain.” She snorted, then calmed as he ran his hand along her scales. The sting of awakening soothed somewhat at the contact.

  “I apologize Lady Raelmaz. It is hard to judge without feeling the way I normally do. What could you have done for us though, even someone so great as you?”

  “Diplomat... Humph. Buttering me up so I don’t eat you all, perhaps.” She thought to herself with the touch of a wry smile tickling the corners of her lips. “I could have reset your sun and had a place to lay eggs. I don’t know about returning the water, but surely you would have found ways to obtain it from other sources.”

  “Then when we finally find a new home, hopefully the generations that come will remember your abilities...”

  “That is if I allow you to go on.” Zentaur removed his hand from her side when Raelmaz spoke, and she brought her face closer “Besides that sun expanding so, what had you done to the planet? Had your people treated it well?”

  “As gently as is possible, Lady Raelmaz. We used a combination of crystal, wind, and solar powers. When crystals were harvested seeds were left behind or planted. The forests were well cared for until the droughts wiped them away. We have footage in the library if you wish to see for yourself.”

  She pressed further in, and her snout nearly touched the slight rounded protrusion where his nose should have been. “Show me. Take me there.” She slid off the ship and drew her body after her, shrinking down to a size that more easily fit the ship and floated before him.

  Zentaur swallowed. What sort of being changed sizes at will and, when condensed to such a size, was still translucent? Why, he wondered that her light didn’t blind them. Plumage around her head rattled loudly, the way a torrential rain sounded in the holo-deck’s simulations. The old legends blurred the line between stardragons and gods. How true were they, and how much simply awe?

  “This way...” The Bridge could do without him long enough to satisfy her, hopefully. To send anyone lesser in standing likel
y would have been interpreted as an affront. He led the way through a transport pod that teleported them to the library deck, which worked for Raelmaz as easily as for him. The feeling of being possessed while she walked at his side made him miskey at first.

  “Indeed I would have thought so...” Her voice came in his mind, “Your First will be able to handle things while I decide your fate.”

  Though she had sounded stern and enraged on the bridge, here she sounded older, tired, and sad to him. The door to the library and archives hissed open when he laid a hand on the center. A twinkling array of various crystals and colors met her, along with shelves of carefully preserved and sealed books and scrolls from their first world along with disks from the second world. It was the crystals which drew her though, and she flew to coil around the largest. It was a five sided point that tapered from a five foot base, and had grown in such a strange way that glyphs of several languages could be picked out by the keen eye. Today the letters from an extinct language displayed near the base: A, S, M, S, and G. The code disappeared momentarily at her touch. The sixteen foot clear quartz thrummed and pulsed welcomingly as she adjusted herself and let the information flow through her. Pictures formed and died briefly as they communed.

  She looked almost peaceful with her eyes closed and head nodding in time to the pulse of the crystal. Raelmaz’s colors softened at times as she crooned to it. Zentaur couldn’t be sure what she was finding as they accessed the information in a much less direct way. Whatever she found, he could only hope it would be enough to preserve the lives of those under his protection who had done no wrong to any planet during their lives.

  “It’s almost a pity that they didn’t bring the main crystal from the planetary core, but that would have been asking too much of the planet and would have been sacrilege...” Raelmaz mused to herself as the crystal sang of how careful the people had been with its mother. She was relieved to find that the visions of polluted seas were not to be found from this planet. Perhaps then it had been a combination of karma and the star’s growth intersecting in just the right way, along with their forgetfulness.

  Raelmaz uncoiled from that crystal and brushed against another that had chimed in with its own set of records pertinent to her search. At times she almost disappeared into them, and the only way he could see her was as an orb flitting through and about...sometimes in the center of the spires that branched every which way.

  After what seemed to be a klar-worth of tetches the twinkles and tones from the crystals and dragon went silent.

  “I see no reason to destroy you. You did as well as could be expected. I do not want you to go the way you are going though...” The voice poured through him as she once more came to plain sight. “You are heading in the right direction for what will serve, but you’re in the wrong layer again.” She coiled up the largest crystal again and rubbed around it as if to scratch an itch.

  “Wrong layer, Lady?” Zentaur narrowed his eyes to listen better.

  Raelmaz snorted and projected a simple view of space for him, and then built on it slowly to allow him to see other spaces overlaid and occupying the same area. She even allowed him to see to see the planet that was forming on a different layer in the very spot the ship occupied.

  “Wrong layer.” She nodded, watching as his eyes widened, then teleported herself back to the Bridge to wait. “Have everyone return to the bridge and I will show you all where to go and how. I remember how jumpy your kind gets if I speak to too many at once who are not together.”