And a Child Shall Lead Them
By Barbara
A/N: I started on this story a LONG time ago, but never got around to finishing it. I was going to wait until I had finished it to post it here, but since I'm not certain when that will be, I'm just going to post it now.
Disclaimer: None of the characters are mine. If they were, things would have gone a lot differently in the series, let me tell you!
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As the capsule was lifted from the ocean floor, Ha'gel slowly began to notice its movement. It took a while to filter through to what remained of his mind that the capsule was moving since he wasn't really conscious. But at the same time, he wasn't really unconscious. He still didn't know whether it was a quirk of fate or deliberate cruelty by the Taelons, but he was not in suspended animation. Rather he was trapped between consciousness and unconsciousness, in that state between awake and asleep where one remembers one's dreams and knows they are dreams. Trapped with no way to fully wake and able to do nothing but sleep. He had been this way for eons, and it was a miracle he was not totally insane by now.
He had felt the return of gravity to a body long unused to it when his prison had entered this planet's atmosphere, but the capsule was too well built to burn up on reentry. He had sensed more than felt the bobbing motion of the capsule before it sank, and in one of his more conscious moments had realized the capsule had been floating on a liquid of some sort- though whether it was water or liquid carbon dioxide, he didn't know.
But now, now the capsule was moving. Had the Taelons decided to kill him after all? It had been a long time, but the Taelons seemed to hold grudges for eternity. The movement continued for some time as he tried to put together enough of his scattered thoughts to grasp what was going on around him. The capsule stopped moving upward after a while, except for this strange side-to-side rocking. After grasping for images of vessels seen by his ancestors in long unused memories, Ha'gel decided that this must be a water-borne vessel of some kind. He did remember vaguely that the capsule had crashed into a liquid of some sort, and in more primitive societies there were vessels that moved across the top of the water. Such vessels were not present on the more advanced worlds the Taelons were interested in.
This suggested the Taelons weren't present, but he couldn't be certain. They might be desperate enough to visit less evolved civilizations. His prison prevented contact with anything outside itself, including the Commonality so he couldn't reach out to find out if the Taelons were present. It also prevented him from putting together a clear strategy or even holding together more than three thoughts in a row. If the Taelons were here, he had to escape before his presence was reported to them, that much, he could hold together.
Unfortunately he couldn't open the capsule from the inside. It was intended to be a prison, after all. So when someone on the outside opened the capsule, he would have to quickly blend into the population to avoid detection, assuming the Taelons were even present. And even if they weren't, water-borne transport indicated a low enough level of technology that contact with alien races might not have occurred. In that case, there was even more reason to quickly blend into the population- he had seen too many beings killed for being different.
After some length of time, he felt the capsule being transferred to a place that didn't rock. This suggested he was on land. Or at least he hoped so. Land would give him much more freedom of movement. He would be able to hide much more easily on land than on a vessel of any sort. Now if someone would just open the capsule. If this were a primitive planet like he suspected it was, he would need to disguise himself as the first person he saw.
Finally, someone opened the capsule. Ha'gel reached out and quickly assumed the form of the person who had opened the capsule. Now he had a disguise. With this form, he could learn everything he needed to know about this planet, including if there was a way off it. At the same time, he reached out to the Commonality, to try to find the other Kimera, only to retreat back in shock. He could feel no other Kimera- or at least none of the large groups he should be able to find in such a short contact, but the Taelon presence was strong- stronger than from only a small delegation. It could be masking his people's presence, particularly since his people had only a small connection to the commonality and he had had only a short length of time to scan. Clearly one of their ships was in orbit, as the Taelons rarely ventured down to a planet's surface in any large numbers. He knew they had felt his presence, and would be hunting him.
Looking up, he saw others who appeared to be drawing weapons. He quickly blasted them with his shaqarava, evaporating them. He hadn't wanted to kill them, but he had no choice. They could have informed the Taelons of his exact location. As it was, all they knew was that he was somewhere on the planet. He needed time- time to decide what to do, time to see if any other Kimera lived. Still, he had overreacted in disintegrating them, but his shock had been so great at the possible death of his entire race that the action had been instinctive.
Quickly leaving the building he was in, he listened to the mount of noise coming from every direction and accessed his host's memories, and then headed in the direction that both indicated the least number of people would be. The streets were deserted. After a few minutes of looking around, Ha'gel saw a structure with an opening several feet up. The opening was rectangular and looked like something had once been fitted in it but had long ago been removed. Perfect, or as good as he was likely to get among this collection of blank faced walls. After he slipped into the building, he realized the opening must be above him. Finding stairs leading upwards, he carefully maneuvered up the rickety stairs onto the next floor, where he found the opening a couple of feet above the floor. It looked to be a method of observing the street below or perhaps a method of circulating air. With no idea the true level of advancement of the dominant species, it could be anything. The room was dirty and littered with debris, but Ha'gel didn't even notice.
Once at the opening, he sat so as to see outside without being seen. He then reached out once more into the Commonality, trying to find any trace of his people that he might have missed. A Kimera's connection to the Link, as they called it, was much weaker than a Taelon's so he might have missed it in those first quick seconds of connection. But try as he might, he could find no trace of the Kimera within the Link.
His people were dead. All of them. The knowledge hit him like a brick. He was alone. Alone, and hunted by the same people that had destroyed his race.
Ha'gel almost laughed at the irony. His people had saved the Matrosians, as the Taelons had been called then, and in return had been hunted to extinction by the very people they had saved. But the Taelons weren't really the Matrosians were they? And in a way, it was his own people's blindness as much as the Taelons' arrogance that had caused his people's death.
The Kimera had helped the Matrosians with a biological disaster on their planet that would have destroyed their race. Because of this, the Kimera were hailed as the planet's saviors. A small fanatical group of Matrosians had even seen the Kimera as the perfect beings- energy-based with a life span a hundred times that of a Matrosian. The Kimera had not regarded that group as dangerous, and had not tried hard to dissuade them. That had proved to be a fatal error, though they had not realized it at the time. After all, how could a group that thought you were perfect be a danger to you?
Unfortunately, that small group had contained a number of innovative geneticists, totally committed to the idea that the Kimera were perfect beings that they should try to emulate. And so, the geneticists had come up with a way to create a more perfect Matrosian, one with the characteristics they admired in the Kimera. And thus they created a new race they called the Taelons- from the Kimera word for pure. The process required the splitting of a person in two- into a Taelon and a Jaridian. The Jaridian was the matter-based remnant of the original Matrosian. Without the personality and knowledge of the original, which was transferred to the Taelon half, the scientists assumed the Jaridian half would quickly die. Unfortunately, to imbue each Taelon with sufficient energy for a long life required far more energy than was present in the original body. And so the fanatics, in their quest to create a purer Matrosian, killed the vast majority of the Matrosian population. And all to create the lifestyle they thought was better. They didn't manage to kill them all though, and the survivors found as many of the Jaridians as they could and slowly re-educated them allowing them to develop as people separate from the original identity of the Matrosian "parent".
The scientists had needed the energy from the Matrosians for more than just an increased life span though. They had decided to join all the Taelons into a commonality that could be used to control the newly created race. Unlike the Kimera, the Taelons would require this commonality. The scientists had needed a method of control, since not all the new Taelons had agreed to the procedure. The fanatics were small in number, too small to form a stable gene pool for a society. And so they had decided to 'recruit' other Matrosians with high intelligence and useful skills. They did this by forcibly changing the Matrosians they recruited into Taelons. They also created Taelons from the scientists' families, knowing their presence would make the scientists more amenable to staying with the fanatics and less likely to oppose them, since that their families were safe from being drained of core energy and at the same time were hostage for their behavior.
But they had needed a way to control these new engineers, scientists, and artists that had been recruited, so they linked them permanently to the commonality, which aided in this control by deadening their emotions. Without their emotions they were less likely to fight against their leadership. At the same time, those still resistant to the Synod, as the core group of fanatics had decided to call themselves after becoming Taelon, were threatened with removal from the commonality. Once they were shown what they would become if severed from the commonality, and told that the atavus thus created would be locked into a room with their family so that it would devour them, they quickly capitulated. None of them wanted to be responsible for their family's death at their own hands.
The Kimera had been repulsed by what the fanatics had done, and had not been adverse to showing it. They had also aided the surviving Matrosians in caring for the Jaridians. They had even tried to reverse the process to help those forced into becoming Taelon, but they were unsuccessful. The Synod had been surprised by the Kimera's revulsion, for were they not more perfect now? They became enraged at the Kimeras' attitude, and at their aiding the Jaridians and struck out at them. The Kimera had tried to reason with the Synod, but fanatics rarely listen to reason. Without advanced weapons, which the Kimera had never developed, the Taelons quickly began to annihilate the Kimera. It had taken thousands of years, and several generations, since the Kimera had been numerous and the Taelons few, but the Kimera had been nearing extinction when Ha'gel had been imprisoned. And now they were gone, completely.
Alone forever, Ha'gel keened out a death song for his race. For Ta'rel, his sibling, for So'cal, his child, and for Mi'a, his spouse. He sang the death march for all those who had died, who had no one to sing them into the next plane. He was alone.
As he slowly began to calm down, he looked out the window to see several members of this species walking down the street. They were of different colors, with different color strands coming from their heads, but they stirred an image within him, a legend that he had heard long ago.
For many years among their people, there had been a legend of the Child Savior, a Kimera hybrid who would save both the Jaridians and the Taelons, and would revive the Kimera race. Most had dismissed the legend, for why would any Kimera child aid those who had destroyed their race? Additionally, at the time the Kimera had been numerous, and many Kimera had scoffed at the idea that they would all be killed. Ha'gel himself had not believed the legend, though he had found it interesting that the legend had an image of the child savior, a child that looked like the race on this planet. Such legends were told telepathically, a common method of communication among their race, which allowed the sending of images as well as words.
He hadn't believed it, until he met Ma'el. He had been searching for a safe haven for his people in a remote sector when he had stumbled across Ma'el. Amazingly, Ma'el had not tried to kill him. Instead they had become friends. And Ma'el had told him that he was the source of the legend of the Child Savior. Years earlier, Ma'el had realized that the Taelons would eventually run out of core energy, and had gone looking for ways to create it. By now, the Synod no longer remembered how to use a person's life energy to form core energy, which was just as well as they would have depopulated whole planets to create additional core energy. After enough generations, even genetic memories deteriorated, particularly when not accessed for millennia.
While Ma'el had not yet discovered a way to synthesize core energy, he had stumbled across three life pods. From the trace energy surrounding them, they had clearly come from the future, though how far into the future was anyone's guess. But with them had been a book, a book of future history. Most of it was of no interest to Ma'el, but some of it discussed the Taelons. It spoke of a Kimera hybrid who would reunite the Taelons and the Jaridians, who would be the last of his race, and who would revive the Kimera race. It even had an image of him. Ma'el had created the legend so that the Child's Kimera parent, unnamed in the book, would know that his race had a chance. Getting the legend disseminated among the Kimera had been hard, but Ma'el had friends among a race which produced the occasional clairvoyant- a race that was also friends with the Kimera. Through them, the legend had reached all of Kimera space.
But before Ha'gel had been able to read much of this book, Ma'el's most secret possession, a battleship full of Taelons arrived. Ha'gel had managed to convince them that Ma'el was his prisoner, for harboring a Kimera was punishable by death, but he had been captured quickly. Ma'el had argued, that as Ha'gel had held him prisoner, he should determine Ha'gel's fate. He had convinced the other Taelons to maroon him in a survival pod abandoned in space. The others had gone along with this, as they thought it a much worse fate than death, but Ma'el had done it to save Ha'gel's life.
And now, Ha'gel was free again. And he still remembered the legend of the Child Savior. He was sure now that this was the Child's race. And as the only surviving Kimera, he was clearly the Child's parent. So now, he had to create a child.
tbc