Ada coughs up sand… she is dying of thirst, with a terrible headache. Alpha leans over her again. He has dug a shallow trench in the sand that carries the water from this waveless ocean.
She tastes it. It's neither salty nor alkaline. It's muddy water, but delicious to someone dying of thirst. Ada takes a little, gathers her strength somewhat, then crawls on all fours toward the sea to get more.
Her suit is filthy. And she's hungry. What the hell is going on? Sitting on a sandbank, she looks around.
A sandbank, planted with a tree covered in moss, holds a stretch of clear water that laps against grey rocks occasionally streaked with red. Inland, the hill quickly gives way to high passes between peaks lost in the clouds. Vegetation is everywhere-but so is silence.
No animals, no fish, no insects, no birds, not even a mosquito. From time to time Ada hears a branch crack in the nearby forest. She washes her suit and leans over the water: the Alexandrite has slipped onto the seabed, three meters deep. The power unit has broken off from the ship… she won't be able to fix it. No matter-she wasn't planning to leave right away anyway.
She can't swim, but she weighs herself down with stones and makes several trips back and forth to open the hold and retrieve some tools: a distress beacon, a few nutrition bars, a knife, her transient FAM, and some small gear stuffed into a shoulder bag. Her morale hadn't exactly been low-just battered by fear-but she gathers her courage again.
When she resurfaces, she sees Kukth sucking on a fruit with a snakeskin peel and pinkish flesh, and she picks one herself. Almost tasteless, but it fills her stomach.
And where to go now? She slowly scans the coastline-long enough for a sea breeze to rise and a darker cloud to threaten rain… but it's swept away, and the cloud layer, that pleasant white sky, settles back in. The silence remains unsettling.
She sees something far off, on the beach-a metallic structure… yes, through the haze, a silvery reflection. Onward.
The sand is soft-the air too, and this natural warmth, for Ada has known few hot planets, feels pleasant, even though it burns her pale skin. They follow the coastal ridges, in the shade of the snakeskin fruit trees, which seem to be the dominant vegetation alongside a few grey shrubs. Between the fruit and the water, she could live here a long time if things went wrong, and she knows that Salman, or at worst Andreï… but she'd rather it be Salman, yes, Salman, would come to find her.
In the meantime, she will have opened the Gates of Empyrean, and she will have seen what lies beyond. That'll make quite a story to tell Salman.
They pass a clearing, then the outer edge of a lagoon filled with immense algae, then climb over some rocks. Next comes an isthmus between a lake fed by a river so torrential you can hear its flow from a kilometer away, and the infinite freshwater ocean, as the sun gently sinks and reddens the clouds.
Alpha, who hops silently behind her, makes a sound that seems like a human word… but she can't make it out. She turns, startled, toward him. Is she going mad from this silence?
Alpha folds his legs. His insectlike frame allows him to crouch far more fluidly than any human. With the tip of one limb, he points to the faintest ripple of the water. Such assertive communication from Alpha is rare-most of the time he merely follows, obeys, and accepts in silence. Thus, fascinated, Ada leans closer to see what he's showing her.
On the sand, in the thin strip of shoreline, the tiny waves are broken one by one by the grains: forming yet smaller waves, crosshatched, that break again and again.
And Alpha says:
- "In each of these tiny waves, there are the Blind Gods."
And he hasn't said it in stellar language, but in human speech. Ada is stunned.
- "You speak my language, Alpha?"
But he has already risen and continues walking.
Ada, shocked, stares at the ripples; she falls to her knees in the water, even tries to scoop some up as if she might catch the Blind Gods in her hands.
But she will find neither gods nor any answer from Alpha. They continue on until, at nightfall, they see the wide outline of a ship stranded in the sea. The vessel seems immense and intact, as if it had fallen just yesterday along with her. Someone come looking for her? And behind it, farther out in the water and to the sides, even more astonishing-other ships. Dented, some nose-down in the sand or split in two, all still gleaming with polished metal. But… what fleet had tried to reach Caliban? And why had they all crashed? Then again, she had crashed too. Something here must interfere with the instruments…
In the last red glimmers of the sun, she even spots an Invictus first generation in the distance-its sharp angles, its massive frame leave no doubt. She'd seen such a ship once in the Prospero shipyards: "a four-hundred-year-old relic," its owner had told her, "rebuilt from scratch because it was a family vessel."
The last ray of sunlight strikes another metallic structure-a wreck?-right on the pass between two peaks, high above behind her.
She activates a light drone and follows what seems like an invisible path in the night. The climb is steep, but the ground is flat, made of sand and humus.
- "Do you think we've gone back in time, Alpha?" (he doesn't answer, so she continues:) "Maybe I just dreamed you spoke to me. I suppose neither you nor the Blind Gods in the waves have the answer, do you?"
The ascent takes several hours. At one point, exhausted, she rests at the base of a tree. Kukth falls asleep on her stomach. As always, Alpha keeps watch.
She wakes to daylight filtering through the branches. The whiteness of the clouds gives the morning a cottony haze, and she uses her hearing to find the torrent again and drink its icy water. There is decidedly no fauna here-absolutely none. She's lost her way a bit, but climbs the slopes hoping to find an open view.
She finally discovers something both astounding and terrifying. At first, she thinks it's a sculpture. But on a rock lies the black silhouette of a creature. Motionless. Asleep? Dead. A legged serpent, the size of a cow. With eight legs. Its body is cold, and its eyes white. It looks as though it died just moments ago.
Ada's breath catches. She had heard of viruses developed by the HS a few years ago, capable of cleansing entire planets.
The luminous sheet of sunlight bursts between the two peaks, onto a pass facing the promontory where Ada stands. More mysterious reflections. Quick and agile, she climbs up the last branches of a tree bending for the first time in its long life.
In front of her, framed perfectly by the sun, stands a great metallic station, with multiple chambers, powered by eight wind turbines lazily spinning in the morning air. And better yet-at the base of one of them, sitting on a chair, gazing out at the ocean, is the calm silhouette of a human being.