Silver Hooves in the Darkness

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Paola Equina plunged into a blackness pierced only by the lights that she had seen in night periods of the domes. Frightened, she trembled in the vastness of an unending void.

A hand folded against hers and gave a reassuring squeeze. Paola steadied herself. A golden nimbus surrounded her and the woman. "Do not be afraid, Paola Equina. This is but an illusion against which to tell a story," Paolina said.

"Dome night lights," the equina said. "Numbers beyond counting."

"Infinity. It is from here that the story begins." The woman swept her arm wide. Something large moved below them.

The silvery object had the shape of a rod. Both ends swelled with gentle curves into spherical shapes, and interspersed among the two ends, flattened discs rotated around the core.

"Behold our spaceship. We left our homeworld so long ago that few in the domes remember that we came from the stars. And those that do remember keep the secret well."

New words had been added to her vocabulary. "'Spaceship'? 'Stars'?"

"The lights in the domes, the only link to memories of the sky above our home planet."

"What is a 'planet'?"

The woman moved her arm again. The spaceship approached a giant sphere. It was primarily blue with white puffy shapes moving around. Large swaths of black and green and brown formed odd patterns on its surface. "This new world, this planet, was much like our own, and we were lucky to find it. We had traveled in space too long and our systems were failing. We had no choice but to land."

She and Paolina no longer viewed the night lights called stars. They stood on a verdant plain. The great transportation vessel rested on the soft earth, the weight of it indelibly marking the landscape. Two blazing balls of light hung above them in the azure sky.

"What dome is this that it can fit an object of such size?" Paola asked.

"Not a dome, Paola, a planet under the light of double stars. One suitable for us to live upon. When our spaceship landed, those who ruled here met us," the woman continued.

 Humans streamed out from the spaceship, but as they emerged, columns of clear crystal broke through the ground and surrounded them and their vessel. The crystals emitted a sharp tone and a thin veil of light covered everything. Twinkling shapes of different colors that changed geometric form from one moment to another darted outside the strange cage that contained the humans. A clear blue crystal broke the ground before the man who had been the Authority. It twisted itself until it took the shape of a human, a crystalline imitation of flesh and blood.

"The Cristalli had gleaned that we were as sentient as they were, but we were made of biological matter, and that fact fascinated them, for only primitive life forms constituted such on this world."

"What happened?" Paola asked as she noted the other people behind the man called Gerardo. They were the ones whose faces she had also seen in the mirrors. And the one woman who looked upon the representative of the Cristalli with the most fascination was Paolina.

"We were true to our human nature. They gave us help and we defied them."

"How?"

"Our ship was no longer spaceworthy. We could not travel to another planet. But we could also not survive on this one. The radiation of the Cristalli matrixed everything. Unlike the biological organisms that had evolved with them, their presence would slowly kill us off by destroying our DNA and our ability to reproduce. So to save us, they built our prison: the domes and the Maze. In our laboratories, we created and used messengers, both feline and equine, for communication between the domes."