Chapter 6: Secrets Revealed
Darrissea peered in Phylomon’s eyes, wondered if he asked for her to come with him only because he was jealous.
“Now?” she asked.
“Yes,” Phylomon said. “It’s urgent.”
Darrissea went to the mammoth, took a running leap, and grabbed onto the hair on its left haunch, then scurried up to the top of the hump on its back and clung to Fava’s waist.
Phylomon kicked the mammoth’s ears, and it headed north, through the camp.
Allon was with her odd friends, and all of them were watching Darrissea leave, all six strangers. Darrissea shouted, “Quit staring at me, you mutants, or I’ll take my knife and abort your mutant asses!”
Yet the strangers watched her still.
Phylomon, Fava, and Darrissea rode north at a trot for two hours, to a small frozen lake, and the mammoth waded through a tangle of scrub until Phylomon reached some rocks—four monoliths standing a dozen feet tall.
A fifth flat slab covered the others, forming a small enclosure. They dismounted.
“What is this place?” Darrissea asked.
“Upon this slab,” Phylomon said, “eight hundred years ago, we built a pyre for Theron Major. His bones are buried here beneath our feet. I thought we should come and pay homage.”
Theron Major, the first human Starfarer to begin teaching the Pwi, was a man of peace; he was also the first human to be gunned down by the Slave Lords.
Darrissea felt privileged to be here, but was still curious as to why Phylomon was being so demanding—and so secretive.
Darrissea wondered if Theron would ever have guessed that in Smilodon Bay alone, his deeds would be so well remembered that a dozen men would be named for him.
“Did you know him?” Fava asked.
“Very well,” Phylomon said. “I was young when Theron ran his school in South Bay. We had heard rumors that the Starfarers were taking slaves. We came on an expedition from South Bay, flying in hovercrafts. At Bashevgo we found many Pwi who had been taken as slaves to work as farmers, miners, and laborers. Theron tried to talk our people into setting them free. We thought we’d succeeded, but here the slavers ambushed us and murdered Theron.”
“Is this the same path you took to Bashevgo back then?” Fava asked.
“Yes, roughly,” Phylomon whispered. He stepped outside the small structure and looked up. A red drone shone in the sky, palely visible even in daylight, a spear of white. Phylomon muttered, “The world is only so large. I sometimes seem doomed to travel the same paths, over and over, as if retracing my steps.”
“What do you mean?” Darrissea asked.
Phylomon said, “That summer, I traveled these same plains with Theron, and afterward I learned to hunt slavers in the darkness. Three hundred and sixty years ago, I came here leading Terrazin Dragontamer to our first battle on the north rim of the Mammoth Run Plateau. Now I’m circling round to Bashevgo again. It feels like some great cosmic chase, a spiral, an endless battle between enons.”
“Enons?” Darrissea asked.
“An old term,” Phylomon said. “A concept borrowed from our friends the Eridani.” He nodded up into the sky at the red drone. “Enons are opposing combatants that can never win, never dominate. You would think that the Eridani, with their communal minds, would have reached some consensus on issues such as justice and mercy, good and evil. But they haven’t. They view the universe in terms of competing opposites, called enons. In the physical universe enons are observed in the form of matter and antimatter. Creation and chaos. Enons appear to do battle, but their forces remain equal. That is the way I feel about the Blade Kin. I and they are enons. I battle them, hack them down. Always they come at me again, as if freshly created only to bloody my sword.
“Anyway,” Phylomon added, “to work. For over three hundred years, I have kept some armaments hidden. But now I must unearth them. I wanted you to be here with me, to see where the cache is. That way, if I die, you will know what is available to you.”
Phylomon walked into the brush and set his hand on a huge boulder; then Phylomon had Darrissea and Fava place their hands beside his, and he asked each woman to speak her name.
Last of all Phylomon spoke his name.
The boulder collapsed into dust, and a great stone box appeared. The mammoth, only a few yards away, trumpeted in fear, and Darrissea fell back in surprise. Fava felt her own stomach fluttering.
Phylomon spoke to the box in English, saying “Open,” and the lid slid away to reveal odd devices—rods, medallions, strange guns. The box emitted a rotten odor, like some long-unused pantry. Fava stepped back a dozen yards, terrified.
For a long time Phylomon studied the great box, and then he pulled out a tiny black cube and swallowed it.
“What is that?” Darrissea asked.
“A weapon that will remain hidden in my stomach until I call upon it,” Phylomon said.
He pulled out eight white rods and one blue one, like long pipes, and he gave three each to Fava and Darrissea. “These were not made as weapons,” he said softly. “Originally, when our forefathers terraformed Anee, the planet was very unstable. Situated as it is, the largest moon circling a gas giant, it undergoes phenomenal gravitational stress, causing volcanoes and earthquakes and tremendous tides. Those stresses were necessary for the planet to build an atmosphere, but they are also inconvenient. So we used harmonic resonance rods”—he held out the sticks—“to trigger earthquakes and relieve the tectonic plates so that we could build our cities.”
Phylomon looked at the two women and must have realized that neither of them could understand him. “When we get to Bashevgo, we may need to breach the walls to the city. To do so, you must plant the rods in the wall and twist. Plant all eight white ones first, and the blue one last. Within a few minutes the walls will shatter.”
“These start earthquakes?” Fava asked, her eyes widening in a mix of wonder and fear.
Phylomon nodded gravely. “Bashevgo is fairly stable. I don’t know exactly how much damage we could cause. But in some other cities—down in Greenstone where they are closer to the fault lines—we could level the entire countryside.”
Fava set her rods on the ground, gingerly, as if afraid of them.
Phylomon reached into the box and pulled out other objects—five guns, exactly half of those in the box. “So little left,” he mused, and he held them out to Fava.
She would not touch them. “Those are evil weapons,” Fava said. “They are not friendly to me, I can tell.”
“I offer you portable laser cannons, and you decline? What will you do, fight the Blade Kin with spears and swords?”
“If I must,” Fava said, but Darrissea took the guns, carrying them like an armload of firewood.
Phylomon studied Fava a moment. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. Perhaps I can find some friendly weapons for you.”
He pulled out a shining bow of silver with two knobs on each end. “That looks friendly,” Fava said.
“No, we would need an allosaur to use this. It’s a tamer, used to control such beasts. It attaches to the allosaur’s brain, and when you speak commands, it translates them into impulses that the allosaur can react upon. When I was young, we used to bring allosaurs over from Hotland to race. The Slave Lords used to have their captains ride them.”
He pulled out three pieces of green leather—two inches wide and a foot long, like pieces of dry jerky. He studied each in turn, peering at them closely.
“What are those?” Darrissea asked.
“These are the cauls of the symbiotic skins taken from dead Starfarers. Unfortunately, these were not available when my first wife was alive. Only after the Talent War, when the Starfarers died. You see, sometimes a body is so destroyed that even the symbiote cannot regenerate it. Then the caul separates, and the symbiote must wait to reattach to a new host. Would you be willing to wear a skin like mine?” Phylomon looked up at Fava and Darrissea, held out the strips of jerky. “You need only cut yourself and place the caul on the cut so it can feed on your blood. Once it drinks a few drops, it will cover your skin, and thereafter it will feed primarily on your sweat.”
Darrissea’s heart pounded. She knew what he was offering—immortality, and possibly his love.
His eyes showed pain, loneliness. She had thought that she only imagined jealousy in his eyes when he caught her with Stavan. She suddenly saw that the Starfarer must be so alone, living forever in his cage of flesh. In a way, Phylomon did not live, but merely existed.
“No,” Fava said, and Darrissea waited, considering. Phylomon’s loneliness should not have mattered to her at all, did not really matter much.
Darrissea had found Stavan now.
“Wise choice,” Phylomon said when she did not reach out to take one; he smiled down at her, and his cerulean eyes were ancient.
“I never would have chosen to live my life either. When I was young, we slipped symbiotes on and off with hardly more thought than you would change your clothes. Unfortunately, these cauls have died over the years and will do no one any good.”
He crushed the strips of leather in his hand. They crackled and tore like chaff, and he let them float on the wind.
Phylomon searched the remaining pile of odd boxes until his eyes settled on a small bundle of wrapped leather the size of a loaf of bread. He picked it up, as if testing its weight, then looked steadily at Fava.
The leather bundle was crudely tied, as if by a child. Darrissea could almost imagine that the leather protected some girl’s wooden doll.
The Starfarer held it out for Fava. “You wanted a friendly weapon. This is not a weapon, but it is friendly. Unwrap it.”
Fava tried to unwrap the bundle, but the leather straps broke easier than they untied. Still the leather smelled sweet, as if it held some treasure. Inside was a small silver flask and a beautiful ivory broach with a leaping sabertooth carved into it.
“You have heard of faders, those of my people who it was said could ‘walk invisible.’ Would you become one?”
“Would I be invisible?” Fava asked.
“No, not really,” Phylomon said. “The fader distorts time. It causes an intense energy field around you, warping time. While others live in our time stream, you can speed up.”
“I don’t understand,” Fava said. “What would happen to me? Would I speed up forever?”
“When you activate the fader, for a brief moment, a few seconds, time would seem to slow around you, and you’d move quickly. The air would seem thick and unyielding, like water. Perhaps this would frighten you, but as long as you move slowly and breathe deeply, you will be all right.
“As the rest of the world ages three seconds, you will have about five minutes in which to work. You could retreat from danger or cross a wide field unseen. You could walk so rapidly over water that you would not sink, or you could kill enemies.
“In these ways, Starfarers who wore faders served as spies. I think that since you are both already disguised as Blade Kin, Fava, you would make a good fader.”
Fava nodded dumbly, and Phylomon opened the silver flask, had her drink the fluid, then fitted the ivory medallion to her cloak. “The fluid from the bottle takes two days to become absorbed by the cells in your body. After that you can activate the fader by pressing the medallion hard between your fingers,” Phylomon said. “But remember, the medallion requires a great deal of energy, which it gathers from radiation.”
“Light from the sun?”
“No,” Phylomon said. “This radiation blows through our world day and night, never slowing as it passes through the planet. Still, the fader must gather energy from these particles, and it takes several hours to recharge. You must use the fader sparingly, and rely on your wits more than on technology.”
From the box Phylomon pulled out several large white plates, then took one small black one.
“Hover mines,” he explained, and he pulled his knife, slit open his left arm, then placed the small black hover mine in the incision.
His symbiote healed the incision immediately, concealing the weapon. The women watched in horror, and Phylomon said, “I carry more weapons this way than you know. Now that we are going into battle, that is exactly as it should be.”
He looked at the box one last time, said the word, “Close,” and the great stone slammed shut. He said, “Conceal,” and all around them motes of dust seemed to flow upward, like millions of ants crawling atop each other, until the dust closed over the boulder.
When he finished, the great obsidian boulder sat with bits of crimson and yellow lichens on it, appearing to be a simple boulder, except that it was no longer covered with snow.
He sat down on it and, showed them how to use the weapons.
When he finished, Fava remained perfectly still. She sighed and said, “There will be much to remember.”
“I will make it easier for you,” Phylomon said. “In order for your brain to make temporary thoughts into permanent thoughts, it must use electrical energy to change the DNA in your cerebrum. The process takes roughly half an hour. On the trip home, as we ride for half an hour, think about what I have told you, practice each action in your mind, and if you can manage to concentrate for that half an hour, then even when you are an old, old woman, you will recall all that I have said.”
Darrissea did not understand much about electricity or DNA, but she pondered his instructions as they rode home.
When Darrissea returned to camp with Fava and Phylomon at sunset, they found the three Blade Kin prisoners decapitated and hanging by their feet among the barren trees.
Phylomon wondered aloud if the Hukm had decided to kill the men, and he checked the scene. There was no blood on the ground, though a bloody cooking pot stood by. Darrissea studied the gory mess and found footprints in the well trampled snow.
All the footprints under the tree were human—the big toe pointing forward instead of curving in as on the feet of a Neanderthal.
Phylomon spoke to a dozen Hukm who were sleeping in the camp nearby. At last he gazed over to the group of six humans, the outsiders.
They were all awake now, but none of them looked his direction. Instead, they stood with shoulders hunched, as guilty men will.
Phylomon cut the dead prisoners down. He picked up the bloody cooking pot. There were marks in the blood around the rim, the impressions of lips.
“Someone drank their blood?” Fava wondered aloud.
Phylomon loosened his sword in its sheath. “Follow me, and stay close,” he said. He carried the pot back to the six. The sun was falling behind the mountains.
Darrissea and Fava each carried a gun, followed behind Phylomon, legs shaking in fear.
“What are you?” Phylomon asked the six as they drew near. None would look at him. “Why did the Creators send you?”
The beautiful blonde Allon leapt at him from a sitting position twenty feet away, seeming almost to fly through the air.
Phylomon ducked aside and slashed above him with his sword, and great gouts of blood splattered from her stomach as if from a sack. She fell in two pieces.
The other five bounded away, leaping astonishingly high, then began running.
It all happened so quickly that neither Darrissea nor Fava had time to fire, but Phylomon howled in parody of a Hukm, and within moments the Hukm rose from camp, racing over the ground, and began clubbing the the strangers.
The strangers bounded away, sometimes jumping five feet over the head of a charging Hukm, gyrating and twisting in the air to avoid the deadly clubs.
One of the strange men landed on the shoulders of a giant Hukm woman nearly ten feet tall. He slapped her temple, tore open a bloody swath and snapped her neck.
The nearest Hukm roared in anger and charged.
Suddenly, among the snow-covered hills, thousands of Hukm roared in answer and converged on the area, loping over the snow between the twisted limbs of scrub oak and juniper.
The Hukm caught two strangers quickly and pummeled their broken bodies with great war clubs. Two others seemed far more interested in escaping than fighting. But Darrissea watched the Hukm converge.
The outsiders didn’t stand a chance.
Phylomon caught one woman, a nubile young brunette, and pinned her to the ground, but the muscles in her arms twisted like steel cables, breaking his grasp.
Darrissea watched the Starfarer’s symbiote release a blinding bolt of electricity, like lightning, and the girl’s muscles spasmed.
She jerked forward and lay facedown in the snow. Hukm circled the two.
The big white females with their pendulous breasts raised their clubs, threatened and growled. Their brown eyes were wide, fierce, excited.
Darrissea feared that they might leap in and smash Phylomon in their blood lust, but the most shocking thing was not the sound of their roaring that echoed over the hills, or their eyes glazing in their fury.
The most fascinating thing to Darrissea was their smiles. The Hukm were smiling as they snarled and stifled the urge to attack.
Phylomon leapt on the downed woman, pinning her tightly.
“Answer me!” Phylomon shouted. “What are you?”
She only growled at him in anger, like a trapped wolf.
He flipped the girl over, and Darrissea saw that her face no longer looked human. Instead, her features had become distorted.
The flesh had caved in over her skull. She was still spasming from the shock. She reached up with her nails and slashed Phylomon’s back, a blow that shredded his thick leather jerkin.
Darrissea felt sure that her claws would have ripped the kidney from a normal human. The girl’s face puffed out again, the hollows on her cheeks and forehead expanding like balloons, and Phylomon pulled his sword, rammed it through her neck, and staggered back, gasping.
Darrissea watched the girl’s features deflate, even her breasts beneath her jacket.
She slumped down and died in the snow, a strangely formless creature.
Darrissea peered around. The battle was over. Phylomon stood, panting over the fallen strangers.
“We’ll remain camped here for the night,” Phylomon said.
The Hukm brought over the bodies of the other false humans, and hundreds of the Hukm circled them.
Phylomon looked up at Darrissea and Fava. “I’m going to dissect them, find out what we’re fighting,” he said. “It won’t be pretty. You may want to avert your eyes.”
Darrissea nodded and walked over the uneven ground back to camp, which was hidden in a shallow depression surrounded by willows.
The snow was deep and windblown in the depression, and the air seemed somehow cleaner here away from the heavy scent of fur.
The Hukm quieted. In the distance, miles away, Darrissea could hear the Hukm’s questioning roars, almost like the calls of some odd, feral night birds preparing to sleep.
Stavan lay in the snow in the setting sun, curled in his bedroll. Darrissea looked down at him, at his burnished hair, the sleek angles of his face. He breathed erratically, shallowly. She knew that he was awake.
“Stavan?” she asked, recalling those lips, sweeter than any man’s lips had a right to be, the way his muscles had felt like iron cords, the way he had set a naked knife beside their bed earlier in the morning. “Stavan?”
He looked up, smiled at her as if just waking.
He stretched his arms wide, displaying his sleek musculature. He was nude within the bedroll. Darrissea’s voice sounded far away even to herself as she asked, “Are you still hungry for me?”
Stavan gazed into the barrel of her gun, and his beautiful gray eyes flew open wide. “I’m not like the others,” he breathed, “I love you! I really love you! I wouldn’t have hurt you—I was just …”
“Hungry?” For a long time she stared into his eyes, and the setting sun was so bright that it highlighted each hair on his brow, the golden skin of his face.
He swallowed hard. “I’ll go away, leave you and your friends. Tell me the name of a city, someplace where your enemies live, and point the way for me. I can hunt elsewhere.”
“Denai,” she said, jerking her chin west toward the mountains.
Stavan nodded. He cautiously climbed to his feet began packing his bedroll.
Night was falling, and he’d be weeks marching through the snow. She’d seen the hunger in his eyes earlier, knew he couldn’t make it without feeding.
But he was strong, dangerous still. Darrissea knew she couldn’t let him get close. He moved slowly, pulling his bedroll tight, as if pondering.
When he turned and leapt at her, Darrissea fired into his throat, blowing him backward, where he sprawled on the ground.
There he lay, unnaturally still, not breathing, not moving in the slightest. Darrissea found herself panting, wanting to scream or run, but she forced herself to stay. She stood for an eternity watching the skin on his face deflate.
***