* * * * *
“To the inhabitants of the planet Kiel3.” The voice that emerged suddenly sundered the ageless silence within the ice-cold subterranean vault. The speaker spoke into a complete darkness that momentarily detached him from the world around him and from any particular point in time. The language he used was not his own. It was a language he knew from the records only, ancient and powerful, from the sphinx-strewn sands of Kiel3.
“I send this dispatch to you from the Selesta, the glory of our Empire, the flagship created to ensnare a galaxy.” He continued quietly. “I am the last record-keeper of Selesta. I was not present when the Selesta visited your small world, nor was I responsible for the assistance your people once received from us as a sign of our Federation’s good faith towards you. A legacy of power and glory. The beginnings of your primitive planet and its first epics of empires and kings. We created you. Yet, after these aeons of time, there is something now which I must now ask your people to do for us, in return for my most solemn pledge—”
The voice, formerly bold, suddenly broke off. He went on after a moment, this time in a self-conscious tone edged with self-mocking humor. His words, the words of a king or general himself, now lost and alone in defeat, with no more legions or men to command.
“I shall not lie to you.” He amended himself carefully. “If you are to be involved in the destruction of the Seynorynaelian Empire, if the legends of our gods the Enorians can be believed, then I must be honest with you or risk everything I have spent a lifetime trying to achieve.
“Yet I ask each of you first who hear this message in the aeons to come, have you ever known what it is to be afraid to speak of what you have done? Have the limits of your deepest faith ever been tested fully?
“Have you ever found it difficult to proclaim your own sins before the iron judgment of so many?
“I admit that I am afraid; afraid that much of what I have to say will seem no more than meaningless wind to you, that I will not be able to reach you. And I am afraid because my own redemption rests in your hands.”
Why? Why did so much of our fate revolve around this planet Kiel3? The speaker’s thought slipped out, almost in grudging wonder. Kiel3—named after the pole star, the mariner’s star, was it not a planet created by the ancient Enorians? Created by their seeds of life, by the life cultures they had created.
Life cultures had been scattered across the universe. Seeds, as it were, cast by an unknown hand and left to grow wild—so were they all, all of the life-giving planets, even the great planet Seynorynael itself had grown from such a seed.
Seynorynael’s Empire had then left its own mark on the universe. Now, with Seynorynael’s era of glory erased by time, all that remained of her vanished civilization were the seeds of a fallen empire lying scattered among those others—long aeons dormant.
And on Kiel3, the last hope for the survival of them all.
Kiel3, a planet certain that it had grown all on its own.
But not for much longer, if I have my way.
The voice continued after a moment, dark, low, and reverberating, the melodic voice of a bard, the voice of a people whose language knew no harsh, guttural sound. It was the voice that had once swayed the will of nations throughout the known galaxies—that perhaps desired to do so again.
“I fear I am making little sense to you. This is a story of the epic tale of gods among men, beginning in the stars. It has a simple beginning, so I should begin there. And the beginning that matters to us as living beings, if not to the lifeless universe, is the beginning of human life.
“But what are we both, you and I, your people and mine? Where did our lives begin? It seems such a simple question, this one all beings in the universe have asked, yet who can answer it?
“Is life merely a spontaneous eruption? An accident of chance born on one lonely world at a time? Is it nothing more than an accident that will never be repeated in the same way again on any other planet? Or, once begun, does life grow like a contagion? A disease infecting the universe with foolish men, who turn to contemplation of questions whose answers can never be known?
Was it possible that these scattered species, who had come in contact with each other, might find a common biological ancestry, buried in time long ago?
“Would you believe me if I told you that all of this was possible?
“Would you believe me if I told you that all of this has already happened?
“Would you then ask—’who am I to tell you this?’
“My name means nothing, for I abandoned it long ago. I present myself to you now as simply a record-keeper. But I am Ornenkai. They called me ‘the golden one’, I was once the ruler of many men.
“My civilization, the civilization of the planet Seynorynael, carved out the largest known intergalactic empire in the universe. Our planet was three hundred and twenty million light years from your Milky Way Galaxy, within a large group of galaxies known to us as the Great Cluster, to you called Pleiades. There, in the Great Cluster Galaxy, thousands of intelligent species came to life, creatures of every size and shape imaginable, and one by one we Seynorynaelians subjugated them all.
“In the beginning, this was not our intention. Ours was a peaceful planet, located near the interior of a large whirlpool galaxy within the Great Cluster, the Pleiades. Long ago we believed that nothing which occurred in life, however important or insignificant, came about by chance, and that nothing which happened in life was without purpose and meaning. We believed in fate, as certainly as destiny. Even our most distinguished citizens kept absolute faith that it was our heroic duty to civilize the galaxy! We had all the known universe at our disposal.
“When our people made their first journeys into the heavens, our space explorers found the galactic cluster teeming with life. And we proved that life had spread from one world to another. We proved the legends of our ancestors, the Ferai-Lunei: the Comet Riders, passed down from before the dark ages of our world. Creatures who had ridden on the silver tails of comets to our planet, not only once, but twice in the murky prehistory of our world.
“The Comet Riders were no mere myth. They were good angel-gods, infinite in power and achievement. But we never knew who they were, or where they had come from; men some said were from a world called Enor.
“It was not until Fynals Hinev returned from the explorer mission that we knew with absolute certainty. Our civilization had truly begun in another time and place, on the legendary planet of Enor. When I was born, I did not know that my fate had also begun long ago on Enor, or that my future would extend so far, so very far beyond the natural bounds of time.
“I did not dream that any man could achieve immortality.”
“Nor that, thanks to the Emperor, Marankeil, I should become a god.”