The Red King - Michael A. Martin [2]
“Can’t we approach it more closely?” g’Ishea said, cuddling up against Fasaryl, her mate. Members of an indigenous species that had been displaced—and then largely slaughtered—to make room for the shining Neyel capital of Mechulak City and the other great metrosprawls of the Neyel Coreworld, g’Ishea and Fasaryl had never known a time when their kind had been free to graze unhindered. Frane could only wonder what it was like to live as a forced laborer on what had once been a bucolic paradise, toiling endlessly beneath the Neyel lash and the lidless eye of Holy Vangar, the Stone Skyworld that had orbited their planet since the times of the First Conquests. How would it be, he wondered, to live that way for a dozen generations without any hope of freedom?
Frane cast a questioning glance at Lofi—or rather at the globular, leathery portion of Lofi to which her primary sensory cluster was attached.
“I would advise not getting any nearer to it than this,” Lofi responded, an overtone of fear coming through the vocoder that rendered her guttural native utterances into Neyel-intelligible speech. “That phenomenon is throwing off spatial distortions like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I can’t guarantee this ship will hold together if I let us drift any closer to them.”
“Disappointing,” Frane said, though he wasn’t completely certain that he meant it.
“I’m more than happy to keep my distance,” said Nozomi in a quavering voice. Her tail was wrapping nervously around Frane’s waist again. He brushed the prehensile appendage aside with his own.
Frane turned toward her, prepared to offer a waspish observation about her tiresome, almost theatrical displays of faintheartedness. Why couldn’t she keep her fears to herself, as he did?
“Why has this appeared?” Fasaryl said, pointing the opposable digits of one of his front hooves toward the tendrils of energy displayed on the screen.
“You know why, beloved,” g’Ishea said, worrying her dewlap with her wide, rough tongue. “Because the Sleeper has at last begun to awaken.” Though g’Ishea’s low voice sounded calm, the gurgling noise emanating from her multiple digestive organs told Frane otherwise.
“So everyone keeps saying,” Fasaryl said, clearly unsatisfied with the obvious answer.
Since the puzzling energetic phenomenon had abruptly appeared several weeks earlier, just pars’x from the very Coreworld itself, the Neyel intelligentsia had offered countless theories to account for it, as had the clergy, both on the cultural fringe and in the mainstream. To some it was a rare instance of interspatial slippage between adjoining regions of subspace. To others it was merely the beginning of yet another iteration of the cycle of cosmic death and rebirth, a phase that would take the universe billions more years to pass through entirely. To others it was merely a localized natural disaster, a thing of rare beauty and thankfully even rarer violence.
Frane knew that some saw the vast, multihued energy eruption as a cause for fearful rejoicing, because it had destroyed but a single Neyel-settled world.
So far, he thought.
Or was the expansive, colorful energy bloom, as those of a more secular bent had suggested, merely a temporary reopening of one of the long-neglected spatial rifts through which the Devilships of the Tholians had launched their savage attacks some ten generations back?
Frane felt certain he knew the true answer to the mystery. The real nature of the thing on the screen. And he knew that the other Seekers After Penance, the natives who had traveled with him to the ragged edge of this lovely, savage manifestation, shared his certainty deep down, regardless of their fears and doubts of the moment. Their own peoples, after all, had compiled the stories, had told and retold them for uncounted thousands of planetary cycles.
This blaze of unimaginable forces was nothing less than the Sleeper of M’jallanish legend, stirring at last from His aeons-long slumbers. And Frane was here to witness it.
Maybe we haven’t come merely to watch the Awakening,