Chapter 42: Farewells - 2

The Wau must have slept ten hours. He propped himself up on his elbow. He was on the upper floor of his stellar fortress, facing the Halcyon. In front of the ship, unmoving, stood the golden orb of the Transient.

He turned sharply toward the Entangled Gates, still functional, and his heart froze.

- “But no, old man,” said the Wau. “This is where he found me!”

- “Relax, Wau. I’ve moved your fortress. You are on Lennox.”

- “On ... Lennox?”

The Wau understood that, for now, he was out of Garen Antor’s reach, and that Lennox was also free.

- “Yes,” added the Transient. “Somewhere in a desert far from the human city. On another continent. In the worst-case scenario, the one who calls himself Aleph is a week away from here.”

- “I understood he could move as you do...”

- “Yes, but he maintains a sort of bubble of control from Earth. My deduction is that he’ll prefer to reconquer Lennox by sending a ship equipped with an Entangled Gate. Even though with sentients, driven by passion, logic is rarely a constant.”

The Wau stood up.

- “So you knew I live here. And about the Saint of Saints.”

The Transient changed form. It grew in the hangar and became a luminous plant, endowed with many appendages ending in spheres.

“This is my people. We called ourselves those born of the earth, which in many languages, including yours, could be translated as humans. We were life forms you would classify as vegetal, but which to us were dominant. Mobile life forms emerged over time in our ecosystem, but they were systematically subjugated by us. Indeed, our mode of communication was the diffusion of scents—that is, molecules capable of conveying messages—but selective evolution endowed us with molecules capable of controlling the biological brains of the animal kingdom. To transmit a message, a single molecule would suffice, and sometimes it would travel around our world, a small moon orbiting a large planet with sixteen others. We sensed the air, its variations with the terrain. We could even perceive the position of the stars through the shifting angles of volatile molecules turned by photonic pressure. Other species were at our service: we guided their combative and reproductive instincts with molecules stimulating their nervous centers, selecting only the most docile and intelligent each generation, of which there were three or four in a single one of your human days. The molecules were transported by armies of insects who became the extension of our thoughts, like the LE is for you. The other creatures, useless, were destroyed. Is that wrong, in your opinion, Wau?”

- “Hard to pass judgment, considering how many creatures my species has wiped out on its own planet, keeping only those it could eat, enslave, or find pleasant company.”

- “Precisely. The planet we orbited also hosted an intelligent life form, rather from what you would call the animal kingdom. We don’t truly think in terms of form, but imagine large bears from your homeworld. They managed to create a ship, no more sophisticated than a rock, and landed it on our world. They did not understand that we were intelligent and brought back some of our kin—specimens—to their own planet. Four of your years later, their entire planet was under our control. With our symbionts, whom we called our servants, we built other ships in which we placed seeds that could germinate in millions of years. Some of these ships are likely still drifting through space. Is that wrong, in your opinion, Wau?”

- “Despite our physiological differences, all this reminds me of the story of my own species.”

- “Indeed. We are close, and that’s why I love your civilization and have lived among yours. I see in you the faults we committed, and I hope, through our guidance, to be forgiven for what we once were. Most Xenos recoil from conquest and war, which they rightly associate with risk and chaos. At that time, we digitized our molecular exchanges through electrical currents first woven into spiderwebs, then synthetic threads. Very quickly, we constructed an After, literally above our heads, for we lived beneath the great web. The era of information and AI brought about a questioning of our identity as a society, and we developed empathy, which multiplied within the After, with the equivalents of what you call Pax. I see in your mind that you know what Pax is. The transition from the After to transcendence was very rapid for us. Some of our ships landed on viable worlds and contained seeds of ourselves from thousands of years earlier. Imagine suddenly a tribe of Cro-Magnons or a galleon of conquistadors arriving on a planet of Xenos who abhor violence. What would happen? Fortunately, we had already transcended. We stopped our counterparts before the worst could occur.”