The light of the newborn sun rose that instant far enough above thehorizon to shine directly into the tower's upper dome-like room, and Iwas awe struck by the texture that the lights created on the glass ofthe walls, for when it shone through at just the right height, apreviously invisible picture came to view. It was of a towering clippership with sails that stretched across their masts like skin over thebones of a pleasantly plump fellow, the wind billowing them about at aleisurely rate. Waves broke gently upon the ship's side as the crewrested peacefully on the various cables and nets, all except for theone-legged captain who was busy looking at the map and accompanyingcharts. It was a quaint and beautiful scene, though it soon passed awayas the sun moved upwards in the sky, and I wouldn't have mentioned it,except that as it disappeared, I found myself looking at where it hadbeen, but instead of the ship, I saw directly through the glass theinhabitants of Nunami arising and beginning their daily business, ascene which I might have missed since I was previously wholly absorbedby the picturesqueness of the sky.
Usually the Zards would arise before dawn and be about their business,but because of the great flames of the night before, they had no doubthad trouble sleeping, and therefore slept later than usual when theyfinally did fall into the lands beyond consciousness. They hustled andbustled about the streets of Nunami, each doing their own business, andthere was much business to be done in a city in which all provisions areprovided internally, with no trade or commerce outside whatsoever. Therewere merchants and stores still, yet they were not traders butproducers, each making their own wares as they sold ones they hadalready made. Butchers sat in their shops with their blood-stainedaprons already donned, cobblers and tailors were busy with the day'srepairs and new creations, the milkmen paraded the streets slowly andmethodically, somehow getting their products to the citizens before 8AM. The farmers and herdsmen were also at work in the fields that werespread throughout the city, plowing and sowing, and being joined bythose who had just finished distributing the milk.
All was commonplace and normal, I thought, and I was surprised, for theZards were not at all martially minded, a great contrast to theirCanitaurian brethren. Of course, I had never actually met any of theCanitaurian commoners. It seems to me that the only ones who really aremartially minded are the leaders and politicians, everyone else seems tomind their own business, and sometimes I wonder if there would even beany wars if there weren't any governments with the power to wage one.There was a group of Zards by the government center, which was close tomy involuntary quarters, and they were leaning over an opening in theaqueduct that ran down into the lake in the southern section of thecity, branching off from there into all the various sectors. They weredumping a barrel of a fine, white powder into the water that was runningdown into the lake, and after the first had been poured in, they addedanother and another until they had put a good five barrels into thewater source. Once they had finished, they took the empty barrels to alarge cage that was down the road a bit, inside of a small grove oftrees and shrubs. Inside the cage was a multitude of little beetles thatcrawled around every which way and were evidentially feasting on a largechunk of glowing material. For a moment I was surprised, and wonderedwhat it was they were doing, but then it hit me: they were the delcatorbeetles that Bernibus had told me of earlier, the ones that absorbed theradioactive material and stabilized it. As I learned later, they had twogood uses, one was that they consumed the unstable materials andneutralized them, but the other was that their droppings, when mixedinto the water supply, also gave all that consumed them a greatertolerance for nuclear material. It was almost ironic that their wholeway of life was dependent on the feces of another life form, but I willrefrain from turning it into a metaphor.
The female Zards wore a black headpiece that mostly covered their faces,and at first I found it strange that for all his talk of progress, theKing's people still oppressed their women, perhaps there wasn't as muchprogress as he had boasted, or, more likely, he was unaware that therewas no such thing as progress, just different manifestations ofoppression. History repeats itself, they say, and indeed it does, bothliterally and figuratively.
There suddenly arose a great commotion in the square between the Templeand the palace, and as I looked, I was surprised to see that there was alarge crowd gathered. In the middle of the square there were two groupsof ten Zards facing each other, with a single Zard in between them, andaround the outside of the plaza area stood a hundred or so spectators,apparently watching those in the middle. A moment after I startedwatching, the solitary Zard, the referee as I found out, walked to theedge, and each of the groups walked to one of the opposing sides andthen turned about to face the other. The referee let out a loud yell andin a flash, the two teams ran at each other headlong, until convergingsomewhere in the center of the field. As they met they dived upon oneanother and pushed and shoved until the left team had isolated one ofthe right's players, who was the only one on his team wearing an orangejersey. They dived on him and jumped until the whole field was piledhigh with them, and then they slowly began to disembark. Once all of theopposing team's players were off of the orange shirted Zard, all wassilent and still as the referee held his hand aloft and began countingwith his fingers. Everyone held their breathe and stood tensely by asthey watched. Just before the referee's tenth and final finger wascounted, the orange shirted player rose from the ground, amidst thescreams of joy from his team and about half of the crowd, apparentlytheir fans. The two teams then returned to their respective sides, andagain the referee yelled loudly, signaling them to rush at each otheronce more, and more of the same ensued, this time it being the otherteam's orange shirted player to get pounced on. Once again there was ahigh pile on top of him, and once again, as they crawled off and he wasexposed, the referee began to count. Except that this time the orangeshirted one never got up. The other team cheered again and so did theother half of the crowd. The referee went to a pole on the sidelines andput up the number '1' on it while a few bystanders picked the Zard upand carried him off the field. They continued to play in this fashionfor awhile, going until one team or the other had no longer any playersto be jumped upon, but I was too disgusted at their violent nature towatch, and instead walked over to the end table and picked up thetelescope, taking back as I did my thoughts about the innocence andgentleness of the common folk.
With the telescope in hand I went over to the eastern side of the roomand began to closely inspect the savanna in an attempt to get a bird'seye view of the point of my entrance in Daem. It looked rather the samefrom above as it did from below, though the smells and sounds weremissing, and I found that it was rather bland once the initialexcitement, surprise, and respect of its novelty had worn off. Indeed,it was quite too dull for me, even in my state of boredom as a prisoner,though I suppose that that isn't a proper description of my feelings,for I wasn't free from excitement or intriguing events, but rather, Iwas in the middle of a campaign of new and anticipated things, butsimply unable to participate. Stuck in a room 800 feet from the groundwith walls of glass that allowed observation of the whole island ofDaem, which I assumed to be the only civilization in the world, whilegreat events unfolded around me, of which I was supposed to be theprimary actor, was very disconcerting, though I find in retrospect thatfate worked so mysteriously in my situation that it is quite puzzling tothink about, meaning, of course, my relationship with the doom ofhumanity as preventer and provoker, as savior and condemner.
My writing of this manuscript may be considered quite a big cheat, as itdetails my direct involvement with Onan, the Lord of the Past, and thegeneral circumstances of the end of life on earth, for the current ageat least, but still I am allowed to write it. Onan told me just a fewmoments ago that I could write it and tell all that I want, to which Iwas taken aback. When I asked why he would allow me to break the law ofthe council of the gods, he replied that there was no rule against ahuman agent from detailing his involvement in the actions of thedivines. It was allowed, he told me, because it would never m
ake a miteof a difference, for even if it were able to survive the bitter ice agesand all the evolutionary periods in this TAB (Temporal Anomaly Box,which I will explain later, since I get ahead of myself and have nottold of them yet), and even if it is found by humans, and even if theyare capable of understanding the text contained within it, even thenthey will take no gain from it. I was again taken aback when he saidthis, for though I know humans to be stubborn and foolish, in general, Iwould think that they would at least mind the warning when theconditions of its completion came to pass. But he dissuaded me, tellingme that my coevals of the next age would no doubt take it as a novel.
At this I took your defense quite personally upon myself, and demandedin as not so humble a tone as would be thought proper, though as I amabout to die within the next day or two, I have to admit that I don'tgive much of a damn for politics or manners. And yet, with all my ardorI was quickly subdued by a curt rebuke by my interlocutors (for Zimriwas there as well), which was, quite simply, that you hadn't taken Homerfor any more than a creative poet, even after a few thousand years ofstudy, so why should my meager manuscript make such a large impact. Atthat, I acquiesced to them and admitted that on that end my attempt tosave humanity one way or another was contemptible, but I still write, asyou see, for the story's sake, and possibly for my own materialimmortality. But never mind that, for it is high time that I went backto my story.
I was looking through the spyglass at the various areas of Daem where myadventures had so far taken me. After I had examined them all for a fewmoments, I felt a strange urge to use the telescope to look closely atthe mainland that I had seen before, to see what the effects of theGreat War had been there. As I turned the telescope's sights toward it,I was at once surprised and flabbergasted at what caught my eye. Therewere living beings on the mainland, not too far from the coast. And notonly that, but they were standing upright, though stooped, as if byweariness and the wiles of life, and they seemed, in general, toresemble humans, not directly, but as much as the Zards and Canitaursdid, and with the effects of the radioactive instability greater on themainlands, it would seem natural that they would be further removed fromnormality than those on Daem. The land itself was barren and flat, withsparse vegetation in the forms of small, deformed shrubs and a short,weak looking grass. As I looked closer I saw that there were about sixof the strange, stooped humanoids, and they were gathering the fruits ofsome of the shrubs for consumption. In a few moments they finished theirtask and began to walk further inland, and I followed their progresswith interest until they finally disappeared behind some of the smallplateaus that were scattered here and there among the wastelands.
Putting the telescope down, I walked over to the couch and laid down onit, with indignation filling my every move, for I was almost enragedthat the Zards and Canitaurs both should fail to tell me, whom theyclaimed to respect as kinsman redeemer and whose decisions would sealtheir fate for good or ill, that there were other survivors from theGreat Wars. I was also shocked by their selfishness, for while theyfought pettily amongst themselves over how they would change their landsfor the better, a seemingly important question about past and future,they completely ignored the sufferings of other humanoids, to whom theirway of living no doubt seemed like a paradise. But there they were,stuck across the sea on their desolate lands, unable to cross to Daemand enjoy its plentiful resources and luxuries, yet not at all unawareof them, for as they labored in their hopeless ways, they could see Daemshining like a heavenly vision before them, one which they were not ableto touch or grasp, but instead one that must infuriate them to no end intheir heart, at the knowledge of fate's unfairness and their utterhopelessness and complete poverty, not because of their laziness ortheir ignorance or anything involving their actions whatsoever, butsimply because they had been born on the wrong side of the sea.
At that moment I was embittered against both the Zards and the Canitaursfor their selfishness and their pretensions of morality. There is nomorality where one sees another starving and suffering and does nothelp, when one sees a whole race of people living on a land wherenothing but sorrows dwell, but will not let them share the wealth thatwas given one by no doing of oneself. There is no morality inselfishness, and when I saw those wretched people, I no longer felt likeredeeming those on Daem from the impending doom of humanity. Whateverplans they had for me they never told, I sensed, for there was somethingdeeply wrong about the way they looked at me and talked about me,something deeply wrong about the way they patronized me and treated melike a silly child, while I was the one who was to decide their fate.The Canitaurs and the Zards both looked at me with a subtle sense ofdeceit and ill will, all that is, except Bernibus, which is why ourfriendship flourished so swiftly. As I laid there with thoughts of Onanand the decision that I was to make, and of all the responsibility thatwas put upon me involuntarily, as I thought of the conflict of past andfuture at the neglect of the present, as I thought about theself-obsession and overindulgence that come with wealth, and the desirefor still more that accompanies it, I fell to sleep and into a placewhere no troubles lay, for my long day and night had left in me no energyfor dreams.
Chapter 10: Devolution