© David Cox, 2018
eISBN 9788409038381
HOSTILES
CHAPTER I: COMMAND: RESET
CHAPTER II: THEIR GOD, TURESWAJA
CHAPTER III: SOME BASIC LESSONS
CHAPTER IV: THE FISHER KING
CHAPTER V: THE HOSTILE
CHAPTER VI: THE ROYAL PALACE
CHAPTER VII: THE WORD OF GOD
CHAPTER VIII: THE YAXO TAVERN ON PIER 35
CHAPTER IX: TAX EVASION
CHAPTER X: THE KEY IDENTIFIER
CHAPTER XI: THE TRADE ZONE
CHAPTER XII: VOWS OF CHASTITY
CHAPTER XIII: ALL THAT WAS HIS
CHAPTER XIV: THE RIGHT BOY
CHAPTER XV: A THOUSAND MILLION BITWONS
CHAPTER XVI: ORBITAL INTERSECTS
CHAPTER XVII: NO, WE’RE NOT ALL ONE
CHAPTER XVIII: THE BIG BOOM
CHAPTER XIX: REBELLIBUS REFUGIUM
CHAPTER XX: OUR FUTURE PAST
EPILOGUE: SOMETHING VERY IMPORTANT
As soon as the solvent had washed the first layer of soot off the murals and the images on the infrared viewer had revealed what they depicted, I knew that I had finally found exactly what Nansil H’To, Oracle of the Kingdom, and Ol S’Neury, Speaker of the Government of the Fifteen, had hired me to find.
‘Clear the site!’ I shouted, pointing towards the exit. ‘Command: reset! I want everybody out! Right now!’
The androids who were working with me in the cave swiveled their heads towards me and dropped the tools that they’d been using. For a second, their cameralens eyes went blank, their bodies shut down and they were utterly motionless. Then, their system resets completed, they left their work stations or came down from the scaffolding, and formed up into perfect ranks and files.
‘Command: delete!’ I continued. ‘Full erasure of all work data stored and recorded over the last three standard days!’
‘Does that include the server, Maestro Nevus?’ my foreman asked me.
‘It certainly does,’ I confirmed, as I slowly climbed down the extension ladder I was standing on. ‘Full erasure. Full reset. Go to Caves Three and Four and carry on working. Make sure that everyone on the team obeys the new order: any reference to Cave Five must be removed from the records. From now on, neither humans nor androids nor robots can set foot in here. Is that clear?’
‘Couldn’t be clearer,’ the foreman replied and began to head off with the rest of the workers.
‘Oh, and Tilma…’ I added, ‘get in touch with Nansil H’To and Ol S’Neury, and ask them to join me immediately.’
The light footsteps of the androids disappeared off into the distance and it all went wonderfully quiet, that almost tangible silence that you only ever experience deep below ground, in empty spaces surrounded by thousands and thousands of tons of solid rock. And even more so, in this case, because Cave Five was separated from the rest of the ancient underground complex by a long and narrow winding passageway that blocked off the noise from the other restoration sites.
I took a good look around me. Cave Five was a roughly rectangular space, about six meters long, four meters wide and five meters high. Centuries and centuries of filth had accumulated on its smoothly finished walls, creating a thick dark patina which only very occasionally let through traces of the beautiful murals below. These dated back to the very first Khams who had arrived on Kham Tare about four and a half thousand years ago and had been devotedly painted to celebrate the distinctive culture, beliefs and traditions that they’d brought with them. They were strange works of art which we’d been slowly uncovering since starting work in Cave One, the first to be discovered, purely by chance, two standard years earlier inside the Great Temple of O’Tado, the residence of the Oracle of the Kingdom.
The government of Kham Tare was absolutely determined to restore the murals to their former beauty. It may seem strange that a planet so small was prepared to spend so many millions of bitwons on it, but the main reason for their enthusiasm was very straightforward: they were desperately hoping that the murals would reveal to them every last detail of a secret and ancient ritual that was central to the history of their royal family. For the past four thousand seven hundred and eighty-two standard years, their kings had all been given exactly the same name - Kûrü. According to what little was known, the original Kûrü had led an uprising of the Khams when they were enslaved on a planet called Esmerdis. Not only was their struggle for freedom successful but, under his leadership, they settled on Tare, a small mining planet that was four light years away, renamed it Kham Tare and built their own society from scratch there. Not surprisingly, Kûrü was revered as their founding father, but it was their god, the mysterious Tureswaja about whom I couldn’t find anything on the ultranet, who (according to the Khams) ordered the Oracle to anoint Kûrü as the king of Kham Tare and decreed that he and his descendants would rule there forever.
Kham Tare was a tiny little planet in the Atordeen System, right on the very edge of the Galaxy, and the Kham were very closed off, very secretive and forever afraid of being enslaved again. As a result, they kept their distance from the Systems’ Alliance, avoided contact with other worlds and, despite their very significant levels of interplanetary trade, forbade outsiders from setting foot on their planet. Their trade zones were completely fenced off and sited well away from their cities and population centers. Even I wasn’t actually there, in fact.
It was purely by chance that they’d discovered the lost cave complex – they came across it when they were building an extension onto the Great Temple of O’Tado – and when they did, they immediately became fixated on returning it to its former glory. So they looked for the art restorer best suited to their needs and, not surprisingly, they came up with me. My reputation as the outstanding restorer in the whole of the Alliance goes without saying, of course, but what clinched it for them was my insistence on working with RoDrons. There was no way I was prepared to waste my precious time on endless boring interstellar flights that generally took several standard years, when I could just as well use RoDrons to do the top-quality work required. Not all my prospective customers understood that, but that was their problem. I chose the jobs that I wanted to take on and I ran them exactly the way that I wanted to. So, from the Khams’ point of view, I was the perfect solution: they got the best, without my even setting foot on their planet. They supplied me with exactly the RoDron that I’d asked them for (the very latest ZD-345S model), and with the robots and androids I wanted. And they agreed to pay my very high price tag without even trying to bargain me down.
‘Maestro Nevus…’ a soft female voice whispered to me out of the darkness. It scared the hell out of me.
I turned on my heels (and my RoDron’s heels) and what did I see but the tiny and stunning Nansil H’To, Oracle of the Kingdom. She was so spectacularly beautiful that, whenever she appeared, I could barely think straight. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She had an exquisite face with very delicate features that were framed by a long mane of shiny black hair, and the way that she looked at you, it cut right through you like a knife, coming from deep within her almond-shaped grey-brown eyes and beaming out from under her finely arched eyebrows. Nansil H’To was a precious jewel in a matchless setting. Her role as Oracle, as the channel through whom Tureswaja addressed the Khams, required her to be a virgin, the very epitome of chastity. That afternoon, as ever, she was wearing a long black sleeveless blouse and a black skirt which went right down to her ankles. And on her head, she wore the richly embroidered biretta which corresponded to her role and position.
‘Welcome, Oracle,’ I greeted her, bowing my head slightly.
She looked around her, as if she was searching for something.
‘I imagine that you have finally found the depictions of the Ritual,’ she whispered to me. She never raised her voice, she never waved her hands and she never showed any emotion on her face. None at all. It was uncanny.
‘I believe I have,’ I replied. ‘Which is why I immediately arranged for you and Counselor S’Neury to be informed.’
‘Yes indeed,’ she told me. ‘I was up above, in my residence. But he will take a little longer to get here, because we agreed that he should bring someone with him to advise us, someone who is an expert on the Ritual.’
I was very surprised to hear that this ancient ritual of theirs, which had something to do with their King Kûrü, was apparently still being practiced. Given how secretive the Khams were, I found any little detail about their culture, however insignificant it was, to be absolutely fascinating.
‘But my problem is…’ she started speaking again, with something vaguely resembling a smile on her lips, ‘that I cannot see any sign at all of something painted on those walls over there.’
I smiled too, but I didn’t bother to hide it.
‘You’re right, of course,’ I told her. ‘They’re not yet visible to the naked eye. But they are there and I will show them to you. So far, all I’ve done is clean off the first layer of dirt, soot and grease. Even though there are still several layers of muck covering the dyes and pigments, we can already see the overall composition and make out almost all of the images depicted. And, by the way, I ordered a complete reset of the androids and the full erasure of their memories, just as you specified in our contract.’
She took a couple of steps into the center of the cave and slowly looked around. Very concentrated, very focused.
‘So,’ she whispered to herself, ‘it is here.’
‘If you’re referring to the ritual, yes, that is the subject matter. All the key elements that you told me to look for are present: the newborn child, the circular door openings and so on. When Counselor S’Neury gets here with your expert, you can decide for yourselves. I might be mistaken, of course, given my limited knowledge of the ritual and your traditions in general. But when you do see the murals, I am confident that you’ll confirm that they are the ones that you were looking for. Then you can tell me exactly how you want me to proceed with my work from now on.’
We didn’t say another word. She just stood there, spellbound, gazing at the filthy walls, while I used my little wrist monitor to switch on and adjust each of the powerful cold-light spots and to set up a series of strategically-placed tripods with their high-res infrared reflectography cameras.
It wasn’t long before we heard the sound of heavy footsteps approaching through the winding passageway.
My RoDron ZD-345S was exactly two meters tall, which was the universal standard in robot avatars, but it made me feel like a giant next to the Khams, as even the very tallest of them didn’t reach one meter ninety. I was pretty sure that Counselor Ol S’Neury, a leading member of the government of the Fifteen, was not the least bit happy about our difference in height. The old man was hugely overweight, as flabby as a bowl of Jell-o, and the top of his baldhead barely reached my RoDron’s shoulder. S’Neury always seemed uncomfortable around me, irritable and irritated, even offended by my presence. He never raised his head to look at me. He clearly didn’t like outsiders.
The young woman who’d come with him – their expert on that mysterious ritual of theirs, I assumed – was very tall for a Kham, significantly taller than the roly-poly Counselor. Her hair was a fiery red color and, even though she wore it tied back in a long thick braid, she had what looked like a reddish halo around her head from all the hair that had refused to stay where it had been put. She was dressed up in an official-looking cobalt-blue jacket with leather trimmings, slim white trousers narrowing in at the ankles and a pair of low-cut leather boots. The skin on her oval-shaped face was very white indeed, her nose was fine and elegant and her eyes were a beautiful turquoise, with what I’d realized was the Khams’ most distinctive genetic characteristic, and especially so in her case: bright gold rings around her irises, just like her two companions had.
‘Good evening, Maestro Nevus,’ Ol S’Neury greeted me, very bluntly. As always, in his right hand he held the huge gold medallion that hung from his neck and marked him out as one of the Fifteen.
‘Welcome, Mister Counselor,’ I replied, with a bow.
‘It is my pleasure to introduce to you,’ the Counselor began waving a pudgy hand in the direction of the redhead, ‘a highly-respected figure in Kham Tare, um… Professor Gan U’Hel, Head of the… um… Royal Research Institute.’
It was blindingly obvious that Gan U’Hel was neither a professor nor the head of some Royal Research Institute, if such a thing even existed, which I very much doubted. The Oracle had described her to me as an expert on the ancient ritual, so her official post was very unlikely to be such a dry and academic one. I noticed that she was looking me up and down, and after a few seconds she walked over to me with a friendly smile on her lips.
‘I’ve never seen a RoDron before!’ she said, looking over at her fellow Khams, delighted. ‘It actually does look like a real person!’
We bowed our heads to each other, both at the same time.
‘The latest RoDron models,’ I told her with a smile, ‘are designed to look like human beings, right down to the smallest detail.’
‘But tell me: where are you really? I mean, where is your real body, the one that belongs to the living, breathing Maestro Nevus?’
The Counselor was beginning to get impatient, I could tell. And that made me laugh out loud.
‘I’m at home,’ I told her. ‘In my house on the beautiful clifftops of Peristere, a tiny little asteroid that orbits the planet Boros, just over fifteen light years from Kham Tare.’
That was a huge surprise for her. I could see it on her lovely face.
‘So it would take you at least nine standard years to get here on the fastest civilian ship around!’
I laughed again. I was enjoying this.
‘Instead, in a few minutes’ time,’ I said to her, ‘I’ll be fast asleep in my bed. Just as soon as I shut down my virtual connection with that RoDron that you’re looking at.’
‘But not before you tell us exactly what it is that you have found,’ S’Neury butted in, clearly annoyed.
‘Certainly,’ I replied, bowing to him once again. I walked over to the longest wall, which was the one that faced the doorway, and took a laser pointer from one of the toolboxes which were on the floor. ‘Before I say anything else, you should know that these murals, specifically the ones in Cave Five, are actually in rather a critical condition. The surface on which the mural was painted was made from mud, which was probably taken from a nearby riverbed and simply applied directly to the rock and worked until it was smooth. The problem here in Cave Five is not that fragments have broken off as has happened in the rest of the complex, but that here the murals are basically hanging loose, like curtains, and are barely attached to the rock anymore. And what makes it worse, as you can see,’ I went on, pointing at gaps in the murals on each of the four walls, ‘water filtration has destroyed large sections of the work, leaving the original rock in plain sight. The damage is extremely serious.’
‘Your job is to fix that,’ the Oracle pointed out, very calmly.
‘And that is what I will do, Honorable Nansil H’To. I will do it. No question about it. I just wanted you to be clear about the scale of the task at hand.’
‘Show us the paintings,’ Counselor S’Neury demanded me.
‘Command: cameras,’ I raised my voice. ‘Project and focus. Command: switch off spots.’
Cave Five immediately went pitch-black and the four infrared reflectograms were projected into the air. With the first layer of soot removed, the infrared light was able to cut through the filth below and then the dyes themselves to reveal the original designs which had been drawn on the mud plaster in charcoal. This made the basic composition of the works – including the occasional mistake – very clearly visible.
What the murals depicted was actually a single event attended by a large number of people, each one carefully framed inside a grid system designed to keep them all in proportion. The tiny little men who filled the lower section of the first reflectogram were poorly dressed in breeches and nothing else, while the female figures were wearing exactly the same clothes as the Oracle, Nansil H’To: long blouses over skirts which went down to their feet. Everyone there was looking admiringly at two large figures who were holding hands right in the center of the picture. One was a man who was fat and bald, very richly dressed and had a big friendly smile on his face, and the other was a Kham with his long hair in a braid, who was holding a scepter in his right hand and looking down at the little men and women at his feet.
In the second reflectogram, the fat bald man was sitted floating on a cloud up in the top left-hand corner and gazing at the braided Kham who was resting on some sort of divan with his eyes closed. The Kham was also pictured standing at the foot of the divan and looking towards his right where he appeared again, this time striding across the threshold of a circular doorway. Hundreds of little Khams were following him, both men and women. The technical backwardness of the ancient Kham mural painters was very marked: they were not even aware of the rules of perspective, something which had been discovered about eleven thousand years ago. Their long enslavement on Esmerdis must have been very grim indeed for their people.
The third reflectogram showed the flabby man and the braided one sitting down on the floor with their legs crossed, facing each other and having what seemed to be an enjoyable conversation. And in the fourth and final projection, a small Kham woman, also dressed the same as Nansil H’To, was walking in through another circular doorway on the left-hand side of the image, with an enormous new-born baby in her arms, which was twice her size and fast asleep. Hundreds of little Khams were celebrating wildly, dancing around and waving their arms in the air. And that was the end of it all.
‘So, what do you think?’ I asked my three engrossed companions. ‘Is this what you were expecting? The new-born child that you told me about is there, and so is the Kham with the scepter in his hand. Not to mention the two circular doors. I would be very sorry if I had dragged you down for no reason.’
But those three high-ranking dignitaries from Kham Tare just kept on staring at the crude black-and-white sketches as if their very lives depended on them. Gan U’Hel, the tall redhead, had a big broad smile on her face and seemed to be utterly enraptured by what she was seeing. So I decided that I’d better just shut up and wait.
It must have been at least ten minutes later that Gan U’Hel finally let out a long and happy sigh. All three of them had completely forgotten about me. Suddenly, they all looked a happy and pleased group.
‘That’s the most beautiful sight that I have ever seen,’ the redhead said in a quiet voice.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I thought they were awful.
‘Yes,’ S’Neury agreed. ‘But they do not help us resolve our problem.’
‘We had been pinning far too much hope on these murals,’ the Oracle whispered. ‘But they truly are wonderful. A worthy celebration of our people’s history.’
‘I’ll be able to study them properly once Maestro Nevus has finished restoring them,’ the Honorable U’Hel remarked, looking up once again at the images. The end of her long red braid reached just below the small of her back. ‘Maestro Nevus, I would like to make regular visits here, to see what progress you’ve made. I hope that my presence won’t be a nuisance to you.’
‘Not at all, Honorable Gan U’Hel,’ I replied flattered, ‘but you may well find what I do very boring.’
‘I won’t be spending a lot of time down here,’ the alleged head of the Royal Research Institute said with a laugh. ‘I’m sure that once they are fully restored, the murals will give us a lot more information. That’s right, isn’t it?’
‘Of course it is,’ I told her. ‘I’m not sure exactly what kind of information you’re looking for, but the infrared light doesn’t reveal anything like the whole picture, not even close. What I’ve shown you today are only the original sketches which were done in charcoal. Here, for example,’ I told them, pointing to an empty space in one of the reflectograms, ‘there could be birds, geometric motifs or even other figures which the painter added later without ever having done any preliminary sketches.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ Gan U’Hel replied, happy to hear the news. ‘But do finish your work as soon as you can, Maestro Nevus.’
‘Fine. So, from tomorrow morning, I’ll get back to work as usual.’
Counselor S’Neury rolled his eyes.
‘No, no, no!’ he cried, appalled at the suggestion.
‘The thing is, Maestro Nevus,’ the Oracle explained, ‘these murals depict the Ritual and, as a result, everything to do with this cave…’
‘Everything to do with this cave,’ the unpleasant Counselor interrupted her, ‘is absolutely top secret! Your androids and robots are liable to be checked at any time to ensure that they are not recording what is going on. We will also be keeping an eye on you and we will be deploying signal detectors to ensure that none are emitted from anywhere inside the Great Temple complex.’
‘My RoDron is permanently sending and receiving signals to and from the virtual reality suite here in my home,’ I reminded them. ‘If you block the exchange of signals, I simply won’t be able to carry on working.’
‘In which case that channel and that channel alone will remain open,’ the Counselor replied. ‘We can monitor it. In fact, we already are, to avoid any leaks. What we will do from now on is encrypt it, so that no one else has access to it.’
So they were monitoring me, were they? That was good to know. They were crazier than they seemed, that was for sure. I had been working on their planet for over a year and in all that time I’d never left the complex, not even once. I had only met two people – well, OK, that had just gone up to three – and naturally I’d taken great care to fulfill each and every clause and sub-clause in our contract, right down to the smallest detail. But now I find out that they’d been monitoring my exchanges, presumably searching for key words referring to the murals to prevent any leaks. They were raving mad, the lot of them.
‘You cannot talk to anyone about this cave,’ the Oracle told me, apparently unaware of how angry I was. ‘You cannot write anything down about it, not now and not in the future. You cannot record any images and you cannot allow anyone in here, not even a Kham. And, to state the obvious, you are not to pass on any information whatsoever to any Alliance body: not to the General Academy of History nor to the Galactic Archaeological Register, for instance.’
‘I’m going to disconnect,’ I replied abruptely.
‘Very well. But you will be back at work tomorrow,’ the Counselor said.
‘However stupid my clients may be,’ I replied, through gritted teeth, ‘and even when they spy on my communications without bothering to inform me of the fact, I always complete my jobs and I always fulfill my contracts.’
Fifteen light years away, I, the actual flesh-and-blood Nevus, pressed the neck button on my virtual reality suit and disconnected myself from my RoDron in Kham Tare. I was fully myself again. I took my helmet off and angrily hurled it at one of the armchairs, completely unaware that Dawa was sitting in it, calm as ever, and watching my performance. Dawa was an android, exceptionally beautiful and intelligent, and luckily had excellent reflexes. By the time my eyes had gotten used to the brightness, my helmet was safely on her lap.
‘Bad day at the office, darling?’ she asked, a big smile on her face.
‘Awful,’ I grunted as I stepped down from my spherical work pod.
‘I heard what you were saying,’ she said, getting up from the chair and putting my helmet down on the side table, ‘Listening to RoDron signals without the permission of the designated user is a very serious crime.’
‘In the Alliance, it is! It’s only a serious crime if you’re in the Alliance! And these idiots don’t belong to the Alliance!’ I roared, rubbing my face with my hands, trying to clear my head. It was almost twelve noon in Peristere, but at home we were living in accordance with Kham Tare’s twenty-six-hour day.
Dawa came up to me and put her arms around my neck.
‘Do you want to have dinner?’ she asked. Then she started kissing me softly.
‘I’m absolutely ravenous,’ I told her. My anger had faded away and I was smiling again. She stroked my moustache and my goatee beard with the tips of her fingers.
‘Come along with me,’ she whispered.
The midday sun lit up the room and all of a sudden I felt bright and invigorated. There was nothing like coming home after a long day slaving away in the dark damp depths of a seriously annoying planet.
‘We’re going to have a nice quiet dinner,’ Dawa told me as she dragged me upstairs towards the dining room, ‘and then we’ll have a steaming hot bath together and then we’ll go to bed.’
‘But not to sleep.’
‘No, not to sleep,’ she grinned at me. ‘Today I have something very special planned for you. I’m looking forward to seeing how you behave…’
I wanted her. I wanted her badly. That android excited me in a million different ways. She was stunningly attractive and her body took my breath away. But her finest quality by far was her amazing sexual inventiveness, her sheer skill at the art. When I bought her I’d insisted on that when I had her programed.
But that afternoon, as I stroked her warm and perfect skin, all I could think of was that tall redhead with those turquoise eyes ringed with gold. And I couldn’t help wishing it was her, not Dawa, that was wriggling away in my arms.
The next day, when I reconnected to my RoDron to start work, I thought for a second or two, that my VR link must have had some kind of nervous breakdown. Either that or it was me that had just gone crazy: Cave Five was totally empty. Stripped bare. The murals had disappeared completely. All I could see were damp rock walls. I was stunned.
‘Maestro Nevus!’ My foreman called me over. ‘We’ve been waiting for you, Maestro.’
‘W-what?’ I stuttered as I took a step or two forwards. ‘What the hell has happened here, Tilma?’
‘Three hours after you disconnected, Counselor S’Neury returned to the complex accompanied by Sil V’Raol, the Counselor for Security, and they ordered me to prepare the Cave Five murals for immediate removal. We worked all night, Maestro, but we did a good job, don’t worry about that. The murals left here in perfect condition, all crated-up and properly protected.’
At that very moment, as a group, in walked Counselor S’Neury, the Oracle, the red-haired ‘royal researcher’ and two men who I recognized as members of the government, but only because of the gold medallions that were hanging on their chests, just like the one that S’Neury wore. One of them, the youngest one – barely grown-up, in fact – looked extremely nervous. The other one, middle-aged and with an arrogant and high-and-mighty look about him, smiled at me as if we’d known each other all our lives. My eyes were fixed on Gan U’Hel, who I’d spent the entire night with, although she didn’t know that. She looked back at me with those gorgeous turquoise eyes, utterly indifferent.
‘The Counselors will bring you up to date on everything, Maestro,’ Tilma told me, immediately aware of their presence because of the temperature change in the cave. ‘I informed them of your arrival.’
Tilma was essentially an AI algorithm, and my exclusive property. He contained all the art restoration knowledge in the universe, which naturally included all my personal techniques and practices. Despite the fact that he was currently downloaded into an android which didn’t belong to me, nobody apart from myself had the right to use him. As everybody knows, hardware is one thing, but software is something else entirely. And both Tilma’s programing and the programs installed in the rest of the workers and technicians were my property and mine alone. The government of Khan Tare had just committed another crime and this time it was an even more serious one. Their appalling behavior now gave me every right, both legally and morally, to break the contract that I’d signed with them.
‘Good morning, Maestro Nevus,’ S’Neury greeted me, his flabby belly wobbling as he adjusted the belt on his breeches.
‘Good morning, Mister Counselor,’ I replied, bowing to acknowledge all the new arrivals. ‘I would like to inform you that I hereby terminate my services on Kham Tare. I will return the down payment received, after deducting my general expenses and the value of the work that I have done over the last year.’
‘Not so fast, Maestro!’ he interrupted me, waving one of his chubby hands at me. ‘Our God spoke to us last night.’
‘I’m delighted to hear that,’ I replied, my fists clamped onto the lapels of my white lab coat. Despite having worked all night, I noticed, Tilma hadn’t forgotten to clean my RoDron and change its clothes. ‘And now I will leave you to celebrate this undoubtedly happy event. I have a great deal of coding work to do before I can erase my programs from your androids and robots.’
The three Cabinet members, the Oracle and the mystery researcher all looked at each other, their eyebrows working overtime. They clearly didn’t understand what was going on.
‘Did you not hear what the Honorable Counselor S’Neury just said to you?’ the teenage politician squeaked. All too predictably, he was covered in spots. ‘Our God, Tureswaja, spoke to us last night!’ He swallowed, took a deep breath, and then he started blushing. ‘And he talked about you!’
I scorned at him. How could a boy with barely a hair on his chin be a member of the government of the Fifteen, an actual Cabinet minister, when he should really have been at school, hanging out with his pals and chasing girls or boys to have sex with them?
‘Listen, young and Honorable Counselor,’ I answered, my hands still tight on my lab coat lapels. ‘Your god is not my god, and whatever it was that he said about me last night is of no interest at all to me, none whatsoever. My only business here was with your murals, and given that the Cave Five murals are no longer where they should be, my contract is now officially null and void. Furthermore, you have been monitoring my private communications with my foreman without informing me of the fact and you have used his and my technicians’ algorithms without my permission. I therefore believe that I have more than enough reasons to leave this planet as soon as I possibly can.’
‘Before you go, listen to what we have to say,’ the Oracle said, in that emotionless voice of hers.
‘Nothing you say, Honorable Nansil H’To, can be of any interest to me.’
Offended, the red-haired professor lady took a couple of steps towards me. She didn’t look very happy.
‘You won’t be any better than we are, if you just run away without listening to us!’ she yelled, standing right in front of me and staring me down, her hands jammed onto her hips. ‘Forget that stuck-up oh-so-sensitive artist’s pride of yours and open your ears for a change! Maybe the only idiot here is you! What we want to tell you is very, very important!’
What really surprised me was that, when she stood there in front of me, her wonderful eyes with their golden rings were absolutely level with my RoDron’s. Could she really be two meters tall? That was way taller than I’d imagined her. And why was it that I’d dreamt that it was her that I was making love with last night, rather than Dawa? And she’d just gone and called me stupid, stuck-up and over-sensitive.
‘That’s the way I like it!’ she concluded, turning her back on me and rejoining her colleagues. ‘I much prefer you when you keep your mouth shut.’
It wasn’t that I was deliberately keeping my mouth shut. I was just stunned into silence. It was ages since anyone had talked to me like that. I could have sworn that the last one who did was my mother.
‘Would you like to hear the prophecy now, please?’ the Oracle asked me.
The prophecy…? You’ve got to be kidding! Someone get me off this planet full of maniacs! Had they gotten stuck in the year 1000 of the Common Era? Or the year 2000, maybe? I breathed in, getting ready to tell her no, that no way did I want to listen to their damn prophecy, but for some reason, when I opened my mouth again, what I actually said was:
‘OK, I’ll listen to you.’
Four of the five Khams let out big sighs of relief, and suddenly they were all smiles. And that included the redhead. The Oracle, on the other hand – just for a change - didn’t even lift an eyebrow.
‘We are deeply grateful to you, Maestro Nevus,’ she said. ‘Follow us, please. We will now go to my residence in the Great Temple.’
What? They were actually going to let me leave the underground complex and set my eyes on the Great Temple in O’Tado, the capital of Kham Tare? I couldn’t believe it. I’d be the first outsider who had ever been there. What the hell had that Tureswaja of theirs said about me? What had made them think that I was worthy of such an unprecedented honor?
In absolute silence, we left Cave Five. Soon we were out of the underground complex and reached a chamber where there were plenty of sliders. We boarded them, headed on and then went up some stairs which took us outdoors and into an enormous courtyard that was paved with well-worn flagstones and bordered by colonnades on all four sides. All the walls were made of glass and I could see that, on each of the four sides, there were three classrooms full of schoolchildren.
Thanks to my VR system reproducing for me back on Peristere what my RoDron was experiencing on Kham Tare, I could feel the heat out there in the open and enjoy the smell of a distant bonfire. The bright aquamarine light from Shairas, the planet’s sun, was quite a revelation – I’d read about it, of course, but I’d never actually seen it – and everything was bathed in a soft blue-green color. To produce such a magical effect, either Shairas or the planet’s own atmosphere (the most likely explanation) must have contained a very high concentration of iron or beryl molecules.
Unfortunately all of the planets and asteroids that had been terraformed between 6000 and 8000 CE with the relatively primitive techniques of the period had a wide range of characteristics that were by no means all intentional. Eventually, the process was improved and perfected, uniform terraformation was achieved and it was successfully carried out up until fifteen standard years ago, when the Alliance prohibited any further planetary creation or colonization. Kham Tare was clearly a product of the earlier period, but the technical defects had actually produced a world that was breathtakingly beautiful.
‘Maestro Nevus,’ the Oracle said, snapping me out of my daydreams. ‘We are now in the northern sector of the Great Temple, where the children whom Tureswaja chooses to enter into his service reside. I myself lived and studied here before I became the Oracle. My parents handed me over to the Great Temple at the age of seven standard years.’
Only good manners stopped me coming out with some cutting remark about this appallingly heartless behavior. Still, respecting the customs of other people’s planets – or appearing to, at any rate - was more or less the first law of galactic coexistence. So long as the Khams didn’t try to impose their culture on others by force, there wouldn’t be a problem. Then again, small children being handed over to a temple by parents who probably couldn’t be bothered to take care of them was bad enough, but reinterpreting that as their heaven-sent selection by some all-powerful god, well, that really did make me mad.
‘So how does your god go about choosing the children he wants?’ I inquired, trying to disguise my irony. ‘I hope you don’t find my question offensive, by the way.’
Nobody replied to me, but I was expecting that. They were all exchanging worried looks as we left the large courtyard on our plate-shaped sliders. We went through some automatic doors and arrived at the beginning of a wide stone corridor, illuminated by that strange blue-green light which came in through a series of large, tall windows.
‘I will answer your question, Maestro Nevus,’ the Oracle said, after a very long and awkward silence. ‘You must understand that we are not in the habit of sharing our customs with outsiders. We obey Tureswaja wishes giving you all this information, but it’s very hard for us to do so.’
‘I fully understand,’ I replied, although the truth was that I didn’t, not at all. The way they behaved, it struck me as incredibly backward, to be honest.
‘All the children and young people who are brought up in the Great Temple,’ the Oracle continued in that unstressed voice of hers, ‘had died from disease or in an accident and were brought back to life by the will of Tureswaja. That is how our god selects them. For the parents, however painful it is for them to be separated from their children, it is nevertheless a joy and an honor to hand over their sons and daughters to the Temple. In any case, they would never have seen them again, had our god not resuscitated them.’
‘Forgive my curiosity,’ I said to her, once I’d gotten my breath back, ‘but do you have doctors and hospitals, you know, medicines, emergency services, that sort of stuff?’
‘Our health service is one of the most advanced in the entire galaxy,’ the high-and-mighty middle-aged Counselor proudly informed me. ‘By the way, my esteemed colleague S’Neury has been rather inconsiderate here: he has not introduced me to you.’
S’Neury turned to look at him. He was clearly offended.
‘One never introduces a Counselor,’ he reminded him pointedly. ‘And particularly not to someone who is not Kham.’
‘S’Neury, S’Neury, my dear fellow… Were you not listening to our god last night?’ the arrogant Counselor answered in a patronising tone. ‘Maestro Nevus, my name is Sil V’Raol and I am the Counselor of State Security in the government of the Fifteen. My esteemed colleague here is Tau L’Sham, our young Counselor for Defense.’
Well, that was a big relief, at least: the baby-faced boy wasn’t in charge of anything important: it was well over three thousand years since we’d had any military conflict in the galaxy. In fact, we didn’t even have armies anymore. After millions of deaths in thousands of wars, we had finally learned the value of mutual respect and live-and-let-live.
I didn’t see an awful lot more of the Great Temple, just the school courtyard and an endless series of very long corridors, interrupted occasionally by automatic doors which opened and closed behind us. We bumped into a few of the resuscitated grownups who were coming and going, and they stared at me with an over-exaggerated curiosity. They all seemed to be very busy.
But when we finally arrived at Nansil H’To’s enormous residence, no-one was waiting for her, there was no-one at all inside and, as far as I could tell, nobody else was living there. Not a single android servant or Counselor, not to mention a cook or a cleaner. What shocked me even more was that the Oracle’s entire palatial residence was a deep, dark black color, very overpowering. And I mean absolutely everything: the walls, the floors, the ceilings, the furniture… Strangely, the blue-green light that poured through the vast round windows picked out flecks of emerald in the shiny black lacquer. The only other touches of color, apart from the wooden frames of the few and rather austere pieces of furniture, were supplied by a very large image which was repeated on every single wall that was big enough for it to fit on: the full-length portrait of the balding fat man with the sumptuous robes and a friendly smile who had also appeared in the reflectograms that we’d seen in Cave Five. The same face, four and a half thousand years later, but this time in color, and with a much bigger smile.
‘This is Tureswaja’s physical appearance,’ the Oracle informed me. ‘For those of us who have seen him, this is what he looked like, always warm and welcoming.’
‘Did you see him when you were seven, when you died?’ I asked her. It may have seemed like I was giving credence to their ridiculous belief system, but I wasn’t, not at all. I was just going along with them so as not to seem rude or insensitive.
‘Yes, I did see him: we chatted away and spent some time flying kites together. They were lovely,’ she replied. ‘I did not want to return, but he told me that there was a very important task that he wanted me to carry out for him and that I really should come back to life. And years later, he chose me as his Oracle. Now, whenever I go into a trance and he takes over my body, he always transports me to that place where we spent time together.’
‘He seems to be a very friendly god,’ I mumbled, choking back a laugh.
‘He is,’ the Oracle said. ‘And he always takes care of the Khams.’
I have to admit that, at the time, it all seemed to me to be pretty absurd. Childish, almost. But later on, when I knew rather more about this friendly god of theirs, my take on him changed, very radically.
‘And last night he spoke,’ the Counselor for Defense insisted. ‘And it’s been a terribly long time since he spoke to us.’
‘That is right. Last night he spoke,’ the Oracle confirmed. ‘I never have any idea what happens when I go into a trance, so every time that Tureswaja takes me over, his message is automatically recorded so that, afterwards, I can help interpret it.’
‘So, what your god said about me last night, you actually have a recording of it?’ I asked. It seemed polite to show a bit of curiosity.
‘Yes, and we are about to show it to you,’ Counselor S’Neury replied, flopping down onto a large wood and leather sofa. It was black, of course. ‘Sit down here, Maestro, if you would be so kind.’
Everybody seemed to treat the Oracle’s residence as if it was their own home. The ginger-haired researcher had wandered off somewhere and returned with a tray full of drinks that she handed out to everyone there. Everyone except me, not surprisingly, given that RoDrons can’t drink. But she did sit next to me and I was pleased about that.
Once everyone had made themselves comfortable on the sofas and armchairs, all the windows in the room went dark but, instead of a screen being projected in mid-air, which was what I’d been expecting, a huge hologram emerged from goodness-knows-where and displayed the entire event in 3-D. The ceremony that I then witnessed, well, to say that it took my breath away would be to undersell it big-time.
Much to my surprise, the recording had been made in exactly the same room that we were now sitting in. The Oracle was surrounded by five or six of the resuscitated who were helping her change from her normal clothes into a much fancier costume, right there in the middle of the room. The only difference between then and now was the presence of her resuscitated assistants and a lot more Kingdom Counsellors that I had never met. They did call it the government of the Fifteen, after all. The Nansil H’To in the hologram just stood there, motionless, letting her assistants dress her. A few minutes later, completely enveloped in some iridescent material which was embroidered in metal and precious stones, she closed her eyes and everything went quiet. Nobody moved a muscle.
For what seemed like a very long time, nothing happened at all. Then, suddenly, Nansil H’To’s face began to change. Her beautiful and finely formed mouth, which was normally inexpressive, opened up into a gloriously happy smile, her nose became bigger and wider and her eyes, those stunning almond-shaped eyes of hers, looked like they were about to pop out of their sockets. The transformation was absolutely astounding. She barely looked like Nansil H’To anymore. In some strange way that I couldn’t make sense of, by the time the process was complete, her wonderfully fine features actually did look an awful lot like the chubby smiling face of their god Tureswaja. But it wasn’t just her face that had changed. Her slim body had somehow swollen in size as if she had swallowed so much air that she was on the point of bursting. Then she began to walk in circles, painfully slowly, as if she was so fat that it took her a huge effort even to support her own weight. It reminded me of a heartburn remedy that I had at home which used to blow me up like a balloon whenever I took too much of it.
Then she began to speak. But not in her own voice, so quiet and unstressed. It was a deep voice, unmistakably masculine, growly and rough and I couldn’t understand a word it was saying. The Oracle paused the hologram playback and turned to me.
‘You will not be able to understand what Tureswaja says, because he is speaking in the ancient Kham language, which predates our enslavement on Esmerdis and has disappeared completely. Only two or three people today can speak the language, and the only reason that they learn it is so that they can translate the messages which are given to us by our god.’
‘Are you one of those two or three people?’ I asked her, still finding it hard to accept the incredible difference between the beautiful face of the woman who was talking to me now and the frankly grotesque one which was up there in the hologram.
‘No, I am not. In fact, the Oracle is not allowed to study the ancient Kham language. It is forbidden. I help with the interpretation of the messages only after they have been duly translated by the interpreters.’
‘And this is their translation,’ Gan U’Hel told me, unfolding her wrist monitor. There was a text displayed on the screen. ‘I will read to you what our God told us last night.’
‘Searcher-in-Chief U’Hel is one of the few people who does speak our ancient language,’ the young Counselor Tau L’Sham piped up enthusiastically.
Searcher-in-Chief…? Not a researcher then. So should I assume that she was the head of the Kingdom’s Searchers, rather than of its Researchers? And if she was Searcher-in-Chief, the inevitable question was: what exactly was she searching for?
The hologram was switched back to play and the Nansil H’To who had now been transformed into the god Tureswaja began to move around, waving her arms around and talking that mumbo-jumbo again. She went on and on, but suddenly the sound was turned down and Searcher U’Hel started to read out her god’s message in a language I could understand.
‘My beloved Kham people,’ she began, ‘why don’t you do what I am asking you to do? Did I not tell you that this long Epoch of Grief & Anguish would only come to an end if you brought the man named Nevus to Kham Tare to restore my ancient temple? You brought him here, that is true, but only to keep him locked away below ground all day, never letting him know what was really going on. Let the man learn! Let him help us! I want him to study our customs, to study the history of our people. He is a man who knows, a man who can understand it all - a man who travels in time. He is the one whom I have chosen to bring to an end the most protracted Epoch of Grief & Anguish that we have ever had to suffer. Remove the Mural of the Rite from the damp cave where it has been hidden away for eons and set it proudly beneath the dome in the Place of Prayer, in the sight of all. I want Nevus to restore the Mural there and I want all our people, even the very youngest Khams, to have the chance to lay their eyes upon it. I have nothing more to say.’
At the very moment that Gan U’Hel finished reading out Tureswaja’s pronouncement, the Nansil H’To in the hologram collapsed to the ground, her body seemingly falling in on itself. It looked as if she had died. Her resuscitated assistants rushed to her side to help her get to her feet and they carried her out of shot. And that was the end of the recording. The windows went see-through and the blue-green light streamed back into the Oracle’s gloomy residence.