* * * * *
"Captain Lier, I want ask—is Federation giving Tulor ship—so we come home from visiting?" Lier stopped in his paces across the bridge to consider the new Tulorian mother's question—the Federation she spoke of didn’t exist yet, but the Tulorians had been led to believe it was already an eventuality.
Lier knew all of the Tulorians were thinking about how they would get home if neither the Seishinna nor Velastria returned to Tulor. Nilery had told the Tulorians about the Seynorynaelian space fleet, but he had also divulged that there were few ships outfitted for long-term durations of travel; thus far only the Seishinna, Velastria, and Kaleena were capable of travel outside the Seynorynaelian solar system. The council had been working on augmenting the number of spaceships for the proposed journeys to other nearby planetary systems, but it would be years before more ships were completed; Nilery hated divulging the information to the Tulorians but considered it necessary. Yet the Seynorynaelian public itself had known nothing of the tentative plans of Maklian’s council to form a Federation with the inhabitants of any aliens they discovered, if against all odds, such a thing was possible.
Lier’s instincts told him that the Federation was already in its inchoate stages, and he had lived to see it happen.
"Yes, Tombtasheh, I believe we will give you a ship to return home.” Lier said steadily, eyeing Communicator Pelksen and his wife who had come to visit him on the bridge. He regarded them with a benevolent air; Lier was self-consciously aware of his responsibility everywhere on board the Seishinna except his own quarters. “There will soon be a great number of ships making journeys between our worlds, I imagine." He added, in slow, carefully articulated words so that she could understand.
She seemed to understand enough. Lier watched the Tulorian woman sitting beside Pelksen, gratitude shining in her amber eyes. He tried not to stare at the tan arms that held her new daughter.
Lier didn’t like children himself; he found them annoying from their early infancy to childhood, and after they became mobile, they proved reckless and destructive as well as annoying. At the same time, he felt a strange sense of wonder regarding Tombtasheh’s child, as though it brought home the miraculous, tenuous, and fragile nature of humankind as nothing ever had before.
The baby girl's skin was not exactly a pale tan, because of the lighter cast to it. Her eyes were a blue like Seynorynaelians, but wider, and her ears curved slightly differently than Lier's.
"She’s cutting teeth, eh, Tombtasheh?" he said, wincing, as the baby began to cry.
The sixteenth half-race child had been born less than half-way through the return journey to Seynorynael, more than three years after the Seishinna's launch. This was the sixth birth on the Seishinna.
Lier tried hard not to worry about Chiyenn.
Shortly after their arrival on Kayria, an epidemic had hit the city, crippling half of the Seynorynaelian crew, who had no years-long built up resistance to Kayrian disease. Chiyenn had been one of the worst afflicted, and had been isolated in a critical area to recuperate; by the time he recovered, he had already fallen head over heels for his attendant doctor, a young widowed Kayrian woman. Chiyenn asked her to come back with him to Seishinna; she agreed, despite the risks of traveling to Seynorynael.
The truth was that none of the Seishinna crew knew for certain that they would definitely make it back to Seynorynael, if something suddenly went wrong with the ship’s biosystems, or if something unexpected happened in the space near them on their return journey. Space travel was in its infant stages and a long way from being routine and safe.
Thelatesse had already determined that Kayrian and Seynorynaelian body structures were not incompatible, Lier knew, and though the Kayrian woman Chiyenn had fallen in love with agreed to return to Seynorynael with him, Lier himself still found the idea of becoming attached to an alien significantly less appealing than his friend. Still, Lier was willing to approve for Chiyenn’s sake and permitted Chiyenn’s new wife to join the crew.
Lier tried not to think of himself as prejudiced, but at first he had considered the inter-racial attachments only slightly above bestiality; it was only after the discovery that half-race children were genetically possible that he changed his mind about this.
Lier had never presumed to understand the universe; he spent little time contemplating bizarre coincidences or arguing pointlessly. He just wished someone would figure out why this interracial pairing was all possible before they landed on Seynorynael.
Chiyenn, his youthful friend and confidant, this toe-stepping serious young man with a tendency to overdo everything, was already attached and had a little boy rambling about the ship! It was hardly to be believed! Yet Chiyenn was a father, father to an adventurous, wide-eyed boy named “Lier” after the captain of Seishinna, his godfather.
Lier didn’t like children in general, but he made an exception of his godson. Later, he was forced to admit that the children had done the crew the biggest service of all.
Little Nildriyan had begun to speak his first words just after the Seishinna made its rendezvous with the Velastria. Now, more than three Seynorynaelian years later, the child was fluent in Kayrian, Tulorian, and Seynorynaelian. Through him, little Lier, and the others, many of the miscommunications between the Kayrians, Tulorians, and Seynorynaelians were beginning to disappear. No doubt it wouldn’t be long before the children able to speak at least two languages from infancy would establish the real linguistic groundwork necessary for precise communication between the races.
Little Lier had already taught his namesake how to sing—badly—several children’s songs from Kayria.
Lier looked at Tombtasheh again, and thought about little Lier, this time fondly. The little spitfire was always making visits on the bridge with his mother, and insisted on sitting on his “uncle’s” lap in the captain’s chair.
Only one thought gave him cause for concern. Lier thought about how long it had taken for him to overcome his own instinctive, natural prejudices against the Kayrians and the Tulorians, even after years entirely isolated among them; he was satisfied that his prejudices were all gone.
And that was why he began to worry. What would the consequences of his mission be years from now, long after his own death?
What would Kayrian history make of him—ally or enemy?
The woman known as Selerael stood among the crowds as the Seishinna landed in Ariyal-synai in the middle of a worldwide celebration unequaled since its launch. She watched, just a person in the crowd, as Lier and Chiyenn disembarked onto the airfield with their crew, and with the first of the Kayrian and Tulorian delegates ever to set foot on Seynorynaelian soil—at least as far as Leader Bandary knew, and he was the one making the announcements.
Would he be surprised to know that he himself was already part-Kayrian? Granted a small percentage, but part Kayrian nonetheless. Wouldn’t Lier be surprised to know that he was as well, and that his navigator Chiyenn was even more so?
She recalled the day that Syleraestia had crashed at the edge of Firien, thousands of years ago in almost a haze, as though to recall it clearly would be too painful. She had journeyed into the past—to the past of the planet Seynorynael where her mother Alessia had been born. Selerael had been on Seynorynael in its early history when the climactic-induced dark age kept the planet in a cultural dark age for more than two thousand years; it was still recovering now, but that hurdle had been passed, for now, and Seynorynael had begun its slow climb back towards civilization. Yet she remembered the sensation of the air, back on the day of the crash when she had met the colonizer of Enor—the people who had seeded the universe with life cultures…
And now she was here, standing on a bare astroport field, standing against the cold winter day, freezing with a half of a million other Seynorynaelians angling to get a better view of their heroes.
Selerael, a shapeshifting being who was also an immortal,
stood in the disguise of an elderly man, wearing an outlandish tear-shaped stone about his neck, surveying the hedonistic spectacle with a cold, attentive eye.
The years since her son Adam’s death had not been easy.
The more Selerael knew and learned, the more she was tortured by all of her knowledge rather than comforted, as though each conflicting belief in the world waged war on the battlefield of her mind, and it was only growing worse. She was continually reminded of what had happened to her mother’s mentor, the genius scientist Fynals Hinev, in the far-distant future—how Hinev, left alone among the ordinary population, had developed a multiple personality disorder that had brought him to the brink of insanity and driven him to search for a means of suicide with as much passion as he had searched for the key to immortality.
She understood Hinev now. He had gained immortality, and bestowed that gift to others—to his pupil, Alessia.
Now Selerael understood through living how lonely, how desperate Hinev must have become, how supremely tortured he must have been. For she had waited many long years on this beautiful planet already, and her wait was only just beginning.
She had been sent into the past by Hinev’s mission for those who would defy the emperor—and kill him before he could establish the Empire.
She wanted to fight her despair. She had grown overwhelmed by using her telepathic power—the mind-raping power of telepathy—as Hinev had, and to risk mindlinks was always dangerous—she even feared them, despite knowing that a tremendous destiny lay in store for her, for she could never be sure in her own mind what and who she was, and how successful she might be if she allowed a momentary weakness to stay her hand or to sway it. She was so tired of “seeing” memories and thoughts that did not originate in her own mind.
She tried as hard as she could to find causes worthy enough to occupy her time until the day in the future that the emperor would be born. Yet she was so restive that no tranquillity could bestow peace of mind, and no promise of momentary happiness or contentment had the power to keep her interest for long; she only knew how to do what she had to do—to destroy the eternal Emperor Marankeil—and that to stop would have been impossible.
The worst part was the waiting.