Immortals (25 page)

The Map Room was brightly lit. Dumyaiite hated bright lights but said nothing. The Lords were seated around a long table with the cartographer occupying a chair at the head and the other one empty for the Roudaiitya.

The Lords arose and greeted him and Brignaiita nodded to him from his chair. Their greetings were terse and the Lords appeared tense.

‘Hello, there! I had not seen you thus. You look fabulous,’ Dumyaiite remarked to Brignaiita.

‘The grace of Theranuse, my Lord,’ Brignaiita replied.

Brignaiita did indeed look fabulous. He was in a teen Dae’ityon body with rippling muscles and a square-set jaw. No one would guess that the body harboured a near-senile Dae’ityon who was at least 3000 years old. Dumyaiite’s eyes gleamed and he promised himself that he would get himself into a similar body soon.

He was not allowed to kill for the body. It was a convention that he juvenate himself with a naturally dead Dae’ityon’s body or a death row inmate from the penitentiary, but then Dumyaiite had never much bothered with the written laws let alone conventions. He felt sure that Brignaiita had done the same. He would not have come across such a fine specimen by grace of Theranuse, the Dae’ityon God of Death.

Dumyaiite sat down and they rushed through with the formalities of the Council meeting. As soon as the formalities were done with, the Lords cornered Dumyaiite over the situation. Dumyaiite made a plea for time saying that he hoped to course-correct as soon as he had any leads.

‘And please believe me when I say that my captains and Map Master, Brignaiita here, and his commodores are looking very hard to get usable leads. It’s only a matter of time before we have some.’

Brignaiita interrupted him almost immediately.

‘I can only make the best of the space-time sector given to me. I have scoured this part of the universe and am continuing my efforts but I have to admit that I have little hope of finding any more COPs here.’

‘Wily old bastard!’ thought Dumyaiite.

Brignaiita had thus indicated that he was not going to get Dumyaiite’s back. Dumyaiite had counted on his support but the bastard had deserted him at this crucial juncture.

He drew a deep breath and continued:

‘My fellow Lords, we have gathered here at a crucial time during our journey through the universe. We have never before had this occasion where our survival had been threatened by the non-availability of COPs.

‘We have survived thus, hunting, gathering and consuming C-planets, for close to a hundred and twenty thousand years and I am sure that this is only a minor glitch in our journey. All great journeys are fraught with difficulties and obstacles and no journey and no adventure is greater than ours in the entire universe.’

He paused for effect and then continued.

‘As you all know we hadn’t embarked on this journey of our own accord. It was thrust upon us when the Usurayans ravaged our lovely planet the Dae’ityovanan. We have since then made the best of what fate has dealt us. We have evolved our ways and have adopted this cosmos-faring lifestyle so that we never call a piece of rock, home and will thus never ever be thrown out of another home.

‘And what a journey it has been. We have triumphed, aced, and expanded since our early days. And believe me when I say that the early days were more treacherous and presented seemingly insurmountable obstacles in front of our fore-Dae’ityons. But they never hit the panic button and they never switched ships in between. The challenge that we face today is but a minor glitch compared to what was faced by our ancestors. They proved their mettle and are today revered as gods by us mortals. Today the challenges that have befallen us beckon us towards divinity and towards immortality. We should strive to maintain calm during these difficult times. I would urge the Lords to seize this opportunity to lead by example and to maintain calm and decorum in their respective wards and I promise that we will soon be able to get to a number of rich and fulfilling COPs.’ Dumyaiite waved his tentacles with a flourish as he winded up his speech.

Immediately, a hand shot up. It was Lord Rippodaiite.

Rippodaiite was the Lord of the eastern board. Being a ship floating in space meant that there were no directions but the ship had names to that effect and people used the dimensions of ship as directions – east, west, rear, and the fore boards. In addition there were two central boards, the upper and lower.

‘With all due respect to the Chief Lord Roudaiitya, I beg to differ.’ Rippodaiite said as he looked towards Dumyaiite and his look had contempt and insolence rather than respect.

Alarm bells started ringing in Dumyaiite’s head. It was not a good sign if a Lord opposed him so openly and so undiplomatically.

Rippodaiite continued:

‘Our Chief Lord has very wise words for the Council. But the members of the Council did not travel this far for an inspiring “we shall prevail” speech. That is not going to feed the Dae’ityons under my control. And some of us do care about food more than mere words.’ The last sentence was measured for its impact and its barb was aimed directly at Dumyaiite.

Dumyaiite was seething with anger by then, his tentacles having engorged and the veins seeping a fiery red colour by now.

Rippodaiite saw the change of colour on Dumyaiite’s appendages and raised his voice a notch further.

‘Fortunately some of us have been doing something about the mess that we find ourselves led into. And by grace of Theranuse, my efforts have paid dividends.’ There was a pause in Rippodaiite’s oration.

He raised his voice even higher.

‘I would like to propose that the present Council be dissolved and that it should reconvene under my Chief Lordship and then shall I lead us out of our present misery. I hereby stake my claim to be the Roudaiitya so as to take us out of the dire straits we find ourselves in.’

Dumyaiite shot up from his seat, banged his studs on the table and shouted:

‘This is a mutiny and Lord Rippodaiite shall have to pay for this with his life.’

Rippodaiite’s voice rose higher than Dumyaiite’s.

‘I have perfected the
Quantum COP Seeker
codes.’

There was a stunned silence in the room. Dumyaiite sat down with a thump, pushed back into his seat by the words of Lord Rippodaiite.

Brignaiita got up.

‘Lord Rippodaiite. This is sacrilege. You cannot blackmail this Council. Whatever information of value you have needs to be put on the table now.’

Rippodaiite replied, the rancour gone from his voice now:

‘Map Master Brignaiita, you are a wise man. I would not argue with your authority. I would very much like you to continue as the Map Master of this ship. Our deity, the mighty Theranuse, knows that this ship needs you more than anyone else. I would place whatever I have in your trusted hands. But I hope you recognise my candidacy to be the Roudaiitya to allow me to bring my vision to the future endeavours of the Dae’ityon race.’

Placating Brignaiita was all that mattered to Rippodaiite. He had made his play carefully. If he could swing Brignaiita to his side, the other Lords would follow. They had no choice, now that he had announced the perfection of the ‘
Q-COPS’
.

Dumyaiite was growling like a beaten fighter by now, his studs dripping red out of their pores.

Brignaiita thought for a while and then spoke:

‘It is unfortunate that our recent failures have brought things to this head. Nevertheless, we cannot afford to ignore the crisis looming over us now. I do not approve of the methods of Lord Rippodaiite but I certainly want to explore the option that he has. I need to confer with him in private.’

Brignaiita politely turned down Dumyaiite’s protestations. Brignaiita and Rippodaiite closeted themselves in an adjacent room for the better part of an hour, while the other Lords waited in silence in the Council room.

Finally, the decision was made. Brignaiita emerged from the room alone and vouched for the workability of Lord Rippodaiite’s plan.

Lord Rippodaiite was crowned the Chief Lord, the Roudaiitya, a day later.

One of the first things he did was to juvenate himself with a twenty-year-old Dae’ityon prizefighter’s skin. Dumyaiite announced his resignation due to personal reasons. There was to be no ‘juvenation’ for him. Only the quiet of a retired life lay ahead of him.

The new Chief Lord Rippodaiite then submitted the co-ordinates of the new C-planet to Brignaiita.

The wise Brignaiita was requested to continue to be the Map Master for the ship, which he humbly accepted.

***

A brilliant captain of the eastern board, Captain Larsenaiita was killed in a freak incident on the engineering deck, the next day. His surveillance craft had crashed into the Pyrroleum tanks and he had been incinerated beyond recognition. Not many people knew that Captain Larsenaiita had put three years of toil and hard work into developing the vastly improved and newly-employed ‘
Q-COPS’
codes.

None would know that Brignaiita, who saw him as a future threat to his authority and his position as the map-master, had engineered the crash and death of Captain Larsenaiita.

Captain Larsenaiita had stumbled on a very ingenious way to worm quantum-seekers through space. Others had been trying to do something on similar lines for a long time but had met with very little success.

The beauty of the seekers that Larsenaiita had developed was that they were not physical but mere energy codes that were configured to carry information back and forth without eating out precious worm space. They could therefore, send thousands of them simultaneously through tiny quantum wormholes without having to deal with the impossibility of sending that many physical seekers through larger physical worm-drives. He had checked and cross-checked his results and had gone ahead and sent 10,000 quantum codes into the adjacent galactic super-cluster.

He had waited with baited breath and muted excitement and the results had come through within thirty-six hours. The probes had returned four hits in all. Four hits among ten thousand meant a very huge number of C-planets in the entire super-cluster. He had jumped with joy and his tentacles had radiated incandescence in his ecstasy. He had rushed to his Lord Master with the results and Lord Rippodaiite had been very pleased with him. Larsenaiita was ambitious and his dream of being the ship’s Map Master one day had seemed to have drawn a step closer to him that day. Now the dream and its dreamer, Larsenaiita, were dead.

***

Brignaiita had just heard of the accident on the engineering deck and he silently confessed his guilt to Theranuse, asking for his forgiveness.

He finished his prayers, sighed, and returned to the controls in front of him. The source planets looked good prospects to him. He had chosen what looked like a binary system of carbonised planets spinning around a moderate-sized star in a spiral galaxy in the adjacent super-cluster.

Of the two, one was virtually dead and lifeless, albeit with huge sources of fossilised carbon within, while the other was a carbon-rich, living, breathing planet, third in orbit from its sun, with a little too much water for his liking.

                                                   ***

from

Exodus

Book-II

Domus Series

Jai and Ludvig

Sleep doesn’t come easy when you know not when or where you will wake up.

There was white all around when Jai opened his eyes. He was startled and it brought back, to his tired and confused mind, the terror of his ‘white interruptions’. Panic set in immediately. It was like waking up into a nightmare rather than waking from one. For a moment he thought he was back in his prison cell, his white interruption, captive and paralyzed, bound to the bed.

He moved his hand. He could do that. So, he was not paralyzed, fully. But the movement hurt like hell. He winced and grimaced but stifled the cry of anguish rising within him. He tried to remember what had happened.

They had embarked on a journey to Greenland with Ludvig, to set off the nuke. Something had gone wrong. The bomb did not go off as planned and Henna had rushed in. Henna was there, yes, she was the one who had triggered the nuke. Then, everything was white. He had not felt a thing. Was that the end?

No, there was more.

He had woken up in the white room and the old man in the ‘Bomb Squad suit’ had helped rescue him and Ludvig from there. They had climbed on the back of a big burly brown beast and had ridden away amidst intense fighting. They had taken shelter within a forest, which had trees as high as the sky above, rising way above the clouds that had covered the night sky. The ground was covered with a green carpet of what looked like moss and felt soft and rubbery to touch. The beasts had ‘run’ through the shrubbery and the undergrowth to get them to a river.

His head hurt like hell now and he raised his hands to his head.

Yes, he remembered that color. His hands and his entire body was a strange bronze color here, the color that he had first seen on himself during his white interruptions. It was the same for all the others. Yes, he was on the new planet, the Nova they called it. He was on Nova and Nova was at war. His life on Earth was over. That life, the one on earth, was apparently an illusion, a diversionary trick being played on his mind during captivity on Nova. He would never return to the streets of Mumbai, to the squalor and filth of his previous life. That was some good news in that there would be no Mumbai underworld, no police hunting him down anymore. Yet the dread of this new place filled him with terror. Mumbai was hostile, but it was familiar territory, its streets were home to him. His life as a killer for hire in Mumbai meant that the city was at its heels before him. Mumbai had no power over him, prostrate to his wanton disregard for his own life.

That was before he had met Henna.

That had changed everything. He had, for the first time, something to live for and he had protected what he had with Henna. What that was, was more than love. It was a blinding, all-pervasive, all-consuming feeling that had enveloped all his waking senses. Then, all hell had broken loose and he had found immortality while on the run from the police and the underworld. His immortality and his white sojourns had started a roller-coaster ride that had ended here at Nova, a planet in a galaxy light-years away from Earth.

The good Professor Ananthakrishnan had explained it to him as best as he could. This was another place, far far away from Earth, in a different star system and in a different galaxy altogether. The Professor had mumbled that in fact it could be a different time or a different Universe altogether. He had asked him what that meant. The Professor had just shrugged his shoulders and replied

‘Better not go there. It’s something that you simply wouldn’t understand! With all my years of astronomy, even I cannot claim to fully understand the true meaning of time or the outlandish concept of Multiverses’ he had said that with a sense of deep regret without any hint of condescension and Jai had left it at that.

Henna had been the price for all the wrongs he had done in his last life. He had strapped himself to the bomb on the ice-sheet of Greenland, thinking that his love, Henna was secure in her future, guaranteed thus by Ludvig. Ludvig had promised that Henna would be relocated to Norway, into a new life, where all her needs would be taken care of, for the rest of her natural life.

But that was not to be.

‘Oh God!’ he let out a cry of anguish as the images of the bomb going off in that little hut on Greenland ice played itself again in his head. Henna was standing right next to the bomb and had actually set it off by flipping a switch. He did not feel anything after that. It had been a blinding flash of white light and nothing else after that.

‘What had gone wrong? Why was she flipping the switch of the bomb?’ the tears flowed freely down his cheeks now.

He looked around. He wasn’t alone in the room. Ludvig occupied a wooden chair at the foot of his bed. Well, not the Ludvig he had known back on Earth but the bronzed version of him here on Nova, whom he had first seen occupying the other bed during the ‘white interruptions’.

Ludvig stirred, Jai’s muffled cries reaching his half-asleep ears.

‘Hey! Good to see you come around. How are you feeling?’ he drew closer to Jai and continued

‘Hey! Are you crying?’

‘Henna’

‘Ah yes. I wanted to talk about that.’

‘How did that happen to her? Why was she in the cabin?’

Ludvig pulled his chair closer to Jai

‘Henna is an incredibly brave girl. Over there in the hut in Greenland, when all was set, Dan tried the remote switch but there was a malfunction, the bomb did not go off. If you remember what the Professor had told us, there was only a narrow window of time to get the bomb going in order for us to make the trip back here. Once the remote malfunctioned, there was only one-way to do it – to set it off manually. When Dan hesitated to do what needed to be done, Henna jumped into the car, rode like hell to our hut and set off the bomb manually. She did that for us, rather for you. She loves you that much buddy. You are a truly lucky guy.’

Jai nodded his head, his tears still flowing down his face, then realized something

‘Hey! How do you know all that? How do you know that is what happened? You were also strapped on that chair with me and the bomb went off, bringing us here.’

Ludvig leaned in closer

‘Glad you caught onto that because that is not the end of her story. Do you remember what happened after you were brought here?’

Jai nodded

‘I think so. We were rescued from the white room and then onto the river.’

‘What happened then? Do you remember the girl that jumped into that river, the attack that came thereafter?’

Jai frowned and then a moment later, it dawned on him

‘Yes, I do. The jets crawled up onto us and then there was that deafening noise’

‘Well, there was that but before that, the old man from the white room rescued and revived that girl, moments before the jets sneaked up on us. When they did, everyone ran for cover, leaving the girl out there, in the open under the jets.’

Jai listened in rapt attention. Ludvig continued

‘The jets positioned themselves over the girl, perhaps preparing to strike. Then something incredible happened. The jets were struck by…’ Ludvig paused, looking deep into Jai’s eyes and then continued

‘…meteorites. BAM! The jets just disintegrated in mid-air, right over that girl, blasted to nothingness, leaving the girl without a scratch on her body. But this tale of awesome coincidences doesn’t end there. The best part is yet to come.’

Jai looked into Ludvig’s eyes, awestruck

‘What is that?’

‘After the attack, the girl by the river stirred into consciousness and…’ Ludvig kept his hands on Jai’s face and continued, ‘…asked for you by your name. She asked for Jai, and said that she was Henna! Bloody fucking miracle! Henna indeed!’

Jai clasped his hands around Ludvig’s

‘What? How is that possible?’

‘The old man thought about it and the way he explained it to me was that the blast in the cabin killed us all, the both of us strapped in our chairs and Henna, standing by the bomb. Our deaths on Earth had opened a quantum portal to deliver our consciousnesses out of there. But, instead of two, it picked up all three of the consciousnesses there. The old man put ours back in our bodies and still had enough to make up nearly a full consciousness. He held that unknown quantum of consciousness in some sort of a ‘consciousness cage’, bringing it along with him. The girl that jumped into the water, when they fished her out of the river, she was dead. The old man drained the third consciousness into her.’

Jai listened without even blinking his eyes, his brain furiously trying to make sense of all this.

‘So, you say that Henna is here.’

‘Well, her consciousness is here, just like the both of us here’ he raised his hands to Jai’s face, showing the bronzed arm to Jai.

‘That means she is a bronzed new version of herself’ Jai’s tears had dried by now and there was a look of relief mixed with bewilderment on his face,

‘Why is all this happening? What exactly is going on?’

‘A war is going on.’

‘What are we? Where are we? Who are fighting whom here?’

‘We are what we were before – trans-humans. The people of this planet are descendants from our Earth back in our time. They left Earth many thousands of years ago to reach Nova, a habitable planet in the Mouse-tail galaxy, light years away from our galaxy. We set up home here and this planet changed us. Some of us evolved, adapted or trans-mutated to our present-bronzed forms on this planet.’

‘Who are we fighting against?’

Ludvig laughed

‘Well, we are fighting against ourselves. There were a lot of us from Earth who refused to settle on Nova and continued with their journey further into the farthest reaches of space. They have returned to Nova now, changed and trans-mutated into an evil marauding species, much different from us, intent on decimating and colonizing us.’

‘Oh…’

‘Well, Nova didn’t change all of us. Some remained unaffected, remaining the most human-like amongst us. They call themselves the Sterling-Humans or the Sterlings.  We call them the white-demons and yes, we were at war with them too. A home-grown variant of civil-war that is currently on hold in face of a bigger threat from outside.’

Jai held his head and collapsed on his bed, the turned to Ludvig

‘Where is Henna now?’

‘You were out cold for the past five days. Henna waited by you for three days. When you refused to come by, they moved her to a more secure base. She is safer there. She is a sort of celebrity here now. They are calling her ‘Skyball Lyra’ now’

Jai’s face had aged in minutes, his forehead furrowed in wrinkles and the bronze appearing faded.

Ludvig held Jai’s hands

‘Don’t worry, she is safe now. She did not want to leave your side. I persuaded her to go, promised that I would look after you here.’

Jai nodded his head and sighed, probably dazed by all the information that had had to process,

‘Why do they call her Lyra?’

‘Lyra was the name of the girl who jumped off that cliff.’

Jai sighed,

‘What do they call us?’

Ludvig looked up and his eyes went up in a smirk

‘Well, that’s interesting. They call us JAI and Ludvig.’

‘How is that possible?’

Ludvig shrugged his shoulders,

‘Maybe a coincidence. I don’t know.’

Jai looked unconvinced. Nevertheless, he could not think of anything to explain that. Moreover, he had a hundred other questions in his head,

‘Why did the humans leave Earth?’

Ludvig looked at Jai and shook his head

‘Do you want to go there now? It’s a very long story, the story of humans fighting the odds and winning and yet ultimately losing the one thing that was dearest to them, their home, the Earth.’

‘Where did you find out about this? Took some lessons in history?’

‘Well you can say that. I did read about it but it was not a history book that I read. They call it ‘The Exodus Story’. No one knows much about the author and if it is all true but it sure is an entertaining account of what happened all those years ago. He must have been on the ship that escaped Earth and probably had a ringside view of events as they happened or perhaps he researched the topic, met people who were in the thick of it and wrote a fictionalized account of events as they transpired. It is however, by far the most popular book on the topic. The elders discount it as pure fable but the masses love it.’

Ludvig got up from his chair, reaching a wooden cabinet on the wall to fish out a book.

‘Here you go. Since you have nothing better to do and need to rest here for a couple more days, I would suggest you dig into it. I am sure you will not be disappointed. I will come back with something to eat. And hey! Don’t run away.’

Jai smiled, accepting the book off Ludvig’s hands.

(to be continued...)