8th January
18:40 GMT
"
How..?
Dare you?"
"Hm."
Karmang -odd name for a Martian- sprouts four spindly arms from his sides and makes a series of rapid, intricate gestures. Blue light wafts around his fingertips for a moment, then
leaps for the projection. Which… Suddenly isn't a projection any longer.
"Two degree-" Another gesture, this one involving clenched fingers and a tugging motion. "-shielding. Adequate-" The floors
shifts, enveloping the Primate. "-in most-" Two arms retract and he makes a circling gesture, blue runes appearing all over the Primate's rocky prison. "-circumstances. But by now you should have realised that you were dealing with something
unusual."
The shocked Primate stills, then shudders as a section of runes flares. Karmang bows his head slightly, while the machinery fetishist next to him sort of
rumbles.
"I
wrote the spells you just attempted. Even now, can you not accept that your preconceptions are wrong?"
"You are not
Karmang."
"Ah." He turns his attention to me. "What is your name, alien?"
"I am Grayven."
"Do you know much of Martian history?"
I shake my head, then realise that he's probably not familiar with humanoid body language. "Not a great deal."
"And
magic. Do you know about
magic?"
"My people's Elite have powerful innate magical abilities.
Studying magic is a little less common, but we have more than a few sorcerers around the place."
"And what brought you
here?"
"I'm living on Earth at the moment. Its arcane energy networks are
remarkably strong, but
severely underutilised. This was
supposed to be the first step in forming a collegial research and knowledge-sharing group."
"I heartily approve." He looks around the entry hall for a moment, taking in the frescos on the walls before returning his attention to me. "That was why I established the first monastery-."
"
You lie. You are
not Karmang the Good."
Karmang the arguably-not-good retracts his two remaining bonus arms and extends his natural right arm to point to a scene on one wall. "Yes." The scene shows a six-armed Red Martian leading a group of other Reds across a desert. "This is how they depict me now. Because it is
completely unthinkable to this generation that any could learn magic who are not
Red."
The mechanical martian's left arm shapeshifts into some sort of gun-.
"No, don't do that. I think that maintaining physical proof of their idiocy will be helpful to future generations."
"
Blasphemer!"
"I wasn't trying to
found a religion." He goes back to looking at me. "Do you know what the Guardians did to our people?"
"Broadly. Though I can't say that I disapprove. If the Burners had ever reached Earth, my favourite planet would have-."
He raises his right hand. "I know. And I
agree. Even now, I find it
difficult to recapture how thinking like that
felt. The
incessant drive to
destroy-."
"Wait." I frown. "You were
there? Martians… Aren't immortal."
And if they
had been, I suspect that the Guardians would have edited that too, just in case.
"There are ways to extend one's life with magic, if one has the correct frame of mind. It requires me to spend periods of time in torpor, but I believe it has been worth it."
"And… I got the impression that the Guardians scrubbed the memories of the martians they worked on. If you retained yours, shouldn't you be an apocalyptic rage monster?"
"It's
hard, remembering what it was like back then. It was a long time ago, and I was a
very different man. I'm not sure exactly what happened. I remember… Our alpha and his warriors being struck down, and… I think I remember trying to hide. Or at least trying to threaten without attacking. But they pacified me and took me aboard their ship. I remember the… Green glowing automata who served the short… Guardians."
"
How do you remember?"
"Magic. It was a long time afterwards that I learned to systematise even a tiny fraction of what I could
feel about the universe surrounding me. But a tiny…
Shift, a simple protective sigil was enough to shield my memories from their machines. Not my body, and their bonds still bound certain parts of my mind, but once they left I alone remembered how things had been."
He walks over to another image, the six-armed Red gesturing to a garden while his students listen at his feet.
"Having had
millennia to consider the issue, and to compare what we are now with what we
were, I have to say that I think
this is better. And while I'd rather they hadn't wrecked our planet to do it, it wasn't anything we wouldn't have eventually done
ourselves."
"I'm a little surprised to hear the leader of a terrorist-." I glance at L'atroma. "Sorry,
murderist group being so calm about things."
"With great age comes… Perspective. Some things are worth being angry about. Others aren't." He gently touches the fresco. "I took my first students from amongst Ma'aleca'andra's Red population, believing that the Guardians had altered them
least."
"I'm sorry, I thought that you said that you
approved-?"
"Of clarity of thought, yes. Not of being afraid of fire or isolation. I wanted to learn how it had been done, to see if I could learn to modify it, to alter us
further. And in case you've ever thought that simply
being more like our forebears was what allowed the Reds to become dominant, no. It was
me." He turns away from the mural and back towards the Primate. "By teaching Reds from across the planet the most elementary principles of magic, it reinforced the instinctual fear and respect we had been programmed with. And because I took Red students from all across Ma'aleca'andra and returned them home once their studies had reached a satisfactory level, I created a worldwide network of sorcerers who knew one another and who were on good terms with one another."
Hah! "You created their planetary government?"
"Its
predecessor, yes. And then I underwent my first torpor, and when I emerged… Colourism which put
me in the underclass, and not a jot of progress toward the goal I had set them." He walks back towards the Primate. "But I was prepared to be patient. I sought volunteers from the White population, and experimented further. I've learned a great deal about the magics of Mars, but I never came close to a solution to my main problem. So many years… Only for my agents to one day hear a telepathic broadcast which explained the whole thing and demonstrated the
solution."
"I was on that mission."
"I don't remember seeing you. And I studied that missive in
extreme detail."
"I was evacuated before the confrontation with the Burner could occur. Nitrogen narcosis and a drained power ring. Trust me, I'm in the full version." He doesn't respond. "But surely my name came up in relation to the fix?"
"I don't recall seeing any alien faces. But as you pointed out, young M'gann wasn't broadcasting
everything she experienced. I
would like to meet her at some point. Could you arrange th-?"
The rock holding the Primate
explodes!
