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Kindred Star

By M.D. House

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PROLOGUE: A NEW DAWNING
“Relax, Anistan. The universe won’t end before we get there.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Anistan’s stance slackened somewhat as he clasped his hands in front of him. He still seemed to be at attention, or at least ready to leap at an instant, his rigid, serious exterior mirroring the solid metal walls of Toryl’s first interstellar spacecraft, The Tev.
Mei’ Shera shook her head and pursed her lips into something she imagined was half smile, half grimace. She shouldn’t have expected anything different, not from Anistan. The man never seemed to flinch in his discipline, nor did he show anything much in the way of sharp feeling, at least not that she had noticed. It wasn’t healthy—even she knew that. You could only shut down your emotions for so long, and Anistan had apparently been doing it since their uncomfortable encounter in the Hall of Magistrates in Seraelin nearly half a year ago. The desperate battle against the traitor Akazhiel’s Internal Security troops had followed, with Anistan in the thick of it. That had surely left some scars as well.
“No,” she persisted patiently, “I mean, take it easy for a while. You’ve been going non-stop since well before we launched. I don’t think I’ve seen you take a break since we left Toryl—and not even in the two months of training before we left.”
“Ma’am, the Five Traits of Piety are—”
She raised a forestalling hand. “I know the Five Traits, Anistan. I believe in them too now, just like you knights. But believing in them is one thing, living them another, and you must have balance or they become harder and harder to follow.” She paused, realizing what she had said. It bordered on profound.
The expression on Anistan’s face hadn’t changed a bit, her marvelous insight apparently wasted on him. He merely nodded, which meant he’d heard her words but had no intention of heeding her advice. She could order him to stand down, had almost done it numerous times. One or two days of rest and recreation would do wonders for him. But would he really let himself enjoy it? And how would she monitor his ‘rest?’ She felt a sudden surge of exasperation, but let it pass and turned to gaze at the holographic star maps hovering near the far wall of the forward meeting room where she had known she would find him with his books and videos, holos and maps. Maybe she should have listened to her husband. Coren had told her not to worry about Anistan, not to try to persuade him to ease up on his regimen, but she had stubbornly determined to try at least one more time.
She turned back to Anistan to take her final shot. He hadn’t moved a millimeter, not even his eyes. “Anistan, I understand and appreciate you’re completely focused on this mission, and I know as well as you do how important it is. But you’re no good to us if you’re burned out before we get there. We need you—and your knights—in top form. That means—”
“I’ll be in top form, Commander. That’s a promise.”
He hadn’t interrupted her before; this was new. So, he was either starting to crack, as logic told her should be happening but which she didn’t believe in her gut, or he was becoming absolutely sick of her. Okay, the latter, but at least she was having some effect.
She stared at him for several seconds, during which time he blinked maybe once. Finally, she folded her arms and nodded slowly. “Fine, Anistan, but at least show a little emotion—excitement, maybe—about what we’re doing. This is not just a mission. It’s the most fantastic adventure anyone on Toryl has ever taken. We’re the first people to explore another inhabited planet. The first. I won’t order you to ease up, but at least help your men recognize the honor and get a little enjoyment out of it.”
What she’d said sounded silly to her after the fact, but Anistan signaled acquiescence by snapping to attention and saluting her. All this blasted saluting, she thought with a frown as she poorly returned the salute. Why did they have to make us co-commanders? Coren could have handled it all by himself and that would have been just fine. She had felt reasonably comfortable leading her own people of the Avre Tiera back on Toryl and helping them re-integrate into Irrianite society after the civil war. But directing a starship with some of the best scientists in the world on board, plus a contingent of knights, on the first interplanetary exploration mission ever attempted … that was a far different story. And she didn’t get to spend enough time with Renni and Nemara, their adopted children from The Maze. Renni was almost eleven now, and Nemara had recently turned six. They had come a long way in the last three-plus years, healing faster than adults, but their past still haunted them at times.
She blamed her predicament on the press—or rather, the politicians and media elite who so easily steered each other into exaggerated nonsense. The recent victory over the rebels—make that partial victory—had generated far too much attention for her and Coren. Sometimes she wished she could take Coren and the kids and return to the once secret underground city of her youth—of all her life until a few short years ago. They could easily disappear into those great alien-enhanced caverns among her people. They could continue studying the records and artifacts of the mysterious, long-departed races of apparent galactic wanderers or outcasts who had initially seemed so ferocious in her mind. That would be nice. Maybe they could go there for an extended time after this mission.
She finally smiled and relaxed.
“Okay,” she relented, not knowing if she had accomplished anything or not. It was doubtful. “But one more thing. Call me Mei’ from now on, like you used to. No more ‘ma’am.’”
“Yes, Mei’, ma’am.” Anistan chuckled—he actually chuckled! Maybe she had achieved something after all.
She smirked and threw up her hands in mock defeat, then turned and started walking out of the room.
“By the way,” said Anistan, causing her to pause and look back from the doorway. “We’re supposed to speak in English—all the time—remember?” It dawned on her that he had been speaking English all along, what few words he had said, while she had spoken pure, undistilled Toryllian.
She cleared her throat to prepare it for the strange English sounds, which she was mastering quite well, though not nearly as well as Anistan, who could probably already pass for a native Earth English speaker. “You are correct, Anistan, and I will better do.”
“I will do better,” Anistan corrected with a slight grin.
Mei’s face flushed in embarrassment. She knew that construction. “Oh, yes, yes … I will do better. Now … go study more.” She dismissed him with a curt wave and left.

Anistan allowed himself another smile after she left, but only a brief one, tinged with … not sadness or regret, but something harder to define. Guilt, maybe? He sighed and rubbed a tired hand across his forehead as he returned to his chair in front of the terminal, which still displayed relief maps of the Atacama Desert on its wide screen. Why he had been looking at those maps he couldn’t remember—oh, yes, one of the most arid places on the planet, the great copper mines on its eastern edge, in the Spanish-speaking country of Chile. Those mines, and others nearby in Peru, provided forty percent of the world’s copper. Extraordinary. And Spanish seemed a beautiful language—maybe he would learn that one next. They had so many languages on Earth! Toryl had one, plus a few close dialects.
He finished his review of the Atacama, then sat back for a moment in thought. The parallels between Toryl and Earth, from what the probes had gathered, continued to astound him. The two planets were nearly the same size and mass, with Toryl only slightly larger. The atmospheres were almost identical, the view of the two celestial orbs from space so similar as to make no difference. Toryl had a bit more land mass, almost twice as many people, and less violent storms, on average. Earth claimed the prize for the tallest mountain ranges and the greatest sea depths, and also the widest ranges of climate. Toryl took slightly longer to make a revolution on its axis, and a bit more time to complete an orbit around its sun, and that sun was slightly larger than the one sustaining Earth. The sun/planet size proportions were identical, though, the additional distance of Toryl from its sun exactly matching the increased mass of that sun, maintaining the precise equation for supporting life. Toryl had two moons, Earth one of larger size. Both planets boasted millions of species of life teeming among land, sea and air, including various types of extremophiles. Most of the species of Toryl were significantly different from their comparable likenesses on the ‘sister’ planet, the most notable exceptions being horses and …
… humans. The dominant species of Earth appeared to be human, just like Toryllians in every respect. Human. How had that happened? Could it be they had been designed in exactly the same way? Was the designer the same or different? If the same, did Earthlings (as they called themselves) and Toryllians have common ancestors? Humans adapted, of course, but over just a few thousand years the differences would be minimal. He had gone round and round on the topic in his head many times and hadn’t been able to break out of the circle. They just didn’t know enough, not yet.
It seemed Earth’s scientists were starting to catch up to their Toryllian counterparts in recognizing that life on their planet hadn’t just evolved from inorganic matter or popped into existence. However, many of them still clung tenaciously to a completely unprovable theory that the major forces of the universe—gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear and weak nuclear—had fine-tuned at random to support both the universe’s own existence and, through the thoroughly disproven notion of abiogenesis, the unimaginably complex, information-saturated creation of conscious life within it.
It seemed almost comical, though he knew Toryllian scientists had passed through the same trials in the evolution of their understanding, with politics, pride, and greed often holding them back. The most significant related arguments on Toryl now concerned whether it was a caring master intelligence, like God, or super-advanced races of extraterrestrial beings, who may or may not care at all. If the latter, then humans were a grand experiment existing in a giant petri dish, and they could be expunged at any moment.
Mei’ and Coren, of course, believed Toryllians and Terrans were children of the same benevolent God, or related gods. Perhaps, but that wasn’t the kind of answer Anistan could really sink his teeth into yet, even though he was now an Aegis—or Stormshield—Knight, and the knights believed in those sorts of things. As did his semi-adoptive parents—Merak and Lara Dorvallen, Coren’s mother and father. They were President and First Companion of Irrianon, which still clung to superpower status on Toryl. He grinned to himself and said out loud, “If I have such a hard time believing something like that, why in the world did they ever want me to become a knight?”
As he resumed his studies, his thoughts turned to the social behavior of Earth humans, which had been captured by the probes in hundreds of thousands of news stories, online videos, podcasts, and other television and radio programs, plus literally millions of phone calls, e-mail messages, social media posts, and texts, which The Tev’s computers analyzed for metadata and trends. The people of Earth, it appeared, had the same virtues and vices as the people of Toryl. He had watched hundreds of news programs and documentaries over the last several phases—no, weeks was the word he should use exclusively now, though Toryl measured similar weeks within its phases—showing the atrocities of which Earth humans were capable. He had also witnessed countless examples of noble action and selfless sacrifice, though these behaviors didn’t seem as prevalent on the newscasts.
Newscasts … yes, another new word he had picked up and absorbed into his thought processes, which were now almost fully saturated in the English language—he even dreamed in English. He was American—at least that’s what everybody would believe—and his documentation had already been generated, complete with birth certificate, social security number, driver’s license from the state of Nevada, two credit cards, a bank account with a healthy $250,000 balance, a complete credit history, a high school diploma, even a U.S. Passport showing various stints in several countries over the last few years—the cover being that he had taken both pleasure trips and humanitarian missions for obscure aid societies funded by his mysterious American parents who lived in Switzerland. Those ‘parents’ had recently told him he needed to learn to provide for himself, granting him a sizeable amount of seed money. It was all backed up by the minor electronic surgeries the computers in the probes had performed on a host of Earth systems. All verifiable, all completely believable, unless someone tried to physically locate his parents and talk to them, or find old schoolmates who would remember him. He would get a job when he got there, maybe take some classes at the university, start to see what life was really like there.
That was their mission: immerse themselves in Earth life and report on it. Observe the people of Earth, learn their behaviors and their history, see how they were progressing both scientifically and socially, try to understand what their origins could have been, gauge how they might react to the appearance of another race—or rather, another group of people of the same race—from a different planet. The free nations of Toryl had adopted a charter which laid it all out, proscribing certain kinds of interactions with the people of Earth, with the dual purpose of keeping their identity a secret and making sure they didn’t mess things up for their unwitting hosts. It was a good set of rules, and Anistan liked having sound guidelines when he went into a mission, appreciated being able to provide the same instructions to his people, so they could make better judgements and sounder decisions.
He pulled himself out of his maunderings and refocused. He spoke a command, and the bioscientists’ latest summary came up on his viewscreen. The four bioscientists on board posted a report at the end of each workday, and Anistan faithfully studied it every evening—or what counted as evening. Their work was fascinating and critical. He began reading, paying attention to both the words and the floating three-dimensional diagrams projected above the screen. They were close to perfecting the antibodies that would protect their Toryllian bodies from Earth’s pathogens. They had already ensured, as best they could, that potentially dangerous Toryllian pathogens no longer existed among any of the passengers, so visitors to the surface wouldn’t accidentally cause a potentially deadly outbreak of illness when they landed on the planet and began interacting with its environment and inhabitants. As a byproduct, the scientists had come up with cures for several diseases Earth scientists had so far been unable to solve. That presented a conundrum, but they had firmly decided, based on their charter, that they wouldn’t interfere with Earth’s natural progress—at least not yet—by surreptitiously revealing the cures to Earth’s scientists. Anistan knew they would continue to struggle with it, though, because how long could you watch people die when you knew you had the cures to most of their ailments? The major one they hadn’t yet cracked on board The Tev—at least not fully, it was so devilishly adaptable—was AIDS, but with time and some experience on the planet perhaps they could beat it.
He finished and moved on to a book on finite mathematics, which the probes had copied from a publisher’s electronic archives. He already knew most of the material in the book—becoming an officer in the Civilian Protection Forces of Irrianon required a strong education—so he was now learning English expressions of the same material. He nurtured an unquenchable determination to not only pass easily as a native of Earth—of the English-speaking United States of America in particular—but to be recognized as a well-educated citizen. Of course, he had rejected the college diploma and transcripts which could have been provided for his cover, partly so he could fit in as a ‘genuine’ though somewhat older university student, but also because he didn’t want a job sitting at a desk somewhere. He had been doing enough desk-sitting.
Four hours and various subjects later, Anistan left the forward meeting room and headed for his quarters. He thought only briefly about going to the rec lounge, an idea he occasionally entertained but rarely acted upon. He fell asleep not long after his head hit the pillow.

“I’m worried about Anistan,” announced Mei’ later that evening, in English, as she entered the quarters she and Coren shared. Coren wrenched his mind away from the book he had been reading—an immersive American mystery novel—and raised his eyebrows. He noted her lips compressed in concentration and worry. Her wavy, dark-brown hair shimmered, even in the sterile lights of the ship.
“Huh?” was his English response. It was the first word he had mastered.
“Anistan,” repeated Mei’, coming to sit next to him at the narrow desk on one side of their room, which, while cramped, was still the largest on board. “I’m worried about him. I still can’t find him—I mean, reach him. All he does is study and drill his men. He never takes a break, never socializes with anyone. You know, there’s that attractive geophysicist on 4 Deck … What’s her name?”
Coren shook his head and pretended to be confused. “What day is it?”
“Why?” she asked suspiciously.
“Because we had this same conversation yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that.” He smiled to make sure she knew he was teasing. “Forget about it. He’s okay. And quit trying to arrange him.”
Mei’ frowned. “Set him up.”
“What?”
“Set him up. That’s the correct English phrase. And I’m not trying to set him up. I’ve suggested a time or two that he go to the rec lounge at about the same time I knew she would be there. That’s not setting him up. Besides, he’s never shown up.”
Coren laughed. “You’ve watched to see if he does?” He maintained a teasing chuckle he knew she both hated and couldn’t get enough of.
She gave him a playfully warning look, then turned and got up from the desk. She walked the short distance to the opposite end of the room to stare at a map of Earth displayed on a large screen.
“We’re halfway there,” she noted, switching to Toryllian.
Coren rose and moved to stand next to her, sliding an arm around her waist, happy to speak in their native tongue. “Two more phases—about four more weeks.”
“Captain Saarig is sure they won’t be able to detect us when we come into orbit?”
Coren shrugged, then moved behind her and slid his other arm around to join the first, drawing her close and resting his chin on her shoulder. “As sure as he can be at this point. Someone might detect a shadow moving across a telescope, but electronic systems will miss us completely. The trickier part is the landing ships, but we think we have that figured out, too.”
After a few moments, Mei’ responded, her tone one of mock threat. “Well, for your sake I hope so.” She relaxed into his arms and closed her eyes as The Tev continued to slice comfortably through space at speeds once thought utterly unachievable. Coren breathed deeply, savoring both the moment and the entire venture. Two hundred scientists, a hundred Stormshield Knights, a command crew of twelve, his absolutely gorgeous wife, their two adopted children, and a pet manit—which somewhat resembled a large Earth canine and had been named Jethro for a character in an old Earth television series—all anxiously awaited their first physical contact with a kindred planet.

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