Worlds Apart 02 Edenworld

by James Wittenbach

  “ETA fourteen minutes,” the Marine finished. “Should we go and meet them, or wait until they come to us?”

  “We go to them,” Redfire answered confidently. “Show them we’re just regular guys. Just me and a couple of Marines.”

  “Should we take arms?”

  “Pulse weapons, just in case they don’t like regular guys.”

  He went to the hatch and touched the egress panel. A chilly breath of night wafted in, cold as ice and dry as old bones.

  His comm-link chirped. “Cmdr. Redfire, we’re getting a linguistic data-link from the Alpha Team. They have a tentative language matrix.”

  “That was fast,” Addie remarked.

  “Our captain has a talent for making... contacts” Redfire told her. “Transfer the data to my earpiece. Let’s go outside.”

  He stepped out into the dark with a pair of Marines and Addy with him. They were joined by a mission specialist and a Marine from Neville. Redfire ordered pulse cannons to minimum setting. As they left the lights of the ship, it became deeply, intensely dark. Raggedy black clouds blew across the faces of three of Eden’s fellow moons, like feathers from the broken wings of ravens. The wind made a sound as it blew, like a sigh of desperation. The dark, the cold, and the winds played on their minds, with only the voice of Anne Hulley in their earpiece making any human sounds.

  “Forty meters to contact.”

  “Thirty meters to contact.”

  “Twenty meters to contact.”

  “Stop!” called a voice from the darkness ahead, from behind a pair of enormous boulders that gated the path. “Advance no further, or you will be attacked.”

  Redfire called in return. “We did not come to harm you. Will you speak with us?”

  A woman stepped out from behind the rock, and into a place where night-vision augmentation could pick her out clearly. She was statuesque by the standards of any world; her waist was as improbably narrow as her shoulders were broad, anatomical data not in the least obscured by the animal skins and chainmail she wore. She carried a sword that appeared long, heavy and - one could infer - sharp. Although the night was cold, she wore nothing to cover her head but a thick, lustrous mane of ash-blond hair. She was exactly the wrong kind of woman to meet the landing party, the kind of woman Redfire had a weakness for, the kind of woman who brought back memories of frozen fields, lights reflecting on icy streets, rooftops, and ice sculpture.

  The sound of her voice snapped him back to reality. “If you have come to take us back,”

  she shouted. “Know this, we will fight and die here rather than go back.”

  Redfire stepped forward. “We mean you no harm. I am Tactical Commander Philip John Redfire of the Pathfinder Ship Pegasus, I bring you greetings from the worlds of Sapphire and Republic.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I know of no prefecture called Sapphire or Republic, and I know nothing of any Commonwealth.”

  “Sapphire and Republic are worlds… planets in orbit around stars. They lie 117 light years…from here.” He pointed to a break in the clouds where stars were visible.

  “You move among the stars?” she intoned doubtfully, and he could sense the grip on her sword tightening.

  “Every star in the sky is a sun, like yours. Many of them have worlds like yours with them. We are from two of those worlds.”

  “According to what we are taught, our people were deposited on this world by an ancient race of powerful beings called the Progenitors. Are you they?”

  “In a way, our progenitors were humans, like ourselves. They deposited our ancestors on the worlds we inhabit. We’re just regular guys,” he added

  “What do you want from us?” she repeated.

  “Only knowledge of your world… and if you desire, more ships will follow us, and bring knowledge from our worlds to yours.”

  “Why have you come to this place? The far side of the planet has many more people. What do you want with us?”

  “Some of our people have gone to the other side as well. We mean to learn about all the peoples of this world. Our instruments showed that this was the largest settlement on this side of the planet. That is why we came here.”

  The woman stared at him. Redfire had a feeling that even without night vision, she could see him clearly. She lay her sword on the ground. “I will believe you, Tactical Commander Philip John Redfire of the Pathfinder Ship Pegasus, for now and until you give me cause to doubt you. I am called Winter. Our village is called Green Witch. So long as you do no one harm, you are welcome here.”

  Eden – The Dayside

  They came to the citadel by means of a road, only five or six meters wide, paved with white stones. The citadel was something less than an hour away, but the Edenian sun moved hardly at all. This and the unaccustomed lightness of gravity were playing a subtle kind of havoc with their sense of time. There was no sense of time passing, yet the walk seemed uncommonly long. Their awareness of time was further dampened by the distraction of forty, scary-looking guardsmen surrounding the landing party.

  When they finally came to the citadel, the thing that grabbed their attention most was the wall.

  The wall surrounded the citadel, 10 meters high and black. Along the face of the wall where it met the road, there were four great gates, each one flanked by two gigantic gargoyles. As the party drew closer, they saw that the walls were covered with a black tableau of skulls and bones.

  Keeler tapped Alkema on the shoulder and walked with him off the path to examine the wall close up. A low guardsmen snorted, then followed them. The arrangement of skeletons was quite deliberate. Some reached out from the wall, as though trying to break free. Some looked as though they had been caught in the final moments of a death spasm. Others were racked, as though undergoing torture.

  Keeler nudged Alkema. “What do you think, Specialist? Is it real, or is it sculpture?”

  “Looks like a classroom wall mural painted by second graders from Hell Elementary,”

  Alkema said, surprising Keeler with a verbal wit he had never previously seen in the boy. Alkema raised his Tracker. “Organic material encased in a mixture of iron, carbon, and corundum. It’s bone, all right. But why embed it into a wall?”

  “I think we can rule it out as a monument to a fertility goddess.” Keeler reached tentatively toward one skull. It was larger than human, elongated, with a ridge of large and small horns, sharply angled eye-sockets, and long, sharp pointed teeth set a double array of jaws. He stopped short of touching it, overcome by a strange feeling that if he did, it would come to life and leap out at him. “A warning to outsiders, perhaps? Or, a warning to their own citizenry?

  Or, do they just like skulls and bones.”

  “Maybe this is how they bury their dead.”

  Keeler regarded to tableau again. “I find it hard to believe people would arrange the remains of their loved ones into scenes of horror and agony.” He tapped one specimen. “Look at this.”

  The skull he indicated looked basically human, except for three large horns, saber-teeth, eye ridges, and a pointed beak-like structure encasing the nose – a low guardsman.

  “How do we find out what it is?” Alkema asked.

  “We ask. Guard!” Keeler called.

  One of their escorts approached them. Stiff, solemn, void of expression, he seemed less alive then the bones in the wall. “We were admiring your... handiwork,” Keeler told him. “We were wondering how the custom arose of placing ... dead bones into such deliberate arrangements.”

  “The enemies of Altama Prefecture are entombed in the outer wall,” the guard said, his voice so low the ground seemed to rumble. “This, we do to warn all of the fate suffered by any who offend against the Prefecture or the Scion.”

  “I see. So, do these figures represent those who tried to invade from outside, or those of your own citizens who broke the law.”

  The guardsman’s yellow eyes narrowed to slits. “Yes,” he growled. “I think you should rejoin the group now.”

&n
bsp; Keeler and Alkema took the hint and made their way back toward the road. There was a crowd of people around the gate to the citadel, and the guards were roughly thrusting them aside to permit passage of the eight strangers.

  “Captain,” Alkema whispered. “One of those statues just moved.”

  Keeler looked. Not just one, but both of the eight-meter tall gargoyles on either side of the gate were reaching down with their great black arms toward the gate. They grasped either door with hands bigger than the entire body of a human and began pulling them open.

  “They must be some kind of mechanism... encased in ...”

  “Neg,” Alkema said, reading his Tracker. “Their skin is the same material as the wall, but there are definitely living things inside.”

  “As the ancients used to say,” Keeler whispered. “Are we having fun yet?”

  When the gates parted, a great roar arose from inside the citadel. Beyond the gate was a great milling throng of people in a panoply of vibrant colors, colors, reds, blues, whites, greens, yellows... some muted, some vibrant under the brilliant gold light of Eden’s sun. To the landing party, it was as though they were wading into an ocean of people, parting before them as the low guardsmen brutally made a path.

  There was an annual festival in the tropical port cities of Sapphire, the Festival of Masks, wherein the citizenry dressed in outrageous costumes and masks and everyone tried to be the most elaborate and outrageous. The population of Citadel Altama made those revelers look like gray and desultory monks of some restrictive religious order. There were guardsmen and more guardsmen, high and low. There were dancers on platforms with iridescent skin and feathers where hair normally grew, some with bonus sets of arms and breasts. Aside from the normal range of human skin pigmentation were bright yellows, blues, reds, greens, magentas, and turquoises.

  Alkema could not help staring at a woman with a head like the pictures of terrible reptiles from Earth. She saw him staring, smiled rows of interlocking triangular teeth, opened her mouth and waggled a forked tongue at him.

  “I think she’s taken, sorry, Dave,” Keeler whispered.

  When Alkema looked back, the reptile woman was being embraced by another woman... this one with a bouquet of pink and purple tentacles. Never mind how Keeler could tell it was a woman.

  The citadel’s buildings were constructed of brick and stone, all between three and five stories in height, whose roofs were a profusion of steeples, pointed towers, curving minarets, and spikes. All the structures ran together, forming solid walls, street-long that turned the whole citadel into a giant labyrinth. They lost sight of the gate after the first turn. The guardsmen cleared a path around them made their way toward the Second-Best Palace of the Scion Altama. The only one in the crowd to break the perimeter of guardsmen, was a huge being, who towered even above the rest of the crowd with a face like a lion, and a great mane of golden hair.

  “A fine catch,” he was saying. “Product of a successful raid into the Peridine Prefecture, by the looks of them. Could you have them brought to my apartments for inspection? My crops grow ripe in the fields and my bed grows cold.”

  “Lord Stonejuncture,” growled the Head Low Guardsman. “These are for the Scion.”

  The lionesque man growled. “Just like the Scion to keep the best for himself.”

  “What does that mean?” Alkema whispered, an edge of fear creeping into his voice. Keeler answered. “It means Thank God we brought Marines with us.”

  The Scion’s second-best palace was joined to the wall, much like any of the other structures. It was larger, and more impressive, but not a great deal more than the secondary houses in the Keeler Compound. Which meant, Keeler thought, the Scion’s Number One palace was either a doozy, or not that great either.

  They were hustled up a set of stairs, through a kind of foyer, and into a beautiful garden. The Scion was there, on a dais, surrounded by court of guardsman, Hroth among them. Among his courtiers was someone with a face on both sides of his/her head, a pair of women with silver and gold skin, another woman with leopard-print skin and glowing eyes, and a pair of huge, muscled four-armed men.

  From nowhere came a voice, masculine and commanding. “All Hail Scion Altama of the Citadel Altama, Guardian and Protector of Altama Prefecture, Defender of the Fertile Fields of Altama Prefecture, Beloved Patron of the Citizens of Altama, and Chosen of the Progenitors as his Incarnate Perfection, the Scion Altama.”

  The man who stepped forward from the dais was disarmingly small and slight, with a neatly trimmed white beard that almost unnoticeably defined the margins of his face. He was clad in a robe of a complicated orange, black, and white design. Atop his head was a tall, pointed hat, which, Keeler knew, meant status. Every head bowed as he passed his courtiers and stepped down from the dais.

  Keeler stepped forward. “Captain William Keeler, representing the...”

  “During the last period of darkness, my court astrologers logged the appearance of a new planet in our heavens,” The Scion announced, his voice nasal and piercing. He reached out and a high guardsman placed into his hand a large piece of creamy paper, with a complex drawing on it. The drawing was of a ship, shaped roughly like a large diamond linked to another much larger diamond: Pegasus.

  “According to our legend/history, our ancestors traveled here from other stars. They found this planet a barren and desolate place, and they built it into a paradise. They were the Progenitors. They walked among stars. They were gods.” He looked somewhat disdainfully at the landing party. “You, clearly, are not gods.”

  A kind of shocked murmuring rustled briefly through his court.

  “We have come...”

  “I must return to my meditation chamber, and contemplate the implications of your arrival. When I return, I shall have decided whether you will live or die, and determined the manner of your execution.” With that, the Scion turned away from them, and walked past the dais into his chambers.

  “That could have gone better,” said Captain Keeler.

  Chapter Five

  Pegasus – Iestan Family Temple, Deck 16, Section 69:L20

  Like all Iestan places of worship, it was small and simple in design, used only for public ceremonies: graduations, weddings, and Passages. It was in this temple that the Lears and one-hundred and seventy hand-picked, well-dressed guests gathered to celebrate the Passage of Goneril and Augustus Lear’s eldest son.

  In the center of the room was a large table, laden with traditional foods and Republic delicacies. The walls were hung with flags and bunting in the family colors, burgundy, black, and gray, which matched flowers procured at great expense from the ship’s gardens. At an altar, guests inscribed words of praise and encouragement on slips of creamy paper. The Executive Commander watched her son, awkwardly and self-consciously talking with her and her husband’s guests. He was dressed in brand new endurance clothing, a black and grey jacket, trimmed in red, and loose mottled-gray pants, both with an excess of pockets. A small pack contained three 1-liter containers of water and a copy of The Life, Reflections, and Teachings of Vesta.

  She made her way over to her son, stopping only briefly to exchange pleasantries with a couple she had not previously greeted. Finally, she had an audience of her son. “Are you enjoying your party?”

  “I don’t know any of the people in this room,” he said, in a voice of anger putting up a front for fear to hide behind.

  His mother put on a sympathetic expression and surveyed the room. “Ordinarily, these occasions are reserved for family, and only the closest of friends. We have to adapt to our circumstances. Are you afraid?”

  “Nay.”

  “Enjoy the food. You won’t believe how hungry you can get in three days.”

  “Why don’t they hold a party after the Passage?”

  “After the Passage, you’re supposed to reflect on the life ahead of you, and on any revelations you received during your journey. Do you feel ready?”

  “It doesn’t matter whether I
feel ready, I’ll just have to get through it.” He sighed. “I’ll be very happy when this is over.”

  “Indeed, you will be,” she said. She gave him a long, loving look. “This is the last time I will look at you as a child.”

  Trajan rolled his eyes.

  “Mom!” came a sharp voice from behind. It was Marcus, her other son. Marcus was darker than Trajan, but more outgoing, more physical, although presently a little ungainly, unaccustomed height owing to a recent growth spurt made him a little off-balance. He carried a large plate heaped high with a good haul from one of the buffet tables.

  “Do you want to wish your brother a good jornuey, Marcus?”

  Marcus looked offended. “Why? He’s not even leaving the ship.”

  “Homunculus,” Trajan hissed.

  “If it were my Passage, I’d go to the planet and find an island where I’d be all by myself.”

  “When it comes time to do your Passage, you can do whatever you like,” his mother assured him.

  “Someplace with a toxic atmosphere...” Trajan suggested.

  Marcus stared down his brother, hard. “Jeb Devries says doing your Passage on the ship is like taking it in the Shopping Zone.”

  “Jeb Devries is a parasite.”

  “Mom!”

  Lear gently took his hand. “Marcus, the point of the Journey of Passage is where you go inside, not where you are outside. It doesn’t matter where you take it.”

  “I know,” Marcus said, shoving some cake into his mouth.

  Lear ran her fingers through Marcus hair. She tried to send a message to Trajan, asking him to be patient with his brother, but she could not tell if it was getting through. “I have to prepare for the ceremony,” she said out loud. “You two behave,” she gave Marcus a shoulder squeeze, meaning especially you, and with that made her way to the prayer chamber. When she had gone, Marcus leaned in close to his brother. “Hey,” he whispered fiercely.

  “Guess what?”

  “What?”

  “I just danced with Mercedes Grumman.”

  “So.”

  Marcus put his mouth to his brother’s ear. “My reproductive organs were engorged the whole time. I think she could feel it, too.”