The Guiding Star

Stories

## Character Profiles

Tsujimoto Tsukasa (辻 pronounced the same as 十)

A young exo-civilization observer sent by Earth to Exo-Civilization No. 611, Oceano.

Collecta

Tsukasa’s subordinate, a B-rank purpose-personality. The tallest of the three, with a mature allure. Conspicuous wavy curls. In charge of “Science.”

Almity

Tsukasa’s subordinate, a B-rank purpose-personality. Long-haired, an artificial body with downcast eyes. In charge of “Economy.”

Barney

A B-rank purpose-personality, like Almity. The shortest of the three, marked by tousled short hair. In charge of “Survival.”

Cheqi

A young woman of the black-skinned people.

The Walker who leads her race toward the earth.

## Chapter One: Dawn of Flame — The Age of Hunting and Gathering, SOE Year 582

The three toes of her right forefoot hooked into claws, and Cheqi did not move.

She held her breath and kept still, though of course she could not be perfectly motionless. A little dragon-bug was climbing the branch. A careless reach would startle it into flight. A little dragon-bug this large was rare. For the sake of the younger sister waiting in the nest, she had to catch it.

There was another reason she did not move.

There was nothing beneath her feet.

The branch Cheqi stood on was as thin as a whisker. This was the end of the canopy, the highest branch of all. Having climbed this far, there was no longer a way straight down toward home. Looking below, through the deep darkness, she could glimpse the world of death on the ground. Root-tendrils thin as membranes spread in a tangle in every direction.

To fall was to die.

Even among Cheqi’s people, who loved the heights, few of the clan ever came to a treetop this dangerous. This was the first time Cheqi herself had climbed so high.

Cheqi was the best hunter in the family, and she knew exactly the limit of what claws and tail could hold on a branch. The one beneath her was about to snap. She wanted, right now, to get back to the main trunk.

But she had no right to choose her branch. All the good trees had been taken by the Hishiuriki, the White Fierce.

The Hishiuriki were enemies threatening the forest’s territory. Those ones were formidable.

Cheqi’s people fought them with everything they had, and at the same time tried to seek a new world. Those attempts had not succeeded. Climbing into the canopy, beyond the yellow-green clouds at the forest’s edge, one could see the neighboring forest. But it was too far. There were no connecting branches. Even hanging, one could not reach it…

## Chapter Two: The Azure Fang — The Age of Flourishing Metalwork

On the stoneware just drawn from the furnace, a golden lump blazed with a blinding light.

The Swift-Handed one, Qiqiaolu, moved the lump onto a solid stone slab and began, with great care, to strike it with a hammer. In the steaming lateral cavern, tang! tang! — a sound all its own.

As the lump cooled little by little, it lost its glow. Qiqiaolu, though, skillfully changed the direction of each hammer blow and worked it, with practiced hands, into a shape that meant something.

Soon the lump had become a rectangular plate. Qiqiaolu set it back in the furnace to heat it red once more, then suddenly thrust it into the pool of water gathered in the rock beside him.

Steam spread at once and escaped through the vent overhead. Eyes narrowed, Qiqiaolu watched the water, chose his moment, lifted the plate, and set it on the slab.

On the plate, still fierce with heat, the boiling water quickly beaded and rolled away. Qiqiaolu set down the hammer, scratched at the white fur soaked with sweat, and picked up a bone as if at random.

From behind him came a voice that sounded curious.

“Is that a shoulder guard?”

“…Yes.”

Having answered, Qiqiaolu turned.

Watching his work in silence was a young girl. She wore a thin canopy of shed skin from a great dragon-bug, and fine ornaments and bracelets hung on her body — every one of them proof that her station was no ordinary one.

Her fur, though, was not the color of Qiqiaolu’s. She was black. She was a Shuvalis.

For this old dig site, this dark and filthy cave, she was without question a guest who did not belong.

“That’s amazing.”

The girl stepped across the ore slag thrown everywhere on the ground, came closer, and leaned in to look at Qiqiaolu’s hands. It was not yet time…

## Chapter Three: The Southern Paradise — The Age of Trade and Seafaring, SOE Year 344

A night with neither the elder-sister star nor the younger-sister star.

He lifted his face, and the sky was that deep. Countless stars threatened in silence. The sight was the same as the night that had scared the piss and shit out of Gukaluqiu when he had only just become a helmsman. An endless sky and sea with nothing to cover them could drive the Hishiuriki mad.

But the Gukaluqiu of now was a seasoned helmsman who had held a ship’s tiller for twelve years. He did not tremble at a pitching wave-crest, and he did not lose his mind at the first sight of the night sky.

Nothing like Barino, who had only just come aboard.

“As if even the soul were about to be sucked away…”

Gazing at the night sky, Gukaluqiu murmured to himself.

Barino Aiono was an apprentice crewman. He had boarded this ship, the Diamusin — the Golden Thief — at Leiqifulu City. Seeing how badly he swayed on the deck, Gukaluqiu could not help asking, and learned that the boy had never even been to sea, let alone steered a ship.

So whenever the ship rocked he had to go to the privy once, and if it rocked a little harder he had to go looking for water to drink. As a lookout, he was of no use at all.

At this moment Barino was squatting in the privy at the stern. His mouth said his stomach hurt. In truth he was afraid — afraid of this darkness.

This was the end. Four thousand fifike north of the Nui, the Crimson Peninsula, which jutted like a fang from the continent into the northern ocean. A lone island in a great sea that even the feather-dragons could not cross. The ship had anchored here to wait for dawn.

Ahead, was it nothingness, or the underworld? It was no wonder the young Barino was afraid.

“…Hah. Nothing to be done.”

His beard streamed on the wind. Guka…

## Exo-Civilization Support Agency, Planning Bureau Files

Midterm Report on the Support Plan for Exo-Civilization No. 611 (common name: Oceano)

Exo-Civilization Support Agency, Planning Bureau Files

“Oceano”

Oceano civilization was discovered during the fifteenth wave of exo-civilization exploration in the two-hundreds of Union Mean Time (UMT). Oceano names not only the planet on which the civilization dwells, but also the stellar system to which that planet belongs and the star it orbits. It is the six hundred and eleventh exo-civilization discovered by the Union.

Its polar coordinates with Earth as the origin are right ascension twelve hours, forty minutes, five seconds; declination minus fifty-eight degrees, twenty minutes; distance 412.55 light. It can be observed in the direction of Sagittarius.

The star Oceano is a G6V main-sequence star (a dwarf), slightly redder than the G2V Sun, cooler and older. Within its system, however, there are bodies of many kinds, including a white dwarf similar to Sirius B and a red giant like Alpha Orionis. Seen in that light, it may be called a star very much like the Sun. From that resemblance, the life it has produced may be considered very close to the life of Earth.

The temperature difference between Oceano and the Sun cannot be ignored. It has an extremely long-term influence on the organisms the two have nurtured.

The star Oceano is slightly cooler than the Sun. The fourth planet of its system, however, orbits closer to its parent star than Earth does, and so receives ample heat.

For that reason its orbital period is necessarily short. It is not strictly necessary that this be so, yet its rotational period is short as well. Therefore the weather of the fourth planet, Oceano, changes more frequently than Earth’s. And from this, in every respect, the activity cycles of its life…

## Chapter Four: The Braided Gray-S Rope — The Age of the Origin of Religion

SOE Year 272

After ending a faster-than-light flight of three hundred and seventy light-years and entering the Earth sphere, the Edialance received not berthing instructions for the space city where the headquarters of the Exo-Civilization Support Agency stood.

“The lunar surface?”

“Yes. The order is for this ship to stop in lunar orbit, and for only Madam Masa to disembark.”

“Has Union Headquarters moved away from LP4?” (Clsyz note: LP4 is the abbreviation for the fourth Lagrange point.)

“Operations on ‘Manhattan’ don’t seem to be having any trouble.”

Hearing her subordinate Zhao Xiangyu say this, Madam Masa Guguyi frowned and straightened the video-glasses on the bridge of her nose. A plump figure, a wheat-colored bun drawn tight at the back of the head — she gave the impression of a rural primary-school teacher. But this country auntie was not as simple as she looked. On the shoulder of the Support Agency’s standard black seamless uniform, a silver laurel and a Solar System emblem were embroidered with pride. That was the mark of a senior Union officer. She was one of only eight quadrant governors in the entire Exo-Civilization Support Agency.

Masa looked at a certain image displayed in the control room. The long barrel-shaped space city commonly called Manhattan was wrapped in the engine-radiance of a great many spacecraft, as if shrouded in cloud and mist. It was no different from before, still floating at the fourth Lagrange point, equidistant from the Moon and the Earth. (Clsyz note: A Lagrange point is a point at which a small body can remain stable under the gravity of two large bodies. A small body, under the gravity of two large bodies, at…)

## Chapter Five: The Hesitant Morning Star — The Beginning of Modern Science

SOE Year 202

“Hm.”

The silver-haired old man turned the thing in his hands over and over.

It was a sphere thirty centimeters in diameter. Its color was gray-white, and it had the hard, fibrous feel of corrugated board. To be precise, it was not quite a sphere. The circle at the bottom had been cut away and a hole dug out, and from there one could look into the interior. Looking in, one found it hollow.

“This is a work of the Bespa.”

So said the big-bellied, broad-shouldered red-haired man seated on the sofa indoors. The old man did not turn his head.

“A craft object?”

“A practical object. Still, the workmanship is fine enough that calling it a work of art would not be too much.”

“Is that so.”

Peering into the hole at the bottom, the old man muttered in deep doubt,

“The making is certainly delicate…”

“Heh — look at it under ultraviolet.”

“Hm?”

The old man cocked his head and stared once more into the sphere. Then an expression of astonishment spread across his face.

“Oh! Th-this is… a star chart!”

“Yes. The night sky of their planet, painted on it in ultraviolet pigment. Not only the sky. Look carefully. Try magnifying it a hundred times.”

“Writing! A myth…? No. From stellar distances to spectra, it’s all recorded! Truly marvelous beyond compare.” (Clsyz note: Any variable that manifests as a complex oscillation over time or spatial distance can be decomposed into many harmonics of differing amplitude and frequency. A graph that arranges the amplitude values of those harmonics by frequency or period is a spectrum.)

“The Bespa are flying creatures eight centimeters long. They flew inside to paint it, this…”

## Chapter Six: Wings of the Bond — The Opening of the Age of Aviation, SOE Year 130

“An even split won’t work.”

The instant the girl said it, the tension filling the sealed cabin rose for nothing, close to killing intent.

Because this was not advice on how to divide snacks. It was a proposal for how to allot oxygen, a matter of life and death, and the argument had already gone on for some time.

The squad leader, Jebaifu, glared at the girl with a vicious look.

“We finally agreed, and now what are you trying to do? In this sealed cabin there’s only a first-aid kit and a simple toilet. Spare oxygen and food — there’s none of either.”

“In the first-aid kit there’s insulin for bran-sugar sickness, isn’t there? If you inject too much, it ought to put a person into a state like death. Leave only the minimum number of people, and if the rest go into hibernation, there shouldn’t be a problem of running short of oxygen.”

Tsujimoto Tsukasa, who until then had been leaning on the wall in the corner, heard a suggestion he had not expected and looked the girl over again. While the zero-gravity work training had been going smoothly, this girl had kept a smile on her face and said not a word. Only now, with them in a bind, did she speak for the first time.

They were a team thrown together for the sake of finishing the exercise. He had not known what sort of character she was, and only at this moment did he take a fresh look at her.

The white, skin-tight, full-environment suit she wore, the type rated for outer space — AE wear — was the uniform of the preparatory course at Christmas Island Orbital School. In that she was no different from the others. Black hair tied in a ponytail was her striking feature. Her skin was a yellowish white like Tsukasa’s, and in appearance she was likewise of the East…