The dark-blue canvas of the night had been stretched upon the planet. Zarah blundered arduously forwards as if she would have wandered in thick fog. It was the haze of her vision; she could not claim that the streets would have been badly lit.
"Oh me, oh my..." she stammered her mantra, finally getting to her ship, starting then the engines.
The glitter of teardrops made the green in her eyes profound, her deep and sudden misery reflecting fully from her face.
"My life was supposed to be a secret! How could this have happened? How on heck could this have happened?"
Even anger broiled her inners. Hatred towards everything and everybody, although nothing was anybody's fault. Her emotions were so mixed, that they would not be washed clear today, any more.
"I have to get back to Xaneda... but I can't do that, yet..." she cursed aloud to the steering wheel. "I have to warn them...and him... but when? The dratted purchase offer is there to mar it all! At the earliest on Friday... it's Tuesday, now. That's too long! Anything can happen before that!"
Zarah found herself speeding without her comprehension. Providentially, she noticed the over-indications of the gauge and got the city speeder slow down its manic verve.
The main reason for Zarah's apprehension was the security of the Sanctuary. Xaneda, the asylum, had still remained as a 'ghost planet', invaded only by the sands and the heat that had their lugubrious reign there, above the surface. From Buzz Lightyear's eyes, she had seen that finding out the current place of Warp Darkmatter was not an unessential point for him. Who knew what could happen in a few days, if the hacked data would be put into the same bowl with a bit of incautiousness, and mixed up together...? A sheer catastrophe, a roaming black hole of chaos, who knew? The souls of millions, the souls of those millions of hunted, who had attempted to turn to the good... in a terrible danger.
Back home, Choi dived straight between her bed sheets, crying herself to the lulling somnolence. Friday, oh if only that Friday would come in a breeze, so she would get back to him... or maybe she would wake up in the morning and notice it all having been solely a nightmare...
Buzz had been busy after the depart of his worried guest. The clear images in his mind had turned to polygon graphics into his palm book. The symbols of Zarah's bracelets teemed still in front of his eyes, telling their intriguing story, whatever it was, then.
"There must be some kind of connection to the location or culture where she has been given to Warp... or whatever it is, then. I don't believe he has bought them to her. This is something else... normally if we get married, we put a simple gold ring around the ring finger, not gauntlet-looking carved what-ever-they-were... and craters, they were heavy!"
He typed and tapped his keyboard.
"Where to start...? Could those symbols be related to some kind of a language that I don't know? English is the common language of the Galactic Alliance... although the solar systems and sectors have their own official parlances, I've never collided with such letters... but they can't be just simple decorations, there must be some meaning behind them... and that meaning might lead me to the traces of Warp."
Darkmatter... he had to meet him, in a way or another. With any cost?
"With any cost."
Buzz logged in to the intranet of Star Command, putting then a search machine to quarry through the databases and information sites. After half an hour, the results came.
"Craters and exploding coronas! Nothing! Next search", he grimaced to the computer and hit the login screen of the Alliance Network.
Hours went by... finally the weary figure of Lightyear stood up from his chair and switched off the computer. He had been up way too late, tomorrow at work he would behave merely like some eerie, grey semicircles under his eyes. The scores of finding that Chinese-Hebrew-Gibberish from the networks had been as successful as if he would have been searching for an embroidery handbook from a motor-car repair shop.
---------Next day, early afternoon-----------
The mighty figure of the Capital Planet Museum was delineated against the grey sky. An irritating drizale filled the air and Buzz accelerated his steps. In his pocket, he fingered his palm book, as if making sure that it definitely was there. He did not know what to do, to whom to turn to. The idea of contacting some person, who studied history and galactic cultures, had come to his mind at work. But where would he find such an intellectual? Not in Star Command HQ, there were only space rangers swarming around, most of them barely knew who had been the president before the current Madame. In addition, Buzz was none kind of a history expert by himself, either. The only berth for such linguistic information that had popped to his mind was the particular museum. Maybe there he would be guided to meet someone who would know...
Today Lightyear had drawn the attention of his teammates, several times, and not in a positive way. Being so much in his own circles he absent-mindedly had almost collided with a meteorite, while driving 42. In Star Command HQ cafeteria, he had crashed straight to Mira, a fresh chocolate-nougat ice-cream cone in his hand. Well, of course the dessert had ended up to decorate Nova's coiffure. After Buzz had said 'how do you do' to a copy machine, Commander Nebula had sent him home. That is why the ranger was so early on Capital Planet.
In the lobby of the museum, Lightyear straightened up himself and walked to the info desk. Behind it sat a mid-aged fat woman polishing her nails red. She gave an arrogant and indifferent regard to Buzz when he hackled for to take her attention.
"The tickets are that way", she noted and pointed at the counter behind him.
"Yes, ma-am, I know, but I don't want to take a tour. I'd like to see some... um a professor. I have..." his sentence was cut short.
"You buy a ticket or go away. This is not a reception, this is a museum. No one needs to see a professor. If the supply of the museum displays is not enough for an average Jack, then please go to see the open positions of history courses in the civil college. Thank you." she puled and turned over her plump hand to see if she had succeeded in spreading the bright-red lacquer on her nails.
"But..." Buzz began.
"We're closed. Good day to you, Mister", the woman looked darkly at him before slamming a hatch over the desk.
Buzz stood there completely baffled and angry. "I guess I have to buy the ticket. Maybe I find something inside there." He threw a couple of uni-bucks to the clerk and got the entrance opener. Soon he was in a hall filled with a myriad of dusty display stands.
"How am I ever going to find anything is this history labyrinth?" he groaned to himself. He wandered around from room to another, reading silently the signs and semaphores. "...the scrolls of Abragadabrah... Romy -the queen of Planet WillyFogg... Gungan vehicles and fishing tackle from 800th century before the Alliance... the lost map of an unknown temple... the biography of John Lasseter... I'm getting nowhere with this!"
Four hours later, he was tired out. He had compared the symbols drawn in his palm book to hundreds of old documents and scripts in the display cases. His eyes were aching because of the futile glancing and reading. The years as a space ranger, he had accustomed to physical action, not structinizing smudgings and discoloured manuscripts. Besides, he felt completely stupid in the middle of all this cultural material and different languages, since English was the only language he ever had known.
Unexpectedly he saw a figure of some old and stoop man waddling next to the back wall of the room. It was a white-skinned alien with grey hair and did not much look like a museum visitor. Buzz got some light into his thoughts and took steps to the man. "Excuse me, sir, but are you a professor?" he shouted.
The old man turned to him rather absent-mindedly. "A professor? Where? Oh... you mean me? Yes, I am a professor."
A wide smile took up the corners of Buzz' mouth. "I'm glad to meet a professor! Could you, sir, help me? I'd have some questions about some symbols of a particular jewel. I wasn't able to find any information over here, but I'm wondering if you could help me?"
The dusty and aged brains of the professor started to hum for sheer excitement. He was a person always willing to help out, if someone asked about history.
"Sure, young man. What are those symbols for?"
"That's what I came to ask. I have them drawn right here in my computer."
"We'll go to my office", the expert of the antiquity answered.
The professor, who had introduced himself being archaeologist-scientist Colossus-Ga'losh, stared long and contemplating at Buzz' notes. He kept meddling his heavy glasses, wrinkling his brows and puffing to himself, thinking hard of the meaning of the gravure.
"I've seen these things somewhere... a very long time ago... talking now in decades... what could it have been..." he slapped his forehead a couple of times.
"Please, I would really need this information. Can you try to figure out, what are these things?" Buzz pleaded.
"This is something that is not common in the area of the Galactic Alliance. No culture here uses this kind of language, that's for sure..." the old man muttered. "I might try to find these over the Galaxy History Database. It should be comprehensive enough to get me to the trails."
Lightyear had never heard of such information source. It was not available in the local Galactic Alliance Web at all.
Buzz leaned over Colossus-Ga'losh' shoulder to see, what he had found.
"I knew I remembered seeing these somewhere. They are letters of a language called Uxgamagah. This information holo tells that there is a small colony of that unknown race in the solar system of Na-Sula... Too bad that this text doesn't seem to tell where they originally are from... they just settled there a few centuries ago..." the professor read the lines.
"Does it tell anything about the meaning of the symbols? Or where is this Na-Sula?"
"There... at the bottom of the page... it's a link to further information..." Colossus pressed the button and entered a site where was a comprehensive instruction to Uxgamagah.
"Jumping cerements!" he uttered. "Must be a difficult language..." he continued and gaped at the holo. It explained that the literal form of Uxgamagah consisted of partly pictography, partly phonetic symbols. The hieroglyphs were several thousand. So he did a picture search and soon got the mention of the leister-shaped symbol of Buzz' notes. "This is a picture symbol. It stands for 'purified'."
Buzz wrinkled his forehead. "Purified? That's peculiar."
"And here we get some more light... one stands for 'submissive', the next two are some kind of letters for gutturals and... that one that looks like G, is for the syllable 'böö'...
"Can you get anything sensible out of them? Like a sentence?"
"Not exactly... but may I ask where did you see these symbols? It's not a weekday thing to find them."
Buzz hesitated a bit for if not to tell. "They... were decorating the bracelets and rings of one woman."
"That's interesting. Very interesting. How did she look like, what was her race?" the professor got inspired.
"She's a human, like me."
"That's odd... odd indeed."
For half an hour, the men kept still killing time and discussing about the linguistics and the race. Buzz gave his communicator number for the professor, in case he would find something out of the symbols. Then, it was the descending of the marble stairs of the museum, into a heavy black rain, which had grown from the gentler shower during the stay.
Back home, Buzz flopped down to his living room sofa for disappointment.
"Nothing! I benefited merely nothing about the museum visit," he sighed. "Na-Sula... it is a place far too revealing for a person like Warp to live... I can clearly see that it is some kind of a coulisse, too. But how to explain then the language used in the bracelets of Mrs. Darkmatter... that is another mystery to be put onto the top of the enigma pile. Uxgamagah... blast."
He sat for a few minutes in his position, glaring at the deep shadows the night cast behind the furniture. The next moment, however, was like an illumination to him. He suddenly was able to put all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together, although it still was quite complicated.
"That's it... it is a coulisse. Didn't the professor say that the race, which uses Uxgamagah, had had its origins in some a place unknown? That's it... what else could be the hideout of Warp unless a planet or place like that? Who knows what this oracular race does behind our backs... maybe they hide persons like Darkmatter or relevant, what is anymore so overtaking in this Galaxy... hmm..."
He took his hands up in front of his face and counted with his fingers, thinking, thinking...
"I have to find out, with any cost..." Buzz did not notice that this idea had become an obsession for him.
"What should I do? She must visit the place sometimes, if she wants to meet her dear husband... a possibility to find out where she goes, would be... spying."
His thought was greeted by the shrill scream of his conscience. Spying? Craters, that was not a right thing to do! Buzz Lightyear would never give in to such temptations! Nonetheless... there was this puny tormentor living inside his heart that kept gashing him about the matter of Warp.
"With any cost..."
No, the end justifies the means, or so he thought. "What other way is there, but to spy her? He lives out there, somewhere and she goes to him... and I will be there to see that."
The tinderbox of his idea chamber rubbed vehemently against each other. What to do, what to do? How to spy that double-life living woman? She must be a clever one; too, if she was able to keep her little secrets hidden under her cover... so, analogous cunningness would be needed. In addition, Buzz knew he could not bushwhack G'Deneb; he had his own daily work as the defender of justice.
He would have to hire someone to do the dirty work.
"Dirty work? What are you doing, Lightyear? This is wrong, you know it!" his tiny guardian of laws squealed.
For the first time in his life, Buzz smothered this voice, the voice the always had guided him in his missions.
"Hmm... who would do it? Someone competent, used to lurk in the shadows, able to collect every tiny piece of information..."
Crumford Lorack?
...to be continued...