A GREAT DISEASE AMONG THE STARS
1563 4D
He woke on his back under stars, among the scrub and boulders of the mountain slope. Jeddin sat on his right, Turiosten on his left, and Onnhasshakh on his left near his feet. “Can you stand now?” Jeddin asked him.
Andrew struggled to his feet and sat against a large rock. “Yes.” He turned to Onnhasshakh. “Who are you? What are you? Where is Leil?”
Onnhasshakh tilted her head slightly to one side, and spoke in a curiously formal tone. “I am the ancestor of others here, others who inhabit your kind. A million circles this world has made about its sun since I arrived here with my strandfamily, whose name I no longer speak. Thousands of turns ago, your people first arrived here. They were tiny things, made small, and frozen for space migration; they remade themselves into others like you. They built these Cities, they lived a time; and then my children killed them.
“For that wrong, I repudiated my ancestors and my descendants, my timebraid. And when your people arrived in your slow ships at last, you came to live in these Cities, the houses of your ancestors’ greatest descendants. I awoke then, once again. I feed on those among you who have destroyed their sentattar, and on those who have none.
“I wait for your people to change their world. You have set a war in motion, a war which will determine whether you will all die as the builders of the Cities did before you.” Onnhasshakh paused. “That is who I am, for you. Your Leil is gone now, through the Gate none of us can pass. It will be your Gate also, some day.”
“Make it my Gate now.”
“That is not my choice. You will choose it, but not soon.”
“No? I can kill myself.”
“Of course. But do you know where the paths lead beyond the Gate? Your choices here will choose your path there.”
“Yeah, I know. This is just so many words.” Andrew slapped his hand against the rock. “Wait a minute. You swallowed us up. Is that where we are back in the City right now, inside you?” In the corner of his mind, he wanted to see Leil there again; maybe she was safe with him, maybe this was all a nightmare.
“You will see,” Turiosten said.
“But who killed the builders?” Jeddin asked.
“My kindred,” Onnhasshakh replied. “The builders of the Cities invaded the innerspace that now only your andros, and those half-andros like you, can see. They found what we have forbidden them, and they began to spread like a great disease among the stars, long before it would be safe for us all.
“We debated and argued, knowing we had to destroy them. Against my own strand, I stood for leniency, and after the destruction they exiled me here.” Under the last rays of the setting second moon, she stood silent.
Andrew thought of Grendel and Ezzar. “And the war? Who should win, so we’ll be safe?”
“It is not the winner, but the winning, that is important. Most wars are only loss.”
Andrew looked up; beyond Jeddin a third female figure stood shining in the night, its back to him, its arms lifted up as if to embrace the sky full of stars. For an instant, fueled by stubborn hope, he thought it was Leil, somehow regenerated here in this shifting dimension; then the figure turned to face them with dazzling sun-hot eyes. It spoke, and its words took roiling shapes and fell to the slope to bound away like fat, frenzied little rodents.
Turiosten laughed and said, “Onnhasshakh and I have made the hanhorhn. The woman you see is our child, from qaqanhialh. We name her Arhnhashokha. Jeddin, will you carry her too?”
Jeddin nodded.
Onnhasshakh said, “We will go back now.” The side of the mountain softened into wool. Andrew, still clutching at the images and sounds of Leil on the mountainside, shouted “No!” and sank into velvet darkness.
