The Space Between Her Thoughts (The Space in Time Book 1)

by Marie Curuchet

  “Now you’re contradicting yourself. You said control was good.”

  “No, that is not what I said. You are thinking of discipline, discipline to enforce your few rules. But your earth was far past the time to do anything about it. Das birthed slowly. Humans birthed fast. The inflection point of our key technological discoveries was concurrent with only a few hundred thousand Das on our home planet. With earth, you were at what? Seven-plus billion and growing rapidly? Too many beings. Laughably far too many of you to learn to treat each other well. Medicine allowing a huge increase in births before society could adapt, before planetary norms could be agreed upon. You were falling and flailing into your own prophetic visions, like a belief that a president, a dictator, a prophet, or an entitled and therefore elevated set of beings would lead you out of your self-created hell to a better place. There were so many factors that would have caused the collapse of your civilization. Rapid population growth was simply another of earth’s many tentacles that would have eventually ensnared it anyway. Sorry, but I did not answer your question. It is because the discipline and control were rooted in the wrong rules or focused on laws in lieu of rules. This is quite often the cause for a society’s demise.”

  “Some great, golden virtuous set of rules you guys established that made you so damn successful that you can sit here and watch joyfully as other worlds die. Like watching red ants fight black and getting a sick joy out of it.”

  “There is no joy in it, I will assure you of that.”

  “Why the hell do you even care? Why the hell do you go to the effort? Why not stay on your own home planet and let all this just happen.”

  “Curiosity certainly, but mostly to prove our own rules to ourselves.”

  “What the hell’s that?”

  “Of Interlocking Effects.”

  “Jesus, stop it dude, that Das mantra makes me sick.”

  “Mantra? You asked why we do it. I said to prove our own rules. You understand, when you have seen the millions of civilizations that have died, then you see four that have survived, even into the billions of years, you search to see if any others have made it and whether it was due to the same cause, that of Interlocking Effects.”

  “Could you use another phrase?”

  “Nothing else describes it as well. Think of the things I just told you. Think of strict, no exception adherence to a few rules. Think of a few societies that are technologically advanced, but their basic tenets come back to the few, the same, over the millennia times a million.”

  “Same what?”

  “Same rules. Not laws. You should understand the difference. You can’t confuse them. Rules. Norms. Accepted standards of behavior. Courage, confidence, courtesy, consideration, modesty, honesty, giving and generosity, energy and vigor, calm, faith, patience. Extreme intolerance for discourtesy or inconsideration. Intolerance for genetic manipulation of your basic being – beyond what you carefully, very carefully do to eliminate aging, excessive sickness, excessive pain, excessive hunger. Intolerance for manipulation of your external, non-immediate environment – and you humans were classically master manipulators and destroyers of that quite lovely planet you called earth. A focus on discipline in all scientific research. Open sharing. Clear recognition and avoidance of over-indulgence, of self-indulgence. Intolerance for jealousy, hatred, bigotry. Actively and aggressively providing the working tools to each individual from infancy, and as a result the entire society of individuals, to overcome the two proto-evils that appear ubiquitously in abundance across the universe – which are by name entitlement and fear. Entitlement to anything. Entitlement, which always leads to terminal overindulgence and death and destruction in so many ways. Fear, of anything. Of anything. What you don’t understand as yet is that which we have found to be true, a law of existence – that the end state of the universe is entropy, nothingness, no interactions between anything, not even the smallest atomic particle with another. Not matter with antimatter. The dispersal and dissolution of all matter and energy. When entropy is the inevitable end state of the universe, and you are effectively going to live to see that end, you understand that any kind of entropy prior to that is not your friend. Your earth had people actively tearing down your rules of behavior and socially functional norms, and as happens almost always, the allowance of that incrementalism becomes the antithesis of a viable society and the great friend of accelerating entropy, in humanity’s case many billions of years before entropy’s final celestial victory.”

  “Oh, great superior being,” she said sharply in her sarcasm, “it’s obvious you Das are the moral gods of the universe, and maybe you think of yourselves as substitutes for God. I assume you don’t even fear God since you said you don’t fear anything.”

  “And your own doubt about God is burning within you. We shouldn’t move to that subject right now.”

  “Why?” she said, with tears beginning to sting her eyes. She waited a minute for a response from Isda, but he stood, serenely, moving his wedge-shaped wings back and forth slowly as if fanning himself. “Damn it, I hate it when you read my mind!”

  “Sorry, Margot. It has been too long since I have felt any personal pain for a dying planet and its beings. The numbers, the commonality, it eventually numbed me, I suppose. Perhaps my own form of incrementalism that I need to work on. I know the pain is real for you, though.”

  Margot’s face was in her hands now, and tears streamed through her closed fingers.

  How could He have done this to us? How could He have let His children die like this? We didn’t do anything terribly bad. We didn’t. There were so many people who were good, who believed in Him, worshipped Him. How could they have died, too? Damn rapture. There was no rapture! Rapture. Torture. Yes, torture maybe, torture as so many saw their loved ones die, then themselves. How could any Father have watched his children die like that?

  “Margot, let’s save this for another discussion.”

  Margot sobbed quietly, barely hearing the response.

  My God, my god, you hath forsaken me. Is that what Jesus said on the cross? You hath forsaken the whole planet. All of your children. What about the Muslims, what about Hindus, Jews, and Buddhists? What about the millions of Christians? What of those who sacrificed for others? All people, not just those who knew to speak to you? How could you have? Are you real? You can’t be, you can’t have existed for this to occur. This is horror. Cataclysm. Punishment carried too far, too far. You have stripped your planet, your Eden, your place of beauty. You did it, you allowed it. You let it happen. You controlled it, you willed it. How could we have helped it? How could we have been so horrible that you would do this to us? I am their speaker now, I am the lone remaining prophet for humanity, so I can ask these things that may be difficult for you to answer. Didn’t you saddle us with enough misery? Weren’t wars and viruses and plagues and populists and pestilence and Ice Ages and earthquakes, and different faces and colors that became reasons for hatred, wasn’t that enough to inflict upon us? Wasn’t that the hell, purgatory, punishment? It surely wasn’t heaven, it surely wasn’t. Heaven is my desert before it was stripped by developers. Heaven was my brother sitting at my bedside, praying for me to wake up. We lived in hell, we surely must have, given all the crap in humanity that was the earth. Couldn’t you have made fewer of us? Couldn’t you have made us all one color, I don’t care which color, or have made us all so smart and wise that we had no troubles? No, damn it, instead what we got was pain and suffering, in most parts of the world, mixed with a little enjoyment and pleasure now and then. Very little, and too rarely. God, you created creatures like Geoff, so inconsiderate, so pleasure-oriented, so self-centered. Earth and its people, no heaven there. But you took the good when you took the bad. You took the good.

  Isda interrupted. “You get what you get.”

  “What?” Margot said, barely raising her face out of her wet hands to peer at him through foggy eyes.

  “You get what you get, Margot. Your thoughts, fatalism, fate,
destiny, as if it was supposed to be effortless. When you have lived what I have lived, you understand that God simply is. No special favors other than existence – and for you and us, advanced forms of consciousness. Indeed, perhaps our special favor from God is consciousness – and choice. Your sense of entitlement as a species led to the demise of the species. Your fears led to the demise of the species. That too was effortless.”

  “Effortless, damn it, effortless?” she cried. “You can’t imagine how difficult things were. You’ve never had a boyfriend go out on you, then brag and joke about it in your face. You’ve never had a dog die in your arms or seen an aunt rot away in a hospital bed from cancer. You think that earth was a piece of cake? You’re wrong.”

  “You don’t think life is effortless, then. Where did you place your efforts?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your personal efforts. You, individually. Where did you choose to focus your attention?”

  “I don’t know. You’re getting me mixed up. Look, I was just thinking, I was just thinking . . . you know what I was thinking. You tell me!” she whined.

  “About God.”

  “What do you know about God? In my book, you’re the the essence of evil. You let our planet, the whole human race, self-destruct like it was some ant hill you just sprayed with Raid.”

  “You asked what I know about God. You won’t like the answer.”

  “Don’t tell me he’s not real. I already know the answer. He’s not. If he was alive, if he were real, none of this would have happened. You wouldn’t be here. There’d be humans, and we’d all be alive.”

  “Did you think that God was exclusive to humans?”

  “No! What do you mean?”

  “Did you think that in this universe there was only one society, one race or life form that God created?”

  “Jesus! I don’t know. I never even thought about it. Who cares?”

  “Did you not find it unbelievable, or repugnant even, that a universe so large and endless as ours would have only a single sentient race? That God, whose essence is creation, would ever stop creating? Is that not the embodiment of species entitlement?”

  “Like I said, I never thought about it.”

  “Your mouth says one thing, your mind another again. Let’s assume you thought about it. What bothered you about the thought?”

  “I don’t know,” she stammered.

  “Don’t worry. Humans were far from alone in the universe. You see, most societies get to a point where there is a belief in a single deity, a single creator. Most also believe, given their ability to self-reflect, in some sort of special entitlement – that they are specially watched over and protected by that deity. Self-centered, yes, and so very wrong.”

  “How?”

  “Perhaps you all took your biblical prophecy about being created in God’s image far too literally. Indeed, God is an organism, and just like you, God simply is. God exists. I think it was said by him in your books ‘I am that I am’. You are an organism, too. But in your body, is there one single cell that does all? Is there a single cell that represents all of mankind?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Nor is there a single society or race of beings that represents God.”

  “You make no sense.”

  “Most societies like yours never advance to the point that they are able to travel in space and discover its tremendous diversity of life and thought, as you have minimally seen in the Viewing room. In an effort to prove their uniqueness, their closeness to God, they refuse to consider the inevitable conclusion.”

  “What conclusion?”

  “That if they are not unique, then they hold no special favor with God, outside of what you might hold for a single cell of your own body.”

  “Look, I don’t know about you, but I hold all parts of my body with favor, down to the last cell.”

  “But you forget the billions of cells that your body sheds each day.”

  “Yeah, but those are cells, those aren’t planets with millions of people on them.”

  “When you have trillions of planets inhabited as such by many more trillions of beings, and maybe even an infinite number of universes, do you hold any one planet with special favor?”

  Margot thought for a second about what he was getting at. “Look, idiot, the way I used to think about God was that he held us in favor. I mean, he sent Jesus to us, and all of our sins were forgiven, and Jesus was apparently a special favor, but,” she stopped for a moment, “obviously it was all a hoax, or sham, because no God and no Jesus exists, now that we’re all dead.”

  “We can go down that path, but it is deviating from this point. I am telling you that humans were not unique, and there was no special favor or consideration for them. You were provided, you were gifted, a set of innate or inbred rules. These were not conferred upon you by a tablet or oracle, though rules were captured at times on tablets. To a great degree in your history, these basic rules were ignored. I have read your Bible. Your Jesus, he taught many of them and distinguished properly between rules and laws, though he was one of many who did so. I’m not sure you understand the point, however. Consider it this way: when the cells called earth were shed, they all went together. The bad with the good.”

  “Disgusting to relegate it to such banality. It was much more complex than that.”

  “Sorry, Margot, it is the best analogy I can use because it is real.”

  “You sure as hell aren’t made in God’s image, if there was ever one,” she said, smirking as her eyes rose from the floor to view Isda’s body.

  “Let’s take your Bible’s words literally if you choose to. I am saying that there are a few rules inherent in all societies, rules of right and wrong. These are absolutes, regardless of what people put into law, and this is something that all people know. God defines these rules in such simplicity that they are often hard to grasp. When the rules are not obeyed, the cells are shed from God’s body. This is the way of the universe, as we have experienced it. You were no science experiment. You had your day in the sun, and you experienced it for that brief moment.”

  “You’re ridiculous! You make me laugh. Then you’re supposed to be what remains of God’s body?”

  “You might say that we are a part that has not been shed – at least not as yet. But by far, we and the three other known civilizations are likely not the only ones. We have only explored less than ten percent of the universe, and it expands and shrinks much faster than we can reach it. We will never find all by the time the universe reaches its end state.”

  “And when that happens? You all die anyway, and so does God then, given the way you think.”

  “We’ll reach that point when we get to it. It is far, far away. All we know is that the rules are consistent. The societies that follow them, the very, very few, end up surviving, as we think of it, as a part of God’s body. The others get sloughed off.”

  “I can’t believe you believe in God the way we do. Your God is not the God of humans.”

  “Trust me, my perspective on what God is goes exceedingly beyond this discussion. But later with that. Like the rules, God is so profoundly simple in purpose around which most beings weave an unwieldy complexity and often fatal philosophies. What makes societies, even you, think that you are so rare? Is it this isolationism of the Universe, the expansiveness of space, that contributes to this thought of omniscience and singularity? You on earth were average, just average, in nearly every single respect. That includes the belief in God, the common and abusive use in God’s name for that which the antithesis of civility and compassion, the power derived through controlling others in God’s name, the enrichment and deifying of those seen closest to God, or the same claiming to speak to God with a special entitlement. I could go on and on, but this was simply a large and noxious tentacle that was turning back on humanity, helping to accelerate its own entropy.”

  “There is nothing special about you Das, not in my mind, other than you are holier-t
han-thou because you guys lived and everyone else died. That to me is the essence of entitlement. God is not you, shithead. God is separate. God is God – or, was God.”

  “Look, Margot, the odds are that out of the millions, a few will find an answer that works in the very, very long term. Interlocking Effects is our answer, as it is for the others. It is the same conclusion. Perhaps that’s by circumstance, but we think not. Oh, by far we four are not the only societies who have considered it and melded it into our souls. But we are the only few who, as yet, have been disciplined about applying the rules and norms into the fabric of all things that we do.”

  “You are so two-faced! If you are that considerate, you would help those planets and civilizations in need!”

  “Who are we to say that they need help? They are responsible for themselves! To themselves! This is the universal truth that they don’t see!”

  “What about helping your brother and fellow man and consideration that you just spoke about, and all that good Christian thought?”

  “And it is good thought. It truly is. But are you our fellow man? Are the ants in their ant hills? Are the worms? Are the whales? What distinguishes a race of beings or a society that we can judge which one to help? For in helping one, it usually harms other species or societies.”

  “Don’t tell me we were less important that ants or worms, damn it. You know we were.”

  “I know that you had language. I know that you were sentient, able to distinguish right and wrong. I know that you knew of the rules and norms that would guarantee your longevity. It was hard to miss that in your holy books. I also know that there were many other creatures on your earth who were quite advanced in their sentience, beyond your human presumption of entitlement in that regard.”

  “Oh, bullshit! We had language and we had literature, all those things, buildings, tools, we had advancement. We were obviously the dominant species. Nothing was even close, not even apes or octopuses.”

  “And where on the continuum do we draw the line? Do you see? Sentience, cognizance, this is something not on a black and white scale. It is unending shades of gray and convoluted definitions. No absolutes. But sentience or not, for us to have helped you would have deviated from one of our main rules.”