Scattered Suns - Kevin J. Anderson [47]
The old historian Vao’sh said in a potent voice, “If it grows too terrible, pause and turn your face to the sky. Yes, the night is black and the universe is deep, but each one of those bright stars is itself a blazing sun. Just narrow your gaze and focus on the sparkle, then concentrate on all the illumination pouring into the universe. Snatch just one droplet of it, and that should be sufficient to keep you strong.”
“Like a thread of the Lightsource,” said the lens kithman Ilure’l. “If we can cling to it, we will be saved.”
The refugees moved onward, their spirits buoyed for a little while before they sank into fear and gloom again. To distract them, Vao’sh began to tell heartwarming stories from the Saga of Seven Suns. But when the group stopped to rest, Designate Avi’h talked in a trembling voice about the awful Shana Rei, the creatures of darkness. Most of the panicked survivors blamed the Shana Rei for sabotaging the generators and destroying their escape shuttles.
Rememberer Vao’sh couched his reminiscences as heroic stories set in the thousand-year-long war against the ferocious shadow race that stole both light and souls. Eventually Ildiran heroes had vanquished the creatures that lived in the depths of black nebulas. Vao’sh’s tales should have been uplifting, but the tattered group fixated on fear of the Shana Rei.
“Probably not a good idea to talk about that, Vao’sh,” Anton advised quietly. “We do not need to create imaginary enemies.”
The human scholar knew that someone had intentionally shut down the generators in Maratha Prime. Someone had sabotaged the power assemblies and battery-storage areas, plunging the whole city into darkness. Though the Ildirans didn’t want to admit it, Anton speculated that the culprits might have been the Klikiss robots. There was no evidence against them, and the black robots had always seemed cooperative...but there simply weren’t any other suspects, unless he decided to believe in monsters under the bed!
He couldn’t shake the feeling that they might be walking right into the enemy camp. Yet what other choice did they have but to go seek sanctuary, now that they were stranded out here in the dark?
They walked on in silence. The lifeless quiet around them was disrupted by strange noises that a frightened child might have heard as bumps in the night.
The sudden severe cooling following months of hot daylight caused Maratha to throb as the landscape cooled off into the long night. Nearby, hot rivers sliced narrow canyons. In the abrupt thermal gradient, steam roared upward and then froze in the shatteringly cold air to fall as glittering frost.
As the group entered a thermally active area, steam vents broke through the ground, spewing geysers. In the pools of light from their handheld blazers, Anton could see smears of colorful lichens that thrived in the crevices and on mineral-rich surfaces of the upthrust stones.
Ahead, surprisingly incongruous in the dark rubble, ghostly stalks rose like a forest of armored plants with hard clamshell blossoms. The clusters reminded Anton of long barnacles or limpets that he had seen on the piers near his university town of Santa Barbara on Earth.
The two mated agricultural kithmen saw the growths and brightened. “Something alive, something growing,” said Syl’k, the female. “Not a normal ch’kanh.”
The group pushed ahead, grasping at any positive sign. In better days, Vao’sh had taken Anton down into a deep river gorge near the domed city. There, in the moist heat bathed with steam, colonies of armored anemones had risen with clacking hard petals to snatch gnatlike fliers from the air. The rememberer had called the plants ch’kanh.
These wild growths were the same as those plated anemones, but much larger, bristling with more outgrowths and telescoping stalks, each of which culminated in an armored mouth. These looked somehow...hungrier.
As the two agricultural kithmen