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Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 63: Cooper 93
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Kondor 276
The octet of part-time adventurers pursued the wide hallway with Cooper and his swordlight leading the way. The floor was smooth, by design and not heavy use, he thought. They came to a fallen chunk of ceiling, but there was no way to shine a light on the ceiling, let alone reach it, as high as it was. The crew was more nervous at this proof that the upper passageway above them was decayed by age.
Muttering comments, the eight of them went farther after passing the multi-ton ceiling part and its smaller fragments.
Kark suddenly shouted out, “A light ahead!”
Cooper did not see it, but he did not have the same eyesight as the Martian Kark. It made sense that a Martian’s eyes might be more sensitive to dim lights. Also, he held the main light source, which must be blinding him a bit. The shout echoed down the hallway with beautiful reverbs. Cooper paused to listen, and decided that if it were safe this would be an excellent place to sing for a choir, and do a recording.
Hope filled his chest, and going forward he, too, saw the glimmer of light that strengthened as they walked to a steady welcoming light. Pressing on faster now, they passed a few chunks of ceiling, and barely noted them, or the dust on the floor as the light became a vertical bar. Entering a cul-de-sac of sufficient size that they could not see all the walls in detail despite the light in front of them, the octet studied with open mouths the idol or statue in front of them.
“Shining, Silent Light, watch over us, protect us, never let us fall into darkness,” Cooper heard Afo pray. Looking closer at the glowing thirty foot wall statue, he saw a form somewhat like a female, but with four arms, and eyes far too wide to be a daughter of Eve, and feet that bore six toes each and were absurdly large. Was this what she actually looked like? Did she actually exist, or was this ‘goddess’ a mere fable, an imagination?
She did not feel evil, and there did not seem to be another door out of the cul-de-sac. Looking around even as several other sailors began to worship, he cast his eyes on the bas reliefs carved in the wall. They went in circles, and much of it seemed almost understandable. Here was Jupiter. There was a comet exploding out of Jupiter; a starship in a solar system; war between weird aliens who looked like the goddess. But as he looked at the bas-relief squares he was having a hard time figuring out the meaning of the multiple circles.
“You start at the bottom with the personal insignia of the goddess, as this would probably be her story,” Afo said, and Cooper thanked him. That made sense. He looked for something that might be a personal insignia on her, and saw a multi-pointed asterisk on a sash about her waist, like a star.
Looking back, even as the others were getting out food to eat, he brushed them off, and continued searching. Ah, there was a star. And each square yard bas-relief to the right would be the next panel in the story, he thought. Next was an orbital map of a different star system, with two suns and four planets; then a picture of nine stars, and one separated from them, or going to them, or leaving them; a picture of an alien and a starship, different from her; a line representing a ship arriving in the Shining Light’s star system, and the odd aliens on board; a picture of many of the Shining Light’s people; arguments; a picture of the odd aliens and the Shining Light’s people standing together; a dead alien; many dead Shining Light; war as some sort of dart hits one of the four planets occupied by her people. Now it showed three planets in the system.
Cooper pursed his lips. He thought that what he was probably seeing was refugees who came for aid, and received it, but eventually a war broke out between the indigs and the refugees with one planet destroyed by some sort of kinetic energy weapon or antimatter missile.
The next relief showed the Shining Light in a starship leaving her system. So they fled, he deduced. They came to a singleton star system. It had eight planets, but while it had some similarity to Earth, some of it was off. For one, there was a pair of gas giants in the outer system that orbited each other.
There was a ringed planet with an already existing space-faring civilization which warned them off with ‘shots across the bow’ so they went to the fourth planet, which had no people, and made their life. For a long time they lived, and built things. The inhabitants of the most inner planet also became spacefaring. Soon some other planets joined them. The dwellers from the ringed planet began to build an empire, but it fell when the residents of one of the moons they had conquered took them over. Eventually, the residents of the ringed planet overthrew their new masters, but now chastened they did not seek empire again.
At this time, the old and odd aliens came to the system, and great war was fought. They wished to bring the Shining Light’s people, who had grown to great numbers as they had some form of extreme longevity, into submission. The fourth planet was shattered, and most of her people died. But in their death strike, they moved the blue planet that orbited the other gas giant into a retrograde spin to fly outward into a new orbit, and smash the enemy fleet.
The Shining Light and her people lived in the rocky remnants of an asteroid belt that had been her planet. But then something utterly astonishing happened, and Cooper could tell from the art that it had amazed and shocked everyone--and this to a people who had used a gas giant as a battering ram.
A planet appeared out of nothing. Over the course of six of its days, life sprouted on the planet. None could get close to it, but no one was particularly eager to do so, because whatever great power had caused water to appear out of nothing, and then become a planet, was not any power they wished to offend. But they could tell that by the eighth day of that planet that the residents too had failed the test of Right.
It was difficult to see what was happening on the planet, as a floating ice shield covered it. But then, over a thousand years later, a comet struck it and turned it to a water planet for a time. But beings soon spread across the planet again. Cooper staggered. He was looking at a retelling of Creation, the Fall of Man, and the Noahic Flood from a somewhat disinterested and distant alien viewpoint.
Another thousand or so years passed, and suddenly the planet that he recognized as Jupiter was wobbling. To balance itself, it threw off a very hot ball of matter that careened around the Solar System for a time as some mysterious force slowed it. Eventually, it slotted itself into Venus’ orbit.
“Just like Aphrodite being born from the head of Jove,” he murmured. In its path, it had done damage to Mars, Mercury, Earth, and the Asteroid Belt. But it had cooled, and so the Shining Light led some of her people to Venus. There she spread terraforming. But her husband disagreed with her, and went to Mercury. He and his people became the Dark Side Mercurians after they genetically adapted themselves, and lost their technology.
She had a smaller following, and so used her genetic engineering tech to create several new races. But she saw that it was corrupting her people to have lesser races, and so commanded them to join her in sleep. They would wake in ten thousand years, and look around. That was, he guessed, about the time of Christ coming to Earth.
Some of the residents of the retrograde spinning planet that had orbited Jupiter, the Neptunians, had gone to Earth and met Christ. At that time the Saturnians were still isolationist but had wanted tariffs, so the Neptunians had flown out around them, and by mistake on fuel and breaking parts had been forced to land on Earth. Thus they met Christ, and came back to Neptune to spread the Word. But as that happened, the Shining, Silent Light, the last survivor of the Great Escape from their home system, slept the millennia away.
He looked at her now with new eyes. She was not a goddess even if the Turquoise People of the Venusians and others thought so. But she was a deeply admirable woman who had fled her home in childhood, and served as guardian and counselor to her people for literally millennia.
If he did nothing, he rather thought she would wake up in about eight thousand years. What to do? He looked at the last panels, and thought they were instructions on how to wake her early if needed. But did he want to do that? Part of him definitely did. The chance to converse with a woman who was at least four thousand years old, not counting her sleep time, was a great wonder and an opportunity to learn so much. But what if she could not go to sleep again, and he stole her from her people?
“Sleep in peace, Shining, Silent Light,” he said quietly.
Then a panel opened, showing a glove which popped out an inch from the wall. Huh? What was this?
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #529: Characters in Action. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
