by Anthology
Revelations
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 1:3.
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 the
y 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?”
***
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.
~1 John.
The Letters of John
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 m
achine. 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.