Helmuthros Baran frantically rubbed his hands. The cold he felt never ceased. He was old. Very, very old. Juvenile treatments had brought him to his 177th year of life, but nobody had told him about the side effects. He felt hollow somehow. It was as if every breath he took created a deep, crunching echo in his chest.
A beam of pale artificial light illuminated his desktop. He no longer wrote with the others in Hall Alpha 44 of the Logisticae scriptorium. The heating there was dreadful. So he had obtained special permission to work in his private study, a remuneration for almost 150 years of service. And in all those years he had never told them. Not even the boy. He should have. Karpat was a good child—ambitious, of course, but also true of heart and brave beyond the usual unexciting profession they both shared.
And now it was too late. Too late to share his deepest secrets with the boy he felt for like a son. He had taken Karpat Jaleph under his already brittle wings as soon as he had learned of his exceptionally high administrative intelligence and his quite unusual interest in Terran history.
And a good part of that late history was still alive behind Helmuthros’ eyes. The early years of his service: accompanying dangerous military expeditions of a Warmaster who called himself only the Emperor, serving as an army purser at merely seventeen years of age. He had begun chronicling his experiences soon after joining, as he started seeing things nobody in his family could ever have dreamed of. Faraway lands where indescribable creatures crawled and flew; strange skies with suicidal clouds and rainbowed winds of fear and despair. Yet in the end, all of this paled in comparison to the secrets he had been told and shown in his childhood in South Pacificus.
The old man shivered from head to toe. Once again, he heard the forgotten songs of ancient sand and felt the inverted shadows of cursed rocks upon his skin. And he saw it. A chill ran down his spine, ignoring the thermo-pack they had provided him with after his last treatment.
He stood up, rubbing his shoulders, and stretched his back. A protesting crack followed. Then he slowly strode over to the cogitator they had rolled in a few weeks earlier. It hummed, still unable to harmonise its unwelcome noise with the buzzing of the old dataslate on his desk. Everything was irritating, even here—in his private room.
He walked slowly past the flickering data screen projecting delivery quotas and acquisition datasets to the back of his cell and sat on an elegant stool beside his bed. It was sunny today beneath his section of the climate conservation field, and rays of honey-coloured light fell through the window. Of course, they provided no warmth any more, having been filtered and modified countless times while passing through the force shield of the Imperial Palace.
He knew he should have told everything to his boy. Not just the adventurous parts of his childhood stories, the fables and fairy tales of the Pacific dusts. It was too late now. Karpat Jaleph was gone, drawn towards the forbidden plains no longer covered and suppressed by Terra’s oceans.
Helmuthros stooped down and turned the bed heating up to eleven. Then he took off his fur-lined boots and slid beneath the thick blanket, curling into a foetal position. He stared at the scuffed back of his bookshelf and closed his eyes. He would soon fall asleep, and he knew what he would dream of again: a place so barren and hot that it freezes your soul.
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