String Theory_ Cohesion (Book 1) - Jeffrey Lang [95]
Seven nodded, approving of the evident orderliness of the process.
“And everything was fine for a few hundred cycles until this farmer in the Fourteenth Tribe, Dagan by name, broke his plow blade on a rock. Except, of course, it wasn’t a rock.” He paused, waiting for Seven to ask the inevitable question.
Something in her almost rebelled at the expectation, but Seven fought it down, deciding that cooperation was more important at the moment. “Then what was it?”
“It was the Key,” Pad said. “The Key to Gremadia.”
“And what is the Key to Gremadia?” Seven was suddenly overcome by a desire to throttle the shriveled little creature.
Pad held up his hands about twenty-five centimeters apart and said, “I’ve seen drawings of it. About this big. Porous. Nothing special about it except that Dagan says as soon as he touched it, he started getting visions.”
“About Gremadia,” Seven said. She had analyzed enough of these sorts of stories to know what would come next. “An ancient city of wonders where the pious would live forever in peace and harmony.”
Pad extended his neck and reared back slightly. Seven hadn’t seen the gesture before and didn’t know how to read it until the Monorhan said, “Not exactly. Gremadia was a city on another world or in another dimension—Dagan wasn’t too clear on this—and it was inhabited by these all-powerful beings that battled for dominance. The gods the fourteen rih-hara-tan had talked about weren’t all one god, Dagan said, but a bunch of different fellows who all wanted to be the leader. Sometimes one person is in charge, sometimes another, and that’s why things rise and fall the way they do.”
Seven was intrigued. Though there were certainly cultures who had developed myth cycles that revolved around the tales of constant conflict between divinities—Earth’s Norse myths and the ancient Klingon god cycles were prime examples—these were generally legends of warrior civilizations. As confusing as Monorhans were in many regards, they were definitely not a warrior race. “Interesting,” Seven said. “And this Key—what happened when others touched it? Did they share Dagan’s visions?”
“No,” Pad said. “Some got sick, enough that other folks decided the gods didn’t want anyone but Dagan to touch it. Of course, that doesn’t explain why he died so young.”
“How young?”
“Just a few cycles after he found the Key,” Pad said. “Least that’s what the history books say.”
“But despite that he managed to gather followers,” Seven said—a statement, not a question.
“He managed to convince most of the Fourteenth Tribe,” Pad said, crumbling the greasy paper into a ball and throwing it into a dusty corner.
“He must have been very persuasive.”
“They say he could persuade anyone of the truth of his words in less time than it took to plow a field a chao long.” He added apologetically, “That’s a small field.”
“What did the other tribes—the ones who did not hear him speak—think of Dagan?”
“Nothing good. The rih-hara-tan were threatened by the change. There were lots of border incidents, though it never came to war.” Squinting up at Seven from where he squatted, Pad explained, “We Monorhans have a hard time going to war. We get mad at each other, we fight, but large, organized aggression, it doesn’t come easy to us. Something to do with the linking, the way hara see into each other.” From his tone Seven could hear he was guessing, that he could not know