by Jimmy Guieu
“Some informal researchers base themselves on the beliefs or traditions passed down from initiate to initiate and adept to adept in order to establish the chronology of these vanished races. Of course, not everyone agrees with the dates or the duration of the periods ascribed to these possible humans, just as there are various schools at present15. It is unquestionable that in their ramblings the truth must lie beneath many layers of legends and beliefs that still exist among the peoples of the Earth today. Some scholars who study legends and folklore have concluded that it was very possible that civilizations long before ours really existed. Legendary characters, such as dwarves, gnomes, giants, fairies and all powerful genies are, perhaps, the disguised forms of our distant ancestors or of beings come to Earth from another world… The Dragons of Wisdom—the Bimkamians—natives of the Katong solar system, are proof of this. In essence, humankind on Earth, or rather the different humans who had come after one another, had instructors—at the very least Masters—who were replaced over the course of the geological periods… Masters or Instructors who came from another planet.”
“Where are we now, in fact?” Glanya inquired.
Commander Taylor looked at the screens on the control panel and answered, “We’ve come to a point on the Time Spiral that corresponds to 39 million years before our Atomic Age.”
“Let’s stop the Retro-timeship,” Professor Harrington decided. “We should be at the dawn of Gondwanian civilization.”
The American officer threw the breaker. The ship started shaking violently, then everything fell silent. The grayish light outside was replaced by a darkness full of shining stars. The majestic orb of the planet Earth—of the full Earth because in direct sunlight—sat in empty space. A geographer, even a regular graduate student, would have been astonished to be told that this planet lost in the heart of the cosmos, surrounded by unknown stars, was his planet.
The Retro-timeship was set over a vast, elongated continent, including what is today South America, Africa, part of South Asia and a large portion of Oceania (e.g. Australia).
“So, there’s the famous Gondwana continent!” Professor Harrington got excited as he looked out upon the hemisphere flooded by sunlight.
A thin, dark crescent covered the edge of the planet. The Moon hung like a white disc with marbled continents and bluish zones of small seas that in this tremendously ancient age existed on our satellite. A thin atmosphere haloed the Moon. The cosmic cataclysms16 had not yet wounded its surface. Craters, chasms and gigantic pits were still not blemishing the face of our night star.
“Get closer to the land, Commander,” Professor Harrington said. “We’ll take a sightseeing tour and find a good place to land.”
The Retro-timeship wobbled gently before diving down on a slight curve. The view was clouded through the dense atmosphere but daylight soon replaced the empty, interplanetary night.
The ship flew over the eastern rivers of Gondwana where Australia would be in the future. Huge forests of leafy ferns formed green patches contrasting with the ochre of the open spaces. The sea, a darker bluish-green, battered the coastal reefs with raging waves. Giant swells crested with white foam broke against the coral formations whose red-orange ridges stood out in the shallow lagoons, like strange, tangled, twisted byways.
On the banks of a sheltered cove a great number of glittering domes were lined up in rows of a hundred. One in particular, right in the middle, rose up higher than the others.
“Weird,” Kariven observed, “those don’t look like natural formations.”
“Let’s land,” Professor Harrington suggested, as intrigued as his friends.
The ship set down around 150 feet from the bizarre constructions. Before opening the hatch the time explorers inspected their surroundings meticulously but they saw no living being.
“Now that we’re a little more familiar with time travel and vanished countries, do you think we should still use the transparency serum?” Streiler questioned.
“We can always take the first dose that doesn’t last for more than an hour,” Commander Taylor proposed, a believer in the politics of prudence. “We’ll leave like that and if we run into something too dangerous we can come back to the ‘bus’ to get a second or third dose to last longer. What do you think?”
The proposition was accepted unanimously and Kariven used his expertise on his friends: he injected them with the transparency serum as well as the antidote to protect their vision. The harmless shot had more than its usual effect on Glanya who looked in the mirror every five minutes to watch herself undergo the strange process of her tissues fading into transparency.
Half an hour passed and our transparent friends took off their clothes and put on the plastic underwear. They each grabbed a weapon and prepared for the expedition into the mysterious city. Glanya picked up the disintegrator rifle that she had carried away from Shâmali and her time.
When they were on the ground a crushing silence pressed down on them. No sound, no animal cries disturbed the tranquility. The silence, so intense on the edge of so many buildings, utterly astonished Kariven and his friends. They were overcome by an indefinable feeling that added to the weirdness of the phenomenon.
“Could it be a dead city?” Streiler scratched his head thoughtfully, puzzled.
They walked slowly, almost afraid to make a sound in the extraordinary solitude, until they reached the first spherical constructions.
The sun cast its rays through the transparent men making them even less visible.
The explorers paced around the first dome they came across and found a narrow door around six and half feet high. Kariven pushed it open and squinted, intrigued. Inside the “house” was a bluish light. Hazy forms in motion flitted about furtively and then, all of a sudden, the sourceless light turned yellow-gold.
The ghostly forms melted away in the light that, after examination, seemed to be coming from the concave ceiling, which had turned golden.
“Did you see what I saw, Kariven?” Professor Harrington asked, adjusting the rectangular glasses on his nose… his invisible nose.
“I was just going to ask you the same thing.”
“What do you think it is?” Glanya inquired, inching timidly closer to Streiler.
Kariven frowned. “Apparently there’s nothing in here. But we all saw or think we saw something moving. I suppose…”
He broke off and suddenly stretched his hands out in front of him. He looked completely stunned. His hands felt like they were kneading the empty space.
“Good God!” he exclaimed. “Touch this! Could we have ‘rivals’ who can make themselves invisible?”
Commander Taylor raised his eyebrows and gawked as he said, “Touch what? I don’t see what you’re fiddling with here…”
In spite of the unease caused by Kariven’s cryptic words, everyone reached out toward what he was feeling. Taylor, Harrington, Streiler and Glanya all turned pale and stood speechless, astounded, troubled.
Some light obstacle had stopped their hands in the apparently empty space!
“And it’s like… what is it like, do you think?” Commander Taylor muttered, fumbling and skeptical.
“I have no idea! But it is moving…”
“Hey, it’s leaving,” Streiler shouted, waving his open hands around the empty space.
Indeed, the form they had touched had slipped away and disappeared, if you can say that for something that cannot be seen…
“Let’s get out of here,” Kariven suggested, “and visit the city, which I think we can call this collection of shiny domes.”
They walked down an avenue lined with these weird buildings, made of an unidentifiable material, until they reached a relatively open space. In the middle stood the grand dome seen during their flyover.
A row of oval openings ran along the base of the dome that sparkled in emerald green. The time explorers risked a glance inside the first arch. What they saw froze them on the spot.
Under the great dome, which
also gave off a bluish light, there were haunting figures milling around, ghosts of a sort that had a vaguely human but quasi-fluidic appearance.
In the blue light they looked brown and floated jerkily through the air, a little like seahorses, those strange “horse-fish” that swim vertically by undulating their bodies. The “phantoms” had lumpy heads, huge, pale eyes, two legs and a slender body without a well-defined outline or surface. They spun around, moved forward, then backward, and sometimes intermingled to become one, bigger, phantom form. And all this in deathly silence.
“This is the most extraordinary ballet I’ve ever seen,” Commander Taylor whispered. “But what’s the point of mixing together like that?”
Deep in thought, Professor Harrington hazarded an explanation, “Don’t think me a doddering old fool, Commander, but I have the feeling that this is a building meant for procreation. Look at how those things fuse together in pairs…”
“Of course! They come together as two but they separate as three…”
“Exactly. These curious creatures are joining to give birth to other complete creatures, in an adult state, if I may say so. Unlike the human race and the animal species, they don’t have a period of gestation, an actual birth, growth and gradual development. Among them two complete creatures fuse and instantly give birth to a third complete creature.”
“I think the ceremony is over,” Commander Taylor remarked on seeing all the ghosts head for the oval openings.
The blue concave dome slowly grew dark and only the light of day lit the building.
When one of these strange beings left through a door and went outside its color faded. It became nothing but a vaporous body with a weird, very pale yellow aura, hardly visible in the natural light. Crossing the sunny plaza they disappeared, melting in the sunrays, leaving only a spectral trembling in the air, like those little mirages on hot roads during a heat wave—fluttering, shimmering puddles on the road gave an impression of these extraordinary beings.
“This form of life is so different from ours,” Kariven observed, “that it seems to me really hard, if not impossible, to communicate with them.”
“I’m probably going to sound dull as dishwater to you,” Commander Taylor smiled, “but what do you say to some breakfast?”
The explorers immediately approved his wise invitation and left the “City of Ghosts.”
When they reached their improvised landing strip Kariven opened his mouth and raised his arm to stop his companions. 100 yards from them and passing close by the ship, apparently unnoticed, were ten men and women, bright yellow, as if endowed with bodies of malleable gold.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The time explorers watched these strange humans with understandable surprise. Although transparent Kariven and his friends moved away and hid safely behind some bushes to let the weird group pass by.
“Are they painted or are they…?” Commander Taylor whispered without finishing his thought.
“Certainly not,” Kariven whispered back. “That pigmentation is natural.”
They snuck after them and soon stopped behind one of the domes that was used as a house for the ghostly forms. When the golden men had gone inside, the explorers approached the narrow door and peeked inside.
In the concave dome the bluish light showed the rippling, brownish, spectral forms fluttering around their golden visitors and sometimes touching them with their wispy aura. The ghostly, ectoplasmic beings went from one golden man to another, darting like a fish in water.
“What could they be doing?” Glanya whispered, fascinated.
Kariven made a guess. “Wouldn’t this be their way of communicating? Couldn’t they be exchanging telepathic waves like the Bimkamians of your race, Glanya?”
After half an hour of this strange affair the visitors left their ephemeral hosts. Passing by the explorers again the strange humans surprised them in the most singular, most astonishing way.
Kariven scrutinized them minutely and whispered, “But… they’re not men and women. They’re asexual or rather bisexual… they’re androgynous!”
In fact, being totally nude, nothing of their peculiar anatomy was hidden. All of them had the same intersexualization characteristics: their structure was derived from that of man and woman.
Reflecting on this unusual observation the time explorers followed the androgynes. Unaware of their presence, they led the explorers to a cove where the green waves of the ocean came to die peacefully. They jumped into a strange boat—a kind of wide, pink metal dinghy—and headed out to sea. An engine huffed noisily under the back as it dug a deep wake through the liquid.
“A jet turbine!” the engineer Streiler remarked. “Or something like it. Obviously our ancestors are still full of surprises for us.”
“We’re not going to swim after them,” Commander Taylor said. “Let’s take the bus. Besides,” he noted looking at the others, “we’re starting to become visible again.”
They ran through the city of ectoplasmic beings and reached the Retro-timeship that, very soon, was taking off. Only at an altitude of 1,000 feet did the American officer turn the ship toward the coast.
The sea, colored by thousands of little waves, glimmered like an emerald basking in the sun. A pink spot slicing through the water around 50 miles from the coast appeared on the screen showing how fast the androgynes’ dinghy was. 50 miles in 10 minutes was a worthy performance for any boat… from 1,390,000 centuries in the past.
15 minutes later the super-fast dinghy made a wide circle and slowed down into an artificial channel that led to a port.
“Wow,” Glanya’s eyes widened with surprise, “that white city is identical to… Shâmali!”
Through the cockpit the Earthlings from the future recognized that except for some minor details the city was an exact replica of Shâmali, the Bimkamian base established on Earth over 9 million years later.
An astrodome with oval spaceships—whereas the Bimkamian ships were spherical—was located to the north of the city. To the west, at the foot of a mountain around 20 miles away as the crow flies, stood another cluster of buildings that was nothing like the big port city. Its houses were low, two or three floors apparently; its streets seen on the viewer were more like those in small cities of the Atomic Age. One main road linked the Shâmali look-alike to this place.
On Professor Harrington’s order Commander Taylor landed his ship close to the astrodome. Glanya did not let her eyes feast on the magnificent white city that reminded her of Shâmali. She snuck a peek at Kariven and saw the deep sadness written on his face. Like her, he was thinking of Leyla.
From a tall, rectangular, metal building on top of a huge cement structure two giants over nine feet tall came out! They took a moving escalator that brought them down to the runway. There they stopped in front of the first oval spaceship and had a conversation, pointing to the spaceship but apparently not seeing the Retro-timeship parked at the end of the site. Dressed in long, white coats and tight fitting, purple pants, their heads protected by a big, round helmet that reflected the sunlight.
Glanya examined them, astonished and speechless. Streiler put his arm affectionately around her waist and asked the reason for her astonishment: “Seeing these giants is really so disturbing to you, Glanya? Don’t they look like your brothers? Of course, they’re taller but…”
“These are my ancestors, Kurt,” she ended up muttering. “Our archives in the artificial astro-base that is floating a million miles from Bimkam tell the complete history of our humanity. I studied a compilation about our expansion in the Galaxy. For 200 million years our race flew all over intra-galactic space trying to peacefully colonize the solar systems with planets inhabited by thinking beings. Colonization is not the right word because we’re happy just to educate the peoples without exploiting them. I clearly remember having learned that from the start of our Astronautical Age our mother race sent subjects to thousands of different worlds. The Bimkamian Instructors, therefore, educated countless races. Th
ey came to Earth several times where the civilization had been ravaged by one disaster after another. When the new humanity on Earth, after these cataclysms, started becoming civilized the Instructors came to this planet to teach them the good and develop their knowledge. My ancestors didn’t always live on Bimkam, needless to say. Because they also experienced disasters. But their vast empire in space spared them the ruin suffered by the ancient races on Earth. When a planet occupied by Bimkamians suffers one of these cosmic disasters the colonists can flee to other planetary refuges. Even if they were totally engulfed in the end of the world, their brothers in other systems would continue their civilizing mission. By sheer number and power the Bimkamians will never die out.
“Obviously our race changes and develops over the years. That’s why these giants, almost ten feel tall, my ancestors, are bigger than us, the Bimkamians of Shâmali. And you Earthlings from the Atomic Age are smaller than us but the human race survives and will always survive. Even if in a million years—after the Age you come from—your Earthling race changes and gives birth to dwarves… the representatives of the Mother Race will keep pretty much the same morphology. We occupied two planets of this solar system: first Mars, then Earth. Later our descendants will occupy Venus, which is not yet inhabitable.”
“So, they’re also our ancestors,” the young French scientist observed. “In a talk at the Academy of Sciences I proposed a hypothesis in which Earthlings would have a Martian origin. In an expedition in Antarctica, some American technicians and myself discovered a bronze-skinned race that descended directly from Atlanteans and that lived in a sheltered valley in the polar ice. These beings were Martian offspring that had come to colonize the Earth after a cataclysm had ruined their mother planet17.”
Glanya thought for a minute before saying, “The Bimkamians, therefore, would have mixed with the Martians and their cross-breed would have colonized Earth because our race is white.”