The Blind Gods
Copyright© 2025 by Wau
Chapter 86: The Pilgrim
Only Andreï managed to fall asleep that night. He told those who were overexcited or floundering in their fear that sometimes, the best thing to do - the very element of survival needed in the moment - was simply to sleep, here and now, and that this single thought plunged him into deep slumber.
When he seemed isolated in his sleep, the others spoke softly. They didn’t dare think that the Blind Gods were near, but that hope wandered somewhere in the back of their minds. Konrad, as usual, was grimly pessimistic:
- “The Xenos have Xeno manners, of course, but they treat us badly. Maybe they mean well, but a three-year-old child crushing ants doesn’t hate them either. This is our last chance for the Alecto to put pressure on them, that’s what I’m telling you.”
At dawn, they were awakened by the whistling and crashing sound of a ship falling to the surface. It was made of worn metal and rested on a four-legged landing gear. A cockpit, oddly placed in the middle, opened to let a few phasmid-like Xenos through. So, it was indeed a civilization capable of interplanetary travel.
- “Look at the landing gear,” said Momoko, pointing at it with her blaster. “By the looks of it, it must be twelve meters long.”
No one commented aloud, but all understood that it was the same model of ship that had once rescued Garen Antor from his castaway life. Some unusually agitated Xenos opened the cage and pushed them toward the ship, where they were crammed into six square meters with only a meter and a half of height. The door sealed airtight, and they owed their survival only to the oxygen supplied by their suits.
The captain argued that the Xenos couldn’t conceive the humans’ need for oxygen. Contacting the Alecto, the ship confirmed that their craft was ascending the canal at a speed of two thousand five hundred kilometers per hour. Markus, the communications officer on the morning watch, sounded hesitant, as if reluctant to say something. In a pale voice, he added that the signal strength weakened under the forest canopy.
The captain took note, then cast a sharp look at Pallas and Konrad, weakened by hunger, thirst, and exhaustion. Konrad in particular looked grim. One of these two birds is hiding something from me, he thought. Maybe both.
Finally, the ship stopped vibrating, and the metal cell opened, letting through the declining sunlight filtering between the trees.
The captain reported their situation to the Alecto, but communications no longer went through. When their eyes adjusted to the light, they saw that they were on the landing platform of an advanced metal city, nestled within an immense depression like a crater stretching to all horizons. And from all horizons came the canals that carried the golden river.
The “houses” each stood on a circular base, made from fused, identical metal pieces. The streets, too, were metal, and one could discern observatories as well as factories, river plankton fisheries, and large meeting halls or temples. The Xenos here numbered in the millions, going back and forth along great circular arteries; the city spread out in concentric rings around a well or dark zone invisible from the platform. Among the crowds, many Xenos did nothing - they simply looked at the plants, the earth or the clouds, the trees swaying slowly in the wind.
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