An Excerpt from Planets and Peoples of the Dark Arm: My Journey across the Spur of Leda, from Erostera to Lebenda and Back Again, and What I Discovered along the Way; by Professor Rouxaan Okkum of the University of Vyecourf, Published in the Seventeen-Hundred-and-Third Year of Our Lady, May Her Wisdom Guide us Always.
Chapter 83: On a Mangalian Junk.
Leaving the Atalyans to their silly feast, I booked passage on a Mangalian junk, which, luck would have it, was bound for the next stop on my journey, the System of Swyti. On the third day of alignment, I befriended, with the help of a bottle of Atalyan vysky, the captain of the junk, a swarthy fellow named Barbura, who spoke heavily accented but understandable Hetric. Several hours into our conversation, the captain, being a typical Mangalian in his fondness for licentious tales of personal excess, tales which I shall spare the reader out of kindness, having held the floor for most of that time, turned to questioning me.
He asked me what a Fontishman such as myself was doing travelling alone in Leda. I told him, as I had told a hundred such curious minds, “I am looking for the Starting Line.”
He nodded. “You mean Jurati,” he said.
Now, only a fool would believe the words of a drunken Mangalian, but my interest was piqued. Every planet and planella in the Galaxy claims to be the long lost Cradle of the Race, and so it was not surprising that this man would presume to know its location. But keep the following facts in mind. The Mangalians have what might be one of the most ancient cultures in the Galaxy. Those strange Mangalian towers can be found on almost every civilized world. This is, of course, the result of the nomadic nature of the Mangalians, who travel from world to world on their endless and queer errands, but the generally ruined condition of the towers and the recent advances in bishmit dating, point to a perhaps prehistoric origin. Ask any Mangalian of the location of the Starting Line, and they are liable to name the nearest world and tell you a story to make your head spin. But here was a Mangalian on a short-range junk in the Spur of Leda, naming a place I had never heard of.
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“What is Jurati?” I asked. “Is it a system?”
“It is a world,” said the Captain. “It is the world where everything started. It is the world where the gods once lived.”
I had never heard a Mangalian speak of his gods. They are professed heathens, but normally very secretive about their beliefs. “The gods?” I asked.
“Yes,” said the Captain. “Shakti, Shiva, Vishnu. A thousand, thousand gods. They all lived on Jurati. That is where they made the Race. Out of fire and mud they made the Race, and out of the soul of the dead god Brahma.”
The Captain’s drunkenness had turned somber. He spoke at length about his beliefs for some time. He told me of a god who rode a giant bird whose wings were lightning, and of a god who frightened an ocean into submission. He told me of a god who could fly, and who no weapon could touch, and who could burn with a glance and freeze with a song, and who could lift the world as easily as a mother lifting a newborn babe, and who only ever did good deeds. And he revealed to me that he believed in the Jarm, like the Naitrists, and that every man and woman would be reborn again and again in different shapes and forms, forever. At last I asked him, “And you say it all started on this world called Jurati?”
“Yes,” he said, “on Jurati.”
“Do you know how to get there?”
“Yes,” he said.
I asked the Captain if he would be willing to change course for Jurati. He was hesitant at first, claiming that Swyti had much better trade goods. I asked him if Jurati had any valuable resources, and he replied, “They have very good lumber, but it is expensive.” I offered to help finance a load of lumber, and the Mangalian’s natural greed got the better of him. The alignment calculations for Swyti were abandoned, and those for Jurati begun. Nine days later we were ready for the jump.