Early the next morning, Cleve and I return to the Temple of Chiron before the daily service—before the crowds. When we enter, Sal is setting up, preparing the texts for the day. “Oh, Child of—Mariah,” they greet me, correcting themself midway without me having to ask. “It’s good to see you. There have been some strange happenings lately.”
My eyebrows shoot up. “Additional strange happenings?”
“Some joyous strange happenings! I was wondering if you might shed some light on these things.”
I sigh. Is this about yesterday? My bonding with Gale must’ve tripped Marina’s detector… did it also do something here? I don’t even know where to begin, and I don’t have to, because Cleve says brightly, “Nope, we’re here for the prophecy. We’ve got a lot to do today. You’re a prophet, I’m sure you can figure that stuff out on your own.”
“Of course, of course,” Sal says, flustered. “You have much business to attend to, I’m sure.”
They lead us through one of the side doors into a room behind where they were preaching yesterday. It’s like a little museum—a combination natural history/science/art museum. There are skeletons of various Chiron creatures and desiccated mushrooms, but there’s also a piece of Unity. And then there is the book of prophecies. On each two-page spread, the left is a sketch and the right is text, probably Sal’s interpretation of the drawing.
As soon as I see that, things begin to fall into place. Not that I believe any of Sal’s claims about the Child of Chiron, but I understand how this has likely all come about. “Do you only see things?” I ask them. “Or do you hear things?”
“I mostly see things,” they say. “Usually in a dream, but not always. It started when I was a teenager.” That’d be about ten to fifteen years ago. I was still asleep in my cryopod then, but it makes me wonder at what point the pod was compromised and my infection began. That’s something Deirdre might be able to determine from the logs. “B-but, here! Take a look at this!” Sal says excitedly, pulling my attention back to the prophecies.
There’s a sketch of an indeterminate person crawling out of a cave. “The Child of Chiron shall emerge from the planet,” says the text alongside it. Studying the impressionistic background of the drawing reveals what could be additional people… and cryopods. The page is dated; this was drawn several years ago. Again, before I woke up. But other people could have been waking up then at other crash sites. Cleve and I might not be the only people who woke up off schedule. I’ve seen—or heard, or sensed—things happening elsewhere on Chiron, like when Shu-Fen’s crew was disturbing the area around our module. This could be something similar. This could be legitimate.
The next page shows a person sitting among various creatures of Chiron. This is the one with the phrase Jack quoted, “Every craw and beetle, briar and beast, knows the Child as a friend.” The craws drawn here are smaller than the ones around the Monsoon Jungle, more like the kind that live around the Morgan domes.
Another prophecy: “You will know the Child by the siege worm’s touch.” The art here is a ritualistic diagram with a siege worm tendril wrapped around the person… kind of like how Gale was snaking around me yesterday. Definitely not how I interacted with a siege worm, I think as I glance down at my left arm. My sleeve conceals its jagged scars from the violent break, recently made even worse by Dr. Gupta’s decidedly untender ministrations.
“The Child of Chiron shall lead an unworthy army against the defilers.” The next drawing shows an indistinct person in front of many others, and in the distance are a lot of geometric constructions that contrast starkly with the organic feel of most of the rest of the drawings. Those buildings look like they’re on fire, though they could just be impressions of smokestacks. Still, it gives me pause; I’ve gotten perceptions of fire from Chiron myself.
Further back in the book are other drawings without interpretative texts. One of them is a menacing Progenitor shrouded in miasma. This Progenitor still has their hair and skin and looks very much alive. Of all the drawings I have seen so far, this is the one that makes me say, “This is real.” As far as I know, I’m the only one who has seen a living Progenitor, and that only thanks to Checkerboard’s memories. I’m not saying the text of the prophecies are true or that I’m the Child of Chiron, but Sal really has been seeing visions coming from the planet, same as I have.
“What do you mean real?” Sal asks. “I don’t know what this is.” They look to me, eyes lit with hope. “What is this creature?” they ask intently.
Ah, so I guess I will be granting revelations today, after all. At least that’s how Sal will frame my words, I’m sure. “This is a Progenitor,” I tell them.
“What?! I thought the Progenitors were all dead.”
“We’ve only seen ruins,” I say.
“Skeletons,” Cleve adds with a nod.
“But this is what they looked like.” I tap the picture.
“How do you know this is what they looked like?” Sal asks. “It looks like it could match, but… It came to me in a vision. I don’t know what this means. Please,” they beg, “I ask for your insight into this and any of these other unexplained sketches. I have seen, but I do not understand.”
“I know what they looked like because craws saw this creature,” I tell Sal.
“You can commune with the craws,” they say breathily. “But what does it mean?”
I laugh, and to my ears it sounds a little bit helpless and a little bit overwhelmed. “I don’t know what anything means.”
“Of course. It will be revealed in time,” Sal murmurs.
“The Progenitor that I saw, that looked alive with flesh like this, that was a memory of one from the past.”
“Was it this Progenitor?”
“I don’t know. I saw a craw captured by a Progenitor, a frightening experience. I don’t know how far in the past that was, though.”
Sal accepts that as all I can tell them about this drawing and turns to another. This is a ship, similar in style to Unity, but not our ship itself. I’ve seen enough pamphlets and blueprints to judge that. The engine placement matches, but the rest of the layout is different. There’s an impressionistic planet behind the ship. Chiron? Maybe. If this ship is in orbit around Chiron, then it could be detectable by the planet. And when I say that, I don’t mean Chiron is sentient. What I mean is, I can believe that resonance energies extend up into orbit. Resonance must be somehow related to the interference that prevents satellites from working, so that means it operates on such a scale. I doubt very much that resonance energy could span the whole galaxy, though. As far as everyone I’ve talked to knows, this is not a phenomenon that existed on Earth. So if this drawing is based on a Chiron-induced vision, that ship is probably relatively nearby, either in orbit now or crashed on the opposite side of the planet.
“This looks like Earth design, so I don’t think it’s a view of the past,” I tell Sal. “They could have designed and built a second ship more quickly than the first, based on the lessons they’d learned and the now-existing infrastructure. That new ship might even travel here faster than in a hundred years if the technology was refined. They’ve had a hundred and thirty years since the launch of Unity; there could be a second ship from Earth here already.”
“It wasn’t like the planet was exploding,” Cleve comments. “I don’t know why they wouldn’t be able to send another ship.”
I shrug. “Maybe they did. It did take a lot of resources and coordination to send the first one, though.”
Sal flips the page. This drawing is clearly one of the colony pods, modules that could hold hundreds or thousands of cryobeds. It’s in ruins and somewhere here on Chiron. The backdrop of the drawing is a very distinctive cliff face. I haven’t seen it in my travels yet, but I would recognize it if I did. “There’s probably more people out there,” Cleve says. “That nobody’s looking for,” he adds with some bitterness.
“Do you know where this is?” Sal asks. “I’ve asked every ranger and traveler I can find.”
“Have you asked the ambassador from the University?”
“No, I haven’t,” Sal says pensively.
“Maybe you know somebody who can ask that question?” I suggest.
“I do,” Sal says with a note of resolve. Clearly they’ll be following up on that.
The final picture is a drawing of miasma up against a huge wall. There’s a maplike feel to this, and the scale is larger than one of the Morgan domes—plus it’s inland, so it couldn’t be Morgan territory. Is this Progenitor technology? It could be the opposite of my boutonniere… on a massive scale. Are there even really walls, or is it a field holding the miasma at bay? The drawing suggests a structure, but from my own experience, something could be repulsing the miasma. Cleve and I talk all this over, and I admit to Sal, “I have pushed aside miasma before, kind of in a wall-type way.”
“So somewhere there is a place where miasma is pushed away?” Sal asks.
“Well, when I did it, it was only temporary. It flowed back in as soon as I stopped doing it. But if there’s a device that can do it, it could generate a protective field so that you wouldn’t need to construct an actual physical dome,” I say. “There’s a lot of Progenitor technology littered about. Such a thing could exist.”
“Or it could be human,” Cleve says. “I can’t tell from this drawing. Could be some technology somebody’s figured out or will figure out.” He shrugs. “Or just a wall with miasma.”
“Do we need to recover this relic?” Sal asks.
Relic. Of course that’s the kind of vocabulary they would use. “Do you have a way to even know where this is?” I ask back. “Such that you could even go about recovering it? Do you do anything to trigger these visions, or do they just happen?”
“I normally let them happen to me as they will.” Sal gets a far off look as they explain, “When I look for guidance, I sit outside and meditate, usually at dawn, just as the suns start to come up. That is when I get—sometimes—a vision that is not from a dream. But this colony pod,” they say, flipping back to an earlier page. “Are there people that we need to Save?”
It feels really weird to say, “Let me meditate on this,” but that is exactly what I want to do. I feel no sense of urgency about the colony pod—there’s just not enough to go on. Was that a past vision? A present one? “Aside from when I’ve gotten memories from creatures, everything—I think—that I’ve experienced from the planet has been contemporary,” I tell Sal. “I think,” I emphasize, lest they take it as some kind of divine word. “I don’t think I’ve experienced anything that was a premonition. Or anything that was ancient history that wasn’t a remembered event.”
“Interesting,” Sal breathes.
“For me, it’s like an additional sense, like listening or looking afar. And it’s seeing what is being sensed by the plants or the fungus in a location different from my own.”
Sal reflects on that a moment and then asks, “Why was I chosen to be the prophet of these things? Was it because I was born premature and was in an ICU for several weeks? Was I sufficiently devout before I even knew to be?”
“You were in an ICU as an infant?”
“Yes, I nearly died.” I ask about their age, and it’s about my own.
“So not among the first born, but still early enough that the colony was still getting set up. Resources were scarce, and filtration wasn’t as good,” I observe.
“Yes,” Sal draws the word out, not seeing where I’m going. “I was very ill.”
“But you were on life support. So… maybe that is why,” I tell Sal. “Because I was on this planet for thirty years in a cryopod with a broken seal.”
“And yet you lived!”
“I was on life support, just like you.”
“Are you saying that the planet chooses those who are close to death?” Sal asks haltingly, trying to pick words that will fit the story they want to tell.
“No,” I say firmly. I am not saying that at all.
Cleve has for the most part been letting me deal with this all. He’s kept alert, with an eye to any craziness from Sal or any breakdowns from me, but other than occasionally providing an opinion on a drawing, he’s been quiet. Now he speaks up. “We have a scientist who specializes in this,” he volunteers.
“Yeah! You should allow Dr. Citali to examine you, your blood and tissue—as much as you feel comfortable,” I suggest. Yes, please take some of her attention away from me! “Because I think that, while a certain level of miasma exposure is dangerous to humans, if we have something keeping us alive during it, there’s the potential for us to get past that danger point. To the extent that we get changed physiologically, even.”
“If you would like me to—”
“Sal,” I try to interrupt, my voice the most serious it has ever been talking to them.
“—share with your scientist—”
“Sal, I’m not ordering you. I’m not directing you. I’m not preaching at you. I’m encouraging you that if you want to understand what is special about you—and if you want to understand better how to control it—that you consider talking to her.”
“Very well then. I will go to your doctor, though I don’t require a scientific explanation.”
“I know you don’t, but this is part of getting humanity to live in harmony with Chiron. Understanding what enables humans to tolerate the environment will change lives. The more that we can add to that pile of knowledge—the more that we find people with some of these niche experiences—the more people have a chance to live out in the open, in harmony with the planet.”
“I will go let your scientist gather her information,” Sal agrees. “Maybe she will see the Way of Chiron.”
With that, Cleve and I leave the Temple of Chiron, fortunately without encountering any worshippers. “Unless we know where any of that stuff is, it’s kind of irrelevant,” Cleve says as we walk back through town.
“Well, I’ll see if I can pick up anything on them,” I tell him, intending to reach out with my own senses later, when I have some quiet time in the open air.
“If you can find out where those people are, that’s higher on the list,” he says. “But after the war.” Oh, yeah, certainly dealing with Morgan first is the priority. “That miasma wall seems cool, but if you can ICU a bunch of people, it doesn’t matter,” he adds.
¡Ay! Dr. Citali is going to kill me. You sent Sal to me? I want nothing to do with that stupid cult! But science, Marina! She’ll grumble, but she will take notes, I guarantee it. That life support connection, there’s something there.