Damocles (31 page)

She didn’t even notice the little one until he climbed out from under the table with a bulky boxlike contraption. The sight of it made the group-thrum ripple in what Meg could only describe as an audible tickle. She felt giddy in the midst of it. When Loul told her Po wanted to show her something, she could hear a throb of affection in his voice for his friend. At that moment she knew she would let Po show her the pointy end of a knife sliding between her ribs if it meant keeping that happy, thrilling sound coming from Loul.

The box was a book, a bigger, bulkier version of the illustrated book Loul had shown her at the work site, what he called Magagan. Meg loved the feel of this one, the thick sheaths of some sort of fibrous material warped in alternating patterns so thick Dideto fingers could easily get between them. She wondered if
the manufacturers of the books warped the pages beforehand or just assembled them, and the pages warped with use. Peering at the binding, she saw fat clamps holding the pages in place and leathery-looking blisters on the inside of the cover that connected to the binding with coarse strips. She prodded one of the blisters, seeing the strip twitch. Like so many devices the Dideto used, the book seemed to require more strength than dexterity to open.

It weighed a ton. Turning the book upside down to see the pages swing free, Meg felt the muscles in her arm struggle under the bulk. Unlike the book Loul had shown her at the site, this one’s cover was made up of a collage of images glued over each other. She let her fingers slide over the pictures, some glossy, some matte, all of them faded and frayed. The corner of a small drawing curled up on one side and she knew she could slip her fingernail beneath it and peel it back, revealing the cover beneath, but she couldn’t imagine any cultural setting in which proper etiquette allowed defacing a book. She giggled to herself, feeling her thoughts getting loopy, and set the book back down in its proper position. The rising and falling of that beautiful four-way thrum made her feel a little drunk.

Po climbed up close to her as she flipped through the pages. Several pages in, Meg understood this was a scrapbook of sorts, a collection of written pieces and clippings from other books. She recognized the illustration style from the Magagan book Loul had shown her. Some photographs she recognized from the Dideto database, geographic regions of the planet Jefferson had pinpointed in his mineral research. A detailed series of drawings of the sea caught her eye and she wondered if it was the same sea they had landed beside.

Po asked her about one of the pictures. Even though it was only a drawing, it was the most similar to an Earth life-form
she had seen yet. The question sparked a flurry of discussion that Loul seemed to dismiss, telling her the picture was only a thought. Maybe he meant the story behind the cartoon, assuring her that the grotesque creatures didn’t actually come up from the seafloor and drag unsuspecting Dideto to a grisly death, but the little one interrupted him. He wanted to know if Earth had these creatures, these Gagarel.

“Yes,” Meg said, noting only Po didn’t seem surprised. “Earthers have Gagarel. On Earth this is a giant squid. In the sea.”

The group fell silent but for their lovely thrum. Po’s throat kept a high note as he leaned across the table, staring from Loul to Hark as if making a silent point. Loul rubbed his knuckles on the table and turned to Meg.

“Gagarel not in Didet. Gagarel is thought; is…” His words died away, urging her to understand him. Meg nodded and tapped her wrist.

“Screen okay? Here?”

Loul spoke low and fast to his friends and the little one made a noise that could not be interpreted as anything but ecstasy. He tapped his knuckles and glanced at her wrist.

Meg drew the light screen from her wristband, laying it flat across the table. Po nearly knocked the breath from her, pressing in close beside her to see. His teeth chattered and his thrum hitched as his breathing picked up through his flat nose. She knew Loul could hear her laughing in his earpiece.

Low sounds of wonder came from the two across the table as she flipped through the files searching for the picture. It didn’t take long to find the bio-file on the giant squid, which she enlarged for the group to see. “Gagarel,” she said, sliding the picture to the edge of the screen. While the photo was the realistic image of the giant squid, it wasn’t the picture she
wanted. It took several minutes to search the library, looking for the scans of the old maritime and folklore images. After several wrong clicks, she found the photo she had remembered passing during a bored perusal of the library. It was a photograph of an eighteenth-century woodcarving. In it, a giant squid had been transformed into a sea monster, its tentacles drawing in a multisailed whaling ship and dragging it into the frothing sea. Meg knew this was just one of hundreds of images like this, the old sea monster being the stuff of ancient legends.

“Gagarel, yes?” She pointed from the etching to the photograph of the much more docile-looking giant squid. “Yes, in Didet? In the sea? Gagarel?”

“Dude,” Po breathed the word, “Gagarel is real. It’s a freaking alien. It’s real and it’s an alien. Who knows how much of Magagan might be real? Do you realize what this means?”

Loul stared at the screen. “It means we’re probably misunderstanding what she’s saying. It happens. It’s happened a lot since they got here.”

They all heard the doubt in his voice. Reno Dado spoke first. “Look, I’m the last to board the crazy bus and I don’t know her like you do, but unless they are artists beyond comparison”—she pointed to the photo of the blob-like sea creature—“this is a photograph. And it’s a photograph of this.” She pointed to Gagarel. “And this.” Her hand moved over the illustration that hovered on the screen.

“Well, that doesn’t mean…” Loul didn’t know what it didn’t mean but it couldn’t mean what Po thought it meant. It couldn’t
mean that Gagarel and the Shadow and Sea Gods’ Footsteps were real. That was crazy. That was as crazy as…aliens. “I just think…”

Po saved him from having to pull a thought together. He slid the book out from under the light screen, careful not to break the plane of the illuminated edges. “Here, Meg, look at this.” For all his original shock, Po seemed to have taken to Meg’s presence as the most natural thing in the world, talking to her like he talked with any of them. He flipped through the pages of the scrapbook, opening up to a full-color rendering of a multilevel building. He shoved the picture before Meg, who ghosted her long fingers across the lines delineating the stories.

“This is many, yes? Dideto have this have many?” She looked to Loul to understand what she meant, pointing from the picture to the glass ceiling of the social center. “This? This is many of this? In Didet?”

Loul rocked forward on his knuckles. Maybe it was the noise of the center or the distraction of seeing his friends again, but it felt harder to understand Meg’s broken concepts here at the table. Maybe he was just self-conscious, but found he couldn’t move his hand from the space between
yes
and
no
. He’d brought Meg here on impulse, thinking she was leaving, wanting her to see who he was outside of the landing site. He wanted her to see his friends, see him as a real person, but now that she was here, he felt like there was no real Loul Pell to show her, like the only value he really had was the imagined connection they’d shared in the isolation inside the barricade.

That wasn’t really it, though, was it? If he was honest with himself, and Loul found himself staring face-to-face with the truth, there was more than a small part of himself that wanted Meg to be overwhelmed by the social center, wanted her to cling to him. He wanted his friends to be speechless in her presence, relying on him to bridge the unbridgeable gap. Instead the four
of them laughed and talked and stared into each other’s eyes as if they were the old friends and he was the alien. It was childish and stupid and even as he acknowledged the emotions he felt shame rushing in to fill the cracks.

And as always, heartbeats behind the flood of revelations washing over him, he saw Meg’s face change. Her eyes widened, turning down in the corners as that thin line of hair along her brow arched and curved. She turned her torso toward him, the light screen forgotten, and he could hear the surprised sounds from Hark and Reno Dado when they saw the elegant twist of her thin body. Meg’s hand fell onto Loul’s fist, soft as always, impossibly light and warm where he opened the pads of his top finger to feel her touch. She had said she couldn’t read minds and for that he was grateful. He hoped she couldn’t hear the worst details of the childish reaction.

“Loul is okay?” He tapped his knuckles together, careful not to pinch her fingertips as he did. “Gagarel? Is not good/bad to see Gagarel? Is this?” Her fingers traced the drawing of the imagined Roana Temple. “This is no good?”

“It’s fine. It’s okay. Loul is okay. Loul is…” With her narrow shoulders turned toward him, the bony shelf of her neck taut against her strange pale skin, Loul wondered again if it could be possible to become physically addicted to someone’s attention. She didn’t try to finish his sentence for him. She didn’t try to hurry the words from him. She watched and waited like she always did, like she had all the time in the world to listen to anything he chose to say to her, like her entire life depended upon hearing the next words out of his mouth, like she had never heard anything more fascinating than the things he said. Yeah, he was addicted to her attention.

He looked at the cartoon of the Roana Temple. It was only a rendering from imagination, one of the many archaeological
theories about what the long-ruined structure might have looked like. Loul had already processed the shock when he’d seen how similar many of the Urf buildings looked to these types of pictures. It was the stacked buildings, the way the ceilings weren’t clear but were both ceilings and floors; rooms stacked upon rooms like boxes. The Urfer buildings he’d seen in Meg’s database were constructed just so. He hadn’t seen any with the ornate decorations this cartoonist had imagined on the mythical temple, but he supposed it wasn’t impossible. At this point, what was?

He pointed to the lines that marked the ceiling/floors the artists had drawn on the building. “On Didet, no. Only…” He pointed to the glass ceiling where the Fa-pale light glowed a little rosier than usual. “Only one. Urfers have many. Dideto only one.”

Po huffed out a breath, a flurry of questions on the way, but Meg didn’t turn away from Loul. She squeezed his hand with her thin fingers, barely denting the skin where his fist was clasped. She leaned in close, close enough that he could feel her breath on his face. “Is good. Loul thoughts this”—she pointed to the picture of the temple—“Urf has this. Loul thoughts Gagarel; Urf has Gagarel. Is maybe Loul thoughts Urf? Is maybe Loul thoughts Meg?”

He could feel his friends staring and could almost hear Po’s teeth grinding, wanting to butt in and ask questions and demand an explanation, but he ignored them. Meg’s eyes were wet again, large and flecked with color he could see when she sat so close. He didn’t care if she could read his mind. She was reading something, something very clear, because she had just spoken to him the very thoughts that had just risen within him.

“It’s like I’m dreaming you.” He spoke softly. She wouldn’t know the words, not exactly, but she knew the meaning. She had
just said that very thing. Leaning in closer he lowered his voice so that only she could hear. “There are all these things that connect us, all these stupid cartoon kid-stuff things that turn out to be yours. Temples and sea monsters and spaceships, all this stupid stuff that we entertain ourselves with and they turn out to be Urfer. They’re not legend, they’re history. Your history. Our history. And now you’re going to leave and I’m going to be stuck with comic books and movies and everybody else is going to talk about how much we’ve learned but all I’m going to think about is how much I didn’t get to hear. Some black-shirt team is going to come in and take all the research and present reports and they’re going to ask me for my input. I don’t want to give any input, Meg. I want to talk to you. I want you to talk to me. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me and when you go, it’s just going to be so—”

“Mr. Pell! Mr. Pell!” A camera arm craned over the guards, bobbing over the edge of the booth. “A moment of your time, please!” The guards crouched together in a solid wall of muscle, forcing the curious onlookers farther from the booth, but the camera continued to weave on its expandable arm.

“Oh my god, oh my god, is it…oh my god.” Po rocked up on the seat to see over the heads of the guards. “It’s him. It’s him. It’s him.”

A balding figure in a faded red tunic pressed his shoulder into the wall of guards, not moving them but also not being moved. He held up a microphone in his fist, the familiar logo wrapped around the bulk of the windscreen. The camera whirled on its arm to take in his image and then, at his signal, turned back to the group in the booth—four wide-eyed Dideto and one Urfer, motionless except for the glassine teeth worrying a soft pink lip.

Hark’s hands fell motionless on the table. “Is that…”

Loul blinked several times to be sure. “I think it is.”

Reno Dado snorted a laugh of disbelief. “It can’t be. Is it? Is that really The Searcher?
The
Searcher? Himself? I thought he never left his lair or secret hideaway or whatever it is.”

The man in red smiled a quick smile, tipping his head to Reno Dado. “I do occasionally leave my lair, young lady.” Reno Dado blushed at being caught. “I have powerful enemies who would very much like to silence me, and for that reason I keep my whereabouts unknown for the majority of the time. Sources feel safer, information flows more freely, and—”

Po cut him off, delivering The Searcher’s tagline for him. “And the Truth rises.”

He bowed with a great show of humility and then gestured to the wall of soldiers before him. “May I?”

All eyes turned to Loul. He hesitated from his instinctual desire to yell “Hell, yeah!” This was The Searcher, after all, the man whose underground information and conspiracy theories had entertained, enthralled, and enraged Loul and his friends for more than a decade. He was a living legend, their hero, even when that admiration made them look like fools. Or had made them look like fools. Ever since the arrival of the Urfers, the verdict on who was crazy and who wasn’t was being widely and publicly debated.