Paradox Moon: The First Book of Regenesis
Page 18
In their first trip afield, Davina takes him to the greenery in the alpine valley, a landscape that has more order and purpose than he had at first imagined viewing it from afar. There are row-upon-row of neatly tended vegetables of all kinds—some familiar to him, most not.
They are the descendants of plants her ancestors brought with them, carefully cultivated and preserved as the planet’s seed-bank. Protected from the desolation of the world beyond the clouds.
Rows of fibrous plants, obviously unfit for human consumption, raise a questioning glance from Noah, and Davina explains they are processed on giant looms in the massif to produce the white fabrics her people wear. It creates a lightweight insulate worn both within the city and in the open world beyond.
The fecund fields are home to the first insect-like creatures he has encountered on this planet. They closely resemble the bumblebee of his world as they buzz busily from plant to plant, assuring their propagation for future crops.
But who, he wonders, cultivates the soil and harvests the yield?
That is a question Davina can answer. Her response sheds new light on the communal nature of her people.
While all are committed to their scientific endeavors, she explains, every citizen owes a duty to help tend and harvest the crops. Everyone sets aside regular times to perform these tasks as a function of both self-interest and social obligation. Giving short shrift to his follow-up question about shirkers, she insists:
“Everyone here knows his duties and performs them!”
The alpine gardens are not the only source of food for the community.
In a second field trip, Davina takes him to the shore where the massif cataract flows into the great lake. There, they approach a wide, deep tarn the waterfall has gouged out of the surrounding moraine. Its banks are elevated, smooth and worn, with broad natural steps descending to the water’s surface.
This dwarf lake is teeming with the single species of fish that come there to spawn. Davina explains they are her community’s sole source of protein. Linking the tarn with the great lake is a narrow channel through which schools of the fish migrate to spawn and die as their fry return to the vast depths of the lake to live and grow.
It is not unlike the aquaculture practiced in his world, although there is no commercial incentive here. Like the vegetable fields, this fishery is tended and harvested on a systematic, communal basis.
The fish and vegetables are transported to the obelisk terraces where they are set out for all to eat in a never-ending buffet of healthful choices.
Closer to home, Davina takes Noah to caverns in the great massif, which is the community’s center of manufacture.
The first cavern is home to an exposed segment of magma flow. Using elongated forceps, technicians are reaching through the gelid airstream which encases the magma and extracting quantities of a molten metallic substance. Reaching into his thoughts, Davina dubs the metal “titanium” and describes its valuable properties of malleability, strength and durability.
This is the substance, she explains, from which all durable, non-fabric manufactures are made.
The next cavern houses steam turbines fed by the boil-off of adjacent volcanic vents and transferring energy to manufacturing operations within the massif complex.
Other caverns contain workshops for the manufacture of precision glass and fabrication of useful products from the singular metal Davina calls titanium. There, craftsmen grind precision lenses and toil over items fabricated from their titanium within exacting specifications and tolerances. Nearly all the effort Noah observes is dedicated to the manufacture of large microscopes and other manual scientific instruments.
Noah is fascinated by the craftsmanship of the lens-grinding operation. It is like watching a Leeuwenhoek painstakingly grinding and polishing his bi-convex lenses with the conviction they will bring the invisible world into clear, viewable focus.
Yet, for all their vaunted obsession with science, the products of this effort are no improvement on the single-lens microscopes the Dutchman made. While his ‘spheres of magnification’ expanded the boundaries of the visible world in his time, the craftsmen here are stuck in time, their primitive instruments following the same simple design handed down by the ancients.
He has no time to dwell on these contradictions as Davina hurries him through the workshops.
Like food generation and processing, Davina explains, all the mining, power-generating and manufacturing activities in the massif complex are performed by the adults on a fixed, unchanging scheduled as their contribution to the total communal effort.
That is when a growing disquiet in Noah’s mind begins to assume sharper focus:
The creepy feeling these people are ant-like in their selfless, instinctive, automaton behaviors in slavish thrall to the community.
Governance through subservience of the individual to the state has been tried many times in his world—many rooted in idealism, all ending badly.
The laboratories and scientific facilities are the community’s pride and passion. They are lodged in the tunnels which natural forces have carved into the ice.
That is where Noah learns the shocking truth about this ice-bound race!
There are many laboratories and many rooms where people are single-mindedly poring over ice samples. Peering through microscopes and quantifying samples of earth and rock. It is the first time he has seen children outside the obelisks. Each is assigned to an adult or team of adults engaged in some scientific inquiry or other.
Remarking on the children’s presence, Noah receives an affirmative nod from Davina who explains the obligation researchers have for the children’s education. All research has a didactic as well as scientific element. Every scientist shares responsibility for mentoring the children, educating them in means, methods and procedures.
It is an apprenticeship all children undergo. Since no other form of education is offered, it prepares them for their life’s work. When they attain adulthood, they are expected to take their place in the labs and scientific facilities performing research in their field of training—geology, botany, zoology, chemistry, physics, and other basic sciences.
Proudly pointing to a team analyzing ice cores, she leads Noah to their station for a closer look.
That is when the veil begins to fall from this empty facade.
Each core is carefully sliced into wafer-thin segments,
Then passed along for inspection through a microscope,
Then measured,
Then . . .
Nothing!
It is simply discarded.
No theories are advanced.
No conclusions are drawn.
No record is kept.
The team simply moves on to the next wafer of ice and repeats the same pointless process.
Reflecting on this meaningless exercise, the full force of realization strikes Noah like a hammer-blow.
The fustian pretensions of this race are a trick and a fraud!
The ancients valued science above all endeavors, Davina once commented, and pure science was prized above all else. Industry and commerce were rejected as an abasement and abuse of science, and they abandoned both.
The credo “science for science’s sake” was ingrained in their cultural DNA—passed down through the generations to the exclusion of practical application. Aborting innovation and technological advancement alike.
Science became a means with no ends, as antipathy toward industry and commerce deprived her people of the universal engines that drive progress among all civilizations.
These people mirror, by rote, the methods handed down from ancient forbears without questioning their validity or purpose.
These people mirror the symbols of his own thoughts without comprehending their texture and substance.
For all their facility in communicating telepathically and for all their ability to express themselves through others’ thoughts and speech, this race possesses no originality of its own!
They are simply going through the motions without ever attaining the clarifying enlightenment and progressive fruits of scientific inquiry.
Again, Noah has the creepy sensation they are ant-like in their repetitive, unquestioning, programmed behavior.
Chapter 30. Hands Across Distant Worlds
In his unguarded thoughts, he wonders if Davina herself is a mirage—a beautiful, assertive, articulate Potemkin image concealing an empty, purely reactive automaton.
What he fails to perceive is Davina’s uniqueness among her own people.
Blinded by her similarity in appearance to the other women of her race, he cannot see the differences in her that so alarm the others.
She is adventurous.
She is questioning.
And she is unique among her kind.
No other would venture unaccompanied onto the icepack where first they met.
No other would boldly confront a stranger alone in the wild.
No other would scrutinize and critically examine someone else’s thoughts.
They are behaviors that set her apart from her fellows.
They are what so attract Noah to her and to no other. But they are things that do not occur to him and, so, are absent from his thoughts this day.
It is the uncertainty haunting his thoughts now that provokes a violent reaction from his companion. Wheeling toward him, she slaps his bearded cheek and, in a state of fury, rushes from the lab.
Only then, when it is too late, does Noah admit to himself something that has been growing within him but that he has refused to accept until this moment:
Automaton or not, he has fallen in love with Davina, and the sudden reality of her loss widens the hole in his heart.
His loneliness deepens as he makes his way back to his sleeping-quarters.
He wonders if he will now be forced out of the community. Back to the icebound pathway beside the angry sea. His answer arrives unsummoned in the person of the spokesman from his initial interview. Accompanied by another bearded fellow Noah presumes is here to help escort him out of their realm.
He is surprised by what happens next.
“I bring your new guide and mentor” the spokesman declares. “He will accompany you for as long as you choose to stay among us.”
With that, the spokesman departs, leaving Noah alone with his new guide and mentor. Thankfully, he readily defers to Noah’s mood and fatigue and leaves him to his painful solitude and self-pity.
Almost immediately, Noah is asleep in his pod dreaming wistfully of happiness that might have been but now can never be.
Every dreamy thought is dominated by the now hollow promise of Davina’s sly, saucy smile.
It is many lonely, regretful days before he sees her again.
Noah and his bearded mentor have just returned from collecting ice-core samples, near the snow-dusted high stone embankment where he first espied Davina.
Preoccupied with thoughts of her, Noah for the first time discerns a pattern in the clutches of people around them. It has been there all the countless times he has eaten on the terrace, but only thoughts of Davina give him the eyes to see it.
Except for his bearded escort and himself, every discussion group is made up of couples. What he cannot see, through the opaqueness of their remarkable similarity, is the fact they are the self-same couples he has seen together on every previous occasion. All he can infer now is that they are paired off, man to woman, and remain so every time he is on the terrace.
He will come to know the full truth of their congregation:
The men occupy separate sleeping quarters from the women, but each couple share one another’s company on every other occasion. While all the men are identical in appearance and all the women the same, the mated couples stay together for life.
Childbearing is a mysterious and secretive ritual concealed from all but the couples who will replenish the community’s depleted numbers. Like the furry bipeds who accompanied Noah across the temperate zones of this world, these people produce new life only to replace the old. Efficiently maintaining communal equilibrium and a sustainable population.
This day, Noah and his escort are sharing a quick lunch on the open terrace. Both are deep into a discussion of the nature and evidence of mineral traces in the ice when Noah espies Davina selecting vegetables at the other end of the terrace.
It is the first time he has seen her since her abrupt, angry departure from the ice-core lab.
It is crowded at this hour, and Davina does not see Noah until he is right up on her. He is hurt by her enforced separation and avoidance of him, and he intends to let her know it.
But he is instantly disarmed when, as she lays her eyes upon him, a single tear falls to her cheek and her look is all sadness and regret.
“You cannot avoid me forever,” he whispers. “No thoughtless act, no unintended sleight, no unmeaning transgression of your ways can justify the pain of separation I have endured these many days.”
He can see the pain in her eyes, as well, and it reignites hope that she, too, has missed him. Rapture overwhelms his every emotion as he confesses:
“I am not whole apart from you. You can count on me always, Davina, for where you are shall I also be!”
Her wide eyes widen further as he voices these feelings. Looking him directly in the eye, she raises both hands to her bosom, palms out, wheels around and immediately leaves the terrace.
Alone and confused, Noah is at a total loss, teetering on the cruel edge of despair.
Minutes later, a bearded figure enters the terrace, approaches him and utters three words with the finality of a command:
“You are summoned!”
Following the man he knows not where for a purpose he knows not what to meet with he knows not whom, Noah is totally mystified.
Was he too forward in expressing undying love for Davina?
Has he unforgivably transgressed some local taboo?
Will he be forever banished from the colony?
Or worse?
All these fears, and more, are coursing through the ganglia of his emotions as he follows the bearded guide back through the corridors leading to the heart of the obelisk. Soon, they arrive at a large hall-like room filled with many people.
At the far end of the hall is a raised dais. Standing at its center are Davina and the bearded spokesman from the day of his arrival in this ice-locked realm.
The spokesman summons Noah up to the dais, and there places both of Noah’s hands in hers and, with great solemnity, announces to the assembled company:
“Davina gives her heart to Noah. Noah gives his heart to Davina. By the laws given us by the ancients, they are now joined as one.
“All as one respect and celebrate their union this day!”
As she releases his hands and clasps him to her, Davina whispers in his ear that which he had confessed to her:
“I am not whole apart from you. You can count on me always, Noah, for where you are shall I also be!”
Returning her embrace, Noah is speechless with joy as he raises her hand. Reaching across and bridging a cosmic divide between their separate worlds.
He is giddy at the prospect of sharing his life with this beauty in this ice-locked world sheltered from the uncertain dangers of the lands beyond.
He does not know he will soon tire of the aimless existence in this place.
He does not know he will journey back to the temperate latitudes.
He does not know that, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Creation, he and Davina will find their own Eden.
That, together, they will tame a primal, unspoiled frontier in the wide world they will reclaim as their own!
Afterword
Prising loose a strangely symmetrical object wedged between thin, confining layers of schist and volcanic breccias, the brute extracts a s
tone whose smooth, polished surface stares back at him.
His beetled brow arches in confusion as deeply recessed eyes reflect strange blue markings on the stone’s surface. One resembles the great finned beasts that swim the green polar sea, patrolling the shore he knows well. Other markings look like eyes, but are greatly exaggerated, while the rest are just random dots signifying nothing.
A low, guttural voice near him demands:
“What have you there, Gruk? Is it something to eat? Is it valuable?”
Turning on the other brute, Gruk snarls:
“It is nothing to eat, Grak, and nothing we can trade. Yet, it may have very great value, depending on where it may lead!”
Putting their heads together, the two brutes slowly examine the relic of a departed band of bipeds, evicted from their home by a violent earth.
“Watch what I do,” Gruk commands, “and let us see whether there are more of these strange stones here.”
Soon, both brutes are busy prying loose several of the funereal markers, all etched with pictograms the two cannot decipher. Placing the markers in line, Gruk cunningly sneers:
“Whatever the markings may say, these strange stones surely mean one thing:
Whoever made them has ability. And we are in need of capable slaves!
“Let us see if there are tracks we may follow to capture them.”
At once, both brutes begin examining the rocky surface of the imploded valley. It is a place that ever had been beyond their reach. Blocked by the unscalable height of the old valley’s walls and its impassable ridge from the roof of the valley’s inland stretch to the depth of the ocean at the end of its glacial floe.
Now it is a flat, broken terrain riven with the recent wounds of volcanism and fire. This is the brutes’ first foray into this once-inaccessible place, and they mean to extract whatever of value is here.
Gruk is strong and sly, and the slow-witted Grak defers to his commands. It was Gruk’s idea to come to this place after months of patient waiting until the fires went out and the smoke fled.
Gruk is the unquestioned leader of his tribe, a bestial band of brutes and bullies kept in line by the blunt force of his heavy bludgeon and the sharp point of his crude knife. A coward himself, Gruk preys on the craven bluff and bluster of other bullies who back down before his superior size and swift vengeance.