The Dark Between The Stars

SIXTY-SEVEN
SHELUD

On the isolated alien space city, Shelud was far from the lush worldforest of Theroc, but with his treeling, he could touch the verdani mind and remain in contact with all other green priests, including his brother. It was his safety net.

He had never set foot off of Theroc before. While Shelud had always enjoyed “recalling” the experiences other green priests added to the verdani mind, secondhand events and shared information were not the same as actually being there himself. This was amazing!

Although he had promised not to reveal the exact coordinates of the derelict city, now named Okiah, Shelud could observe and listen, and tell parts of it to the worldforest. The strangeness of this place was breathtaking as clan Reeves began to settle some of the habitable chambers. He shared his impressions through the treeling, showing the mysteries even though he had no answers. No other green priest had ever experienced anything like this ancient alien city. The trees’ reactions to his news indicated strange gaps in the forest knowledge base. Even so, he felt excitement among the verdani. They were intrigued by the derelict.

As clan Reeves worked to set up their new home aboard the cold station, however, Shelud missed the smells of foliage, of berries and wildflowers. This air smelled sterile and metallic. He was used to warm, natural sunlight on his green skin, but here the artificial illumination felt too white, too cold. The metal decks were hard and unyielding. His treeling found the light weak and unsatisfying.

Yet Shelud didn’t regret his decision to come here to Okiah. He had joined the Retroamers to do his duty as a green priest, and he would make certain the worldforest had these new experiences. He occasionally accessed specific data when the Retroamers asked him, although clan Reeves seemed quite self-sufficient and secure in their own practical knowledge.

They installed power blocks to add light, heat, energy, and life support to the central hub and the habitation modules in the first spoke they had claimed. Olaf Reeves assigned a science team to study the long-dormant alien engines and generators. The Roamers could not decipher the mysterious writings, but they did analyze the alien engineering. Once they discovered that the extant reactors operated on principles they understood, the team managed to reactivate some of the systems. After installing supplemental power blocks, they restored primary lighting and power, which radiated out along all five axes.

The Teacher compy BO watched over the clan children. Though the students were restless and excited, she continued her usual curriculum. Clan Reeves had five other dedicated compies to work aboard the derelict city, but for the most part the Roamers did the tasks themselves.

As the days went by, Shelud had no regular role and almost no technical experience that could help the Roamers. Simple data from the worldforest mind wasn’t the same as knowledge, and Roamers seemed to possess an instinctive engineering understanding from the time they were children. While the families kept themselves busy, he tried not to get in the way. Shelud felt selfconscious about standing around and not helping with the frantic activity. Every person kept busy with myriad duties without needing to be told. Shelud didn’t understand how they all just knew what to do.

Of all the members of clan Reeves, he liked Dale best. The quiet son of the gruff clan leader seemed to be a kindred spirit. Finally, in frustration, he asked a harried Dale, “Please let me help somehow. What can I do?”

Dale looked grateful for the offer, although it wouldn’t necessarily diminish his workload. “I don’t know, what can you do? We’ve got habitat zones to check, recycling systems to install, galleys to rig so we can prepare food. This city is huge, and there’s so much room!” He chuckled. “At least no one’s fighting over particular quarters. That’s a nice change.”

“I can keep records,” Shelud said. “I can help unload ships. And if someone shows me how—”

Dale flashed him a quick, mischievous smile. “Oh, nothing like that. I think you’re most qualified to do exploring—hmm, and I’d better go with you to make sure that it’s done properly. We’ve been so busy setting up our new home, we’ve only explored one of the five spokes. Who knows how many secrets Okiah still has for us?”

“Your father said we shouldn’t do any discretionary exploring until all the work is done.”

“The work will never be done—I know my father.” He gave a quirk of a conspiratorial smile. “Don’t you want to share these new discoveries with your fellow green priests?”

“Yes! The verdani want to know all about this place. Some part of the worldforest already seems to know… but it’s forgotten.” He shook his head. “Maybe I can remind them.”

They had no clue about the race that had built this space complex, or why they had chosen to locate the city so far from any planet, but Olaf Reeves was a man with little curiosity. “If this is our new home, we’ll have all the time in the world to poke around and play. But business first, survival first. We stake out our territory, make the systems functional. Families must help one another. Then, when we are stable, we can move on to sightseeing.”

Many Retroamers, though—including Dale—found this frustrating. They wanted to investigate all five spokes, searching for treasure or wonders or information. They were hungry for some hint about the strange race that had created this city.

Looking at Shelud, Dale said, “Worst-case scenario, we could live aboard our ships indefinitely, however long it takes to make Okiah completely habitable. There’s no crisis deadline to get all of the city systems running, so why not explore? Isn’t it more important to learn more about where we are? Okiah is our new home, after all.”

“Yes, I would say it’s important.”

Dale continued, stretching his reasons. “What if we find something that makes the habitation more… habitable? We might find a water reservoir that the original inhabitants used, or a self-sustaining greenhouse dome full of fruits and vegetables. Who knows? It’s worth a look—I’d only be doing it to help establish our new home, you know.”

He obviously didn’t expect even the gullible green priest to believe that. Shelud said, “And because you’re curious and want to look around.”

“That too.”

Dale monitored his fellow Retroamers as they worked, settling into the private quarters they had chosen throughout the first module. Each day he oversaw a list of required tasks, and when that work was done, he and Shelud set aside several hours to secretly explore new parts of the derelict station. Dale did not announce his plans, nor did he ask explicit permission—therefore, his father could not explicitly forbid him.

The two went off by themselves, working their way down spoke three, chamber by chamber. When other clan members dropped out of sight for brief periods, Shelud realized that he and Dale weren’t the only ones investigating the derelict city.

Steeped in the curiosity of the worldforest, Shelud wanted to know who the builders were. What had they called themselves? What had they looked like? Where had they come from before constructing this ambitious city in space, and where had they gone after leaving it?

Each day, Shelud and Dale explored another empty geometrical chamber, and when they came back, Shelud would connect through his treeling and describe what he had seen.

Most of the station chambers were empty, unadorned, sterile metal, but in one dark room not much larger than a closet they found an astonishing mural. When Shelud and Dale shone their lights inside, they saw that the walls had been painted with dense, tangled foliage, bright leaves and lush fronds, close trunks of crowded and immense trees. It looked like a swatch of pristine worldforest. Shelud stared with awe, running his fingers over the images imprinted on the walls. The worldtrees were unmistakable—but how?

Most of the chambers and bulkheads were bare metal, with no colors at all. He didn’t understand this particular vibrant painting.

In a secondary module on spoke three, they discovered a vault where the angled walls were divided into interlocking triangular sections, enameled in bright primary colors. Each colored section was studded with raised designs, embossed symbols that tapered down to the triangles’ points, and unmistakable stylized patterns of worldtree fronds… but why here, in a sterile space city far outside an uninhabited solar system?

Shelud ran his fingers down the vertex of a triangle marked with a frond, touched the raised alien letters. He pressed harder, hoping the language might respond in a tactile way. When he depressed the point, he felt the enameled plate vibrate and grow warm. Then the panel itself dissolved into a projected image.

He gasped and snatched back his hand. Dale hurried over, and they both watched the image sharpen into the face of a parchment-skinned alien unlike any species Shelud had ever seen. The creature was small-statured and hairless, its head round and craggy, like a crudely formed boulder. It had large black eyes surrounded by jutting orbital ridges. The voice droned out incomprehensible words in an even, soothing sound, like a professor giving a lecture.

A grin filled Dale’s face. “You and I just discovered a new alien race!”

“At least the remnants of one,” Shelud said.

Astonished, Shelud remembered where he had seen something like this: During the Elemental War, when the first giant treeships had come back from deep space, one of them had held a mysterious pilot, whose alien features had fused after millennia, becoming part of the tree’s heartwood. The pilot came from a forgotten race that had been connected with the worldforest. Long ago.

This creature looked similar. Could they be the same race?

Such a discovery was too important to keep hidden. When Dale confessed to his father that they had been exploring, he acted tentative and nervous. When Olaf began to rebuke Dale for wasting time and effort, Shelud insisted that he had encouraged Dale to search, because the worldforest had asked for details about the original builders and any cultural artifacts they had left behind.

After Dale and Shelud explained what they had discovered, Olaf could not keep the other Roamers from investigating their mysterious new home. Curiosity seekers and treasure hunters crowded into the library chamber, pressing enameled triangular plates and watching the projected images. All the recordings showed a similar lecturing alien, perhaps even the same individual. But since the Roamers could not understand the language, the records meant little beyond the novelty of observing a new alien race.

Despite Olaf’s disapproval, clan Reeves could not keep this great discovery a secret. Shelud reported the exciting news through telink, spending hours with his treeling to explain the treasure trove of knowledge aboard the empty city they had named Okiah.

Back in the Confederation, numerous xeno-archaeologists were fascinated, and offered to send large teams to complete the exploration “in a professional fashion,” but Shelud honored his promise and refused to reveal the location of the space city.

“I won’t have swarms of strangers picking our place apart,” Olaf grumbled. “We came here. We took the risk, and this is our home.” The clan leader did, however, grudgingly allow exploration parties to continue the investigation, provided their work did not suffer. And Shelud reported the findings.

Pursuing an idea, Shelud brought his treeling into the library chamber. Although humans couldn’t understand the alien language—not yet—he thought the knowledge might exist somewhere in the vast verdani mind. He depressed the point of an enameled triangle, playing a report while his mind was connected to the worldforest and all the ancient knowledge there. The strange-sounding alien language droned in his ears.

To Shelud’s delight, the worldtrees understood.

As the green priest played the alien records, the verdani mind passed information back to him—not a word-for-word translation, but a basic summary of concepts. Listening to the unfolding story, he was filled with wonder…

Later, he met with the Roamer families in an amphitheater chamber for a small clan convocation. Beside him, Dale Reeves listened with bright eyes, as Shelud said, “They called themselves the Onthos, a quiet and passive race that inhabited a dozen star systems. The Onthos did not conquer worlds, did not build a vast empire. The verdani were aware of them ages ago.”

“What do the records say?” Olaf asked. “Why did the Onthos build this city so far from any planet?”

“The Klikiss preyed upon their race in a swarm war. The Onthos were attacked on their planets, wiped out on one colony world after another—the Klikiss destroyed anything in their way. The Onthos were nearly exterminated, and the survivors fled here. Over the years they built this refuge fortress far from any planetary system the Klikiss might be interested in, living where they would not be hunted. They took in refugees from their devastated Onthos planetary colonies. This was their last hiding place.”

“If this city was their sanctuary, then where did the aliens go?” asked Dale’s wife, Sendra.

“That part isn’t in the records,” Shelud said.

Dale suggested, “That was thousands of years ago. After the Klikiss left on their swarming, maybe the Onthos didn’t need to stay here anymore. They wouldn’t have to hide.”

“Then why haven’t we found any trace of these aliens anywhere else in the Spiral Arm?” asked another Roamer. Shelud still didn’t know everyone’s name.

“We haven’t explored every planet in the Spiral Arm,” said Bjorn, the head spacecraft engineer.

“It doesn’t matter.” Olaf Reeves was impatient with the discussion. “The important thing is that this city is empty, and we’ve claimed it as our own clan’s sanctuary. Now that the mystery is solved, we can focus on other things.”

Shelud didn’t think the mystery was solved, and numerous questions remained. Countless chambers remained to be explored, including one entire spoke of the derelict city.

Four days later, Shelud and Dale went to one of the last main modules in the only remaining spoke left to explore, the most remote section on its extended axis. Prominent pink triangles were painted on the entry hatch. Unlike the colorful triangles in the library module, these were crude. The electronics of the hatch had been damaged, so Dale had to work for an hour before he could force the barrier open.

Inside, they found the bodies.