IGMS Issue 10 Read online

  Perhaps, he thought. But the holy maiden was not an adult yet. She had not transcended and gained all of her powers, and nothing guaranteed that she would. Not all maidens ever broke free of their chrysalis. Many died in the attempt. Even those who broke free did not always develop great powers. Years of meditation and good food -- both might help ensure that a maiden became a powerful adult. Yet most of the time, maidens awoke with little more psychic power than they'd held before.

  So if the holy maiden suspected that Anduval might find love with this girl, it might be nothing more than a hunch.

  Ever so gently, Cessari reached down and positioned the maiden's womb so that he could gain entrance, rolling her onto her stomach, and then leaning above her.

  The holy maiden let out a little piping call of desire, and Anduval felt the touch of her mind.

  It was like being dragged into a whirlwind of desire. The longing for her came upon him so strongly that it drove all other thoughts from his mind. He was only twelve, but at that moment he felt a man's desires and found himself staggering forward.

  She wants me, Anduval thought. She wants me as much as I want her.

  But then the maiden caught herself, and her desires withdrew, leaving him empty and embarrassed.

  "Go," she pleaded. "Get out of here before it is too late."

  She was almost mindless with the need to mate. Anduval turned and ran.

  That night, the stars were blazing overhead when Anduval walked to Tallori's sod house.

  Anduval breathed in the rich scents of the night air as he walked. It was late autumn, and the farmhouses along the path boasted trees ripe with fruit -- tart peaches, sweet pears, and fat plums.

  In the night, the deer had come from the shadows of the forest, and now they huddled under the apple trees, sometimes rising up on their back legs as they picked fruit with their mouths.

  Anduval saw a herd of four deer under Angar's apple tree, and the small buck that led them showed no fear of Anduval, but simply held his ground, as if claiming the tree for his own.

  At the sod house, the rich smell of peat and earth mingled. The hide flap that served as a door allowed easy entry, but Anduval stood outside and clapped, until at last Angar came to the door.

  The huge man was drunk and wavering on his feet.

  "What do you want?" Angar demanded.

  "I've come to pay you for your service to the holy maiden," Anduval said. He produced a pouch and handed it to the drunkard. "The price of a dragon's head."

  Angar shook the pouch, and frowned when he did not hear the clinking of coins. "Wha's this?"

  "Rubies, emeralds, and diamonds -- " Anduval said, "enough so that you can swim in a lake of beer, if you like."

  A maniacal grin spread across the man's face. Excited shouts issued from inside the house. His wife had heard the news.

  The young girl, Tallori, appeared at her father's back, peeking out from the shadows.

  She isn't really pretty, Anduval thought. Her face was plain and freckled, her hair too bleached by the sun. She was not a promising child.

  Does the holy maiden really know something about her? Anduval wondered.

  "The Great Lady wishes to bless you, too, Tallori. Your damselflies served her well. What boon would you ask of her?"

  The girl looked down to the ground, as if studying the dirt on her bare feet, then glanced back toward her mother. The girl was obviously poor. Her dress was little more than a sack made of the crudest brown cloth. It looked as if the only comb that had ever touched the girl's pale hair was her fingers. Anduval waited for her to ask for money. Peasants were such simple creatures, that wealth was the only reward that they could imagine.

  "I want to fight the cycor with you," she said fiercely. "I want to come live in the palace, and help build the worldship. If the holy maiden has any power at all, then she knows this."

  If all children spoke with such ferocity, Anduval thought, even lions would fear us.

  Immediately, Tallori glanced back into the room where her mother hid. Regret was stamped upon the child's face, as if she had betrayed the family.

  "The lady bids you welcome to the palace," Anduval said.

  Tallori stared at her mother in the darkened room and asked, "Can I go?"

  There were sobs from the mother then, and the peasant woman came and gave her daughter hugs. Angar made a huge show of hugging his daughter, and for a long time Anduval had to wait at the door while her mother got her things and kissed her goodbye time and time again.

  Anduval had never had anyone treat him so, and he stood for a long moment out in the shadows, watching the stars twinkle overhead. As he watched, one of them flared for an instant and then winked out.

  Somewhere, he knew, a distant star had exploded. The cycor had struck again.

  He heard a gasp, and saw Tallori standing outside the doorway with a small bundle of belongings, all tied together with a rag. Her face was tilted upward. She had seen it to.

  So they took off, running through the warm night, Tallori struggling to negotiate the path in the darkness with bare feet.

  Once again, Anduval felt the weight of the world falling upon his shoulders. He was no skraal nymph, but he could sense the cycor out there in the heavens, hunting him.

  Tallori surely felt it too. She looked small and frightened as she hurried under the starlight.

  Somewhere along the path, she reached out and grasped his hand for comfort.

  Anduval became the big brother that Tallori had never had. He began that night as her mentor and tutor, but she had been raised in a world where the most complex tasks included weaving wool on her mother's loom and churning butter.

  In theory, Anduval was an apprentice to the magus, but after only two weeks of instruction the boy's understanding of physics soon dwarfed that of the magus, and Anduval went to work as head of construction for the most complex system of the worldship -- its navigation system.

  Anduval tried to make Tallori his assistant, but she often became frustrated and wept when Anduval tried to teach her. She grasped basic math well enough -- simple things like trigonometry and calculus, but Anduval's mind was far more powerful than her own.

  His memory was flawless. He recalled everything that he both saw and heard, but his mental prowess went far beyond that. He could multiply any pair of numbers in his head, or divide numbers in his head, or calculate pi to a thousand decimal places.

  More importantly, when confronted with a mystery, he could often consider it for a moment, and intuitively recognize the answer.

  She tried to keep up with him, and one day as she tried to multiply two six-digit numbers in her head, she began to sob uncontrollably.

  Anduval put his arm around her, patted her on the back, and said, "Don't cry, little sister. Don't cry."

  They were in Anduval's room, where he was studying a sketch of the celestial navigation system for the worldship. He had been making notes about gravitonic sensors, red-shift resolution equations, and skraal brainwave-computer interfaces.

  Even with all of his understanding, he struggled to make sense of the holy maiden's often-crude schematics.

  "I can't keep up with you!" Tallori blurted, wiping snot from her nose.

  "It's not your fault," he said. "The skraals can't keep up with me, either. Even Magus Veritarnus has been humbled. But all of us must learn as fast as we are able.

  "It's not your fault that you were raised in a stone-age existence," he explained. "The skraals willed it to be so for many reasons. Technology carries inherent dangers. If we had used ancient telecommunications equipment, it would have unleashed radio waves that would alert the cycor to our presence. Power plants would have left energy signatures that cycor scouts would easily pick up. And even the simplest of electric machines can emit energy fields that adversely affect a skraal.

  "Danai is a world in hiding. Now, we must come out of hiding and escape before the cycor attack.

  "We must master a hundred thousand years of te
chnological advancement in the next four years. Everyone must do all that they can, or we shall all die in the attempt.

  "We can't lean upon the skraals for help. We can't hope that some great leader will save us. The time has come for each of us to be great."

  Anduval stood for a moment, looking sober and hopeful.

  "I don't know if I can be great," Tallori said. "But I know I can do more than other people believe that a child can do."

  Thus as Tallori began to understand the dangers, she often longed to return to blissful ignorance. Just as she wept for her ignorance, she soon learned to weep for her enlightenment. She began to understand why Anduval was such a brooding and driven young man.

  He worked for twenty hours a day, napping for a few minutes in the afternoon, sleeping two hours at night, taking only moments to cram a bit of food into his mouth. Then he would get back to work.

  He became a shell of a child, and Tallori became more than just his pupil. She began to feed him, care for him.

  Anduval was the big brother that she had never had.

  She soon found that the entire world was in turmoil. Their world was called upon to evolve, but the going was extremely slow.

  Before a ship could be built, Magus Veritarnus had to design and manufacture its various components.

  Before the components could be constructed factories had to be erected, tools had to be created, and workers had to be trained how to do their jobs.

  The factories in most cases required nuclear power systems to run the various smelting and metal-working tools.

  Of course before the power systems could run, the fissionable metals had to be mined.

  So the skraal consorts ventured across the land, urging potato farmers to dig for uranium here, begging that sailors manufacture selenium crystals there.

  At every step, the lack of technology and training became a stumbling block. It seemed that for every day of progress that was made, Magus Veritarnus discovered three more days of work to be done.

  For instance, to build the basic hull of the ship -- the easiest component to fabricate -- the people needed to create selenium crystal beams and plates capable of resisting impact with space debris while traveling near light speed.

  The selenium first had to be mined from rock, ground up, and dissolved in an acid bath.

  The selenium solution was then placed in tanks and an electric current passed through it. The charged selenium particles would bind to a titanium plate and begin to form crystals. In this way, beams and plates could be "grown."

  But once they were grown, the selenium crystals were so tough that even diamond could not cut through them. So in order to be shaped and fastened together, laser cutting torches were needed.

  So a single rod for the hull could not be finished until the titanium was also mined, the acids and their containers created, the electrical systems installed in the baths, the laser cutting torches made, and so on.

  Confusion reigned, and the people of Danai hit setbacks at every turn. Much of the planning for the construction took nine months to complete. Too many questions had to be answered. What facilities needed to be built, when and how? Who would do the work, and who would manage the workers. How could you train a stone-age woodcutter to build a gamma converter or a crystal AI?

  Some work was done in fits and starts while other projects were planned, but farmers who had to dig for ore with picks and shovels proved too slow, missing deadlines. The factories were not completed on time.

  After a year the work had hardly begun, and some of the skraals began to worry about human "saboteurs." Cessari called the magus and Anduval to task, insisting that they launch a search for the imaginary saboteurs.

  But good work did get completed. Anduval helped devise an early warning system in case of a cycor attack. Graviton-detecting telescopes were built and aimed toward the heavens. The gravity drive on a cycor ship would register as a massive planetoid or black hole racing toward Danai. Simple farmers were trained to man the scopes.

  Listening stations were constructed to eavesdrop on cycor ships.

  Meanwhile, the magus provided holographic interfaces for himself, Anduval, and dozens of project leaders around the world. The devices were simple silver bands that went over the forehead and wired straight into the optic and aural nerves. Thus, they could relay sights and sounds from one leader to another, so that the magus and Anduval could personally monitor situations and take care of training from afar.

  But in the third year, a hurricane hit the hull's manufacturing facilities, and the factory was swept into the sea. A week later, at a separate construction site, a small nuclear power plant went into meltdown, and four hundred square miles of land had to be evacuated -- along with a newly completed re-breather for the life support systems.

  Upon learning the news, Cessari himself burst into Anduval's laboratory.

  "Now will you search for the saboteurs?" he demanded.

  Anduval had only learned the news of the meltdown the day before; he'd spent a sleepless night trying to figure out how to get the work back on schedule.

  "No, I will not," Anduval said. "There are no saboteurs. None of our people caused the hurricane, and the meltdown was an accident. The fuel rods are cooled by water from a nearby river, but the floodgates that control the water flow broke. They froze shut, and could not be reopened."

  "Where is the man responsible for opening them?" Cessari demanded. "I want to question him myself."

  "He died this morning from radiation poisoning," Anduval said. "He stayed far too long at the site, struggling to cool the reactor's core even after it had gone into meltdown."

  Cessari raged in the way of his kind, striding back and forth, striking the air with his empty fists. Finally he turned back to Anduval.

  "The deadline for completion of the project is coming quickly. You must meet the deadline."

  "We all are doing the best that we can," Anduval said, though Tallori knew that even their best was not good enough. "But we will not meet the deadline. Our only hope is that all cycor ships are far, far away."

  At this, Cessari rushed up to Anduval. He did not dare strike the young man, but he warned, "You cannot fail our queen. If the cycor attack before we are ready, I shall make sure that you are the first to die."

  Anduval bowed his head in acquiescence. "I assure you, under such circumstances, I would have no wish to live. Yet I must also warn you, even skraal law prohibits murder. I will be within my rights to protect myself."

  Cessari blurted an obscenity and stalked away.

  "What are you going to do?" Tallori asked Anduval when the skraal was gone. "You have to protect yourself. The skraals are faster and stronger than us."

  Anduval merely shrugged. "But I am smarter than they are."

  Tallori grew from a child to a young woman. She found that she could not comprehend the math that Anduval was mastering, but she found her niche. She planned Anduval's meals, freeing time for him and making sure that he did not fall ill due to fatigue.

  When a plant manager looked as if he would miss a deadline, Tallori ran interference for Anduval, bolstering men's spirits with praise and honors, offering bribes when it was prudent, and reminding them that failure meant death when necessary.

  Time and time again, she marveled at what her people accomplished. There were little farmers, working their crops by day and mining by night, breaking their hearts in order to meet a deadline that they did not understand, so that their ore could be turned into something that they could not comprehend.

  Old women and children worked in factories from dawn to dusk.

  The world was full of heroes, she discovered.

  In another age, no one would have given her the time of day, but as Anduval's assistant it was rumored that she had the ear of the magus, and all men gave her high regard.

  Thus, she became the mother that Anduval never had.

  But as she neared her teens and her body began to morph from that of a child into a woman, sh
e wanted more.

  Anduval loved a skraal nymph and Tallori began to realize that she was in love with him.

  She wondered if Anduval would ever even notice.

  So the day came when at the age of twelve she sought out Magus Veritarnus at his laboratory. He'd spent long years collecting seeds, spores, and animal embryos, and then freezing them for storage. As she had anticipated, he was busy when she found him. He was always busy.

  The world on Danai had been divided into ecological zones, and the plants and animals from each zone represented species selected from various worlds. The deep forest at Shadowfest was comprised of plants and animals from the skraals' home world. It was an impenetrable jungle where boa trees rose up in vast tangles for thousands of feet, and the ground beneath them was a silent tomb, filled with fungi that digested the fallen leaves and dead animals.

  Most of the alien proteins in the creatures and plants within Shadowfest were inedible to humans, though some terrestrial animals -- like the wild pigs -- had begun to evolve the ability to eat them.

  Around the skraal forests, humans lived in the plains and wooded hills.

  So the magus had to store specimens from both zones. Even a few plants and animals from the dragon's home world still thrived here. Women still planted dragon's breath vines beside their homes. The vines were prized for the mildly narcotic smell that its flowers emitted in high summer. Old folks, bowed by arthritis, loved to take their ease beneath an arbor of dragon's breath.

  Tallori had little interest in the magus's efforts to save specimens from this world. She understood that his work was vital. Whether the people of Danai fled on a worldship or simply tried to weather another cycor attack, the magus's work was vital. But everyone's work was vital, from the farmwife who simply tried to feed her husband, to the husband who mined a little each day, to the factory worker, to folks like Anduval -- each was essential to the effort.

  But Tallori was too focused upon Anduval's efforts to build a prototype of the celestial navigation system. So she dared to interrupt the magus, hoping for a moment of his time.