Pligrimage

by Seven


Disclaimer:  Earth: Final Conflict and its characters are copyrighted by Tribune Entertainment Company.  All rights reserved.



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Zo'or felt the tugging at his being as he never had before. Perhaps it was because a year ago, he had not been Synod leader. And now this grim anniversary had rolled around, but he had no desire to avoid it.

Da'an had participated in the ritual Ka'arpaj, but Zo'or had, ever since he was a child, found that ritual to be bizarre. A remembrance of things as they never could be again, and therefore irrelevent.

Zo'or entered the shuttlebay and climbed through the virtual glass shield of his shuttle. He summoned the controls and awkwardly backed the shuttle out of the bay, concentrating on not crashing into something. It was like learning to walk again, after so much time away from the pilot's chair. For that matter, when was the last time he had been in a shuttle?

In the ID stream, Zo'or allowed the computer to navigate. He closed his eyes and sighed. He still wasn't certain why he did this every year.

The shuttle came out of ID about two miles above the planet's surface. It was charred, barren. Nothing could live on it for long. Zo'or landed the shuttle gingerly and deactivated the virtual field.

He almost gasped at the strong smell of burned organic material. *After all these years, it still is strong,* he thought.

He climbed out to the ground and surveyed the landscape. A wasteland before a huge line of mountains, partially leveled by Jaridian weapons. Zo'or set off across the field, numbly ignoring the whistling of the wind.

----

Zo'or stopped near a dead grotto, surrounded by graceful organic benches. They were too small to have been targets, and were still glowing bluish-purple after so many years of aloneness.

He sat down on the bench and looked out across a dry river ravine. For the first time since his childhood, Zo'or began to cry. Dry sobs, without tears, but an outpouring of grief and anger that he could not hold back any longer.

----

Afterwards, Zo'or went to Ri'hahr'il, a Taelon city that had been the first leveled by the Jaridians. The organic buildings had shriveled and desiccated, but Zo'or wanted to see them up-close. He had surveyed the ruins many times, and now for some reason he wanted to touch them.

The first building he encountered was a huge flat whirl of dried vegetation. Zo'or grasped the edge and pulled upwards. Taelons were not strong, but he had made a point of being more physically able than others. It was, he mused, only one of the self-required tests he had put himself through.

The wall flaked away, bending back. Zo'or stumbled a little as it fell away from him, letting out a shower of gray dust fly. Underneath was a Taelon data terminal. Zo'or pulled up the terminal and brushed the organic flakes from its surface. It seemed to be intact, mostly. All it required was a power source. He began the hike back to his shuttle, terminal tucked under his arm.

A few minutes later, the terminal was at full power, hooked up to the conventional drive power source. Zo'or waved the interface into view and checked over the records.

They were files, about the daily lives of the Taelons in Ri'hahr'il. Zo'or flicked through them, curious. When the files had begun, he had not even been born. Their ending had been when he was younger, a child, and the Taelon homeworld had been destroyed.

Zo'or suddenly shut off the terminal. He had always assumed that as the past was unchangeable, Da'an's seeming obsession with what had been was absurd. Now... he found himself interested in how the Taelons of that city had lived their lives, just before their doom.

He pulled the power from the terminal and disconnected the memory core. The core could be reintegrated into a slightly less battered terminal, if he ever wished to view it again.

And he knew that he would view it again.

----

As Zo'or piloted the shuttle away from the homeworld, back to the mothership, he looked back. That world was unretrievable, but assuming that the Taelons survived, perhaps another world could he settled... *If we survive...*