Earth on Target (Survival Amidst the Stars)

by Angel Bright

  “It turned out that Earth is in my camp, and that’s really the reason it is threatened with annihilation. But if it were not in our area of responsibility, the human race would not exist, and Earth would remain a smoky, volcanic planet with an unclear future.”

  “And you appeared and arranged things out of a love to create and, of course, boredom.”

  “It is not quite altruistic. We also had our own intentions, but they changed under the influence of the changing situation.”

  “In order to be involved in a war with vague goals and an apparently infinitely long timeline. And how can only one person protect a vast planet?”

  “You have been involved in this war since your very creation on Earth, and this is part of the reason for your existence, or do you believe in evolution and gradual development of the suddenly alive ingredients of an imaginary primordial soup? Looking from such an Earth perspective, the existence of any living organism on the planet is absolutely impossible. Absolutely! You have remarkable abilities, and you need only minimal help from me. After a brief training and dedication in the Power, there will be two of us. And two will be harder to defeat!”

  “One or two, it’s still the same. We will not be able to do tangible work against a large army.”

  “We will discuss this later because I have a different opinion. There is a balance of tolerable losses. If the losses exceed the tolerable limits, this is the end of the aggressive civilization, and the Brotherhood is extremely afraid of this opportunity. They know that even if they destroy a certain world, we will not be there at that moment. These wars have been going on for thousands of years without disturbing the balance of power, and it seems to have become the point of our existence. We lost the understanding of what we wanted to achieve with our remodeling. You can assume that we are also not the product of natural evolution, according to your understanding, which we deny as completely wrong. We began to become intoxicated by our infinite power, and as a result of our immortality, our fears of our own descendants began. These descendants became unnecessary threats and dangerous competition in our ambitions, which were already limited by power.

  “Our rivalries for achieving the ultimate power have led to continuous wars in which the majority of our superrace of immortal Gods and Goddesses has died. Then, we switched to creating auxiliary worlds like yours. This is a constant reserve of fighters and battle means. In fact, we have achieved something that was not planned in our development, but it has proved to be our most exalted goal that we would have chosen, if we had guessed in advance—namely, the dissemination of rational creatures derived from Gods and Goddesses. A new clear and constructive goal emerged that rationalized our existence. And suddenly, two ideologies were formed, two new trends—for and against dissemination. They’re quite nonsensical contradictions, because until then, we were indisputable masters of the dead planets, and now we shared our power with intelligent creatures similar to us. Those of us who are in favor of our cooperation with the races we have created, have become a minority again. Before we realized we were the target of the newly created conservative secret union called the Brotherhood, we were isolated from our energy sources.”

  6 Fateful Gifts

  (Narrated by Nolen)

  Hasterazis kept defining his position:

  “With Vigor’s help, I started creating worlds populated with life, as we wanted to make sense of our existence. I had enough models for different living creatures and their necessary plants, and with a bit of help, they settled and transformed the dead planets and prepared the basis for creating intelligent human races. I created human races with ready-made genes from young Gods, which was the easiest, fastest, and most direct way before we were attacked by the Brotherhood. They were late. When we were discovered, I had already created ten worlds full of life. The Brotherhood began their active search and destruction, but it is not easy to sterilize a living world. And each time they leave a world, an observer remains behind to destroy every new blade of grass and every living cell. This has caused a growing discontent among the spoiled Gods and has struck their understanding of their equality. Thus, the branches of the secret Brotherhood were created, and they talked about even more secret and more destructive ones. The remaining Gods are only a dozen divided into groups constantly stalking and destroying one another.”

  Hasterazis turned his eyes to Rhem.

  “As far as I understand, your dream is to return to the planet Earth. Your love and affection for it convinces me that this time I have succeeded in choosing a Protector.”

  “And what do you expect of me? To surrender myself? To take down my weapons like that for a few dazzling stories?”

  “Whom to surrender to? Me? Us? Who needs that? Keep your weapons and skills. But I will make you stronger, more adaptable, and more maneuverable. And I have to teach you how to stay hidden from those who see.”

  “Who see? What do they see?”

  “Your energy charge. We can detect you from kilometers away. We sense you through any barriers. We have such abilities. When you lose the element of surprise, you become a moving target.”

  “I will somehow learn on my own.”

  “You will have to wait a lot, if you survive.”

  “I will survive without your help.”

  “Do not be so sure. You do not know whom you are facing. You have no information about their capabilities.”

  “Who will teach me?”

  “This time, me. Innate skills that are not so strong in my assistants are required. The young Gods have much lesser abilities than yours. They do not have our sophisticated genes. They have some abilities, but they do not have our natural immortality, though our physical destruction is possible under specially created conditions.”

  “When do we start?”

  “Tomorrow at sunrise. But you are at my disposal from that moment on. There is a preset that you must pass. Meditate until dawn on the roof of this building to feel yourself, clear yourself from doubts, and decide whether to devote your life to defending your race. Remember, it’s not easy to decide on such a sacrifice, but that would give meaning to your endless existence. Our rational aim will be dissemination. It is also a sort of power over animate and inanimate nature.”

  “I think I understand that. Immortal means ‘regenerative’?”

  “Yes! Immortality also includes regeneration, but it is a much more generalized term. There are many things you know and skills that you have learned on the planet Earth that we do not know or suspect about their existence, but that does not make them less valuable for your activity and for our cooperation in protecting our territories and ours concepts.”

  “What’s the commonality in mine and your concepts, and what could you possibly know about mine?”

  “You carry my genes; hence, you will enter into the same conflicts as I interfered in. You will not be left alone because your very existence is a threat to the Brotherhood.”

  “And how could I challenge them?”

  “I told you. You carry my genes. They found out about your existence when you were eight years old, according to the established time of planet Earth. That was when some of your organs started to go through physiological changes. We were not sure if you would survive. You were so weak and sickly back then, and we couldn’t bring you to doctors from Earth. Several other projects failed at the same time. Obviously, you found a way to free yourself in a primitive way from the accumulated energy, and that’s why you have survived. But the sharp and powerful energy discharges are like short circuits in the energy balance of the planet and are perceived as blinks—more like light flashes—easily detectable blinking signals in the celestial sphere, enough for Those Who See to realize that something intimidating had appeared in some new world. And they sent young Gods to destroy the danger. Several times they attacked you, underestimated your appearance, and did not recognize the true target, for which they paid with their lives, and the time for my intervention came. Until that time, you had shown good f
ighting capacity, and the time for your planned training came, consisting of attack, defense, and tricks for survival. In this respect, you showed unexpected abilities and managed to deceive us. Absentmindedness and refusal to learn the material resulted in endless repetitions of combat situations in which you survived by some miracle but did not achieve a complete defeat and destruction of your opponents. In terms of my goals and desires, you appeared to be without promise! You did not reach the phase of a battle against multiple enemies at all. We almost gave up on you, and we also considered this project as a failure. But during the task on the range and the skirmish with Torneracta, the situation went out control. We then realized we had achieved much more than we had been aiming for. Let’s move on to the next levels of preparation.”

  “What was this Thornkeract? I thought he was your employee.”

  “We do not know what it is. The range on the planet Olnea is destroyed. Vigor also joined to save you, and that complicated things a lot. All our staff there died. Only you survived, in your own way.”

  “Did Thornkeract survive?”

  “When the fire wave engulfed that part of the range, he stood there. And after the fiery hell, we were not interested in him. We were looking for our staff. I also joined the search, and I’m sure no one survived. Even the rocks on the surface had melted.”

  “But why did you use such a big force against me?”

  “We had the usual number of staff there. Most were located around the exit point. Thornkeract appeared opposite you, and we did not even recognize it. The next moment, no one dared to approach the magical battle area. And the inclusion of Vigor was also unexpected for us because you are not yet tuned to him.”

  Being expressively worried by the conversation between Hasterazis and Rhem, I, Nolen, was not immortal like them.

  This conversation did not convince me of the veracity of Hasterazis’s narrative. I knew the perfidy of the Gods, and I accepted this revelation as more of a tactical trick to achieve the desired victory over a capable opponent. But I was amazed to see the youngster go after Hasterazis up the stairs to the roof of the building, which I had never reached. I got up gingerly and followed them upward. Nobody tried to stop me.

  The climb continued for several floors. I could swear they had not been there before. For a moment, I thought the way back did not exist anymore, but it was best for me to get out of the enchanted place I had lived for the past few years and where I always went back no matter what direction I was heading for. This climb was my only chance, and I decided to take advantage of it, even if I would not live till the morning when I had found myself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Long corridors separated from the staircase platforms and disappeared into the darkness. The palpable magical presence had an intoxicating effect on me, and I could feel the warmth of adventure and the thirst for it in my veins.

  Never before had a mortal been admitted to such fights and to these enigmatic premises that contained amazing possibilities for acquiring magical knowledge and techniques. I imagined getting out of the palace thanks to some special technique and then a moment later walking through the streets of my home village of Jacksonville. As God as my witness, I vowed never again to use the spells and magic that brought me to my current humiliating slave existence. There was always a more skilled magician who needed an obedient servant.

  In the magical world, power and skill dominated. There was no way to impose laws or rules. Everyone with some magical gifts became subordinate to another, but the master provided protection for himself and relatively limited protection for his servant. But in most cases, the servant was sacrificed to enable the master to prepare to reflect an assault or a counterattack. It was a world of predators with the ruthless laws of the jungle. A show of mercy was excluded because the abilities of the defeated were almost equal to those of the winner.

  The oldest Gods were the most capable to fight. They arrived at some territorial dissemination where every external intervention was aggression that was ruthlessly fought and always accompanied by significant physical damage to both sides or to the surviving party. The period of regeneration was kept in utmost secrecy to avoid devastating attacks by strong rivals-neighbors. That way, they reached a loose agreement called the Brotherhood with a single law: a strong rival who attacked and destroyed his injured neighbor was also obligatorily destroyed by his neighbors. This caused constantly changing minialliances according to the interests of the parties at the moment.

  But most importantly, old Gods were becoming fewer and fewer. Their natural immortality led to clashes within the family, and their descendants were destroyed—unnecessary headaches that disappeared. The so-called young Gods were biological assistants with limited capabilities, privileged performers of secondary tasks, leaving their masters free for their main purposes—preservation of the territories.

  For the first time, Hasterazis, forced by circumstances, made a series of attempts to create an equally skilled assistant, but he had only one success: Rhem.

  Perhaps convinced of his imminent annihilation, Hasterazis decided in this serious challenge to use his genes in a new way in order to create an additional obstacle for his ex-comrades. He was original and ambitious. It was not known how much he succeeded in this endeavor because combining genes of different biological origins often led to irreversible distortions in the metabolism of creatures, ending in biological death. But there were also suspicions that the human race was an intermediary product of the divine genes, so he could also achieve some partial greater or lesser success supported by the accumulated thousands of years of experience of the trials and errors in this direction.

  We came to a fairly flat place covered by a star-filled celestial vault. What an unimaginable view! It was a triumph of matter and energies. I gazed at stars and star clusters of different colors—white, yellow, red, and blue—with different nuances and saturations. I would protect those worlds at the cost of my life. I remained amazed and numb from the divine revelation frozen in front of my eyes. In this apotheosis of greatness, I heard the voice of Hasterazis filled with sadness.

  “We are at place out of this world. Here is that which was taken away from me, and we have to get it back and fill it with life.”

  Raymond was struck no less than me. Only now we understood the scale of Hasterazis’s goals. He became my God.

  We were at an exceptional place for meditation. I sat down next to the Earthman and fell into contemplation and self-reflection. Time lost power over us.

  We came out of the deep trance when we were bathed in silver rays. It was dawn, and the huge semicircle of a rising white luminary was barely coming over the horizon.

  Hasterazis led us into the building. I was still alive, and the adventure continued. We reached a floor where I walked down the stairs, but Rhem and Hasterazis stayed. I kept going down into loneliness and thought I was sure about one thing: I would dedicate the rest of my life to the sacred purpose of disseminating the intelligence in the universe.

  7 The Setting

  I noticed Nolen’s persistent warning looks and listened absentmindedly to Hasterazis’s—my “father’s”—monologue. And I was expecting an attack any minute now, which would be more of a demonstration of superiority in fighting skills in a fight I was doomed to lose.

  The Gods were Gods because they possessed qualities that were not given to mortals. And Hasterazis really had almost killed me when I used that magical trick to escape through the underground passages. I had additionally developed this trick that the old magician Donald had told me when he almost got out, but beneath him was dense rock, and he was stuck to his waist in it and became easy prey to one of the Gods. I knew a lot of blazing and exploding tricks to distract and block an attacker’s senses. An attacker could not ignore any of my actions that could prove to be dangerous, and I had inserted some surprises in my series to keep up the tension and hinder his planned combinations.

  I had thrown all slow and weak spells and mantras out of my arsenal
and replaced them with mental commands and ambiguous gestures that almost always sent wrong information to the enemy. I was not afraid of Hasterazis, but I was tense and ready immediately at the reflex level to shoot the first of the planned tactical combinations. But I was disarmed strategically.

  Indeed, why hurt or destroy an experiment that had taken them more than two decades to create, according to Earth chronology, and had engaged so many collaborators so far? A bigger goal stood at the center of their plans, and I had a certain role in them. And the grandiose spectacle of the planet Olnea showed that I was given a more important role in the future than that of a guard. I had not reached higher levels of their preparatory process because my purpose was to show limited intelligence and abilities in order for them to give up on me. I began to get into the plan of the last of the Creators, and the idea became quite attractive to me.

  The grandeur of Hasterazis’s intention and self-sacrifice fascinated me when I stood in front of the starry sky over the roof of the palace. What is a more grandiose goal than filling the tempestuous hell of matter over our heads with intellect? What divine selfishness or dread can be a barrier to the dominion of life over the unstoppable forces of energy?

  Indeed, the picture stretching over our heads was a real object of adoration, and the idea of meditation at this place was filled with worship and readiness for sacrifice.

  And something else…

  At first, I noticed a flow of pale-green rays with a reciprocating motion incomprehensible for me. A moment later, I felt the internal vibrations of an impulse high-frequency electrostatic field. My belief in our safety here, in this holy place, allowed me not to oppose the scanning with the capabilities and readiness that I had.

  Quite close to me, as if looking for my protection, stood Nolen, with wide-open eyes, numb and insensitive. I imposed over myself the comfort and the inner indulgence that was part of the purpose of coming here. Gradually, in my inner gaze remained only the feeling of movement and of entering among the stars.