The Garden of The Dawn Queen

Prince Ta’I turned around again trying to get his bearings. Captain Han’Xi was going to be livid if he discovered his royal charge had slipped the leash once again. He wouldn’t, of course. Ta’I would be back long before anyone noticed. He just wanted to know what was going on. He was just going to step outside and walk around a little. How could he learn about life if he never got to see how things really worked?

There would be no troublesome pursuit by Imperial Secret Service agents. none of them were supposed to be in the City of Cus’XI They should not even have been in this sector of stars. This was system belonged to Kri’Axi Clan and definitely not sworn to his father. A blood feud between their houses dated back some three-hundred years. He had never heard why.

Han’XI had said little about this side trip. They were on schedule for their return to the Imperial Seat at Har’Pai’XI Ta’I had not even known they were coming here until they slid into a city berth.

The captain had left the ship immediately appearing less than cool. He was a big affable man with a carefully groomed full black beard. He loved his position in life, and fussed over his ship like a proud father at a daughter’s wedding. He was also something of a clotheshorse when he made a port. Now he wore an ordinary spacer’s service cloak and utility belt.

Ta’I walked calmly through the field entry port as though he were a ship crew member on leave. He was tall for a nine year old and no one questioned his right to be on a starship landing field or even looked interested. A few hookers took his measure but left him be for the moment. He had borrowed an old cloak from one of the load-masters and looked too poor to worry about. There was bigger money walking around at this hour. That would change later in the evening but for the moment he was on their hunting ground and there was no rush.

There were worse things in port that night.

The Har’Pai’XI sigel was a yellow rose. Ta’I had never seen such a flower. It was supposed to have originated on an old world called Earth. The name had also been given to the citadel of the clan and that now towered above the port. It was a pretty spectacular piece of work and it was yellow.

He had no intention of going anywhere near the place. He had no real intentions of anything. He just wanted to get out of the metal prison he had been living in for the past several months. He wanted to stretch his legs, look around at a strange place that was supposed to be just a little dangerous and then march straight back to the ship.

He didn’t even feel the stun gel thread as it caressed his cheek. He didn’t notice as time suddenly stalled and two darkly cloaked figures caught his arms from either side.

Any onlooker would have dismissed the whole scene as three friends walking together on some errand.

It was some time later that Ta’I realized that he was no longer walking. He was in fact seated somewhere and his back was against something hard and cold. It felt like it might be the wall of a building. It was very dark–darker than he could ever remember, and yet he could feel heat. Wherever he was it felt like morning.

His face hurt as though he had been hit in martial arts practice. He reached up to check for injuries. His face was swollen badly. He must have been hit by thieves and left here in the dark.

At that point he discovered why it was so dark. Where his eyes should have been Ta'I found only swollen sockets. These particular thieves had been filling an order for a pair of human eyes.

Ta'I had only heard of this recently when his father had ordered a ring of such thieves executed.

The thing was completely unnecessary. Human blindness was almost completely unknown at least to Ta’I’s people. It could be treated at any city first aide station. Spare eye packs could be grown within a month and were available in the ship’s surgery.

The only reason to steal complete eyes was for identity theft. Most standard ID was made by retinal scan and all eye packs were registered. It wasn’t the only way, just the simplest and most common for routine matters.

"Hey you." The voice belonged to a man, and the stroke of a neural whip followed.

Ta’I yelped more in surprise than pain, though there was certainly pain. He had never felt the effects of such a whip personally. He was a prince of the Har’Pai’XI Such whips were used only for animals and riot control.

"Up, come on, damn drunks everywhere, come on get up."

"Wai..,tt , shirrr," he tried to speak and found his speech was slurred still from the stun gel.

"m...no dr...nk," he continued.

"Oh yeah, sure...up come on. What’s the matter with you. I said up."

The whip touched Ta’I again and burned like fire. It also made him very mad.

"Hey, what you think you’re doing?" the voice said in surprise.

Ta’I grabbed at the baton with both hands and pivoted to the floor with his shoulder and hips. His Si’Sei would not have been impressed, it was hardly an elegant technique but considering the toxins still running through his blood it worked well enough. The baton turned out of the man’s grasp and Ta’I gripped it awkwardly under his body.

"Give that back you pig brain," the voice said angrily.

Ta’I fumbled with the baton until he had control of the trigger. Then turned around.

"You stop now...hurt," he said.

"Yeah, yeah. You play with the street cousins you take your chances."

There was a short pause. "Give me that baton," the voice said.

Ta’I fired the device as he felt the other grab it. The effect was instantaneous.

The voice screamed once and then Ta'I could hear the sound of a heavy body flopping around on the ground near him. They were supposedly non-lethal but A full dose from a neuron whip could easily produce seizure and fugue amnesia. And apparently this man had gotten it just right.

Ta’I worked his back up the wall to the point where he thought he was standing. He tucked the baton through a loop in this utility belt, and moved along the wall trying to get his bearings.

____________________________________

Sa’Kiry501 slid down the hallway of the Queen Magister’s residence. Three guards lay cooling slowly in the garden below the mezzanine. As much as he was capable he was rather proud of that achievement. The gel gun he carried had a range of only fifty meters. It had taken some slow careful stalking to work close enough to the gun emplacements.

Sa’Kiry501 was neither a he nor a she, but a creation of the Ha’Ni’Saen labs sold fully trained and pre-poisoned as an assassin. He was also far older than any of his creche mates. A Sa’Kiry was always an expensive proposition but his success made him even more so. In forty-three kills he had never missed and retraction contracts had never required activation of its termination clause.

Sa"Kiry501 slid silently into darkened sleep chamber of the old queen. Its star-light optical sensors activated automatically. The processors analysis drifted in cyphers to the side of its vision field.

The analysis indicated a sleeper in the bed in its field of view.

It stopped and slowed its breathing and heart rate, trying to look like a piece of furniture.

The queen had survived a great many attempts on her life. There was very little known about such incidents. The attackers all vanished as well as any careless enough to be identifiable as associates.

Sa'Kiry501 meditated for nearly a kilo second. During that time it recorded all aspects of the environment, feeding it into analyzers. Nothing changed about the situation. This was a sleeping chamber and the sleeper slept. There were no other detectable energies. It appeared very much as though the old queen had spent all of her defensive systems exterior to this chamber. She had certainly done a commendable job there. Sa’Kiry501 prided itself on precision execution and he had been forced to kill three non-targets to get this far.

____________________________________

The door stood alone in the park, about as weird a thing as he had ever seen. It was just an old garden gate standing by itself. Though he did find a nice yellow tea rose, there was nothing but grass and rocks on either side. Cautiously he walked around the thing. It was just a door sitting closed in a frame, and there was more grass and bushes on the other side.

Ta’I turned the handle in the center and watched fascinated as an amazing array of latches he hadn’t noticed before suddenly began switching and sliding back several pins and latches that held the door locked in its frame. The door rotated on its hinge easily and the hair on the back of his neck crawled skyward. Even the birds stopped their chatter. Something was about to happen and all Creation knew about it.

One of the moons had just risen and was cruising along low on the horizon. It was the blue one; he thought it was called Caliban.

Just beyond the horizon he could hear the dire lagomorphs hiss and burble. Their human riders cursed angrily trying to control the beasts. They were quite intelligent and not happy with their handlers for some reason. The soft red eyes were just becoming visible over the rise as Ta’I turned and abruptly crossed the threshold of the garden gate.

Impossibly it was dawn on the other side. He was in a garden—a true carefully tended garden, not just a wild place.

He looked back at the door which stood in a tall garden wall. He watched the approaching lagomorphs bound closer as the gate closed.

He was in a completely different kind of place. It was hardly silent. The air buzzed with small flying things and several not so small he could see cruising above. Some of the flowers looked familiar but many were very strange. There were several he was not sure were bound to the earth.

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"Fear is of the mind daughter. It does not exist and yet it controls, for most, their every action. Fear spikes to anger and stops us in love. It blocks the mind from what it can do and stops us from where we want to go. It has no form and yet in the end is more powerful than a storm in the sea or force of arms."

From the collected sermons of Reverend Mother Ha’Tana.

Lu’XI mentally re-crossed her ankles. Something which was completely impossible for her to do. Her inert body was restrained in a detention cradle which continuously fed her a soup of the things necessary to maintain a semblance of life. She was not completely conscious. Her captors would have been quite disturbed to know how not unconscious she actually was.

She was quite separated from the main stage of her conscious mind. That would have been enough for most people however Lu’XI was a priestess of the Dawn Goddess and quite able to step through the proscenium of her own preconscious when work was to be done.

The chamber wasn’t much bigger than a lagomorph kennel. From the smell of the place she thought it just might have been in some recent past incarnation.

In the darkness she could hear the creak and clank of a large building. She stretched her new found senses through the walls and found that she was not completely alone. She had been right about the lagomorphs. Several of the giant creatures were kenneled in the very next cell.

Lu’XI was an ordained priestess of the Goddess of the Dawn. Ordinarily it was no great distinction. Every daughter of the high clans earned a stint as a neophyte of the Goddess during their early years. Lu’XI had found a family with the order

The Goddess of the Dawn answered such force. Her realm was love.

Lu’XI slid away from the fear and took charge of her own mind.

____________________________________

Grey Paws looked up briefly. Something had changed in the hutch. It was something he could neither hear nor see, and yet he knew that had nothing to do with its reality.

He set down the holo-pad he had been reading and touched the control glyph gently with a claw tip. The page he had been viewing swirled quickly out of existence—a paper on chaos puzzle theory.

Grey Paws was a lagomorph, one of the creatures the humans had made in their odd houses. He knew this from listening to his handlers. While they knew he could understand some of their words his masters had no idea just how much.

The lagomorphs had created their own language some generations ago; had even appropriated the concept of writing. They had also decided that everyone would be much better off if the humans didn’t understand any of this.

He lifted his muzzle, tasting the air. Whatever it was, it was not of the air, though he did notice the small human female who had been placed in the hutch across the tunnel from his.

They had all wondered at this. But the humans here were often almost as unkind to their own as they were to other species.

His people were frequently driven to exhaustion over various projects which seemed useless to him. Technology and its machines seemed to be in short supply on the humans of this planet.

Grey Paws read the newspapers intercepted by his holo-pad with considerably greater frequency than most of the humans who rode in his saddle. He didn’t always understand everything but he knew about space and stars and the civilizations of the humans. Perhaps he knew it better than most of them did.

The sense continued and Grey Paws found that it was something in his mind. There was almost a painful ache, as of an unused muscle being strained, and it was someplace in his mind. He found that he had been ignoring it for some time, and now he sat quietly and found that when he paid attention to it it began to take form. Grey Paws found that he was being spoken to. He also noted with some surprise that part of his mind had already answered this person.

"Who are you?" he asked in what he hoped was his mind. "What are you?"

There was a sense of happiness that was part of what came next. It didn’t come as words in either of the languages he knew. There was a set of impressions and pictures. With those came meaning.

The impression of a young human female answered his question. "My name is Lu’XI," the sound of the name came with a picture of what she thought she thought of herself as well as what she thought she looked like.

"Where are you?" the voice asked.

"I am Grey Paws and I am in the hutch where my people wait for the morning and our next work assignment."

The voice in his mind paused. There was a great deal of information which transferred–happiness at his presence, confusion was one. Then came surprise and delighted realization at a very unexpected discovery.

"Grey Paws...," the thought came to him. "I had no idea of this. Are you one of the farm animals? Reverend Mother said nothing of this possibility. "

Grey Paws was stunned as he realized that the voice in his mind must be one of the human creatures. This was so very dangerous to his kind. His people would be killed instantly if his handlers were to guess at their intelligence. They would see it as a threat to their dominance. And of course they would be absolutely correct.

He was conscious of the creature following along as he thought of these things. She was appalled but so was he. Neither had any idea of what to do. They were stuck in each other’s minds.

But it was so different from his experience of the other human creatures he had met. There was none of the cruel arrogance and contempt he was so familiar with. He found that he actually liked speaking with this creature–-wanted to know more about it what it might be like, what it might think about.

"Grey Paws," the voice in his mind was soft and very lonely. "I think I understand. There is just me but I very much understand why you need to keep secret. I will stop now."

The voice began to fade from Grey Paws mind. "Lu’XI," he thought. "Wait. Stay for awhile. We may decide this later. There are others who should know of this before we do something difficult to undo.

And so, Lu’XI did stay in the mind of Grey Paws that night. There were other minds of his tribe who joined them when Lu’XI found she could tie them all together. It amazed her much more than it did the lagomorphs that she could do something like that. The lagomorphs were natural telepaths. The talent was dormant but as easily learned as a kit opening its eyes after birth.

Lu’XI badly missed the guidance of her Reverend Mother. What the lagomorphs were becoming here was something new, and she had set them to it. She knew that it had to be something of the Goddess will. She hoped she was doing it right, whatever it was.

When the executioner came for Lu’XI there was only an empty cell.