THE GALAXYMBION ODYSSEY

Mysterious filigree heavens surrounded them. He considered what The Web of Kalmek might be like to touch – electric candy floss, perhaps. He pushed a hand into the matrix of pulsing, opalescing capillaries. There was neither resistance nor sponginess, just beautiful tingling harmonics and joyful warmth as a continuum of microphoton suns bathed his hand in their fluctuating spectral waves. He pushed both arms and then his entire body in, disappearing from our space and sensory perception.

Nobody knew of Vojan’s exploit until a blast of luminosity winked brightly, showering writhing fragments of web upon the vessel’s hull. The Event Squadron advanced in response but as they neared that fuzzy barrier Vojan’s spacesuit was thrown out, back to normal space. Inside was a child aging in front of them. The Event Squadron Leader ordered immediate return to Londiv Baranto with their transformed colleague.

Inside the infirmary it eventually became clear that Vojan was subject to a looped cycle of accelerated cellular growth, characterised by blood and other cells reproducing at phenomenal rates, followed by rapid corporeal decay with only minor reduction in aqueous content. He was an adult within a few more lapses, astounding the medical teams as they fought to stabilise his aging process with subcutaneous nutrients. Although he was in imbalance his cycles of decay and regeneration were equally weighted.

“You must nurse our ship through the next half,” he whispered weakly, now a frail old man.

“Next half of what?” the ESL asked.

“He is too weak to answer questions,” a surgeon commented. “We cannot feed his cells fast enough to keep up with their accelerated entropy.”

“Next half,” Vojan partially repeated, now a small child again. Even his voice was dusted with temporal strain not that of a child; shards of weaving death rendered in sound. “May our stars forever bring us light and life,” he commented, now a teenager.

The surgeon applied some refracting ointment to what appeared to be a burn on the stricken crewman’s right hand, then increased the polarity on a portable bio-atomic analyser. “He is delirious due to synaptic overload; his cellular structure is actually coherent. What we are witnessing is not so much rapid aging followed by rebirth, but his atoms literally resetting themselves every fifteen lapses or so and reliving their history in mere lapses.” He looked at a senior nurse and spoke very clearly. “Ask physics to bring one of their Pulsewave calibrators up here immediately.”

“You want to shell-matrix our patient?” the astounded medic gulped. He was not the only one present who did a double-take.

“No,” Surgeon Piravar exclaimed, sounding more than just a little exasperated. “I want to disrupt these high energy microphoton exchanges, forcing the cells they belong to into a normal decay sequence. I believe Vojan is suffering from cellular merging with collapsons from that Pulsewave grid we detected. It occupies all times without any defined temporal signature and its collapsons are incompatible with physical matter. His cells have been thrown into flux as two dimensions never supposed to interact directly with each other try to exist simultaneously.”

The ESL looked amazed, even shocked. “So, this Kalmek’s Web phenomenon we encountered, here at the galactic outer buffer zone, is identical to the collapsar at our galaxy’s core?”

“Essentially, yes, Event Squadron Leader. Its Pulsewave network operates across the macrocosm like neurons in a brain. When Vojan touched it physically he triggered a defensive reaction; it detected an invading unit of consciousness and attached itself to that unit to contain it. It experiences time differently from matter.”

“Just like consciousness and the fifth dimension,” the ESL observed. “But the readings we took of Vojan’s sub-chemistry indicated something similar to readings retrieved from that Belvandaran probe, Carrier 4, when it will encounter a massive temporal lightning storm at the galactic rim in Belva Quadrant, about twenty-two orbits from now.”

“Indeed,” surgeon Piravar commented. “I used to work at The Belvandaran Exclusion Zone’s medi-centre. We recently treated a number of Shazandern refugees recovered from Serendipity, their old rust-bucket of a vessel, in Braagan’s orbit. That temporal lightning storm is what will destroy their home-world in the future. Serendipity’s inhabitants had been subjected to a freak shift into the past and put into cryogenic suspension for forty millennia only to be caught in Braagan’s gravity well and exposed to even more cataclysmic distortions. Can you imagine their physical and psychological condition after all that? Their symptoms were not as pronounced as Vojan’s, of course, but were quite similar, and hence so was their treatment. Aha, here is that treatment. Okay, everyone, get the calibrator set up and prep the patient. We have some serious sub-nucleonic surgery to perform. Everyone else please leave the infirmary now or I will not be responsible for my actions.”

The ESL complied, of course, even though she wanted to stay and witness if this radical cure worked. She felt responsible for not having kept a closer watch on the idealistic young scientist. In the passageway outside main surgery the first symphony of Jean Sibelius was playing; she recognised its romantic slow movement. A panorama of beautiful galactic scenery outside seemed only raised in stature by Sibelius’s music. Her mind wandered to thoughts of that strange world where he had lived such an extraordinarily honourable life; Ledara, a planet that should be off-limits under category ‘A’ restriction. A planet not yet ready to know about us; a social nightmare of a world presided over by a convoluted and arrogant ape. A world where currently two Andromeda class Super Citadels were rewiring that same arrogant, convoluted creature with civilised behaviour. She thought about her mentor’s visit to her home, a short time before that Ledaran mission had set sail, when he had asked for her contribution.

“Are you refusing to participate in The Earth Reform?”

“Yes, master scientist. I am in strong opposition to that mission, and I have no confidence in this decision.”

“Do you also have no confidence in The Galaxymbion, and our own Triumvirate?”

“I have every confidence in both, master Taa-Vel-Ar.”

“You understand, even as you claim these opposites, the incongruence of your thoughts, Lia-Sus-Tra? To have every confidence in our planetary custodianship and our galactic curators, yet none in a decision made by them, is to split yourself implausibly between them and their thoughts.”

“This I know, master scientist. There is no excuse for my irrational viewpoint. Please forgive me, but my choice remains. My apologies if I offend your faith in me or cause discomfort in your professorship.”

“There is no offence, Lia-Sus-Tra, except to your own logic and the memory of your brother. Je-Sus was a good man who tried to help humanity; his demise at their hands was totally unforgiveable, given his magnanimity towards them. Yet, he would not approve of a harsh reaction against their kind.”

“This I know, Taa-Vel-Ar. My thoughts are clouded by sorrow, my anger against the Ledarans is an abstraction from that. There is no vengeance in me, but there is disapproval. I cannot be part of any journey to their insane world. Nor can I help deliver to them our gifts of sanity and civilisation, for which we have worked extremely hard to justifiably deserve and maintain, but for which they have consistently squandered opportunities to attain over numerous millennia of greed, belligerence and fluent stupidity.”

“Very well. The science council accepts your decision, and its reasons, as do I, Lia-Sus. Every Galaxymbion citizen earns their right to register conscientious opposition to a task, through unswerving social and moral loyalty elsewhere. It is therefore our decision to assign you an alternative duty. You will remain here on Elsevara III for one further decorb, completing your studies, until an experimental Dreen time cruiser called the Londiv Baranto arrives on its way to the galactic outer rim. Its mission is an essential part of The Solution and will take it through a dangerous region of The Belvandaran Exclusion Zone to assist more Shazandern refugees. The Dreens request from us a competent Event Squadron Leader with a strong science background; the rescue element of their mission involves a temporal leap twenty-five orbits into the future.”

That had been seven decorbs ago, and here she was on the Londiv Baranto. Seeing the plight of the Shazanderns from that future, as disagreeable and argumentative and materialistic a bunch of mammalian misfits as those pesky Ledarans, had softened her attitudes somewhat. Earlier in this mission she had commanded the rescue teams recovering crews and passengers from two Shazandern gem prospector cargo barges, Trion and Vargon. They had been wandering aimlessly through uncharted space in the future, looking for a suitable home and almost exhausted of essential supplies. Nightspear had been on its way to recover them when it ‘disappeared’ around Falda in 2796, only to turn up in some ancient legend of the Kolda-rians. Those Shazanderns had complained bitterly and argued so much in their first few revs aboard that Lia had often felt like returning them to their dilapidated old mining tugs and setting them adrift again. They were frequently rude and ungracious, lacking in manners, humility or appreciation. They made fun of the Dreen’s appearance, broke things, stole, were uncooperative, left mess in their quarters, and never offered to do any work. They did not even seem capable of a ‘thank you’ for being rescued or a ‘sorry’ for their irreverent demeanour.

But then something incredible had happened. Whilst transiting a nebula Londiv Baranto had encountered a magnetic instability. A violent magnetic wave had battered them, dislodging storage pods, and a Dreen had been injured saving a Shazandern child refugee from the falling cargo. The child had refused to leave the Dreen and even used part of its clothing to stem blood loss from a deep cut on the Dreen’s forehead. Shazandern child and Dreen became close friends. After that the Shazanderns warmed to their hosts, losing their ill manners and actually developing more organised and tidier behaviour. The thefts and breakages ceased, no further unpleasant remarks were made about Dreen physical appearance, the complaining and arguing evaporated and they started offering to help with work around the ship. There had even been a sparkling evening when the refugees, having bathed and dressed smartly and tidied their quarters, invited senior Dreen officers to a meal they had prepared specially to say ‘Thank You’. Lia realised at that point that each new generation of a backward culture learns nonsense from the previous generation, sometimes adding its own foolishness as well. But the likeliest capacity for change and improvement – removing bad influences whilst embracing and amplifying good ones – rested within each new generation.

It made Lia-Sus-Tra wonder what virtues humanity might be capable of if only it made a concerted effort to cure itself of its legacy of deranged savagery. Prompted by such thoughts, Lia had spent much of her personal off-duty time studying literature about Ledara and even by Ledarans. She had been amazed by the words of Shakespeare and Byron, Milton, Chekov, Cervantes and Melville. The music of J.S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Sibelius. Then there were the incredible statues of Michelangelo, the thoughts of Socrates and Newton, Leonardo Da Vinci and Democritus, Einstein and Carl Sagan, Juliet Gellatley and Mohandas K Gandhi, Martin Luther King. And these were just a few she had read about. They represented a minute percentage of human populations yet there were clearly many good humans who at least genuinely aimed for goodness. Not for the first time in her life she wondered two things. Why had her brother chosen to go back several millennia into that world’s bloodthirsty history and try to help them leave their savagery behind when they clung to it so dearly? Why did so many Ledarans continue to follow unvirtuous paths when they witnessed ample examples of kindness, virtue and decency and the capacity to achieve them even if only by copying?

Their collective behaviour showed that the human race saw itself at the top of life’s pyramid, in some Godlike role because of the power it wielded over everything else. At the same time, it was not sufficiently logical, empathic, sane or mature to realise that crushing building blocks it considers ‘beneath’ it will cause its self-awarded summit residency to collapse. Ergo; destroy nature’s balance, destroy oneself. Greedy, blind, arrogance operates at the core of their society, dulling their ability to see where foolish behaviour leads. Eventually only one mammal left on their planet, standing self-pityingly in the ruins of a hell it created, mourning the destruction of the natural infrastructure it spent centuries defiling. Its survival will collapse precisely because it wrecked everything it needed for its own survival.

Such heedlessness; not seeing beyond their own noses yet continuing to fumble around near a precipice of their own making. Human behaviour, especially at global administration level, was erratic at best and seriously dysfunctional otherwise. In their world affairs they often appeared mentally deranged, driven onward by an inexplicable harvesting of cultural suicide; tools of death, unsustainable ravages against the environment they depended on.

What prompted their insane preoccupation with weaponry? They made swords, knives and spears as soon as they discovered how to work metal. Why? To kill. Those were not destructive enough. So, they discovered gunpowder. Not content with fireworks they fashioned explosives and bullets and the means to launch them - cannons and guns. What did they do with them? Kill. But those were still not harmful enough. They increased the destructive yield of bombs and bullets; bigger missiles packed with more incendiary chemicals, automatic machine guns. Then they could kill thousands of their own in the time it used to take to kill one with a sword. What did they do? Kill thousands in the time it used to take to kill one.

But even that was not the end; enter the atomic bomb and suddenly they had the power to obliterate millions in a few moments. What happened? Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And since then they increased the potential yields with hydrogen bombs and neutron bombs that made Nagasaki and Hiroshima look like fireworks. Now they live in terror of themselves in case these doomsday devices are activated by error or intent. Sayonara to all life on Earth.

Two problems; humans nurtured an ancient insane desire to wipe out life. Humans discovered new technologies that could exponentially multiply its chances of fulfilling that insane desire. Instead of putting new technologies only to constructive use they irresponsibly harnessed them for psychotic purposes. But without the gun the shooter can’t shoot. Their brains are so rotted with the twin fungi of financial profit and megalomania that they struggle to see anything else as valuable. Earth’s most dangerous and stupid predator - a globalised ape that thinks it is God - will not survive the next two hundred orbits if it maintains this unhinged conduct.

The tragic part is that they actually know the science of nature’s balance; how any global shift spells catastrophe. Even with this knowledge and centuries of Native American wisdom, buddhist philosophy and others who lived more harmoniously they continue eroding nature’s balancing forces. In many of their popular sci-fi stories they are randomly attacked by superior alien forces portrayed as evil destroyers. Do they not see themselves in such portrayals? Humanity’s only real problem is humanity. Now I understand why we had to go to Ledara – to avert humanity’s misery and extinction at its own hands, to prevent them from bankrupting nature’s only true currency - life. We can help them finally achieve civilisation, peace and happiness. Lia wondered how that mission was proceeding, and if the humans knew yet what ‘Ledara’ means.