Rajna the Magistrate sought a course of action. In a hall bedecked with ivy-bound onyx statues of cat deities, stretching between the great Ikoem reception hall and the cloistered cavern chamber of councilors, she considered how – and at what cost – she might do what must be done to pull her universe back from the brink. She studied her own lanky reflection in her pristine bathing pool, her pocked, blemished skin a shade of red so dark it blended into the last flaming rays of sunset behind her. She saw standing there a dark star, absorbing the terrible weight of it all.
She turned to the glowing lacquered skull, her eyes glazed. The skull was that of another magistrate, eighty years deceased, superheated and then frozen in a rare variety of resin, a process that destroyed all organic tissue but bone and nerve. The crystallized neuron network was therefore preserved, a perfect superconducting computer core, programmable to access limitless information.
The skull pulsed with amber light, seeking the vessel in which the Ambassador had absconded to the furthest reaches of Eridu. In a crystal basin, Rajna took in the telemetry from the lost vessel in cameos of hard light. A bleak desert on a distant world stretched out before her, encrusted with hunched, dedicated flora. Sheksama and her child were nowhere to be seen, but Rajna noted the body of Shaksama's attendant, lying next to the vessel in the ritual repose of honored death, the sand beginning to devour her.
Someone was coming across the desert. A young man with pale skin, meandering heavily, yellow hair flapping. He limped and stumbled as he went. Then he discovered the body. Rajna watched him look it over with wonder and...something else. Something like hunger. Then he kissed her.
The signal went dark, cut off by the constant shifts and rotations of the universe.
She turned and felt sick. So the story was the same everywhere. The lust of men, the need to conquer, to devour, to engulf...
"This, of all worlds, is the hell you have run to, Sheksama?" Rajna said, her voice echoing, colorless. She considered the anthems that the Gray Purpose chanted every morning in the streets of Nu's capitol: Ho! Ho! The Great Gray Road, forward to Eternity!
Did they chant the same upon the distant world where Sheksama had fallen?
What could be known about these... humans? She set an intention with her fingers on the burnished skull, closing her eyes. When she opened them, the skull flung out an overwhelming array of smoky projections. A mind-boggling array of video clips, pictures, audio recordings. Heads of state in gray suits with artificial hair, silver buildings crumbling, endless ranks in unison, the color drenched from their faces...fires, floods, famines, committees...flags atop dead-eyed statues of dying soldiers, swarming streets, passersby under black umbrellas, wasp-nest prison cells ten levels high...tanks, transactions, logistics, cities clinging to putrid shores like geometric cancers, walls within walls within walls, gray, gray, gray...
They had been conquered over the centuries many times, without them even knowing it, through promises of strength and brotherhood, good harvests and good values, carried on the backs of millions of slaves toiling under hot sun. Hatred was the very mortar of the Purpose. Efficiency churned out poison, and rampant inefficiency kept the producers starving and the consumers blind. It was in the lines and edges, the ruthless right angles, the contrast of black ink upon virgin white paper. It was precise war, sterile science, fervent belief. It was the hunger in the young man's eyes before he kissed Sheksama's slain attendant.
Rajna turned away, cold, and lost. She could look no more.
They had all but taken it, she realized in horror.
This world already belongs to the Gray Machine.
Her world had known such horrors.When the madman Dajri Rova had split the world of Nu to its molten core while trying to unleash the psychic force of a Mindrealm, it was said he had looked into the molten maw the size of a city.
The magma spewing forth from the gash swallowed a continent, and the heat from it stained the sky of this world forever. Dajri had wept blood, and it fell at his feet. And from it grew the first black Vriktha flower – the drug called Eater of Dreams, and Hunger for Sleep. He picked the flower, and blew a small breath upon it, and its dagger seeds danced away, and spread across the harrowed land. No more than a tear brings hunger for sleep, memory long as victory deep.
But the Vriktha bloom adorned the Ikoem crest for another reason, she reflected. A reminder to never be ruled by ambition.
So what might stand as the Vriktha flower for the Gray Machine? How might she teach them the same lesson, without destroying another world?
She made her way with long strides through the great hall to her command quarters, traversing cool swirled marble. Passing through the Sisterhood's hanger, arched like the center of a kaleidoscope, she spared not a glance at the Drifts and Pales that oiled the flexwings and kept the dark marble gleaming bright as onyx ale. The workers avoided her solemn gaze, seeing a woman with all the poise and inscrutability of a hungry tigress.
The Magistrate sat down at a private distal communication module. She made a gesture as if waving out a candle flame, conjuring a living light statue of a stocky, balled headed golden man. It was far from a face she wished to see... but such are the times in which we live.
The man they called Fen, newly appointed baron to the five dwarf stars of Q'uahid, might have been handsome in an opprobrious way, a decade or two back, if not for the smirk. Any woman who'd thought so the night before wouldn't the morning after, but no one could argue his charm. Charm alone kept his newly-won galactic barony within his sweaty little hands. That, and his tendency to put those same sweaty little hands into everything.
Fen was defined by three features beyond his squat smugness. The first was the opulent silk flung around his rotund torso. The second was the rugose greenish gills he bore upon his neck – the mark of the disreputable Gold underclass of bureaucrats, movers, shakers, back alley dealers. The third was more unique. It was a third eye like hers. He was the only male she'd ever seen with one, and it was unquestionably the source of his infamy.
Fen's projected image hovered, barely more than smoke, above a simmering brazier in the center of the chamber's round, marble table. "Well, Red. I see you've been doing your research on dear old Earth. What a fine, fine mess we are in."
There was venom in his voice, as usual — a tired, jaded sort of venom. He studied her, and the look made her think him lucky to be an image of light and smoke. If he had been in front of her in a corporeal sense, she might have broken off his manhood and shoved it in his mouth.
"May my eyes rot from my skull before they're forced to look upon you again, dear Fen."
The short greenish-gold man's smirk became a full-on grin, his broad teeth swirling in light yellow smoke. "I did quite miss you too, my dear."
"Enough. I need something from you, as much as I hate the notion of it."
"My, my...let's not get carried away with pleasantries, then, shall we?" Fen retorted. "Diplomacy was never one of your weaknesses."
"You flatter me too much, good sir."
"And you deserve so much more."
"Including old friends spying on me and my affairs?" Rajna spat. The fact that he knew she'd been looking at Earth vexed her, and yet surprised her not a bit.
Fen looked so injured she almost believed him. "My lady, deep concern for your wellbeing is paramount. I offer my sympathies at your recent...loss."
"Your sympathies are to me as a serpent's venom to the cat that beheads it."
Rajna realized that at least two pairs of feminine hands we massaging the Baron's soft, stooped shoulders as they spoke. Ghost hands in the smoke, their owners faceless wisps. He sat back self-contentedly, but not self-righteously. There was a tortured quality to this disgusting little man, under all his bluster. And somehow it made her trust him, just a little.
"Your dear Ambassador has taken your one chance at salvation and run to a world you are finding is well within the grasps of your truest enemy. And you hate these humans, don't you? I can see it in those big, beautiful, mysterious eyes."
"Then elucidate, my good Baron. What does a man of your import care of the machinations of a lowly Magistrate and her humble enterprises?"
Fen's face fell. "You misunderstand me, my dear lady. Think. Were it not for you, I'd be a cautionary tale, with all the best bits festooned on the late Imperator Brila's bloody scepter. You should be scrubbing out radioactive waste tubes with the rest of the Reds, and I should be dead or castrated, peddling aphrodisiacs or counting coins or pleasuring fat old penny duchesses in brothels of Ksal. Should. What a funny word."
Fen batted away the third or fourth pair of feminine hands massaging his shoulders.
"But thanks to your 'arbitrary' decision to save my vessel from our dear departed Imperator Senior, I find myself wearing the shackles of power rather than those of a spitted foul. I have no illusions that you spared me out of kindness, though whether or not it was out of cruelty I am not so certain. One way or another, I am left with a barony I do not want and a constituency that does not obey. So what interest do I have in your little escapades? Simply to keep a finger on the pulse of this blister we call an Empire. I find myself in the delicate position of needing to know how soon it's going to burst, and spew its fury out like magma from the mouth of the Mage's Gape. And so do you. And I suppose that's why we need each other, my dear. Now...how can I be of service?"
She saw no choice but to risk trusting him.
"Tell me, Baron. When my choices are the blood of war and the grayness of undeath...how might I save my world without annihilating another?"
Fen drew a long, luxurious trail of fragrant smoke from a smoldering lamp somewhere off-projection, and his eyelids drooped. He grinned. "Shadows, my dear Nightspeaker. It is within shadows you may find light."
"Interesting. Tell me what I might do. And what it is that you seek in return."