Frederick decided it was time to press for more vital information. “If you have inhabited and colonized so many gas giants, why are our rocky worlds significant to you? What do we have that you could possibly want?”

The alien emissary shifted inside his vessel. “You have nothing we want.”

The King ignored the buzz of conversation around him. “Then why do you attack us? Why do the hydrogues provoke a war with the humans and Ildirans? Thousands of innocent people have already died because of your aggression.”

“The hydrogues started no war,” said the emissary. “All was at peace for millennia. We had no interest in insignificant outsiders. We had no needs in common with rock dwellers, no overlap of interests or territory.”

The King was so frustrated he wanted to scream. Then why? He felt the weight of all those deaths upon him, even the Roamer and Ildiran casualties, every victim slaughtered by these hydrogues.

The alien emissary’s features shifted as if replaying a sequence of images it had captured from observing the terror and death of the human model it had used as the basis for its appearance. “In an unspeakable act of destruction, you set fire to one of our finest worlds. You ignited a heavily populated planet. Hundreds of cities and tens of millions of hydrogues were destroyed when you turned our world into a star. Very few of us escaped.”

The liquid-crystal envoy pressed close to the thick wall of the high-pressure environment chamber. “It was you, King of all rock dwellers, who declared war on us.”

98: OTEMA

98OTEMA

Basking in the half-slumbering presence of the all-connected worldforest, Otema sat at her writing desk within the Prism Palace. She wrapped a gnarled hand around the flexible trunk of the potted treeling and recited aloud the beautiful cadences of the Saga of Seven Suns.

She told the frightening tale of a horrific wildfire that had swept across the conifer forests of Comptor, and how the Comptor Designate, the youngest and most beloved son of a former Mage-Imperator, was trapped in his rustic private dacha. As the ravenous fire surrounded the dwelling, the young Designate had brought his family together, to stare out at the bright flames. The Designate told his children that they must never be afraid of the light, that the brilliant glare reminded him of the seven suns that shone down upon Ildira. Then, through the thism, he had communed with his father during the last awful moments, telling the Mage-Imperator how much he loved and worshiped the godlike leader. And then the thism had snapped.

The legend deeply moved Otema, and she read stanza after stanza to the worldforest, which had its own innate fear of fire. The sentient interlinked trees brooded with terrible half-hidden memories of another ancient conflagration, a sweeping conflict that had engulfed many worlds—long, long ago. She tried to tap into the history, but the trees would not share it with her.