The End of One Journey

Posted on Sun Jan 3rd, 2021 @ 10:56pm by Asintu-Farflung

Mission: Planet-Killer
Location: Oasis-Whiteyellow (Federation: KIC 8462852)
Summary:
Timeline: Mission Day 1 at 1100

Today is a rare day for the Basindra and its crew. An impossibly bright star stands off its bow as it coasts gently through the space surrounding Oasis-Whiteyellow. Tasty tasty free-floating atoms and molecules drift into the ship’s particle nets and wake recyclers, so much denser here than anywhere they’ve been in the past year. And atop its aft port pylon, staring behind them and dangling her feet from the hull, sits one small person in a very large void.

“I don’t think there’s any pursuit,” Asintu-Farflung reported into her containment suit’s comm unit. “And the port wake recycler is untangled, should be back up and running. What do the instruments say, Nah?”

“Did I ever tell you the story of the Terenteti King’s missing rings?” came the response.

Asintu knew what that kind of question meant, that Nah wouldn’t be of any use for the next half hour, and she knew that she had to move quickly. “What about the infrared scope? Does our particle trail look right?”

“I’m using the infrared scope to look for one of the rings,” Nah said. “You can have it for the particles after I’m done.”

And that was as helpful as her grandmother was going to be. Asintu sighed into her helmet before reactivating her comm and doing her duty: “Tell me the story of the Terenteti King’s missing rings, please.”

Her duty didn’t extend to listening intently, she decided, so she turned down her receiver’s volume and laid back on the hull of the pylon. Her grandmother’s story settled over her like a blanket. Some of the details stuck: a many-handed king with rings uncounted, his kingdom stretching over all of the land. The king falling ill—or maybe it was a poisoning, Nah had heard it both ways—and plunderers stealing all of his rings. The rings, broken down, their jewels sold off and scattered. The kingdom never recovered, the illusion was broken, the power of the king was no more. The jewels, cursed, brought doom to everyone who had touched one. Nah loved stories with doom and curses.

“And you think that Oasis-Whiteyellow has one of these rings?” Asintu asked during one of the rare gaps in the narration.

“I do!” Nah exclaimed. She didn’t seem to mind being interrupted. Maybe she was feeling lonely. “At least four cultures we’ve encountered since we left Mendor-After tell versions of the Terenteti King’s Rings. Three of them were in societies that had strong telescopes that would have let them see this system, and all of them were between here and home. It’s a trail, Tu.” Then she hesitated. Uncommon for Nah when she was on a roll. “Plus, there’s…”

Any Mendoran-After could see where this was going, but Asintu was particularly sensitive to it. “No. Mendor’s ring is one of a kind. If anyone built it, it wasn’t any Terentish King.”

“Terenteti.”

“Terenteti, whatever.” She was getting dangerously close to being disrespectful, but she’d already reconfigured their entire stealth system, braved a swarm of ancient drones, manually untangled a wake recycler, and listened to a longwinded story. “Mendorans-Before have taught us for millennia that Mendor’s ring is the only one. Our ancestors would have known if there were others. We would know.”

“We can’t know without looking,” Nah said, her voice settling into that maddening Mendoran-Before-and-we-know-better-than-Mendorans-After tone that made Asintu want to turn off her magnetic containment devices. “We’re ancestors to Mendorans-Future. And think of what a good story it would be if you and I were the two to discover proof of the YxToxi-Progenitor!”

That prompted a sigh that Asintu wasn’t able to suppress. “I thought you called him a Terenteti king, not a YxToxi king.”

Nah didn’t say anything. The silence stretched and Asintu got worried. “Rhelenah-Pather?”

“This infrared scope is broken,” her grandmother finally said. “You should come back in and fix it. And besides, what does it matter if I called them Terenteti or YxToxi? The stories are the same. You’re our technical scout. You should be more open to possibilities.”

Asintu considered saying many things. Things like: I’m open to more than I tell you about. Or, you’re the keeper of cultural knowledge on this ship, can’t you keep the stories straight? Or even, maybe if you spent less time ‘expanding your mind’ in your cabin, you wouldn’t get exhausted monitoring our instruments for an hour. What she actually said: “I suppose the name could be anything. Names are cultural. We call this system Oasis-Whiteyellow, but maybe the Terenteti call it Lanlan.”

Mollified for now, Nah’s voice calmed down. “Knowing the Terenteti, they probably named it something stupid. Like a number. Imagine, something as precious as a star, and only giving it a number.”

It was nice when she and her grandmother could be as one. As she demagged from the hull and started for the airlock, Asintu agreed, “Only idiots would assign a number to a star.”