Across the Stars: Book Three of Seeds of a Fallen Empire
The creatures began to approach her, stopping a meter in front of where she stood. Their sad, aged eyes regarded her curiously, as though they were trying to calculate where she had come from and if she were one of them, another survivor who had found them in space.
Selerael found a beacon in her belt and turned it on, hoping to hide the unnatural aura around herself in case it made her appear frightening or threatening to them.
But the man she had observed stepped towards her and peered into her face, suddenly registering a new trace of recognition.
“Are you a colonizer’s child?” he asked in a language she had never heard before. She read its meaning from his thoughts. He clearly understood that she was able to do so, as if he were used to having his mind perused by another. And yet from her probing, she discovered that none of the people before her possessed telepathic abilities.
“A colonizer?” she wondered, attempting to decipher what he meant. He had only a vague image in his mind, a shadowy human form with piercing multi-colored eyes, eyes that oscillated hues like a prism refracting the light. She didn’t understand what he meant. Selerael knew her mother had been Seynorynaelian, but this man had no knowledge of any such place.
His home had been Enor, one of its colonies.
But, as the moments passed after their awakening, it became clear that their memories, dimmed in hyper-sleep, retreated further into their minds, like a dream fading into morning. Or a nightmare that has been lost to the light of day. Some of the ones who gathered around her expectantly had lost nearly all of their memory.
As the Enorians followed her out into the ship, the man answered her questions mentally when she continued to read his mind. His thoughts recalled that once long ago he had seen a large space fleet of enormous vessels, but in order to produce enough escape ships for the entire population, their Enorian colonies had been forced to limit the size and productivity of their ships.
Their tiny escape vessels had no weapons or bio-gardens, and minimal cargo. Foodstuffs had been manufactured chemically for the brief duration of their trip before entering suspension. The ship had been equipped with propulsion reserves and complex navigational equipment. The computer reported that the singularity that had allowed them passage through space-time had inexplicably disappeared shortly after re-entry into the new universe.
Selerael turned to regard the others for confirmation, but vague images were all that had been left the crew. The man she had contacted remembered the most, though like the others, he could not recall many concrete facts—not even his own name. Selerael asked the computer for its data file on the crew, but the computer had no information to give her. Its entire memory was filled with the complexities of navigation, an extensive list of possible actions and reactions that gave it supreme flexibility under any conditions to solve the greatest hardship or obstacle threatening the lives of the crew.
All of the escape computers had been made this way, equipped with the bare minimum of functions. Even with years of warning, it had taken eons for word to reach Lexcar, the only of a few names in its memory, a planet of the outer colonies from which this ship had departed, and still longer to build enough rescue ships for a trillion trillion people. Each ship could only hold fifty with large hypersleep liquid reserve tanks.
The computer did acknowledge that their trip had been longer than the ideal scenario predicted before the launch. The guidelines of their escape dictated that the computer was to strive for the shortest duration in travel time in order to preserve the memories of the crew. The computer had analyzed every possible recourse to their stationary situation but to no avail. A short hypersleep was not possible. Another scenario would have to suffice. In any case, it did not understand the importance of memories, only the significance of preserving their lives.
Selerael stopped short of the air lock door where she had entered.
How were these Enorian creatures going to adapt to Selesta? Without any memories, how would they function in the Selesta’s world?
Imprinting a basic English, Russian, Sakaran, and Kamian vocabulary into their minds proved more difficult than she realized. Some of the alien creatures could no longer speak, and before she could imprint language, she had to use her telekinetic power to repair the damage to the synapses in their minds that initiated speech patterns, damage time had wrought despite their suspended state.
However, once she had repaired the physical damages, she found their minds able to absorb billions of stimuli. It was a miracle, but there was hope for their recovery. Yet they would have to begin their lives anew. Time, like death, had robbed them of identity.
Cameron Zhdanov was going to be upset, that he would have Enorians here at last, but no new answers about them or from them.
Selerael’s friend Cameron Zhdanov and the other scientists and medical specialists turned towards the air lock as Selerael finally re-appeared, and they watched her approach them, trying to maintain their composure, yet eager for news.
Cameron, an olive-skinned man with curling hair the color of an oak tree, was one of the older biological sciences specialists. He was by nature cantankerous but affectionate, meticulous, organized, reasonable.
Despite Cameron’s years, his manner and gait remained youthfully energetic. At the moment, however, most of his features were obscured by the protective flightsuit and helmet that he wore. The atmosphere in the eleventh cargo bay was breathable, but it was best to take precautions in case microorganisms and contaminants somehow reached the cargo bay past the decontamination chamber of the air lock; after all, they were dealing with an unknown here, and Cameron and the others seldom took unnecessary chances.
“Selerael!” Cameron said, relief freeing his voice while she was still some distance away. “What kept you?”
“We need the medical units.” She said, hurrying towards him. Once she had reached the circle of scientists, she eyed Cameron with a steady, piercing gaze. Cameron, dear Cameron, she thought, registering a twinge of guilt. She could see that she had upset him by disappearing for so long in the alien ship, but he didn’t understand.
“There are humanoids aboard.” She said, knowing how the statement would stir them all up. Immediately, the tentative serenity shared equally among the scientists turned to collective incredulity.
“More humanoids?” Cameron repeated, grasping at comprehension. Several of the assembly glanced from one to another, surprised; from what they had recently learned from contact with the Goeur Empire, the humanoid form was strangely common in this large galactic supercluster, but these were still far outnumbered by non-humanoid lifeforms.
“My scanners report no traces of known antibodies of any kind in these people.” Selerael reported, scanning the group. She reached out to grasp Cameron’s helmet playfully. “So you won’t need this—”
“I’ll keep my helmet secure, if it’s all the same,” Cameron said peevishly, pulling himself free.
“And, Cameron,” she said, “I think they were from Enor.”
* * * * *
After the Enorians’ arrival, Selerael had spent a few hours with the Enorians in the cargo bay, relaying only a brief history of Selesta’s journey from Earth to the new aliens. No one else on the ship knew more about the departure from Earth, apart from herself. Essentials were all that the aliens needed, she knew, in order to begin new lives without any outside impositions. They would have to relearn identities and personalities on their own.
“How strange that these Enorian refugees have nearly no memory,” she said out loud again.
“Yes,” Cameron Zhdanov was still there, and also looking as worse for wear.
Enorians?!! Selerael could barely believe it, even though she knew what the aliens behind her were, having read their fading memories by telepathy before those memories were lost. The crew of Selesta, Earth and alien alike, had been searching for clues of Enor for five generations, and at long last had found them—forty-two of them, and no more, from a civilization that had been bil
lions of billions.
Selerael had often wondered how the Enorians were related to Seynorynael, indeed if they were. She knew little enough of her own mysterious people’s origins. Selerael had been found on Earth when the spaceship Selesta crashed there and had been raised to believe she was a human being. After the Earth crew took the Selesta from the Earth to draw away the hostile aliens attacking the Earth, the crew had soon encountered a dozen and more civilizations, former territories of a once great but unidentified galactic empire that had fallen under unknown circumstances. And soon afterwards, Selerael and the other Earth people had discovered that she was not human but the daughter of an alien explorer from the Seynorynaelian Federation, a political coalition that had once encompassed the seven galaxy groups that included the Earth’s Milky Way Galaxy.
So far, as Selesta traveled from one territory to another, everywhere they heard of the legendary Enorians, the supposed ancestors of all humanoid life. Yet the whereabouts of the legendary planet of Enor, famous through the seven galaxy clusters beyond the Great Cluster of Seynorynael, remained a mystery.
Selerael now knew that Enor had truly existed. The leader of the Enorian refugees’ memory had telepathically shown her what Enor had been in the desperate days when the Enorian universe collapsed. Since that time, at least seventeen billion years had passed in the present universe, though there was no telling how long the Enorian refugee ships had drifted between universes before coming here.
The irony was that the Enorians’ memories, preserved for so long in suspended animation, had begun to decompose almost as soon as they had been awakened. Now that Selerael was about to present the Enorians to her fellow crew, the Enorians themselves remembered almost nothing of their former lives.
“They’re almost like children,” she thought, “so meek, so weak as well.”
A strange feeling washed through her, a disturbing sensation. How awful, she thought, to have forgotten so much, and not to even be aware of the fact that you had ever forgotten anything at all. Selerael had always believed that forgetting her memories would be like dying. As beautiful a race as the Enorians were, Selerael thought, the Enorians were like the walking dead, or like children re-born.
Yet, the Enorian man who first contacted her had wished for the oblivion he now had. He had wished for a merciful escape from the few recollections he had left, recollections of chilling nightmares he had endured in hyper-sleep and of terror, the agonizing terror the Enorians had known when they scrambled desperately, trying to escape from the Great Collapse.
“I can’t imagine what they are, or what they went through,” she thought. “Perhaps they were better off starting over.”
“I’ve examined for possible antigens dangerous to human beings, but none seem present.” Selerael said, shrugging. “We’ll set up some vaccine tests of all types in case they’re compatible with these aliens—and someone send for some beds. They’ll need to sleep in their ship a couple of days until the antigens take, but I think we can safely arrange a preliminary meeting now.”
“Sounds good,” Cameron agreed.
“No one has entered the area since we sealed the cargo bay for decontamination?” She asked, looking to Cameron.
“Not that I’m aware,” he answered, managing to sound calm. This conversation was necessary, but it was not what he really wanted to talk about.
The other scientists seemed to take the news and orders with equanimity, as they usually did around Selerael.
The entire crew in fact regarded Selerael as their leader. Few questioned her judgment; most respected her. As he grew older, Cameron often wondered how Selerael felt about the deferential attitude that prevailed around her. What was it like for her? To know always that the lives of all the crew depended wholly upon her actions? To have been raised on the Earth so many years ago and to be snatched away from their ancestral homeland, only to find out that she had never been human at all?
Selerael rarely said much about her past. Cameron Zhdanov had learned it from rumor.
However, there was little need for individual greed or glory on Selesta, where each person pulled their own weight according to ability because this cooperation was the best for each individual’s survival, as well as for the survival of their small, sundered community of the human race.
At the same time, there was plenty of opportunity for each person on board to be challenged and tested by the most extreme and bizarre of situations as they traveled into the unimaginable, and occasion for each man and woman to prove their worth both to themselves and to those around them. Yet Cameron felt each life Selesta harbored was precious, not only because each member of their community was the current end result of the evolutionary journey of Earth and that of other planets, but because he believed in the unknown potential of each human being, whether or not circumstances ever developed that potential or not. He had plenty of cause to be both jaded and inspired by other living beings; he chose never to make rapid judgments of anyone, to have faith in others, and to care about them.
Sometimes it was harder than at other times.
Nevertheless, the few really obnoxious individuals aboard ship, the people he knew to be loudmouths or brash, the small-minded, the simpletons, the spiteful, the mule-headed, the priggishly vain—he left Selerael and Adam to deal with them, to placate them, to handle them. Cameron was not a very good at making conversation or dealing with people he didn’t much like.
He was a scientist, and preferred his labs and his truths.
Cameron shivered as the group of grey-skinned humanoids with stone grey eyes moved past him. They were being taken to their beds for now.
There was something unsettling about their appearance, something unnatural; their beauty was unnatural, ancient, strangely evolved and yet residually primordial, unattainable—and all of this gave him the vaguest sensation that they were dangerous. They were humanoid, but they did not seem at all human. They were something far older, something primal and mysteriously powerful, something that human beings would never understand. They were almost like Selerael, the woman everyone thought they knew; Cameron often wondered if anyone but her son Adam really knew her at all.
“What happened?” Selerael heard her son Adam ask. He had now appeared beside her, having come from the other side of the cargo bay; she could never hide her private distress from him. He was so adept at reading his mother’s expressions, it seemed as if he could read her mind. But then, Adam was also telepathic; his mother’s mind was the only one entirely closed to him.
Adam was in nature very much like his mother, a natural leader among men, self-controlled, self-contained, composed, private, and usually unreadable, far-seeing, with an intelligent sense of humor; despite all of this, however, there was a mild aloofness about him, an air of perfect, unflappable calm and security Cameron often wondered about. Was there a melancholy underneath it all? Was there a side to Adam that no one knew about, a side far less rational and confident, a darker, more dangerous alien nature that Adam kept suppressed? Cameron couldn’t help but wonder, but he felt certain that he would never know.
“Is something wrong?” Cameron asked them in concern, his grey brows crooked into bushy peaks. Of course, he knew something was wrong now, because of Adam’s question, but the alien mother and her half-alien son so often neglected to keep non-telepathic people apprised of events! he noted ruefully.
“Ahem.” Said Cameron Zhdanov.
“I’m not sure yet,” Selerael said and laughed, having heard Cameron’s thoughts; then she turned to one of the alien ship’s passengers.
Cameron waited impatiently as she sang an unfamiliar question to the alien man, and then shivered involuntarily; Selerael so rarely used all of the three small voice-boxes in her throat at once. It never failed to shock him when she did. Her voice in such moments was like music, as unintelligible as music.
Meanwhile, the strange grey-faced man only regarded Selerael with a confused expression, his eyes clear, without concern. He shook hi
s head once. Cameron looked on, studied them all: Selerael and Adam in silver-blue flightsuits, the alien man clad in a uniform of highly reflective, silver-colored material. Selerael’s exposed face suddenly betrayed a rare glimmer of anguish and disappointment as she processed the alien man’s negative response. Cameron wondered why.
What was that, mother? Adam asked telepathically, thinking similar thoughts to Cameron’s.
Adam had searched the alien man’s memories but found only vague images of a former life, like a forgotten dream; the imprint of English, Selesta’s cultures and languages his mother had given the man were the only strong thoughts in his mind. There was a whispering sound on the verge of his senses he couldn’t reach, a soft hiss like the sound of wind in tree branches, or the sound of unending ocean waves lapping on the shore. The sound was Enorian, the last whispers of that language dying away in the man’s mind.
What did the Enorian say? Adam asked, suddenly disturbed. His mother had turned away to help the medical teams when the natural music abruptly died.
“What is it?” Cameron asked Adam quietly when Adam’s eyes were illuminated by sudden knowledge; Cameron knew mother and son well enough to recognize signs of the silent communications that passed between them.
Adam turned to Cameron with a half-smile, the glorious, mysterious smile of a man who has known every depth and pinnacle of human feeling. Who has felt the tremendous burden and exalted pleasure of each and every human feeling. Such a man could only ever remain a mystery to those around him.
“Only a few moments after mother woke the Enorians from their suspended sleep, their leader spoke to her in his own language. But he’s forgotten it—forgotten nearly everything he ever knew or was. They all have. Now he doesn’t even know what it was he asked her, or why.”
Cameron’s elation rapidly plummeted into disappointment of the acutest kind.
“I already knew that.”
“What did he say to her, did she say?” Cameron wondered, now earnestly intrigued to learn the least little information about the Enorians that was ever going to come to light.