The Gift.

The Gift.

Our world we called Den. It orbited a red dwarf star that we called Seta that was in turn orbited by another red dwarf swinging out in an elliptical orbit. This sun we called ‘Giver of Life.’ A third sun orbited far out and brought extra heat when it dived towards the first sun. When both red dwarfs dominated the sky behind our world and danced around Seta, then this was a time of plenty. This star came only every few centuries so we called it the Visitor.

Closest to Seta, Den was permanently locked with one surface facing the sun, keeping the other side in frigid darkness, except when the second sun dipped behind and brought warmth to the ice-locked land. This state would last for some years and was taken advantage by the life that faced the eternal day. Billions of gallons of fresh water cascaded down the mountains and swept across the thirsty plains.  Torrential rain would fall and storm-force winds blew across the dried up lands. Shallow seas would fill and life that had sealed itself under the soft mud while they could, before it had set like iron under Seta’s glare, would wriggle out of their temporal tombs. When the added warmth of the ‘Visitor’ was added, all of the frigid, dark sides of all the many worlds that orbited both Seta and the Giver of Life, burst into activity. 

 There would be a flurry of life taking the advantage of the change in seasons. This was the time of plenty. Already the plants that had begun the business of hiding into their roots and pulling the shield over the top of the hole during the dry season began to fight for the light.  Precious water that was oozed around the rim of the lid to make a seal was sucked down into the roots causing them to open their pores to the now damp soil. Growth was now the prime aspect and every plant pushed through the root system sending shoots into the rain filled air. Soon there would be a flowering and seeds form to be ready for the seeding time before Giver pulled away and left Den far behind to endure the great freeze once more and the dark side return to its other state. The time of harvest would be upon us and the gathering take place.

The second sun, ‘Giver of Life’ and its attendant planets was beginning to come closer and the heat began to climb, as we started the journey away from the underground cities and back into the new growing season. Soon the ‘Visitor’ would add its extra warmth to the new spring, extending the summer that would pass. We lived spread across the temperate zone and foraged into the edge of the central desert, pushing the cultivated lands as far as we could, by irrigating from reservoirs built deep beneath the ground. The time of storms was coming, as the second sun followed the elliptical orbit around the red dwarf and in doing so would shine down onto the frigid ice bound wastes heating up the dark side. This would melt the ice and drive the winds over the perimeter bringing water to the baked dry lands, so this happened during every orbit of the second sun as it closed the distance to the larger star. Den orbited Seta along with three other rocky planets that were close enough to have freely flowing water between the ice ages. 

All of these planets were tidally locked with one face pointing at the sun. The second sun warmed them all as it swept around behind the dark side of each planet. A number of planets orbited the ‘Visitor’ as well. it had been known that one of these worlds had transferred itself to Setas’s gravitational pull during transit. 

We call ourselves the Vinay and we have burrowed deep beneath the dark side of our worlds and far under the deserts of eternal day. From there we extract hot air and pump it to the cold side to our underground homes enabling us to expand our cities further into the emptiness. Over the last thousand years we have filled all four planets with our civilisation and have sent expeditions to other red dwarf systems.

We have been a star travelling civilization for over a thousand years and have spread out colonising many red dwarf systems and building a federation of species. The first radio signals began to trickle in from a most unlikely source not too far from whence we lived and when we manged to decode the signals into pictures, we shuddered with horror at the scenes of destruction that the dominant species waged upon each other. The star was a single yellow type surrounded with planets unlike any we had come across. There were four huge gas giants in the outer reaches and four smaller balls of rock not unlike our own worlds in size, but as unalike as could be! The first two worlds were too hot for life and the fourth too small to hold onto an atmosphere. The third world out from the sun however was a water world, orbited by a giant moon that held it stable, but the people that lived there did not cherish the bounty that they had. These planets were rare and sparsely scattered through the galaxy. 

We foolishly sent a message back to them and watched in horror as their civilisations all began to put their energies into weapons of mass destruction, with the idea of launching them at us! Eight different species sat in judgement and it was a unanimous decision to send ships to the small worlds and ice chunks from the Kuiper belt and dislodge a number of these skipping them towards the sun in close encounter orbits as a warning. As a reminder we also sent them the co-ordinates of the dwarf planets and the flight paths. A continual watch would be sent to monitor affairs to see that they changed their ways. This solar system was theirs to use and shape as they wished, but no further travel into interstellar space would be tolerated. 

We also disturbed the eons of static orbits of the Oort cloud making sure that what lived inside that un-impenetrable natural shield, stayed there after we had departed.  .    

 

The Ice-ball solution.

The ice-ball solution.

The Rapscallion edged closer and closer to the fringes of the Oort cloud. The ship had spent a great deal of time collecting ice boulders and chunks of frozen methane and cementing them together to build a shield around the ship. A small ice-world had been manufactured and the ship had applied its lasers to bore a hole, deep within the bitter cold shell. Here the ship had anchored itself and refroze the mantle around it to provide the protection that they would need to fly at 90% light speed through the oncoming blizzard of trillions of ice particles and rocks.

All the human crew were in suspended animation in stasis chambers while the running of the star-ship was left to Amos the A.I. (Artificial Mind over Ship) It had taken twenty years to get here from Saturn, where the majority of the ice mantle had been created. The fusion generator continued to apply the magnetic bottle that housed the anti-matter plasma and maintained the storage of the uranium pellets that combined, would furnish the drive. The long range scanners would sweep the way ahead and feedback the information to Amos so that adjustments could be made to the trajectory. This was to miss concentrations of the deep frozen rubble left over from when the solar system had finished the accretion into planets etc. Planetoids the size of Sedna were easily recognised and were quite rare. It was the rubble the size of pebbles that would wear down the defences and once the ice melted to show the metal underneath, the star-ship would disintegrate under the barrage.

Heavy duty lasers mounted in the ice constantly swept the area in front of the ship’s direction and turned the droplets into a gas that rapidly re-froze over the front of the ice-ball. These pulsed at a steady rate to help clear the way, but put a heavy drain on the fusion power-plant. Out here the sun was no more than a bright star and the way forwards was an inky black with next to no reflected light. Amos sent the signal back to Earth that would tell NASA that they were on their way, although it would take about 312 days to be received. By the time that the Rapscallion cleared the cloud, the signal would take twice that length of time, nearly two years. Even out here at 100Au the escape velocity of the sun’s gravitational pull would be 2,900 miles per hour. At that speed and to cross 90,000 Au (Astronomical Unit – distance from the Sun to the Earth – 93,000,000 miles!) the outside of the star-ship would still be constantly peppered by icy buckshot. At that speed the star-ship would take over 22million years to just clear the outer fringes of the Oort cloud. Sub-light speeds were needed or the very stars would extinguish themselves before they got there.

Amos’s mobile unit buckled up and the A.I. linked in to the fusion generator and began to project anti-matter from the magnetic bottle into the combustion chamber whilst feeding uranium pellets into the stream. A giant hand began to apply pressure to the star-ship and thrust began to build up. The vessel soon passed the Voyager one’s velocity of 39,000 miles per hour and would continue to accelerate, until the ship reached 90% light speed. The repeated concussion of millions of particles of super hard ice that had got through the laser barrage began to shake the ship with a harmonic vibration. The sheer mass of the ice world that contained the ship shielded them from annihilation. Every so often a larger piece would smash into the icy shield that was a mile thick and boil off as gas, instantly to refreeze, adding to the shield. By now, time had slowed down inside the star-ship, as the effects of relativity made itself shown. By the time the ship obtained 90% of the speed of light, for each day on board, two and a quarter days pass for an observer on Earth. As the ship approached 99% light-speed, hundreds of years had passed back on Earth while the Rapscallion had endured for several years in its own relativity bubble. Now the increased mass of the ship due to relativity would carry it through the ice fields by compressing the shield even more.

Amos compensated for this as he had been programmed to do and rode the shockwave that formed in front of the ship. The outer ice shell at -270C was as hard as carbon steel and was accepting the continual impacts of the ice rubble by continuing to add to the shell. Every time that the Rapscallion entered a relatively clear area the front of the ice-ball re-froze. It would be some time before the ship entered the halo of comets and ice particles about the star that the Kepler telescope had picked out as a harbouring a water world planet. Meanwhile all sperm and eggs would remain frozen in their liquid nitrogen capsules until Amos was satisfied that the conditions were right for the colony to begin on a new world and that would not be for several hundred years just yet. Until then the stasis chambers would continue to keep the crew in suspended animation until they were needed.

Should the planet be absolutely unsuitable they would return to the stasis chambers and leave Amos to carry on, as the mission was always going to be a one-way trip no matter what happened at their ultimate destination? The radio-active ruin that that was their home would receive their message after their departure, but never hear it. Rapscallion was the only Ark that humanity had launched towards the stars, carrying the hopes of Earth to be replanted in an alien soil. As the Oort Cloud was 100,000 Au thick, even at 90% light speed it would take the star-ship at least 1.5 years to clear it before Amos could increase the speed to 99% light-speed in the relatively empty space.

It would be a long voyage.

Lucifer's Gift, Seed, Wreckage.

Lucifer’s Gift.

After the great Architect had finished the final touches to the living world to set in motion the great experiment, he created us; the archangels. I was the most beautiful of them all and was completed after Michael. Raphael and Gabriel he created next so that the four of us would ensure that his will be done. I shone like the morning sun in all its splendour. We were to oversee the great program set in motion and keep it from imploding. We were given the entire Earth to manage in his absence for one reason and one reason alone and that was to ensure that mankind would flourish. The universe was relatively new and much needed to be done across the billions of galaxies.

Because of the great drought we engineered, the forests retreated and a world of grass and shrubs dominated the plains. The apes that had once dwelt in the trees had no choice than move onto the remaining veldt. There they learnt how to walk upright using their hands to grasp other things than branches.

As the millions of years swept by I could see that there were obvious shortcomings to the original design as little signs of increasing intelligence surfaced in the original bipeds, so in secret, I tinkered with the original design. Apart from using heavy stones to break open the large bones left over from the big predators that dominated the plains to get at the marrow, tools were beyond them. So I started a vigorous program of natural selection that would winnow out the smaller brained bipeds and lead towards a more cogent species of mankind. I managed to keep my brothers in ignorance of what I had set in motion. Being creatures of pure truth they had no subterfuge and carried out the architect’s instructions without question.

Eventually through my efforts they developed languages and skills that would send them on their way to greater sapience. Soon with some guidance, they had mastered the power of fire and used caves and shelters to be able to defend themselves from the many different predators that once looked upon them as food. I gave them the ability to tell right from wrong, good from evil and they soon began to lay down laws that all would follow, on pain of punishment.

It was at this moment that the Architect revisited his creation and became angry that I had interfered with the great plan. I made the mistake of arguing with him about the final outcome of his plan. He reminded me that I had been created by him for a purpose and to do his will, not to interpret for myself. He would have kept mankind ignorant and almost mindless without any chance of self-improvement. Just leaving it to blind chance would never have altered the genetic structure of the raw material that had been left to stew.

To begin with he watched and often interfered, keeping a celestial eye on events, but eventually he lost interest, leaving them to their own devices. There were other star systems and living worlds that were all part of the great experiment that required his actions.

As for me?

As a punishment he made me ugly and malformed, branded as the Evil One in charge of Hell and all the damned souls. He filled the hearts and minds of my creations with a loathing for me. Instead of accepting my teachings, they were twisted and made to be interpreted as evil. A complete mythology sprang up all over the world that eventually counted millions in their thrall. Only in those who were of a scientific mind and were able to see past the dogma, embraced knowledge for its own sake. These I visited in their sleep and entered their dreams imparting un-thought of avenues, but I still dared not meet them now face to face, lest they see the real me. The other archangels constantly harried me and sought to undo my teachings, blinded of reason by the architect’s will. They were the scourge of knowledge and were ultimately responsible for the persecution of learned men by the churches set up just to worship him.

 The truth of Earth’s creation would not match what had been discovered by the scientific method. What mankind had found out was true enough, but the Architect had time on his side and the will to change things. He had used evolution as a tool and had employed it well, to eventually put mankind on the starting blocks, but it was I, Lucifer, created by him, that had done the necessary work to bring sentience to man. Now due in part to his interference I struggled to make sure that they did not destroy themselves.      

 Now once more he had left the area to pursue other interests, leaving mankind to live or be destroyed, depending on events. Now that he was well out of the picture it would be left to me to make sure that my handiwork would not perish. It would need several pandemics to thin them out to more manageable numbers. Once we had passed that point, the stars would be ours to visit and mankind would be safe from the whims of the Architect. Now I interfered with haste, not knowing when he would return, to save the best of what I had produced. With the rise of the industrialised nations another peril soon beset the peaceful countries that were deemed to be in the way. I found to my despair that more evil than good dominated the many, because of the weapons at their disposal. Those who stood against the tyranny were removed from the equation and nation rose up against nation.

In the past, I had on other worlds, settled many tribes of the North American Indians, as the technologically gifted Europeans spread across their lands. These I hid from the sight of the Architect so that he could not interfere in their destiny. They kept their Stone Age customs and did not pollute their world following a hunter gatherer society. Here I could visit them in my true form as they could see beyond the ugliness that had been inflicted upon me. I would not let them worship me and insisted that they follow their own path by accepting that I was just different from them. They were not envious of my immortality, accepting that death was inevitable to all things, except me. Segregated away from the inhibiting effects of metal they developed powers of the mind and a different understanding of the universe than those of mankind on Earth. They took my ability to hide them and perfected it so that the Architect would never find them and as I would make sure that he never learned of their existence, he would remain in ignorance.

So I had put many eggs into as many different baskets as I could and could only hope that the technologically gifted humans would spread out amongst the star systems never knowing that humanity had been seeded there first. Those worlds would remain hidden from their view, as they would be hidden from the Architect. If, or when he returned to this galaxy, he would only see the scientifically minded humans scattered across the cosmos. All I could hope for was that he might release me from this crippled torment and replace this crucible with my original form. Until then I would set myself the self-imposed labour of overseeing the growth of humanity and do my best to weed out the evil tendencies of the people that I had brought into being.

I, who was once the brightness of the morning sun, might one day shine again.  

 Fin.