Children of Zanar 1: The Zanari Inheritance

by Niall Teasdale

  It was not exactly a comfort. Kaya’s belief in the Universal Mind did not include funerary practices anyway; when you died, you returned to the universe, no matter what happened to your body, but then… Kaya smiled. ‘Thank you, Fay. That helps, at least a little. A-and if they nuke the place, no one’s going to disturb it for a while.’

  ‘Good point,’ Thea said.

  ‘Yeah… Uh, where are we going when we get to the limit?’

  ‘Harroway,’ Jay said before anyone else could respond. ‘I was thinking about it and… Well, I have some contacts on Harroway I could talk to. They can probably confirm or deny the involvement of the Kraggans. We can head for Teladish after that if it is them, and Harroway’s a hub system if we need to go elsewhere.’

  ‘That sounds like a plan,’ Thea said. ‘Not that I really want to go to Harroway, but it does sound like a plan.’

  Fay gave Kaya’s hand a squeeze and got to her feet. ‘I will plot us a course to Harroway. About nine hours to the limit, Cassy?’

  ‘Around about that,’ Cassandra replied. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I seem to be taking this less well than our young guest.’ She started off for the corridor out before anyone could say anything.

  ‘She, uh, doesn’t look happy,’ Kaya commented.

  Thea nodded. ‘Zanar Prime was bombarded with high-energy kinetic impactors and nuclear weapons for four days when they finally dropped the defences. Cassandra took it pretty badly at the time and, well, she hasn’t had the shocks you’ve had recently to numb the memories.’

  ‘You’d think time would take care of that,’ Jay said. ‘Zanar was a long time ago.’

  ‘You’d think. For me it has, but she has a photographic memory. Everything from then is as fresh in her mind as if it was yesterday. All it takes is a trigger.’

  ‘I’d never have thought of a perfect memory as a curse until now,’ Kaya said.

  ‘If you get to know Cassy better, you’ll find that there’s a lot of curses around what she can do. For right now, you might be wise to try to get some more sleep.’

  Kaya shook her head. ‘I won’t sleep with that going on out there. We’ve nine hours out to the hyper limit and who knows how long in hyperspace. I’ll rest later.’

  ~~~

  For two hours, the cruiser launched missiles at the planet below. Most of them were 2.5-megatonne warheads, relatively small, but still antimatter-catalysed thermonuclear bombs. The focus was on the northern continent where most of the settlements were located, but the sensors detected a ten-megatonne weapon destroying the one outpost the colony had established within the belt of fractured land masses which made the southern ocean look more like the southern jigsaw puzzle. In two hours, one spacecraft had undone all the work done by the colonists of Sadrine’s Drift over sixty-two years.

  Even when it was over, Kaya knew she would not be able to sleep, but she went to her room and sat in the dark, thinking about what had happened to her over the last few days. There were moments where she started and realised that she had, after all, dozed off, but that never lasted. She was not sure what the dreams were about, but she felt them when she woke, clawing at her consciousness like an animal in the shadows.

  When her cabin door opened and she saw Cassandra’s silhouette framed in the light from the lounge, Kaya was surprised, tired, and not sure why she was being disturbed.

  ‘We’re a minute from reaching the hyper limit,’ Cassandra said, her voice soft and somehow more respectful than usual. ‘We’ll be in hyperspace very soon. We thought you might want to say goodbye.’

  Kaya opened her mouth to decline, and then realised that, yes, she had to do it. She had to take one last look at the only place she had ever known as home. And she had to let it go. She could never go back now; there was nothing left to go back to. ‘Thank you,’ Kaya said, climbing to her feet.

  The ‘we’ Cassandra had mentioned apparently meant more or less everyone. Neither Jay nor Geogracus were in the communal lounge, but Thea, Fay, Jinny, and Sienna were there and they all offered her a smile as she walked out to look up at the screen. It was showing space, but had clearly been pushed to the limit of magnification of the sensors because there was one planet centred in it: Sadrine’s Drift. From here, the details were indistinct. It was little more than a white marble, clouds obscuring the surface.

  Kaya stared at the display for what felt like hours, saying nothing until Cassandra announced that they would be transitioning into hyperspace in ten seconds. ‘Goodbye, Mom,’ Kaya whispered. ‘Goodbye, Dad. Bye, Brava, bye, Anna. Goodbye.’

  And then the view shifted to the midnight blackness of hyperspace, only the slight almost rainbow-like distortion of the hyper limit barrier giving any shape to the world outside the ship. Sadrine’s Drift was gone.

  ~~~

  The idea of trying to do a lesson with Sienna was Kaya’s. She did not want to sleep, did not think she could, and Sienna was right there with her when the little group had collectively looked down from the screen. So, Sienna had led the way to her cabin, which was two floors up, right at the top of the ship.

  Not that that made much difference. The Oracle was a spaceship, a hyperspace-capable spaceship, and having weaknesses in the hull, like windows, was generally frowned upon. Passenger liners frequently got around this by having observation decks fitted with huge screens to give the illusion of windows, but it had been realised long ago that if you wanted to keep everyone safe, you kept the hull solid.

  Still, Sienna’s cabin was obviously lived in, unlike Kaya’s. Instead of a sofa and chairs, Sienna had a long, curving, somewhat over-large sofa with a lot of large cushions on the floor in front of it. No tables. The lighting came on soft and warm, and revealed that the galley arrangement was more or less the same as all the other cabins. There were also two doors leading off to the bathroom and bedroom.

  Rather than settling onto the sofa, which would likely have involved a semi-reclining position, Sienna pushed a few cushions together and settled on the floor, leaning against the sofa. She indicated the space in front of her and smiled. ‘Thea tells me that you can cast auras and have a shield, but you were unaware of either before she told you. An accurate summary?’

  Kaya nodded. ‘That sums it up. If I was using this aura thing at all, it was unconsciously. And Thea said the shield was instinctive.’

  ‘It is, but learning to use it consciously has some advantages. We should, I believe, focus on that initially. Before one attempts to master more… offensive capabilities, a good defence should be cultivated.’

  ‘That seems pretty reasonable.’

  Sienna smiled. ‘I’m glad you think so. However, I’d like to at least try to awaken an awareness of what you have, so let’s begin with a demonstration of what you can do and let’s see if you can understand what is happening to you.’

  ‘O-okay,’ Kaya said, unsure of what was about to happen, but Sienna just pulled herself upright on her cushions, lifted her chin, and smiled. Several things seemed to happen at once, but what Kaya was left with was a strong desire to trust the dark-skinned woman in front of her, and a strong impression of… Sienna-ness. It was like someone had distilled the telepath down to her most basic essence and then injected that into Kaya’s mind. ‘Oh!’ Kaya said, trying to analyse what she was feeling.

  ‘Oh, what?’ Sienna asked, smiling.

  ‘Well, I kind of feel like we’ve been friends for months.’

  ‘A generally undirected aura tends to result in greater trust in those around you.’

  ‘A-and there was this feeling of… of you.’

  ‘Telepaths are almost all able to send their mental avatar out with anything they send. Now that you’ve felt mine, were I to send you a message through telepathy, you could recognise it as coming from me. The question, Kaya, is whether you can see now how to cast your own aura, on purpose.’

  ‘I… I’m not exactly sure…’

  ‘Think of it as… being all that you can be. You are a beautiful young woman, a p
owerful psi, strong, resilient. People should take notice of you. People should be aware of who you are and where you are. Everyone around you should sit up and take notice.’

  Maybe because Kaya felt like she should be trusting Sienna, maybe because she welcomed the ego boost with open arms. Maybe because she had figured out what Sienna had done, but it took the little speech to crystallise it; whatever was the real cause of the awareness, Kaya pushed her back straight and her chest out and…

  ‘Impressive,’ Sienna said. ‘Most impressive. You, young lady, have quite a talent for telepathy to have done that first time.’

  ‘I really did it?’ Kaya asked, grinning brightly.

  ‘You did not succeed in getting past my barriers, but I was made aware of you and sensed your avatar. You cast an aura, just as Thea said you did on Abertine. We’ll develop this further, but we should get back to the task of toughening your mind.’

  Kaya pulled her legs into a cross-legged posture and straightened her back, and generally got ready for whatever was coming. Suddenly, she felt good about something. Suddenly, she had something to focus on aside from her losses. ‘Okay. What do I do?’

  Sienna gave a little grimace, even though she was grinning. ‘I know this sounds like a terrible cliché, but I want you to imagine a wall…’

  ~~~

  ‘What does being a zanari mean to you?’ Kaya asked. After almost two hours of imagining walls, brick walls, concrete walls, stone walls, metal walls, Kaya felt as though her head was full of, well, bits of wall since every time she had formed one, Sienna had blasted through it one way or another. She had needed a break and Sienna was happy enough to allow one.

  Sienna pursed her perfect lips and frowned. ‘That’s… not an easy question to answer.’

  ‘I guess not, but, well, suddenly I’m not what I thought I was. Physically. I’ve had a little time to digest this and I know nothing’s changed up here.’ Kaya tapped her head. ‘I mean, nothing’s changed in my body either, but what I am isn’t what I thought, so–’

  ‘You’re a Minder, are you not?’

  The question brought Kaya up short because that seemed to have nothing to do with the matter at hand. ‘Yes, but–’

  ‘Then your beliefs are that the physical body is merely a shell for the aspect of the Universal Mind which inhabits it. Your mind has, I would imagine, changed more from the loss of your world than from finding out you are part of something else. What real difference does it make what your genetics are? Which species you belong to?’

  And she was right: it should not make the slightest difference. ‘Thea told me that zanari don’t believe in the Universal Mind.’

  ‘Most didn’t. The Universal Mind, like so many other religious artefacts, is a creation of people attempting to understand something they can’t grasp. Natural disasters, the rising of the sun, storms… Why, among all the creatures of the Earth, only humans rose to intelligence. How did the universe, in all its glory and horror, come into existence? And, of course, what is the mysterious field discovered by Hepps and Montague? Zanari scientists had a far greater understanding of the field than anyone else and they stated that minds interacted with it, they did not come from it or return to it, and there was no evidence of any “background intelligence” within the field itself. To a scientist, “no evidence” often equates to “does not exist.”’

  ‘Oh,’ Kaya said softly.

  ‘A common error of arrogance. Thea holds scientists in contempt for a number of reasons… Contempt may be too strong a word. She has reason to see science as something which can be as bad for those caught up in it as religion can be. Anyway, one cannot prove a negative. There are many reasons to believe that the Universal Mind is just another deity manufactured by humans to meet their needs, but “we can’t see any evidence that it exists” is not any kind of argument.’ Sienna smiled. ‘There. But what do I feel being a zanari is? I feel that the zanari were people who went out to discover a new way. They expanded their minds and learned more of the nature of reality than any humans before them. They were explorers of the vast ocean that is the mind and all the glory it can achieve. Unfortunately, if that is what the zanari were, then they died out long before Zanar was destroyed. And that, I think, is another reason Thea does not really like scientists.’

  ‘Okay,’ Kaya said, though the answer had not really told her what she wanted to know.

  ‘This ship was loaded up with every bit of information there was on the Zanar Protectorate, Kaya. If you wish to know about the zanari, Cassandra can give you access to the archives. You can learn whatever you want.’ Sienna chuckled. ‘That should keep you out of mischief for a decade or three. I think we’ve done enough for today. Practise the exercises I’ve taught you. We’ll see how you’re doing and proceed accordingly in a few days.’

  Kaya pushed to her feet and flashed Sienna a smile. ‘More walls?’

  ‘Oh, you’ll be entirely sick of walls by the time we’ve finished.’

  Port Town, Harroway Alpha, Harroway System.

  Kaya had never been to the primary planet of the Harroway system and, technically, she still had yet to visit it. There had been a mandatory stopover in the system on her journey to Abertine, but she had spent it on the orbital station in a cheap hotel room, awaiting her connection. That hung in space over the surface of a world not much smaller than Sadrine’s Drift, but that was in orbit around one of Harroway’s gas giants, so it was a moon, not a planet. Standing on the surface of Harroway Prime would have proven difficult. As it turned out, standing on the surface of Harroway Alpha would not have been that easy either.

  The only inhabited world in the system was an ice-coated rock. The surface temperature of just over two hundred and five kelvin was cold enough that carbon dioxide froze out of the thin atmosphere, leaving almost pure nitrogen. Water for the colony had to be mined out of the asteroid belt. Harroway existed as a colonised system because of the abundant minerals to be had from the two asteroid belts, the ready supply of gases which could be mined from the five gas giants, and because it happened to be on several hyperspace routes through that region of the galaxy. No one lived on Harroway Alpha, because everyone lived under its surface.

  The whole place was operated by the Harroway Mining Corporation who kept a pretty tight lid on things. That was why they had not brought Jinny down to the surface with them when Thea, Kaya, and Jay went down. Jinny was likely to cause some sort of minor disaster and she was almost pathologically incapable of going anywhere without at least one gun on her thigh. Even in the town below the surface port facilities, open-carrying a gun was not going to go down well with the armed corporate police who patrolled the streets.

  To Kaya, it looked like a total dump. From orbit, you could only see the huge pits which had been excavated in search of minerals. The port town, called Port Town, seemed to have been built in one of those pits with a dome built over the top. Everything looked like an industrial zone building, but there were apartment blocks, bars, clubs… Kaya had rapidly got sick of the sight of strip club signs. Jay had come down to hunt out some of his contacts and he had left them to dive into one such club without any sign of embarrassment. Then again, Thea did not seem in the least disturbed by their environment, though that might have been because she could probably demolish anyone who got in her way. Kaya was not feeling so secure.

  ‘Here,’ Thea said, cutting across the throng of people they were wading through and into a building.

  Kaya managed to duck into Thea’s shadow as she turned, which meant the crowd flowed around her rather than over her. Thea seemed quite capable of walking through anyone she had to and the locals avoided her with the calm efficiency of those used to being trodden underfoot. The ‘here’ in question was a bank. They had passed several so far, but this one was a BCU-accredited company, which tended to mean it was safer to use than the local banks and credit agencies. The bank was quiet compared to the town outside and Kaya headed for one of the terminals after glancing once around t
he sterile interior. Sterile was actually a lot nicer than the ‘careworn’ look outside.

  ‘How much shall I authorise?’ Kaya whispered as she logged into the system using her ID card.

  Thea leant against the wall beside the machine, her eyes watching the people, and shrugged. ‘Five? It’s just expenses, and it’s just because you insisted. Jay may want paying, but we don’t.’

  ‘Jay doesn’t have a self-sufficient, hyperspace-capable spaceship to run around in.’ Kaya tapped at the keys, requesting authorisation for a five-thousand-unit transfer to her card’s memory. Somewhere in the background, the transfer would be checked by a reconciliation process with her bank on Abertine and, if there was a problem, her account would be frozen and her card flagged, but that was going to take time. Unless someone on Abertine had already frozen her account…

  ‘Much as I’m amazed to say this,’ Thea muttered under her breath, ‘I think you’re going to get away with it. I don’t see guards converging on us.’

  It had been a risk. If BCU Security were hunting for Kaya, they surely would have thought to flag her card. Apparently, they had not. ‘Maybe we got lucky.’

  Kaya was almost certain Thea would say something about not believing in luck, but what she actually got was, ‘Possibly, but I’m not sure I believe that. There’s something else going on here. Done? We’ll go find somewhere we can get a drink and wait for Jay.’

  ‘I don’t really drink…’

  ‘Huh,’ Thea grunted, pushing off from the wall. ‘Believe me when I say that you don’t want to drink the water around here.’

  ~~~