The Red King - Michael A. Martin [1]
If seeds in the black Earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey towards the stars?
—G. K. CHESTERTON (1874–1936)
Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it is, nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.
—H. L. MENCKEN (1880–1956)
“He’s dreaming now,” said Tweedledee: “and what do you think he’s dreaming about?”
Alice said “Nobody can guess that.”
“Why, about you!” Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. “And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?”
“Where I am now, of course,” said Alice.
“Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!”
“If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!”
“I shouldn’t!” Alice exclaimed indignantly. “Besides, if I’m only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?”
—LEWIS CARROLL, AKA CHARLES LUTWIDGE DODGSON
(1832–1898), Through the Looking-Glass and
What Alice Found There
Chapter One
SMALL MAGELLANIC CLOUD, 7 JANUARY 2380
(AULD GREG AERTH CALENDAR)
“Behold,” Frane said, unable to keep a slight tremor of awe out of his voice. Or is it fear? he wondered in some deep, shrouded corner of his soul.
But the vista that stretched before the assembled Seekers After Penance took Frane to a place far beyond fear. It was the most beautiful and terrible sight he had ever beheld. Effulgent tendrils of energy reached across millions of klomters of trackless emptiness toward the battered transport craft, like the probing fingers of some great, grasping hand.
Frane heard Nozomi gasp as she cowered behind him, as though the image threatened to reach straight through the cramped vessel’s viewer and grab her.
“Have faith,” Frane said. As a Neyel who had forsworn his own people’s conquest-hardened traditions to live among society’s slaves and outcasts, he knew well that faith was often the only thing that sustained him. To comfort Nozomi, he took one of her hands even as her graceful forked tail gently entwined with his. He gently disengaged from the female Neyel after noticing that one of her feet was grasping his leg hard enough to whiten the gray flesh beneath his loose pilgrim’s robe.
“I’m keeping station here,” said Lofi, the female Sturr who was handling the helm as well as the sensor station. Because she belonged to a race of multipartite colony creatures—one of the first local peoples, in fact, to be conquered by the ancestral Neyel after their arrival centuries ago in M’jallanish space—Lofi was able to separate several of her rounded thoracic segments briefly in order to perform disparate simultaneous tasks. Looking toward Lofi, Frane considered how this ability had made the Sturr species so useful to the earliest, most expansion-bent generations of precursor Neyel, the eldest Oh-Neyel Takers who spread throughout the M’jallan region to build the Neyel Hegemony on the backs of dozens of conquered slave races.
Will my people ever expiate the shame of those sinful days? Frane wondered. He feared he already knew the answer.
Eager to chase those dark thoughts away, Frane turned his gaze back toward the great, slowly coruscating starburst of energy that filled the screen before him. He saw that the image was holding the attention of everyone else