He nodded his head and spoke, his voice the rough croak of someone not used to speaking for some time. “Greetings, my friends.”
“I assume you are the Gatekeeper,” Selene said.
The man acknowledged his title with a dip of his head. “Please, my name is Jalian.”
“Do you know why we are here?”
“I think so. Do you?”
“We are looking for answers.”
“Do you even know the questions?”
She was aware she was sounding more and more like Ondo. “Not always, to be honest, but we know that a trail has led us here.”
“Very good.”
The floor of the vault was completely taken up by a mosaic. At its centre, underneath the man's chair, was the planet's sun, represented as a circle of terracotta red with stylized flames winding off it. Around it were arrayed other celestial objects: the planet they were on, its three moons, other planets, other stars. Even other galaxies around the edge of the room. The stars beneath her feet were connected with lines, forming the skeletons of their constellations, the shapes the people of this world saw in the sky.
“Is this how you view the universe?” Selene asked.
The man looked amused. “It is common for cultures to believe they are at the centre of everything, is it not? We know the truth of it, but still we consider our red star to be a fixed point around which the galaxy turns.”
She brain-spoke to Hessia. “He doesn't seem worried about us.”
Hessia had also removed her cowl to reveal her features. Her expression was sardonic. “It's possible he's grateful simply because we've relieved his boredom.”
A series of pictures of stars and spaceships were set around the walls, filling the gaps between the windows, forming a sequence that ended in a single, larger image. They caught her attention because their presence was so incongruous on this backwards world – but also because she'd become aware that they weren't, simply, images. For one thing, they were giving off signals across a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum. There was movement to them, too: around nine seconds on a loop. Whatever technology had been used to record the scenes, it had clearly captured a great deal of data, enough for her to study the electromagnetic spectra of the stars and the unique fingerprints of their absorption lines.
She walked up to the nearest one, trying not to think about the gulf of air directly beneath the floor, or about how old the tower was. The man in the chair watched her, the slightest smile playing across his lips. The picture portrayed a star caught at the very point of explosion, blast waves of electromagnetic energy pulsing from it. A supernova. In the foreground there was an inhabited world, with a starship breaking orbit in a futile attempt to flee the conflagration about to consume it.
“I know this star,” she said. “At least, I know what became of it. It was dead by the time we found it; this is where the Coronade tunnel took us. How did you get this image?”
“It has always been here. They all have.”
She stepped around the ring of images. “Most of these stars are unknown to us.”
“It is not a linear road. There are many hidden paths converging on this world.”
The penultimate image displayed a blazing red furnace of a star. There was a ship she didn't recognize in the foreground, an organic-looking cylindrical body circumscribed by three rings of different sizes. Its architecture bore a clear resemblance to some of the Cathedral ships she'd seen.
“This is your star.”
“It is.”
“Whose ship is this?”
“I assume it belonged to the one who created this world.”
“Is it still here?”
“No one has ever seen it.”
The final, larger scene depicted a triple star system and the limb of some blue-green ocean planet. Another alien craft hung in orbit above the world. The bulbous sphere at its core reminded her of Surtr's craft, although the hexagonal mesh around it resembled the system-encompassing structure she'd seen at the Haven.
“Three stars,” said the Ondo in her head. “We know that symbol well enough. Could this be the original?”
“The electromagnetic spectra are a close match to the three in the images you recovered of the Concordance fleet. The Omn homeworld.”
“Agreed. There's a high probability this is the same system.”
“This world,” she said out loud to the man. “Where is it?”
“I do not know. I assume it is what lies at the very end.”
“Tell me, Jalian, are we the only visitors ever to have come here?”
“There have been very, very few.”
She needed to know if Concordance had been there. “But, recently? When was the last visit before ours?
“Three hundred and twenty years ago.” Selene translated from the period of Ansider's orbit to galactic standard. Almost exactly three centuries. A thrill of suspicion ran through her.
“A ship came here?”
Jalian looked amused for some reason. He glanced up as if he could glimpse the stretches of space through the roof, beyond the sky. “A ship came here, yes.”
“What was it called?”
“They referred to it as the Scintennia.”
The datastores and translation routines running on her flecks took a moment to translate the local name. “You call the two dwarf galaxies nearest our own the Scintennia Starfields. Or, as we would say, the Magellanic Clouds.”
“Yes.”
The look of wide-eyed wonder on Hessia's face was impossible to miss. “The Magellanic Cloud came here three hundred years ago.”
“Its crew were troubled. Haunted, if the accounts are to be believed. They felt they
