Kim Wells
The Book of Safkhet: Chronicler of the Journey, Mistress of the House of Books
Originally published in The Dragon Chronicles (Windrift Books, 2015), edited by Ellen Campbell and part of The Future Chronicles anthology series, created by Samuel Peralta."
Blurb: The nature of history, of the origins of civilization, and our own human story, may be changed forever by the discovery of an ancient scroll that tells the story of a doomsday device that threatens civilization as we know it. The Dragons, empathic interstellar navigators of uncertain origin, may be able to save some. But where will the survivors go?
Revelations
“I am the Invisible One within the All. It is I who counsel those who are
hidden, since I know the All that exists in it. I am numberless beyond
everyone. I am immeasurable, ineffable, yet whenever I wish, I shall reveal
myself of my own accord. I am the head of the All. I exist before the All, and
I am the All, since I exist in everyone.”
To begin with, they weren’t even supposed to be diving in that cave, or even going that deep. It was dangerous. Too far from the coral reefs, possibly filled with tiger sharks or moray eels. But that’s what made it exciting. Watching your air bubbles disappear into the light above, knowing how far down in the darkness you were.
Anything could happen.
David was the good diver, the one with all the qualifications. But Anna wanted to try it, too, and they were sure, certain, that nothing bad would happen. Maybe something exciting, but then, wasn’t that what life was all about?
Then Anna spotted a huge turtle, a gorgeous green and black leathery sea turtle. She followed it, past the depths that David had suggested they keep to. She wasn’t paying attention to depth meters when there were turtles to follow. When David saw her swim into a previously unseen cave, he followed her, panicking. He knew how you could get trapped in one of those things and never come out. His bubbles raced above him, frantic, small.
The turtle escaped them both, finding some hole too small for the humans to hide in. But what they found in there was even better.
In the center of the cave, nestled between corals and illuminated by the lights of their diving gear, sat a giant sphere of glass, perfectly sealed, enigmatic. It wasn’t very heavy, so they lifted it, carried it to the surface. They thought of pirate treasure, or lost artifacts of the Pharaohs. The green bubbled glass glistened in the sunlight as their boat carried it to shore.
There was the faintest suggestion in the glass of the perfect figure of a winged creature of some sort. Probably a dragon, its wings spread wide in a flying pattern. But no one could ever decide. It seemed to be flying around a single star-like circle, the only hint of color in the glass, like a red star.
When they showed it to their professors (they were students on an archeology summer-school course in Egypt, swimming on weekends in the Red Sea coral reefs) the professors were excited. There were some kind of scrolls, some kind of papyrus documents, sealed inside the glass that could be clearly seen, even through the green of ancient glass. They all knew they had to examine those scrolls. It was not lost upon the professors that this area was ripe with both legitimate ancient texts (the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example) and forgeries. Finding out which this was caused an international academic uproar.
And that was the trick, wasn’t it? The glass was clearly ancient, but there was no sign of seams, or, aside from the dragon art, any imperfections. Once the word about the find got out, the community speculated forgery. Some kind of publicity stunt. But they couldn’t be sure until they could see the actual texts for themselves.
They spent months figuring out a way to open it safely. They finally decided to pierce the glass with a special diamond-tipped device while it was in a sterile vacuum environment, take a small sample of the papyrus and then reseal the glass. When it was pierced, the oddest smell, of white lotus flower, to be precise, Nymphaea Lotus, completely filled the room. At first everyone was terrified, afraid the scent was some kind of chemical weapon, but no one was harmed, and the smell lingered for days.
After resealing the sphere, they scanned everything inside with a new app that used Lidar to analyze the patterns on the scrolls. The language there was nothing anyone had ever seen, even though the room was filled with specialists in ancient languages. The mystery was thrilling, and for a time, the atmosphere of the room was like a party, a carnival.
For a while. Over months, no one was found who knew the language on the scrolls. And when no codex, no Rosetta Stone for this language showed up, it was mostly forgotten. Years went by before anyone thought of the scrolls again except in passing.
Eventually, for record-keeping purposes at the archives where they were kept, the documents, which dated so far back (more than 200,000 years old) that it was thought there had to be an error because people didn’t make paper back then, were scanned. Cataloged. Placed on the internet. Of course. The words were digitized and the shapes they made approximated by the computers and OCR programs.
One day, many years later, a young woman named Sonya was working on her dissertation in mythological languages attempting to discover the Ur language, the language all humanity spoke before the Tower of Babel, the language Adam and Eve spoke. She uploaded her work to the Internet as part of her course requirements.
Her computer froze.
It stayed frozen for hours. Nothing Sonya did could seem to fix it, even unplugging it and plugging it back on just gained her the same odd frozen screen. In the third hour, a symbol appeared on the screen, like a star on a stick, covered by a weird nipple-shaped hat.
She was certain she had uploaded a crazy virus and sadly planned to take her computer to a friend who was an expert on computers. She worried she had lost all of her hard work of that day (but of course, she had everything saved in multiple spots, on the Cloud and email).
But then her computer restarted. At least, it seemed to be rebooting. But it stayed a black screen for a few moments, and Sonya was afraid this was the end. What she didn’t know was that the program that had begun to run on her computer was actually a kind of virus, a previously unknown and remarkably advanced computer language. Her adding her transliteration and interpretation of the Ur language into the mix had triggered a sort of digital Rosetta stone, a viral program loading that was able to combine the ancient language with computer programming binary. And that the accidental confluence of events was changing her computer forever into a kind of universal translator.
A story began to scroll across the screen. Sighing, and thinking that it was still the virus, the student read along, at first with annoyance, then curiosity that turned into shock and amazement.
And the story Sonya read changed the world.
* * *
The Book of Jude
“Beloved, although I was making every effort to write to you about our
common salvation, I now feel a need to write to encourage you to contend for
the faith that was once for all handed down to the holy ones.”
Jude stalked long corridors of the Dragon’s Hall in a huff.
Everything was going wrong already. His parents had woken him rudely just before the seventh hour. After a hurried breakfast, they had dropped him off with warnings to study hard, with exhortations to “hurry to work” and to meet them back at home later, in hour eighteen. Then they continued talking in rapid, argumentative tones.
Something about politics. It was always about politics. His parents were both Judges, the leaders of their community and ultimately the world, elected by the people once every five cycles to make laws and policy. This meant they were always arguing about something, always worried about something else.
Jude didn’t care about the arguments of old men and even older women in the Halls of Government. But he couldn’t wait to get out to the Halls of the Elder Dragons, where his friend Yalta-ba-oath was waiting to instruct him further in Interstellar Navigational techniques. Especially the telepathic interface that would allow him to pilot the starships that would take them eventually to other planets and solar systems and the stars. He had the feeling he almost was there, more times than not he could now sense the Dragon’s empathic voice just at the edges of his consciousness. A tickle, a mental itch he needed to scratch. He could hear entire sentences at time. He was told he was the one who was blocking the link, and that he just had to keep trying.
The Dragons had always been experts on traveling the other worlds, the solar system and beyond. Rumor had it that they came from somewhere far away, but Yalta-ba-oath only smiled and nodded when Jude asked this question. She didn’t avoid answering, but she redirected Jude to answer it for himself.
“What do you think, Jude? Where did we all come from?”
Her voice was deep and powerful but kind, a little gravelly, though. He couldn’t wait until he could always hear it through the empathic navigational interface. The Dragons could speak to anyone telepathically, and this was the way they navigated their ships, which were somehow organic, also. The ships spoke back to the Dragons but none of the humans could speak to the ships without the Dragons helping. And somehow, the ships and Dragons both needed the human intermediary to translate the ship environment to a hospitable place for everyone.
Jude didn’t understand it all yet, but he was studying as hard as he could because he wanted to be a navigator, with the Dragons. He himself had not yet heard the voice of any of the ships. He hoped to someday.
Jude thought about the Dragon’s question. It took him a while to work through everything, but Yalta-ba-oath patiently let him think in his own pace. He could tell that she felt she had all the time for him to figure it out.
He knew that his home planet was not an easy place to live. Its over 1600 volcanoes were beautiful but could be deadly, and the heat of the dayside of the planet could kill if one wasn’t careful to bring water and shade on any trips across the cities on the edge of the daylight cycle. The sharp black sand of the beaches South of his home city, beaches that ended in lovely dark-green water, that sand could cut your feet with its glassy points if you forgot to wear your sandals to the water’s edge. There the sand was softened, eventually, but you must wait ‘til you get right to the edge to go barefoot.
Scientists said that The People, some called the Tribes, had originated in the cooler, mountain lands and that they migrated down and across the planet at some point in the past 10,000 years, while the planet was in its coolest phase, furthest in its relatively circular orbit around the sun. In ancient times, they had been nomads, following the edges of the sunlight, called the Aredvi Sura, sticking to the twilight zones between the dark, the Anahita sides. Nowadays, they had climate controlled buildings that darkened the windows during the planet’s long day and let in artificial light during the slightly longer night cycle.
Jude had studied all of that in school, but it just didn’t mean all that much to him. The scientists also said that the next planet from the sun, which they called Earth-eal, also bore life. Shockingly, their days were only 24 hours long with half of it in sun and half in the day, and their orbit around the sun was 365 of those 24 hour periods. Jude thought that was unimaginable.
He remembered something about how there were humanoids on the planet, but they were not civilized, living in a much colder world, where the snow that touched the highest mountains on this planet covered large expanses of the ground, there. The humanoids huddled in caves around primitive fires that could barely support their existence.
Jude thought it sounded horrible and never wanted to travel there. But the stars—that was different.
The Dragons promised to take them to the stars.
Jude wasn’t a scholar. Really, he didn’t care where they all came from as long as they traveled to other places.
While she waited for Jude to answer, Yalta-ba-oath yawned, her huge mouth filled with the sharpest, longest, whitest teeth Jude had ever seen. It was early, and Jude had awoken her in his impatience to learn more about the Dragons’ ships. She opened her wings, stretching them. They were sleek, spanning almost thirty feet across and half that in width. She usually kept them drawn against her body, but Jude knew that, in the right conditions with the atmosphere and wind speed just so, she could fly.
She was a red Dragon, her face ringed with pointy tips Jude thought of as her beard. He heard, in his head, her amusement at that label. She didn’t seem to mind, even though his mother would have been insulted. High pointed ridges, three on each side of her face, gathered in a sort of crown at the top of her triangle-shaped head. Her throat was covered in cream scales, some as small as his fingertip, some as large across as a grown man’s hand spread wide. The same cream color could be seen under her wings when she chose to spread them, the strong, muscled arms red and the softer wing leather underneath. Her tail was as long as her body and ended in several spikes.
In spite of this fiercely strong appearance, she still seemed gentle, to Jude. Perhaps this was because as his teacher, he could hear her presence in his head and it never seemed cruel, even when he did the dumbest things like he had yesterday in his training session on navigating Black Holes. A mistake Yalta-ba-oath told him could cost them all their lives if made in the real world and not a simulated dream.
Sleek, black, and large, the ships could travel immense distances. The Dragons were vague on where the ships came from, vague, in fact, on details about themselves in general, but as far back as anyone on Kiel-e-ken, the second planet from the sun, could remember, they had simply been there. The Dragons would travel often, and the launches of the ships were attended with great revelry by the people of Jude’s home-city of Halom.
But it was new that the Dragons had offered to take people with them. And Jude was one of the first travelers, one of the first to study the ships and the navigational systems the ships contained.
Jude finally answered:
“Does it matter where the ships come from, where we come from? Isn’t it true that what matters is where we go next?”
Yalta-ba-oath chuckled. The emotion was strong in Jude’s head, but you could also hear the huffing sound through her mouth and nostrils if you had been standing nearby. Dragons only projected their thoughts to those they chose to project to—if they didn’t want you to be in on the conversation, it was private. Jude could almost hear her thoughts now. He felt he was just days away from truly hearing her through their connection, and then, the ship would be next.
“I can see I chose well in you, Jude.” Jude could hear the smile, even though it was hard to tell when a Dragon smiled from looking at their face. “You ask the important questions, but then you find the answers you need for yourself.”
Jude squirmed under the attention; the Dragon probing his mind always kind of tickled.
“Shall we get to today’s astro navigational maps?”
The Letters of John
What was from the beginning,/ what we have heard,/ what we have seen with our eyes,/ what we looked upon/ and touched with our hands/concerns the Word of life.
To: The Congress of Elders, the Judges
Halls of Government
Aredvi Sura Parallel
Esteemed Elders,
I write to you today to urge immediate action. The beginning of dangerous events is clearly upon us. There is no way that we can continue this dialogue unless both sides agree to discuss the issues at hand. I urge you to include all groups immediately and not negotiate without their explicit attendance at your meetings. Secret meetings of the Government must cease immediately so that the groups in question are not antagonized further.
The “doomsday device” that has been stolen by factions that disagree with our plan to travel to other planets, who believe that we should preserve our way of life at all costs because of the superstitions of an ancient religion, must be taken seriously by all the Wise and Learned among us. This device, while dismissed by some as a simple bomb, could change the entire nature of this planet.
What you have heard is correct: the device will, if detonated in the right part of the planet’s day/night cycle, possibly lead to an escalating Greenhouse effect that could burn off all of our planet’s Oceans. The winds will become a veritable vortex, rotating on our planet at something like 60 times the speed of our normal rotation. All animal and human life will die in the lightning storms that immediately follow said detonation. The escalating heat caused by the clouds of CO, Nitrogen, and Sulfuric Acid that will erupt from this device will then make the planet completely unrecoverable for any form of life as we know it.
I also urge you to consider the implications of all I have written here.
Those who say that it’s a simple nuclear bomb that will only destroy a radius of 8 miles do not understand the science at hand.
I have seen with my own eyes the danger that these people represent when the leader of the Faction killed dozens of his supporters in order to acquire my energy making machine. I know that I have been dismissed as a doomsday prophet, someone who stands aside and predicts scientific disasters that will never come to pass. The government must listen to its scientists if we are to preserve any semblance of life on this planet. Those who say “But they would never dare to use this device” do not know the levels of hatred these people have for anyone who disagrees with them. The fact that they stole the technology for the device from our labs does not go unnoticed by me, and I regret the experiments that lead to its discovery.
Those who say “But the space-travel will save us” do not realize that the Dragons can only carry a fraction of our planet’s life with them. And they do not seem to ask the questions of where we will go? The only other potentially inhabitable planet in this system, Earth-eal, is in the midst of its Ice Age—a time when human life is barely supported on most of its continental land masses. The primitive state of life on that planet, where there are no man-made structures and very barbaric humanoid creatures that live like animals, is not to be under estimated. Any of our planet’s survivors who managed to land on the planet would suffer a horrible fate.
Esteemed Elders: I, John of Tycho, believe that this device could end this planet forever, and the Dragons are not just the saviors of our kind that some would paint them to be. The origins of their species, as well as the nature of their benevolence to us, is unknown. Their minds are of an alien intelligence, and we cannot be certain of their intent.
Please, Esteemed Elders: take this warning seriously. This is about Life as we know it on our planet. We must convince the factions to bring us the doomsday weapon so that it can be disassembled in a safe environment, in a lab. It never should have been built, and I will curse my own curiosity for the rest of my days.
Sincerely,
John Tycho
* * *
Dearest Love:
I have written to the Councils of Elders and Judges. I don’t have any faith that they will hear my warnings. You should take our family and travel as quickly as you can to the Halls of the Elder Dragons and throw yourself and our cause on their mercies. In spite of not truly knowing their intent, I believe they may be our only hope at survival. Plan to leave our home forever. Bring as many of your friends as you can convince to come along. I will try to meet you there soon.
I know this sounds crazy, but if the Faction succeeds in its plan to detonate the cursed weapon that I developed in a crazy bid to provide endless energy to our world, we will all be destroyed.
My love, I long to be with you now, but I am traveling today to the Capitol to try to talk sense into the Judges there, personally. I hope that I am not too late.
I send you my heart, my soul, and my endless kisses. I hope that I see you and our children soon.
Love,
John
* * *
To the Leaders of the Faction:
I beg of you, return the device that is in your possession back to its rightful owners. I agree that we all need a dialogue about the direction our planet’s governmental rulers have chosen with the Dragons. We must discuss the wide-spread effects of space travel on our world in an intelligent, rational manner.
Your religious beliefs are strong, I understand. You must please hear me: the device you hold in your hands could trigger an unbelievably catastrophic series of events that could destroy life as we know it on this planet.
We have nowhere else to go that has homes for us to live in, and any emigration to other planets at this point is unfeasible. Please allow me to speak to you about a device and a danger that I never intended.
Can we not negotiate like civilized people? The day is long and the night is longer—but the sun will bless those of us who save our world.
You hold our fate in your hands. Please look at your loved ones, your children’s faces, and know that it is within your power to change the world for the better, not the worse.
Sincerely, with hope,
John Tycho, inventor of the weapon you hold
* * *
To: The Elder Dragons
Anahita Region
Esteemed Friends:
I believe the time for negotiations has ended. You in your wisdom have provided us a means to travel the galaxies, indeed, the universe. But there are those on our world who are afraid of the gifts you give. They will destroy us all in their fear. My search for renewable energy has caused me to inadvertently create a device that could destroy us all in the hands of those in the Faction.
You will recall the stories you have told me about what happened to your planet, so long ago before you came to us. How the Evil Ones took over, and caused a catastrophic meltdown of your planet’s energy sources. I fear that pattern is happening here, as well. Your interplanetary travel might be all that saves us.
I wish more of our people knew of your story, but I understand your reluctance to share your species origins, that you are extra-planetary beings come here to co-exist with us. I wish we were as intelligent of a species as your initial findings showed us to be.
I believe you must prepare the ships to transport as many of our planet’s people as possible to the Third Planet in our solar system. As you know from your own explorations of our solar system, it is not very hospitable, and there is no civilization to speak of.
The ships must be well-stocked with supplies, both for building, for medical care, to combat the diseases and environmental disasters that will surely befall our people on the barbaric surface of that planet. Not to mention the dangers of super-carnivores which still stalk the Northern hemisphere, and the primitive tribes of barbaric humanoids who live there. They are our distant genetic cousins, yes. But they have nothing in common with our civilized planet.
It has taken 4.6 billion years since the formation of this solar system and indeed, the universe. And it will take mere seconds for it to turn into a raging pit of acid, ammonia, and clouds. It will be, indeed, like the Hell their religion speaks of.
I am sending my wife and children to you. Please, I beg of you, save as many as you can. You, and your starships, are our only hope for some measure of survival.
John Tycho
* * *
Acts
I was sent forth from the power,
and I have come to those who reflect upon me,
and I have been found among those who seek after me.
Look upon me, you who reflect upon me,
and you hearers, hear me.
You who are waiting for me, take me to yourselves.
And do not banish me from your sight.
And do not make your voice hate me, nor your hearing.
Do not be ignorant of me anywhere or any time. Be on your guard!
Do not be ignorant of me.
For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
From the Desk of Joan Lummoch
Official Transcriptionist of the Courts of the Hall of Judges
Five of the Elder Dragons appeared at the Hall of the Council of Judges today. We were in session, discussing the problem of the Faction having gained access to what some are calling a penultimate doomsday device, and that some are dismissing as mere sabre rattling. There was from the area of the larger doors an uproar, voices raised in a combination of alarm and joy. This is not the official record, but my own recollection of what happened. So I may miss things in the excitement.
The Elder Dragons are rarely seen outside of their own Halls, and the Dragons that most people get to see are the navigators and younglings, who mix regularly with our own children and young people.
These were five of the most respected, most wise of the Dragons, the ones that people in the know believe are the leaders of their community.
The first through the doors was Xiuhcoatl. Some said he is in charge of wars, and that he would be a sort of battlefield general if there ever came a need to fight. He was huge, his skin green and yellow colored. Unlike most Dragons, he didn’t have any wings, even vestigial ones, but instead there was a beautiful spiny ridge of red and green spikes coming from his back, tip of his tail to top of his head. His eyes shone a dark jade-green color, and he swung his head back and forth to observe everyone in the room, as though sizing us all up.
The next dragon was thought to be a female, named Ladon. Apparently some dragons can be either male or female, depending on their preference for mating. But she generally refers to herself as a female, so everyone waited to hear from her what her preference was before using pronouns. She was a dark blue, with large purple-red wings that spanned, when opened, twice her body length. She was said to be a water dragon, who would swim regularly in the great pools out behind the Hall of Dragons, and she clearly was not impressed with the lack of moisture in the Hall of Judges. She looked annoyed, and uncomfortable, but also resigned that she needed to be here. Being a water dragon, people speculated later that it was because of her intimate knowledge of the environment, and her scientific training in water and chemistry that she had come along, although she preferred solitude and scientific study to public appearances. I thought she was the most beautiful of all of them.
Third stalked in a large male called Nidhug, whose power-element was his strong, towering legs like tree-trunks. He was dark grey, with black spikes and wings that, when opened, as they briefly were while he was settling in, almost seemed translucent. His chin was tipped in dark blue beard-spikes, and his eyes were almost white, as though he didn’t need a pupil. Those who had seen him before today speculated that he was a deep-dwelling cave or underwater dragon, and that impression was not undone with his court appearance. While the bright lights didn’t seem to cause pain, one got the sense he, like Ladon, would have preferred to not be here.
Fourth was Pythios, who is said to be psychic in addition to a Dragon’s regular telepathic abilities. She can see the future in addition to what you’re thinking, and can project that future vision into your mind, should she choose to do so. She was smaller than the others, perhaps younger, and her green-blue scales rippled in the light, almost as if they were illuminated from inside, perhaps bioluminescent. She had no spikes and her four powerful but still delicate legs somehow reminded you of the fact that most dragons do fly. Their bones must be especially lightweight, unless the flight is caused by some kind of magic and not evolution. Her eyes seemed to pierce into everyone’s soul as though she knew all of your secrets, kept them, but knew what would happen to you because of them.
The fifth and final dragon was Tiamat, also a female. She is rumored to be a fire-dragon, who could literally breathe fire if she chose. Her coloring was beautiful—orange red, with creamy scales along her underside, golden spikes that looked more like soft feathers rippling down her neck. Some said that she was the matriarch of all of the dragons on the planet, that somewhere in history she had been the first Dragon. Since nobody knew how old dragons could be or were, and since both Dragons and Tiamat had been here as far back in recorded history as we had records, it certainly seemed possible. The other dragons deferred to her, and it seemed as though coming last in line was, to the dragons, the position of greatest authority.
After the initial excitement, the bailiffs to the court were able to clear a section of the Judges’ chambers for the Dragons to gather in. They had indicated that they were here to observe, and not to speak.
This seemed true until one of the Judges spoke of the letters of John Tycho, and his warnings about the device that he had invented.
This caused the Dragons to stir, and as though they had agreed upon this beforehand, one of them spoke. I will record their speeches here, as best as I can remember them. For anyone truly wanting to know what happened, they should consult the official transcript, available in the Hall of Records.
Pythios: Learned Counselors, we are here today to speak to you of our species. We do not, as people believe, originate on this planet.
(At this, there was argument among those gathered in the Court Hall which continued until the Dragons, almost as one, turned their eyes towards the people, who immediately quieted under the piercing eyes of Dragonkind).
Pythios continued: It is true. We once lived on a planet in a solar system far away. You would know this system as being approximately 16 of your light-years away, in the constellation commonly called Grus but which we named the Winged Dragon. That planet is now governed solely by a group we call, in your language, The Dark Ones. You would not like to meet them. But their history is one that your planet shares—a history of hate, and intolerance. A history of not allowing open debate. And a lack of a desire to explore outside their own comfort zone.
We who came to this planet before your recorded history longed to connect with other sentient beings. Longed to explore the galaxies. We found this planet second from your solar orbit with your early humanoid ancestors and came here, hoping to co-exist. The other planet in this system, the third from the solar orbit, was not ready for us, too cold, and too unready for our kind then.
Now it seems as though our shared existence on this planet is in danger. Those among you who question the drive to reach for the stars are gathering, and they are dangerous. I believe there is little chance to alter the future I have seen.
Please, join with myself and the other Dragon Elders at our compound. We must evacuate as many as we can to the great Starships, and we must lead a colony to the third plant.
At this, the audience erupted again, and even the eyes of the gathered elder Dragons would not silence them. There were many who ran from the Hall, and never returned. The Council of Judges ordered a recess to the proceedings and cleared the Hall of the rest of the assembly.
We do not know what the official orders will be concerning evacuation and colonization.
Exodus
These are the names of the sons of Israel who went to Egypt with Jacob, each with his family…
The descendants of Jacob numbered seventy in all.
Jude ran from the academic rooms to the staging area. He looked into the sky where the ominous clouds of a seasonal thunderstorm were just beginning to form. From what he had been told, the storm that was coming would be far worse, and last far longer. He didn’t know what to think about the immediate future, but he was glad his parents had made a quick decision to leave.
Frantic crowds gathered in front of the ships holding bags filled with whatever they could carry. Entire families, children crying, mothers trying to comfort them. Men trying to look stoic but sometimes failing and crying too.
Jude knew that Yalta-ba-oath was near. He had finally just mastered the empathic link between his Dragon guide that was required to pilot the Starship just last cycle but it was there. Still tentative, but there.
Jude. This way, towards the front of the ship.
Jude pushed through the crowds. There were guides gathered there, trying to calm everyone, trying to advise them on where to load the Starship, how to stow their baggage. The stewards would handle those details. It was time for him to climb into his pilot pod, nestled next to the Dragon’s much larger pod, and boot up the system for its initial checklist sequence.
He knew that the ship, a biological cyborg entity that had a symbiotic relationship with its Dragon pilot, had already cycled through much of the real checklist needs. The ship would have made the environment right for the occupants based on their metabolic patterns, which it could sense. It would have already plotted out exactly how much fuel they needed, and mapped the path they needed to take. The ship simply needed a special translator-team of the biological organisms onboard to translate those needs, to remind it to continue running and adjusting life-support and adjusting for any emergencies.
He stowed his own gear in the space beneath his seat provided for that purpose and climbed into the seat, which was exactly his size, as though built for him. He scanned the checklist: Auxiliary fuel supplies—Off; Flight controls—Free and correct. Dragon empathic interface—loading. He clicked his tongue on the top of his mouth, which was the signal for the headset to begin the software that helped the process.
At this, he felt Yalta-ba-oath’s calming mind connect with his. The image of water flowing over dark black rocks, which he had been taught as a way of smoothing out any hiccups in the initial upboot, made his anxiety fade away.
He went down the list: instruments and radios—checked and set. Between themselves, Yalta-ba-oath and Jude checked the engine idle status, monitored the still-in-progress passenger loading status. It appeared that almost everyone was on board, and the stewards notified the two pilots, one human, one Dragon, that they were ten minutes from being ready for takeoff.
Jude made a special sweep with his empathic senses, which now engulfed the entire ship’s intricate central nervous throughout the ship, to check for his parents. They were both wedged in the first forward compartments, nervous, sweating. He could slightly read their emotions in the way the empathic link with the Dragon allowed, and knew that they were still not sure they were doing the right thing, and yet afraid that it was absolutely necessary.
The ship could hold approximately seventy passengers. There were ten ships in all, and all of them were completing the intricate frantic dance of passenger loading and Dragon/Pilot interface. Jude could hear the chatter from the inter-ship radio that confirmed all the ships were almost ready, too.
The families that were loaded on this Starship included Judges and all the other staff and legal emigrant candidates that had already applied to the program.
Jude pinged the pod with the two Reuben Judges, who were from a Southern province near the Ocean, to indicate to them that they needed to initiate their takeoff sequencing. They were the only members of the group that did not quite appear ready. They did not have any children yet, although the empathic vibe Jude was getting from the woman suggested the faintest ripple of a mind within her—perhaps a child was coming soon.
The Simeons, two boys and a girl, along with their parents, were loaded in a pod next to Jude’s family. Next to them were the Levis, who had protested and strongly believed this was a premature mistake, but who did not want to risk their family’s safety in the backlash against this action that would likely follow. Those pods were near the back of the ship. Their child was also loaded with them, too young to know what was going on, getting bored and a little sleepy now that the loading process was done.
Judge Issachar, Judge Zebulun, and Judge Benjamin were all unmarried, but they were teachers, also, so they had herded a number of the documented groups of people who had applied to the Interstellar program on board, helped them load into the communal class seating near the center of the back section. The Judges Dan and Naphtali, Gad, and Asher were also on board, and because of their advanced state of training, had already loaded the cryo-sleep programs and were in the light dozing state that was suggested before take-off.
None of the families had ever launched from the planet’s surface before. This was a new experience for everyone, in spite of the months (and for some, years) of training. The Dragons, of course, had been through this all before. They sent calming vibrations through their human pilots, who in turn were able to send those calming thoughts to the other humans.
Pilots were chosen for their ability to interface with the alien mind of the Dragons and the minds of their fellow humans, and Jude had been told he was the best. Jude and Yalta-ba-oath knew that the other ten ships nearby were also finishing up the final stages of pre-flight, but their ship, the Genesis, would be first to go. Yalta-ba-oath had flight seniority.
Jude was proud he had been chosen as Yalta-ba-oath’s navigational partner. Even though he was much newer to the program than many of the other ships’ navigators, he would be the first to touch the atmosphere. First to reach out a hand to the stars and the nearby planet.
The final items of the pre-flight takeoff checklist were lit on Jude’s navigational board, just in front of his seat and to the side. Stewards reported the doors and windows locked. Jude checked, once more, the fuel mixture. It was full rich but would be adjusted once they were out of planetary orbit over 3,000 feet. The ship’s interstellar lights were set and navigational cameras loaded.
The Dragons had agreed to leave the ship’s transponders in the “off” position for now, until it was for certain whether any of the members of the Faction were receiving transmissions. Nobody wanted to tip off the enemy, who was threatening to unleash their weapon any moment now, that the plans for emigration to the Third Planet some were beginning to call Terra, others calling Earth, were activated. Jude checked all the engine instruments and signaled to Yalta-ba-oath that the checklist was covered.
It was time to go!
* * *
Genesis
1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
The ships, ten of them, pierced the atmosphere just above a land mass shaped vaguely like a bare foot without toes. There was a twisting river that the Geographers had decided would be the best possible place to land, and the glaciers which touched most of the planet’s upper quadrant were far enough away that there should be warm weather and fertile soil.
It had been a bumpy trip. Just as the ships, guided by the Dragons (and their capable human navigators) had guided the ships out of the atmosphere of their home and leveled off into space’s quiet vacuum, a great explosion had pierced the planet’s sky.
Clouds of yellow-gold, almost beautiful, definitely terrifying, had billowed upward. Those who were still awake watched the aft cameras, some weeping openly as their planet’s atmosphere was forever changed. The initial plume of golden cloud grew exponentially, quietly for them but probably eardrum piercing on the planet’s surface. The cities could not be seen from this distance, but the flames that could be seen beneath the yellow clouds were undoubtedly destroying everything. The flames reached as high as the clouds for a moment. Near the planet’s southern regions, where the oceans reigned, the watchers could see water plumes vaporizing, the intense heat burning off into steam. As they travelled space and the cameras began to lose the magnification possible to see anything other than a vague shape, they could see the vapor adding itself to the clouds, and lightning-like flashes of whitehot energy blasting the entire southern region near the volcano plains.
There was no hope that anyone who had been left on the planet had survived. The ten ships with seventy passengers and crew each had barely cleared the danger zone when the Factions had exploded their device. Its inventor, John Tycho, was still on the planet, having tried to negotiate with the Faction’s faceless, nameless leaders.
The families on the ships would never know who it was that set off the planet killing bomb.
Those who had opted to take the interplanetary journey without the aid of the cryo sleep chambers eventually rose and gathered in the crew areas, seeking comfort, hugging, crying. It seemed impossible that their home was gone, and they were on the way to an alien planet.
If it hadn’t been for the Dragons, some whispered quietly, perhaps this would not have happened. But if it hadn’t been for the Dragons, they would not have been saved, either. The whisperers looked at their sleeping children, faces slack with the dreamless sleep of the cryo chambers, and sighed.
The new planet was impossibly blue, broken here and there by brown land masses. In the quadrant oriented upwards from the ships, there were large white bodies that the Dragons called glaciers. They were similar to the peaks of the highest volcanoes on their home planet, but so much larger. The Dragons said that this was a temporary cycle of the planet’s position furthest from the Sola, and that it happened at such an infrequent cycle that it wasn’t to be worried about forever.
Larger than theirs, and the Dragons reported that its planetary rotation was backwards! That the solar cycle lasted a mere 24 hours, splitting the period between darkness and light into a tiny fraction of time. There was evening, and there was morning. There were nameless animals creeping over the surface of the planet. Plants that would yield unfamiliar fruits. Flowers with unknown scents waited.
The people on the ship, still reeling from the experience of leaving their home and seeing it destroyed, found hope in their hearts.
The people, who would take to calling themselves the Tribes in Exile, watched as the ships landed in the driest area, similar to the plains on their home planet. The Sola was just rising in the Eastern skyline and there were a few small groups of the proto-humanoids that lived on this planet gathering to watch the Ships land. The Dragons would go first.
They were always first.
It was the end of everything.
It was a beginning.
~Safkhet, Star Date 21*520*205500
World News Time-Gazette
January 15, 20—
Ancient Rosetta-Stone Like Text Uncovered! Scientists Stunned!
The International Scientific community is reeling with the publication of a new translation of an ancient text. Readers may remember the story of a strange sphere being discovered years ago. Many thought it was a hoax, but this new discovery has changed that speculation.
This week, news that the ancient story of an extra-terrestrial race of beings had come to the Earth was uncovered by a graduate student. When her computer was taken over by a virus, Sonya Lake found the initial installment of an amazing story. Publishers are fighting over the rights to release the rest of what might prove to be a historic text that will change the way we view our own evolution, as well as this planet’s history, and that of the entire solar system. Computer scientists say that what has been done to her computer is impossible. Top history and archeological scientists have given no comment at this time, but an anonymous insider says the story is huge.
The first of several stories have appeared, and are supposedly written by an ancient scribe named Safkhet. Stay tuned here to the World News Time-Gazette for more information as the story unfolds!
For Wide Release.
For more information, contact K. Zimmer
@ Time-Gazette.com.
Originally published in The Dragon Chronicles (Windrift Books, 2015), edited by Ellen Campbell and part of The Future Chronicles anthology series, created by Samuel Peralta."
Blurb: The nature of history, of the origins of civilization, and our own human story, may be changed forever by the discovery of an ancient scroll that tells the story of a doomsday device that threatens civilization as we know it. The Dragons, empathic interstellar navigators of uncertain origin, may be able to save some. But where will the survivors go?
Revelations
“I am the Invisible One within the All. It is I who counsel those who are hidden, since I know the All that exists in it. I am numberless beyond everyone. I am immeasurable, ineffable, yet whenever I wish, I shall reveal myself of my own accord. I am the head of the All. I exist before the All, and I am the All, since I exist in everyone.”
To begin with, they weren’t even supposed to be diving in that cave, or even going that deep. It was dangerous. Too far from the coral reefs, possibly filled with tiger sharks or moray eels. But that’s what made it exciting. Watching your air bubbles disappear into the light above, knowing how far down in the darkness you were.
Anything could happen.
David was the good diver, the one with all the qualifications. But Anna wanted to try it, too, and they were sure, certain, that nothing bad would happen. Maybe something exciting, but then, wasn’t that what life was all about?
Then Anna spotted a huge turtle, a gorgeous green and black leathery sea turtle. She followed it, past the depths that David had suggested they keep to. She wasn’t paying attention to depth meters when there were turtles to follow. When David saw her swim into a previously unseen cave, he followed her, panicking. He knew how you could get trapped in one of those things and never come out. His bubbles raced above him, frantic, small.
The turtle escaped them both, finding some hole too small for the humans to hide in. But what they found in there was even better.
In the center of the cave, nestled between corals and illuminated by the lights of their diving gear, sat a giant sphere of glass, perfectly sealed, enigmatic. It wasn’t very heavy, so they lifted it, carried it to the surface. They thought of pirate treasure, or lost artifacts of the Pharaohs. The green bubbled glass glistened in the sunlight as their boat carried it to shore.
There was the faintest suggestion in the glass of the perfect figure of a winged creature of some sort. Probably a dragon, its wings spread wide in a flying pattern. But no one could ever decide. It seemed to be flying around a single star-like circle, the only hint of color in the glass, like a red star.
When they showed it to their professors (they were students on an archeology summer-school course in Egypt, swimming on weekends in the Red Sea coral reefs) the professors were excited. There were some kind of scrolls, some kind of papyrus documents, sealed inside the glass that could be clearly seen, even through the green of ancient glass. They all knew they had to examine those scrolls. It was not lost upon the professors that this area was ripe with both legitimate ancient texts (the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example) and forgeries. Finding out which this was caused an international academic uproar.
And that was the trick, wasn’t it? The glass was clearly ancient, but there was no sign of seams, or, aside from the dragon art, any imperfections. Once the word about the find got out, the community speculated forgery. Some kind of publicity stunt. But they couldn’t be sure until they could see the actual texts for themselves.
They spent months figuring out a way to open it safely. They finally decided to pierce the glass with a special diamond-tipped device while it was in a sterile vacuum environment, take a small sample of the papyrus and then reseal the glass. When it was pierced, the oddest smell, of white lotus flower, to be precise, Nymphaea Lotus, completely filled the room. At first everyone was terrified, afraid the scent was some kind of chemical weapon, but no one was harmed, and the smell lingered for days.
After resealing the sphere, they scanned everything inside with a new app that used Lidar to analyze the patterns on the scrolls. The language there was nothing anyone had ever seen, even though the room was filled with specialists in ancient languages. The mystery was thrilling, and for a time, the atmosphere of the room was like a party, a carnival.
For a while. Over months, no one was found who knew the language on the scrolls. And when no codex, no Rosetta Stone for this language showed up, it was mostly forgotten. Years went by before anyone thought of the scrolls again except in passing.
Eventually, for record-keeping purposes at the archives where they were kept, the documents, which dated so far back (more than 200,000 years old) that it was thought there had to be an error because people didn’t make paper back then, were scanned. Cataloged. Placed on the internet. Of course. The words were digitized and the shapes they made approximated by the computers and OCR programs.
One day, many years later, a young woman named Sonya was working on her dissertation in mythological languages attempting to discover the Ur language, the language all humanity spoke before the Tower of Babel, the language Adam and Eve spoke. She uploaded her work to the Internet as part of her course requirements.
Her computer froze.
It stayed frozen for hours. Nothing Sonya did could seem to fix it, even unplugging it and plugging it back on just gained her the same odd frozen screen. In the third hour, a symbol appeared on the screen, like a star on a stick, covered by a weird nipple-shaped hat.
She was certain she had uploaded a crazy virus and sadly planned to take her computer to a friend who was an expert on computers. She worried she had lost all of her hard work of that day (but of course, she had everything saved in multiple spots, on the Cloud and email).
But then her computer restarted. At least, it seemed to be rebooting. But it stayed a black screen for a few moments, and Sonya was afraid this was the end. What she didn’t know was that the program that had begun to run on her computer was actually a kind of virus, a previously unknown and remarkably advanced computer language. Her adding her transliteration and interpretation of the Ur language into the mix had triggered a sort of digital Rosetta stone, a viral program loading that was able to combine the ancient language with computer programming binary. And that the accidental confluence of events was changing her computer forever into a kind of universal translator.
A story began to scroll across the screen. Sighing, and thinking that it was still the virus, the student read along, at first with annoyance, then curiosity that turned into shock and amazement.
And the story Sonya read changed the world.
The Book of Jude
“Beloved, although I was making every effort to write to you about our common salvation, I now feel a need to write to encourage you to contend for the faith that was once for all handed down to the holy ones.”
Jude stalked long corridors of the Dragon’s Hall in a huff.
Everything was going wrong already. His parents had woken him rudely just before the seventh hour. After a hurried breakfast, they had dropped him off with warnings to study hard, with exhortations to “hurry to work” and to meet them back at home later, in hour eighteen. Then they continued talking in rapid, argumentative tones.
Something about politics. It was always about politics. His parents were both Judges, the leaders of their community and ultimately the world, elected by the people once every five cycles to make laws and policy. This meant they were always arguing about something, always worried about something else.
Jude didn’t care about the arguments of old men and even older women in the Halls of Government. But he couldn’t wait to get out to the Halls of the Elder Dragons, where his friend Yalta-ba-oath was waiting to instruct him further in Interstellar Navigational techniques. Especially the telepathic interface that would allow him to pilot the starships that would take them eventually to other planets and solar systems and the stars. He had the feeling he almost was there, more times than not he could now sense the Dragon’s empathic voice just at the edges of his consciousness. A tickle, a mental itch he needed to scratch. He could hear entire sentences at time. He was told he was the one who was blocking the link, and that he just had to keep trying.
The Dragons had always been experts on traveling the other worlds, the solar system and beyond. Rumor had it that they came from somewhere far away, but Yalta-ba-oath only smiled and nodded when Jude asked this question. She didn’t avoid answering, but she redirected Jude to answer it for himself.
“What do you think, Jude? Where did we all come from?”
Her voice was deep and powerful but kind, a little gravelly, though. He couldn’t wait until he could always hear it through the empathic navigational interface. The Dragons could speak to anyone telepathically, and this was the way they navigated their ships, which were somehow organic, also. The ships spoke back to the Dragons but none of the humans could speak to the ships without the Dragons helping. And somehow, the ships and Dragons both needed the human intermediary to translate the ship environment to a hospitable place for everyone.
Jude didn’t understand it all yet, but he was studying as hard as he could because he wanted to be a navigator, with the Dragons. He himself had not yet heard the voice of any of the ships. He hoped to someday.
Jude thought about the Dragon’s question. It took him a while to work through everything, but Yalta-ba-oath patiently let him think in his own pace. He could tell that she felt she had all the time for him to figure it out.
He knew that his home planet was not an easy place to live. Its over 1600 volcanoes were beautiful but could be deadly, and the heat of the dayside of the planet could kill if one wasn’t careful to bring water and shade on any trips across the cities on the edge of the daylight cycle. The sharp black sand of the beaches South of his home city, beaches that ended in lovely dark-green water, that sand could cut your feet with its glassy points if you forgot to wear your sandals to the water’s edge. There the sand was softened, eventually, but you must wait ‘til you get right to the edge to go barefoot.
Scientists said that The People, some called the Tribes, had originated in the cooler, mountain lands and that they migrated down and across the planet at some point in the past 10,000 years, while the planet was in its coolest phase, furthest in its relatively circular orbit around the sun. In ancient times, they had been nomads, following the edges of the sunlight, called the Aredvi Sura, sticking to the twilight zones between the dark, the Anahita sides. Nowadays, they had climate controlled buildings that darkened the windows during the planet’s long day and let in artificial light during the slightly longer night cycle.
Jude had studied all of that in school, but it just didn’t mean all that much to him. The scientists also said that the next planet from the sun, which they called Earth-eal, also bore life. Shockingly, their days were only 24 hours long with half of it in sun and half in the day, and their orbit around the sun was 365 of those 24 hour periods. Jude thought that was unimaginable.
He remembered something about how there were humanoids on the planet, but they were not civilized, living in a much colder world, where the snow that touched the highest mountains on this planet covered large expanses of the ground, there. The humanoids huddled in caves around primitive fires that could barely support their existence.
Jude thought it sounded horrible and never wanted to travel there. But the stars—that was different.
The Dragons promised to take them to the stars.
Jude wasn’t a scholar. Really, he didn’t care where they all came from as long as they traveled to other places.
While she waited for Jude to answer, Yalta-ba-oath yawned, her huge mouth filled with the sharpest, longest, whitest teeth Jude had ever seen. It was early, and Jude had awoken her in his impatience to learn more about the Dragons’ ships. She opened her wings, stretching them. They were sleek, spanning almost thirty feet across and half that in width. She usually kept them drawn against her body, but Jude knew that, in the right conditions with the atmosphere and wind speed just so, she could fly.
She was a red Dragon, her face ringed with pointy tips Jude thought of as her beard. He heard, in his head, her amusement at that label. She didn’t seem to mind, even though his mother would have been insulted. High pointed ridges, three on each side of her face, gathered in a sort of crown at the top of her triangle-shaped head. Her throat was covered in cream scales, some as small as his fingertip, some as large across as a grown man’s hand spread wide. The same cream color could be seen under her wings when she chose to spread them, the strong, muscled arms red and the softer wing leather underneath. Her tail was as long as her body and ended in several spikes.
In spite of this fiercely strong appearance, she still seemed gentle, to Jude. Perhaps this was because as his teacher, he could hear her presence in his head and it never seemed cruel, even when he did the dumbest things like he had yesterday in his training session on navigating Black Holes. A mistake Yalta-ba-oath told him could cost them all their lives if made in the real world and not a simulated dream.
Sleek, black, and large, the ships could travel immense distances. The Dragons were vague on where the ships came from, vague, in fact, on details about themselves in general, but as far back as anyone on Kiel-e-ken, the second planet from the sun, could remember, they had simply been there. The Dragons would travel often, and the launches of the ships were attended with great revelry by the people of Jude’s home-city of Halom.
But it was new that the Dragons had offered to take people with them. And Jude was one of the first travelers, one of the first to study the ships and the navigational systems the ships contained.
Jude finally answered:
“Does it matter where the ships come from, where we come from? Isn’t it true that what matters is where we go next?”
Yalta-ba-oath chuckled. The emotion was strong in Jude’s head, but you could also hear the huffing sound through her mouth and nostrils if you had been standing nearby. Dragons only projected their thoughts to those they chose to project to—if they didn’t want you to be in on the conversation, it was private. Jude could almost hear her thoughts now. He felt he was just days away from truly hearing her through their connection, and then, the ship would be next.
“I can see I chose well in you, Jude.” Jude could hear the smile, even though it was hard to tell when a Dragon smiled from looking at their face. “You ask the important questions, but then you find the answers you need for yourself.”
Jude squirmed under the attention; the Dragon probing his mind always kind of tickled.
“Shall we get to today’s astro navigational maps?”
The Letters of John
What was from the beginning,/ what we have heard,/ what we have seen with our eyes,/ what we looked upon/ and touched with our hands/concerns the Word of life.
To: The Congress of Elders, the Judges
Halls of Government
Aredvi Sura Parallel
Esteemed Elders,
I write to you today to urge immediate action. The beginning of dangerous events is clearly upon us. There is no way that we can continue this dialogue unless both sides agree to discuss the issues at hand. I urge you to include all groups immediately and not negotiate without their explicit attendance at your meetings. Secret meetings of the Government must cease immediately so that the groups in question are not antagonized further.
The “doomsday device” that has been stolen by factions that disagree with our plan to travel to other planets, who believe that we should preserve our way of life at all costs because of the superstitions of an ancient religion, must be taken seriously by all the Wise and Learned among us. This device, while dismissed by some as a simple bomb, could change the entire nature of this planet.
What you have heard is correct: the device will, if detonated in the right part of the planet’s day/night cycle, possibly lead to an escalating Greenhouse effect that could burn off all of our planet’s Oceans. The winds will become a veritable vortex, rotating on our planet at something like 60 times the speed of our normal rotation. All animal and human life will die in the lightning storms that immediately follow said detonation. The escalating heat caused by the clouds of CO, Nitrogen, and Sulfuric Acid that will erupt from this device will then make the planet completely unrecoverable for any form of life as we know it.
I also urge you to consider the implications of all I have written here.
Those who say that it’s a simple nuclear bomb that will only destroy a radius of 8 miles do not understand the science at hand.
I have seen with my own eyes the danger that these people represent when the leader of the Faction killed dozens of his supporters in order to acquire my energy making machine. I know that I have been dismissed as a doomsday prophet, someone who stands aside and predicts scientific disasters that will never come to pass. The government must listen to its scientists if we are to preserve any semblance of life on this planet. Those who say “But they would never dare to use this device” do not know the levels of hatred these people have for anyone who disagrees with them. The fact that they stole the technology for the device from our labs does not go unnoticed by me, and I regret the experiments that lead to its discovery.
Those who say “But the space-travel will save us” do not realize that the Dragons can only carry a fraction of our planet’s life with them. And they do not seem to ask the questions of where we will go? The only other potentially inhabitable planet in this system, Earth-eal, is in the midst of its Ice Age—a time when human life is barely supported on most of its continental land masses. The primitive state of life on that planet, where there are no man-made structures and very barbaric humanoid creatures that live like animals, is not to be under estimated. Any of our planet’s survivors who managed to land on the planet would suffer a horrible fate.
Esteemed Elders: I, John of Tycho, believe that this device could end this planet forever, and the Dragons are not just the saviors of our kind that some would paint them to be. The origins of their species, as well as the nature of their benevolence to us, is unknown. Their minds are of an alien intelligence, and we cannot be certain of their intent.
Please, Esteemed Elders: take this warning seriously. This is about Life as we know it on our planet. We must convince the factions to bring us the doomsday weapon so that it can be disassembled in a safe environment, in a lab. It never should have been built, and I will curse my own curiosity for the rest of my days.
Sincerely,
John Tycho
Dearest Love:
I have written to the Councils of Elders and Judges. I don’t have any faith that they will hear my warnings. You should take our family and travel as quickly as you can to the Halls of the Elder Dragons and throw yourself and our cause on their mercies. In spite of not truly knowing their intent, I believe they may be our only hope at survival. Plan to leave our home forever. Bring as many of your friends as you can convince to come along. I will try to meet you there soon.
I know this sounds crazy, but if the Faction succeeds in its plan to detonate the cursed weapon that I developed in a crazy bid to provide endless energy to our world, we will all be destroyed.
My love, I long to be with you now, but I am traveling today to the Capitol to try to talk sense into the Judges there, personally. I hope that I am not too late.
I send you my heart, my soul, and my endless kisses. I hope that I see you and our children soon.
Love,
John
To the Leaders of the Faction:
I beg of you, return the device that is in your possession back to its rightful owners. I agree that we all need a dialogue about the direction our planet’s governmental rulers have chosen with the Dragons. We must discuss the wide-spread effects of space travel on our world in an intelligent, rational manner.
Your religious beliefs are strong, I understand. You must please hear me: the device you hold in your hands could trigger an unbelievably catastrophic series of events that could destroy life as we know it on this planet.
We have nowhere else to go that has homes for us to live in, and any emigration to other planets at this point is unfeasible. Please allow me to speak to you about a device and a danger that I never intended.
Can we not negotiate like civilized people? The day is long and the night is longer—but the sun will bless those of us who save our world.
You hold our fate in your hands. Please look at your loved ones, your children’s faces, and know that it is within your power to change the world for the better, not the worse.
Sincerely, with hope,
John Tycho, inventor of the weapon you hold
To: The Elder Dragons
Anahita Region
Esteemed Friends:
I believe the time for negotiations has ended. You in your wisdom have provided us a means to travel the galaxies, indeed, the universe. But there are those on our world who are afraid of the gifts you give. They will destroy us all in their fear. My search for renewable energy has caused me to inadvertently create a device that could destroy us all in the hands of those in the Faction.
You will recall the stories you have told me about what happened to your planet, so long ago before you came to us. How the Evil Ones took over, and caused a catastrophic meltdown of your planet’s energy sources. I fear that pattern is happening here, as well. Your interplanetary travel might be all that saves us.
I wish more of our people knew of your story, but I understand your reluctance to share your species origins, that you are extra-planetary beings come here to co-exist with us. I wish we were as intelligent of a species as your initial findings showed us to be.
I believe you must prepare the ships to transport as many of our planet’s people as possible to the Third Planet in our solar system. As you know from your own explorations of our solar system, it is not very hospitable, and there is no civilization to speak of.
The ships must be well-stocked with supplies, both for building, for medical care, to combat the diseases and environmental disasters that will surely befall our people on the barbaric surface of that planet. Not to mention the dangers of super-carnivores which still stalk the Northern hemisphere, and the primitive tribes of barbaric humanoids who live there. They are our distant genetic cousins, yes. But they have nothing in common with our civilized planet.
It has taken 4.6 billion years since the formation of this solar system and indeed, the universe. And it will take mere seconds for it to turn into a raging pit of acid, ammonia, and clouds. It will be, indeed, like the Hell their religion speaks of.
I am sending my wife and children to you. Please, I beg of you, save as many as you can. You, and your starships, are our only hope for some measure of survival.
John Tycho
Acts
I was sent forth from the power,
and I have come to those who reflect upon me,
and I have been found among those who seek after me.
Look upon me, you who reflect upon me,
and you hearers, hear me.
You who are waiting for me, take me to yourselves.
And do not banish me from your sight.
And do not make your voice hate me, nor your hearing.
Do not be ignorant of me anywhere or any time. Be on your guard!
Do not be ignorant of me.
For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
From the Desk of Joan Lummoch
Official Transcriptionist of the Courts of the Hall of Judges
Five of the Elder Dragons appeared at the Hall of the Council of Judges today. We were in session, discussing the problem of the Faction having gained access to what some are calling a penultimate doomsday device, and that some are dismissing as mere sabre rattling. There was from the area of the larger doors an uproar, voices raised in a combination of alarm and joy. This is not the official record, but my own recollection of what happened. So I may miss things in the excitement.
The Elder Dragons are rarely seen outside of their own Halls, and the Dragons that most people get to see are the navigators and younglings, who mix regularly with our own children and young people.
These were five of the most respected, most wise of the Dragons, the ones that people in the know believe are the leaders of their community.
The first through the doors was Xiuhcoatl. Some said he is in charge of wars, and that he would be a sort of battlefield general if there ever came a need to fight. He was huge, his skin green and yellow colored. Unlike most Dragons, he didn’t have any wings, even vestigial ones, but instead there was a beautiful spiny ridge of red and green spikes coming from his back, tip of his tail to top of his head. His eyes shone a dark jade-green color, and he swung his head back and forth to observe everyone in the room, as though sizing us all up.
The next dragon was thought to be a female, named Ladon. Apparently some dragons can be either male or female, depending on their preference for mating. But she generally refers to herself as a female, so everyone waited to hear from her what her preference was before using pronouns. She was a dark blue, with large purple-red wings that spanned, when opened, twice her body length. She was said to be a water dragon, who would swim regularly in the great pools out behind the Hall of Dragons, and she clearly was not impressed with the lack of moisture in the Hall of Judges. She looked annoyed, and uncomfortable, but also resigned that she needed to be here. Being a water dragon, people speculated later that it was because of her intimate knowledge of the environment, and her scientific training in water and chemistry that she had come along, although she preferred solitude and scientific study to public appearances. I thought she was the most beautiful of all of them.
Third stalked in a large male called Nidhug, whose power-element was his strong, towering legs like tree-trunks. He was dark grey, with black spikes and wings that, when opened, as they briefly were while he was settling in, almost seemed translucent. His chin was tipped in dark blue beard-spikes, and his eyes were almost white, as though he didn’t need a pupil. Those who had seen him before today speculated that he was a deep-dwelling cave or underwater dragon, and that impression was not undone with his court appearance. While the bright lights didn’t seem to cause pain, one got the sense he, like Ladon, would have preferred to not be here.
Fourth was Pythios, who is said to be psychic in addition to a Dragon’s regular telepathic abilities. She can see the future in addition to what you’re thinking, and can project that future vision into your mind, should she choose to do so. She was smaller than the others, perhaps younger, and her green-blue scales rippled in the light, almost as if they were illuminated from inside, perhaps bioluminescent. She had no spikes and her four powerful but still delicate legs somehow reminded you of the fact that most dragons do fly. Their bones must be especially lightweight, unless the flight is caused by some kind of magic and not evolution. Her eyes seemed to pierce into everyone’s soul as though she knew all of your secrets, kept them, but knew what would happen to you because of them.
The fifth and final dragon was Tiamat, also a female. She is rumored to be a fire-dragon, who could literally breathe fire if she chose. Her coloring was beautiful—orange red, with creamy scales along her underside, golden spikes that looked more like soft feathers rippling down her neck. Some said that she was the matriarch of all of the dragons on the planet, that somewhere in history she had been the first Dragon. Since nobody knew how old dragons could be or were, and since both Dragons and Tiamat had been here as far back in recorded history as we had records, it certainly seemed possible. The other dragons deferred to her, and it seemed as though coming last in line was, to the dragons, the position of greatest authority.
After the initial excitement, the bailiffs to the court were able to clear a section of the Judges’ chambers for the Dragons to gather in. They had indicated that they were here to observe, and not to speak.
This seemed true until one of the Judges spoke of the letters of John Tycho, and his warnings about the device that he had invented.
This caused the Dragons to stir, and as though they had agreed upon this beforehand, one of them spoke. I will record their speeches here, as best as I can remember them. For anyone truly wanting to know what happened, they should consult the official transcript, available in the Hall of Records.
Pythios: Learned Counselors, we are here today to speak to you of our species. We do not, as people believe, originate on this planet.
(At this, there was argument among those gathered in the Court Hall which continued until the Dragons, almost as one, turned their eyes towards the people, who immediately quieted under the piercing eyes of Dragonkind).
Pythios continued: It is true. We once lived on a planet in a solar system far away. You would know this system as being approximately 16 of your light-years away, in the constellation commonly called Grus but which we named the Winged Dragon. That planet is now governed solely by a group we call, in your language, The Dark Ones. You would not like to meet them. But their history is one that your planet shares—a history of hate, and intolerance. A history of not allowing open debate. And a lack of a desire to explore outside their own comfort zone.
We who came to this planet before your recorded history longed to connect with other sentient beings. Longed to explore the galaxies. We found this planet second from your solar orbit with your early humanoid ancestors and came here, hoping to co-exist. The other planet in this system, the third from the solar orbit, was not ready for us, too cold, and too unready for our kind then.
Now it seems as though our shared existence on this planet is in danger. Those among you who question the drive to reach for the stars are gathering, and they are dangerous. I believe there is little chance to alter the future I have seen.
Please, join with myself and the other Dragon Elders at our compound. We must evacuate as many as we can to the great Starships, and we must lead a colony to the third plant.
At this, the audience erupted again, and even the eyes of the gathered elder Dragons would not silence them. There were many who ran from the Hall, and never returned. The Council of Judges ordered a recess to the proceedings and cleared the Hall of the rest of the assembly.
We do not know what the official orders will be concerning evacuation and colonization.
Exodus
These are the names of the sons of Israel who went to Egypt with Jacob, each with his family… The descendants of Jacob numbered seventy in all.
Jude ran from the academic rooms to the staging area. He looked into the sky where the ominous clouds of a seasonal thunderstorm were just beginning to form. From what he had been told, the storm that was coming would be far worse, and last far longer. He didn’t know what to think about the immediate future, but he was glad his parents had made a quick decision to leave.
Frantic crowds gathered in front of the ships holding bags filled with whatever they could carry. Entire families, children crying, mothers trying to comfort them. Men trying to look stoic but sometimes failing and crying too.
Jude knew that Yalta-ba-oath was near. He had finally just mastered the empathic link between his Dragon guide that was required to pilot the Starship just last cycle but it was there. Still tentative, but there.
Jude. This way, towards the front of the ship.
Jude pushed through the crowds. There were guides gathered there, trying to calm everyone, trying to advise them on where to load the Starship, how to stow their baggage. The stewards would handle those details. It was time for him to climb into his pilot pod, nestled next to the Dragon’s much larger pod, and boot up the system for its initial checklist sequence.
He knew that the ship, a biological cyborg entity that had a symbiotic relationship with its Dragon pilot, had already cycled through much of the real checklist needs. The ship would have made the environment right for the occupants based on their metabolic patterns, which it could sense. It would have already plotted out exactly how much fuel they needed, and mapped the path they needed to take. The ship simply needed a special translator-team of the biological organisms onboard to translate those needs, to remind it to continue running and adjusting life-support and adjusting for any emergencies.
He stowed his own gear in the space beneath his seat provided for that purpose and climbed into the seat, which was exactly his size, as though built for him. He scanned the checklist: Auxiliary fuel supplies—Off; Flight controls—Free and correct. Dragon empathic interface—loading. He clicked his tongue on the top of his mouth, which was the signal for the headset to begin the software that helped the process.
At this, he felt Yalta-ba-oath’s calming mind connect with his. The image of water flowing over dark black rocks, which he had been taught as a way of smoothing out any hiccups in the initial upboot, made his anxiety fade away.
He went down the list: instruments and radios—checked and set. Between themselves, Yalta-ba-oath and Jude checked the engine idle status, monitored the still-in-progress passenger loading status. It appeared that almost everyone was on board, and the stewards notified the two pilots, one human, one Dragon, that they were ten minutes from being ready for takeoff.
Jude made a special sweep with his empathic senses, which now engulfed the entire ship’s intricate central nervous throughout the ship, to check for his parents. They were both wedged in the first forward compartments, nervous, sweating. He could slightly read their emotions in the way the empathic link with the Dragon allowed, and knew that they were still not sure they were doing the right thing, and yet afraid that it was absolutely necessary.
The ship could hold approximately seventy passengers. There were ten ships in all, and all of them were completing the intricate frantic dance of passenger loading and Dragon/Pilot interface. Jude could hear the chatter from the inter-ship radio that confirmed all the ships were almost ready, too.
The families that were loaded on this Starship included Judges and all the other staff and legal emigrant candidates that had already applied to the program.
Jude pinged the pod with the two Reuben Judges, who were from a Southern province near the Ocean, to indicate to them that they needed to initiate their takeoff sequencing. They were the only members of the group that did not quite appear ready. They did not have any children yet, although the empathic vibe Jude was getting from the woman suggested the faintest ripple of a mind within her—perhaps a child was coming soon.
The Simeons, two boys and a girl, along with their parents, were loaded in a pod next to Jude’s family. Next to them were the Levis, who had protested and strongly believed this was a premature mistake, but who did not want to risk their family’s safety in the backlash against this action that would likely follow. Those pods were near the back of the ship. Their child was also loaded with them, too young to know what was going on, getting bored and a little sleepy now that the loading process was done.
Judge Issachar, Judge Zebulun, and Judge Benjamin were all unmarried, but they were teachers, also, so they had herded a number of the documented groups of people who had applied to the Interstellar program on board, helped them load into the communal class seating near the center of the back section. The Judges Dan and Naphtali, Gad, and Asher were also on board, and because of their advanced state of training, had already loaded the cryo-sleep programs and were in the light dozing state that was suggested before take-off.
None of the families had ever launched from the planet’s surface before. This was a new experience for everyone, in spite of the months (and for some, years) of training. The Dragons, of course, had been through this all before. They sent calming vibrations through their human pilots, who in turn were able to send those calming thoughts to the other humans.
Pilots were chosen for their ability to interface with the alien mind of the Dragons and the minds of their fellow humans, and Jude had been told he was the best. Jude and Yalta-ba-oath knew that the other ten ships nearby were also finishing up the final stages of pre-flight, but their ship, the Genesis, would be first to go. Yalta-ba-oath had flight seniority.
Jude was proud he had been chosen as Yalta-ba-oath’s navigational partner. Even though he was much newer to the program than many of the other ships’ navigators, he would be the first to touch the atmosphere. First to reach out a hand to the stars and the nearby planet.
The final items of the pre-flight takeoff checklist were lit on Jude’s navigational board, just in front of his seat and to the side. Stewards reported the doors and windows locked. Jude checked, once more, the fuel mixture. It was full rich but would be adjusted once they were out of planetary orbit over 3,000 feet. The ship’s interstellar lights were set and navigational cameras loaded.
The Dragons had agreed to leave the ship’s transponders in the “off” position for now, until it was for certain whether any of the members of the Faction were receiving transmissions. Nobody wanted to tip off the enemy, who was threatening to unleash their weapon any moment now, that the plans for emigration to the Third Planet some were beginning to call Terra, others calling Earth, were activated. Jude checked all the engine instruments and signaled to Yalta-ba-oath that the checklist was covered.
It was time to go!
Genesis
1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
The ships, ten of them, pierced the atmosphere just above a land mass shaped vaguely like a bare foot without toes. There was a twisting river that the Geographers had decided would be the best possible place to land, and the glaciers which touched most of the planet’s upper quadrant were far enough away that there should be warm weather and fertile soil.
It had been a bumpy trip. Just as the ships, guided by the Dragons (and their capable human navigators) had guided the ships out of the atmosphere of their home and leveled off into space’s quiet vacuum, a great explosion had pierced the planet’s sky.
Clouds of yellow-gold, almost beautiful, definitely terrifying, had billowed upward. Those who were still awake watched the aft cameras, some weeping openly as their planet’s atmosphere was forever changed. The initial plume of golden cloud grew exponentially, quietly for them but probably eardrum piercing on the planet’s surface. The cities could not be seen from this distance, but the flames that could be seen beneath the yellow clouds were undoubtedly destroying everything. The flames reached as high as the clouds for a moment. Near the planet’s southern regions, where the oceans reigned, the watchers could see water plumes vaporizing, the intense heat burning off into steam. As they travelled space and the cameras began to lose the magnification possible to see anything other than a vague shape, they could see the vapor adding itself to the clouds, and lightning-like flashes of whitehot energy blasting the entire southern region near the volcano plains.
There was no hope that anyone who had been left on the planet had survived. The ten ships with seventy passengers and crew each had barely cleared the danger zone when the Factions had exploded their device. Its inventor, John Tycho, was still on the planet, having tried to negotiate with the Faction’s faceless, nameless leaders.
The families on the ships would never know who it was that set off the planet killing bomb.
Those who had opted to take the interplanetary journey without the aid of the cryo sleep chambers eventually rose and gathered in the crew areas, seeking comfort, hugging, crying. It seemed impossible that their home was gone, and they were on the way to an alien planet.
If it hadn’t been for the Dragons, some whispered quietly, perhaps this would not have happened. But if it hadn’t been for the Dragons, they would not have been saved, either. The whisperers looked at their sleeping children, faces slack with the dreamless sleep of the cryo chambers, and sighed.
The new planet was impossibly blue, broken here and there by brown land masses. In the quadrant oriented upwards from the ships, there were large white bodies that the Dragons called glaciers. They were similar to the peaks of the highest volcanoes on their home planet, but so much larger. The Dragons said that this was a temporary cycle of the planet’s position furthest from the Sola, and that it happened at such an infrequent cycle that it wasn’t to be worried about forever.
Larger than theirs, and the Dragons reported that its planetary rotation was backwards! That the solar cycle lasted a mere 24 hours, splitting the period between darkness and light into a tiny fraction of time. There was evening, and there was morning. There were nameless animals creeping over the surface of the planet. Plants that would yield unfamiliar fruits. Flowers with unknown scents waited.
The people on the ship, still reeling from the experience of leaving their home and seeing it destroyed, found hope in their hearts.
The people, who would take to calling themselves the Tribes in Exile, watched as the ships landed in the driest area, similar to the plains on their home planet. The Sola was just rising in the Eastern skyline and there were a few small groups of the proto-humanoids that lived on this planet gathering to watch the Ships land. The Dragons would go first.
They were always first.
It was the end of everything.
It was a beginning.
~Safkhet, Star Date 21*520*205500
World News Time-Gazette
January 15, 20—
Ancient Rosetta-Stone Like Text Uncovered! Scientists Stunned!
The International Scientific community is reeling with the publication of a new translation of an ancient text. Readers may remember the story of a strange sphere being discovered years ago. Many thought it was a hoax, but this new discovery has changed that speculation.
This week, news that the ancient story of an extra-terrestrial race of beings had come to the Earth was uncovered by a graduate student. When her computer was taken over by a virus, Sonya Lake found the initial installment of an amazing story. Publishers are fighting over the rights to release the rest of what might prove to be a historic text that will change the way we view our own evolution, as well as this planet’s history, and that of the entire solar system. Computer scientists say that what has been done to her computer is impossible. Top history and archeological scientists have given no comment at this time, but an anonymous insider says the story is huge.
The first of several stories have appeared, and are supposedly written by an ancient scribe named Safkhet. Stay tuned here to the World News Time-Gazette for more information as the story unfolds!
For Wide Release.
For more information, contact K. Zimmer
@ Time-Gazette.com.
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