~~~
The next morning, after breakfast, Dr. Ventnor took me on a drive. "We're going to join Camille where she's taken the Colonel's body. You and she must perform an observance and duty."
I just nodded. The car drove on through the outskirts of Columbus, though woodlands, and though central Ohio's endless cornfields.
"You've been quiet this morning, Belle. You also look tired. Did you sleep well?"
I sighed. "How could I the night when I learned that I've been drafted as a technology cop? Still, I understand now the training that the Colonel gave me." I glanced at Dr. Ventnor, his eyes fixed on a straight stretch of highway between white farmhouses. "Have you read the letter from my grandfather to me?"
"Yes, Belle."
"How do you happen to have it?"
"On the night when you came to the earth, when the Colonel was taking from your ship the books and the memory-crystals that came with you, he found notes from your grandfather attached to one of the crystals and to a sheaf of papers. The notes asked him to hide that crystal and those papers from you till you were ready to start the Work. Knowing how intelligent and inquisitive you are, the Colonel decided that it'd be safest to hide the items in question off site. He felt, too, that I needed to read the letter to know how best to guide you."
Taking a breath, I plunged into the deep. "When the Colonel visited the Homeworld, I took him on a tour of Gam Tol. We Tani had set up a shrine to display some artifacts that a crystal-ship had brought to Ul from a ruined world of Tau Ceti. We called that world's lost people 'the Others.' When the Colonel saw the Others' artifacts, he wept. I recall saying that it was kind of him to offer tears to strangers. They weren't strangers to him, though, were they? He was crying for his own people."
Dr. Ventnor nodded. "Sor-On and Dor-Sad knew the Colonel's true nature, but chose not to tell you of it. When the Colonel went to Ul, he wanted to learn how far we whom you Tani call the Others could trust you and whether we should help you. When he saw the shrine that you'd raised out of your poverty to strangers whom you thought dead, he knew that you were like us in the way that counted most: you cherished the past and worked to pass it to the future."
"How is it that the Others are on the earth?"
"Our name for ourselves is Sethiparnen, which means 'Speakers and Makers.' We, like you Tani, built ships that flashed from world to world, though by different means from your power-crystals and brain-crystals. We, like you Tani, looked for other habitable worlds. Having lived under a sunlike star, though, we didn't think red stars worth probing, and so missed your world.
"This world, we did find, about five hundred of its years ago. Learning that its inhabitants looked like us and ate food that we, too, could eat, we infiltrated observers into it to learn whether openly meeting its inhabitants would be worth while, to trade with them, or, I'm ashamed to say, to conquer and enslave them."
I frowned. "If you were conquerors, why didn't you conquer the earth? Five hundred years ago, it could hardly have resisted the mind-control that you seem to have over earth-humans."
"The heads of the Sethiparnen were debating conquest. Before, though, they reached a decision on it, my ancestors stationed on this world lost touch with our homeworld. Those of us left here lacked the technological base to build ships to return home to learn why our world no longer spoke to us.
"We married and bore children, and kept our knowledge of our homeworld till now. Sadly, though, our numbers have never been great. As generations passed, our fertility waned till in the Colonel's and my generation just three children were born." He smiled wryly. "All boys."
I felt a horror like that which the Homeworld's destruction had aroused in me. "I'm sorry! I --"
Dr. Ventnor shook his head. "I've come to accept the extinction of us Sethiparnen. In our last days, though, we've gotten the chance to help save two other peoples. When we heard in our minds your ships' brain-crystals, we hoped at first that they represented our own kind, returning beyond all hope. When we traced the brain-crystals to your ships' landing sites, though, we found there, not Sethiparnen, but Tani."
"How did you talk with them?"
"Dor-Sad and his technicians had already learned a smattering of English from telecasts. It was enough to form a bridge over which our two peoples could reach each other. We warned Sor-On and Dor-Sad of the danger of contacting the humans directly, and Dor-Sad told us of his discovery of the ruined worlds. When your homeworld began to fall apart, Sor-On and Dor-Sad arranged with us to shelter eight lives to preserve the Tan and do the Work of saving this world from destruction. The rest of the story you know."
Overwhelmed by the death of worlds, I missed key questions that I should've asked just then. In any case Dr. Ventnor turned onto a dirt road -- long disused by the look of it -- that ran through deep woods. The road ended at a sinkhole, by which stood a tent like one in which I'd often camped out.
As the car stopped, Kuma came from the tent. Giving Dr. Ventnor a subdued look with which I was unfamiliar on her, she said, "I've laid the Colonel out in the tunnel."
"Thank you, Camille. Please join Belle and me."
I had just a moment to think of the horror of Kuma's carrying the Colonel's body cross-country before Dr. Ventnor, holding the book that had been in the box that I'd stolen from the museum, led Kuma and me down a roughly shaped staircase. This went to the sinkhole's base, where a tunnel ran into darkness. Kuma, though, had brought along a pair of light-crystals, one of which she gave me. Awaking the crystals, she and I brought the darkness the sun's glow.
Just within the tunnel's entrance, three horizontal niches had been cut into one wall. In the farthest niche lay the Colonel, still dressed as I'd dressed him on the morning of his death. I felt grief at his not wearing his dress uniform and his medals -- greater grief at recalling that he'd never earned them. Whatever else about him had been false, though, I felt that his love for Mom and me had been real.
Over the Colonel's body Dr. Ventnor read from his book words that, though alien to me, sounded to me both majestic and forlorn. Afterwards, at Dr. Ventnor's prompting, I recited what I recalled of the Christian service for the dead.
Dr. Ventnor looked along the tunnel. "Here," he murmured, "lie all of the Sethiparnen who've died on the earth. Those who died before the Colonel were sealed into rock by those who brought them here, but the Colonel was the last of us who knew how to shape stone. I fear --"
"Mira and I can seal him in," Kuma broke in to say. Her look of enthusiasm became one of shock as she turned to me. "I'm sorry, Mira! I didn't think of how you might feel. I can do it myself if you --"
Shaking my head, I forced out a smile. "The Colonel used work as an antidote to grief. It's right for me to use work so now."
Thus, Kuma and I used our crystal-shaping gift to weld flat sheets of the sinkhole's limestone into a covering for the Colonel's niche. When we were done, he lay behind a wall that looked as if it had long been there.
"Thank you, ladies," Dr. Ventnor said softly. "I regret that you'll have to perform this service twice more. When you do, please lay me in the niche beside the Colonel's, and the other of us Sethiparnen in the niche nearest the exit."
I nodded, but was too overwhelmed just then to ask of the other. At Dr. Ventnor's request, Kuma and I covered the tunnel's entrance with sheets of fallen limestone; then we folded Kuma's tent and rode off with Dr. Ventnor to Columbus.
In the light-crystals' glow, wise, artistic Sil-Tan raises his hand. "Your account, Mira, raises questions. The first one that comes to mind is, 'How did the Others' book end up in a shop in Madison, Wisconsin?'"
I sigh. "So much was going on in my life that I never got around to asking Dr. Ventnor that question. I can only guess that the book had been lost or stolen, and that whoever found or stole it sold it to the antiquities dealer in Madison. I did learn from some Web research that the dealer had been auctioning the book on line when I stole it from him."
Dala frowns. "Why didn't Dr. Ventnor
just buy it back?"
Dour, brooding Un-Thor snorts. "Why spend good money on what's yours when Mira the Marvelous can just take it back for you?"
I feel warm inside. "You're too kind," I murmur.
"Besides," solid, trustworthy Van-Dor says, "Dr. Ventnor couldn't have been sure of not being outbid in an on-line auction."
Lona shakes her head. "I still don't see, Mira, why the Colonel kept from you who he was all of those years."
I sigh. "I wish that he were here to answer that question."
Sil strokes his chin. "There's still the last of the three Sethiparnen boys. Maybe, he can answer the question."
I glance at Par-On and Kuma, who alone, besides me, know of the last of the Sethiparnen; then my gaze goes again to the long bundle at Par's feet.
He, following my gaze, gives me a wry smile; then he turns to his and my companions. "Mira will tell you of the last of the Sethiparnen, but the story has far to go before it reaches him."
Kuma, to my astonishment, shivers. "I wish that I needn't relive that story, but I guess I must. Still, parts of it are good."