The Story Thus Far
“Suspicions are mounting.”
“And?”
“It’s too much attention too soon.”
“What do you propose? We can’t move up the timeline any further.”
“We turn it to our advantage.”
“…I’m listening.”
“They want a conspiracy: give them a conspiracy. We have no shortage of expendable scapegoats.”
“This could backfire dangerously.”
“We didn’t get where we are now by never taking risks.”
“This risks a lot of lives, though.”
“Life is a risk.”
“What right do we have?”
“We’re the ones with vision.”
The moons of Hafast Penta were arrayed in all their multicolored splendor, a fan of radiant disks spread across the green evening sky like a pocketful of coins from half a dozen cultures tossed on a garish table. Crystal lenses arrayed strategically over the patio where Dreln Navari drank gathered the light the moons reflected from the planet-occluded star Gallio Javre, amplifying and distributing it to provide ample ambient light without a power source. Three other humans were present (each, to Dreln’s trained eye, drinking to forget their past just as forcefully as he was), an Obstentia lounged across three cushioned couches with its head buried in a pail of bar food, and the bartender, a slim Mesilian female, was mopping the counter and surreptitiously watching Dreln with interest.
Dreln himself was absolutely miserable. He’d gotten his paycheck, his clean break, an apartment on a nice but not too expensive Earth-like planet, and had given himself three months vacation from Delving or trying to sell his finds, but he found himself haunted by the last job he’d worked for the NAAFP.
“So, tell me again what you did that was so horrible?” said the Mesilian, whose name was apparently Raven (but Dreln assumed was actually something unpronounceable), refilling his drink before he had a chance to object.
“I sold a database of old genetic data to one of my world’s governments. They’re using it to verify family lineages of current residents and probably genocide anyone with too many markers from ethnic groups they don’t like.” He intoned flatly.
“Oof, that’s rough. Cheer up, though! Last week I had a bloke in here that told me he fucked up the coordinates on a warp drone he was piloting and vaporized an inhabited moon. Millions dead.”
“And he was just out on the town, telling everyone about this?” Dreln asked skeptically, trying to get his eyes to focus on the curvaceous, pale orange, vaguely humanoid creature smiling at him from across the bar. She was a woman (or whatever the analog was in her species), he noted for the first time that evening, and not unattractive in a mysterious, alien sort of way.
“Yeah, on bail awaiting trial. Said he lied to the GC about his species’ longevity and hopes to be dead and buried before they set his first court date. Not a bad legal strategy, if you ask me!” She laughed and Dreln winced at the shrill sound. A crunching noise behind him made him turn woozily in his seat, just in time to see the neon yellow Obstentia finish consuming the aluminum pail it had been eating from and belch richly. He turned back to Raven, who gave him a look that said can you believe the shit I put up with here? Then she spoke again:
“My shift is up in a few. Do you want to get out of here?”
Dreln blinked at her in shock, momentarily sober.
“Excuse me?”
“Don’t be coy. Everyone knows why humans visit Hafast Penta—our males are a joke next to yours—and you’re the best specimen that’s walked in all night.”
Drlen hadn’t known that, having only recently gotten out into the wider galaxy, and had never considered himself much to look at. His areas of expertise were Delving and not leaving his apartment for months at a time, not exobiology and women.
“There’s no accounting for taste, huh?” he hiccupped and almost vomited, swallowed, grimaced at the taste, then managed to grin weakly back at Raven. She rolled her eyes.
“There’s still time for you to fuck this up for yourself, so watch it, ape.”
“The fact-finder has been dealt with. Shame to sacrifice one so talented as Ruffeline, but…”
“He was living on borrowed time anyway; his loyalty only extended as far as it granted him license to do violence. Creatures like that have their uses, but must ultimately be discarded: it is the wont of blunt tools to eventually rebound from too dense a target and strike the wielder.”
“Are we truly justified in such sacrifices, though? Death after death…”
“At least one GC member is close to trans-galactic warp, whether they admit it publicly or not. If we can do it…”
“…the Andromedans might develop the capability as well. Or perhaps they already have.”
“Exactly. Even if they do not wish to invade, we may soon be facing intergalactic conflict—violence on scales heretofore undreamed of. We must do everything we can to prepare for that eventuality. What is one life against a count of trillions?”
“You’re a true believer.”
“Always have been. Knowledge is power, and we still know so little.”
“And this…experiment. You think what it has taught us—is teaching us—is relevant?”
“Think of your home world, of your own people’s beliefs and culture. Recall the first time, as a youth, you encountered a truly alien way of life. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from studying the peoples of this galaxy, it’s that life is limitless in its forms and patterns. We must put bounds on that infinite space of possibility, or we may be doomed by threats from our blind spots. Life goes to extremes—we test the extremes.”
“We certainly do.”
The hangover was worse than Dreln had been expecting. After dragging himself from Raven’s massive hammock, leaving her naked and snoring, sprawled across the sea of pillows, many limbs and tendrils splayed around her like some ancient Eastern god, he crawled into her washroom and cleaned himself from head to toe. He still felt dirty after drying himself off. She had been, by a wide margin, the most forceful and inventive lover he’d ever had, and he had been unable (unwilling?) to divert her from a variety of acts that challenged both his masculinity and his sense of self as a sovereign human being.
She was still snoring when he crept out of her apartment and carefully, quietly locked the door behind him. Then he flat-out ran to the pharmacy down the street and purchased the maximum-strengths of an antiviral, a painkiller, and a contraceptive: he was only fifty percent sure Mesilians couldn’t produce offspring with humans (male or female) and he was even more confused by their biology now than he had been before the one night stand.
Sipping a coffee in a café a safe distance from Raven’s building (the human-centric menus he kept encountering on Hafast Penta made so much more sense now), he struck up a conversation with the only other human in the place, a man unashamedly wearing a tee shirt that said ‘sex tourist’ in Mesilian script and identified himself as ‘Axel Steele’.
“Yeah, I visit this rock at least once a month. It’s an addiction, I won’t deny it,” he grinned at Dreln, then pulled a small dried fungi from a pocket, crushed it to powder with his glass on the bar they were sitting at and snorted it through a glass tube. The baristas didn’t bat an eye.
“I was just looking to get away from Earth for awhile,” Dreln lamented, “I guess I didn’t do my research.”
“You’re here though, buddy. You’ve fuckin’ arrived. This is where you wanna be!”
But it wasn’t. He missed Delving. He missed New Novgorod. He missed Earth, in all its poisoned and faded glory. He wasn’t proud of his species—he was proud of the life he had carved out for himself on that little blue backwater. But he couldn’t return after what he’d done.
“So join the Andomeites! You’re some notorious Delver, right? They’d recruit you in a heartbeat.” Axel had put on a pair of dark shades to conceal his tremendously dilated pupils and seemed to be vibrating in his seat. Somehow, this was the moment when Dreln discovered his calling for the second time: shifting his aching backside gingerly, drinking now-cold coffee made from freeze-dried beans likely imported from half a galaxy away, watching Axel try to talk his way into the pants of every female Mesilian that entered (much to the chagrin of passing or accompanying males), Dreln made up his mind to join the Prodigious and Scholarly Order of Andomeite Chroniclers.
The various sects that comprised the Chroniclers met once every galactic second—a standard decade—to share their findings and negotiate the minutia of their research schedule. Like the Belichore Provincialists, they were the largest and most powerful group in their own line of inquiry, namely, the pursuit of historical knowledge of the galaxy’s peoples, and, also like the Provincialists, they were extremely diverse. Any species could join their ranks, should they have the talent (or the referrals) to get them through a barrage of interviews and competency tests.
They operated mostly in the open, establishing hermitages on willing planets and soliciting any and all historical records, skimming public databases and networks, conducting surveys, and even interviewing everyone from vagrants and rebels to members of clergies and heads of state. They were inherently apolitical, with no agenda other than the accumulation of knowledge, and their reputation alone gave them a massive advantage over the many other groups that sought the same kind of access to extra’ culture and history. With the Andomeites, at least, you knew your data wasn’t being harvested for sale, or being fed to an aggressively expansionist culture that would like to conquer yours. As ‘Axel’ had predicted, Dreln’s interview went extremely well:
“You are ‘The Builder’?”
“Correct.”
“I’m prepared to offer you a generous stipend, should you be willing to serve a three-standard-year tour at the Andomeite Council’s behest. Afterwards, you would have your choice from a variety of extremely desirable research positions.”
So he would have to work for the man again. At least this time freedom wouldn’t be too far off…and he presumably wouldn’t need to scavenge old porn to sell for rent money.
“Sounds reasonable,” he replied in a measured voice, “where would I be working first?”
“A newly established monastery in an out-of-the-way region. The locals are atrocious at maintaining accessible digital records, and our team there is in desperate need of your expertise.”
“System? Planet?” The interviewer hesitated for just a moment, but Dreln noticed.
“Erileytha system. Frond V.”