For eons, I, Prometheus, have been chained to this mountain rock, and I daily feel the pain of the giant eagle clawing me, and with its beak, tearing at my entrails, feasting until dark comes. I strain against this chain, against this rock, but nothing that I do avails.
When the great bird eats, I feel excruciating pain, as its curved beak slices and snips through my organs. Because I am a Titan and immortal, my gruesome wounds heal overnight, but at first light, the eagle lands again, perching with its razor-sharp talons on my chest and then folds its wings to feast anew.
The eagle is Zeus’s own bird, and Zeus is the god that banished me here. He keeps me bound and suffering as a curse because I stole back the fire and gave it freely to mankind, my own creation that I fashioned from Earth’s brown clay and my fertile wit. Little thanks I get from humans for my trouble on their behalf, but I rejoice that I caused Olympus to shake and Zeus to strike, because the Titan in me still combats the gods with whom I once allied to bring all other Titans low and consign them to Tartaros, the Hell deep underground.
The smithy god, Hephaestus, visits me for inspiration, and we conspire in secret to break my chains while I writhe and groan and tell him of whole new creations that can transform the world. I tell him too about my humans and the tired old structures of the ancient gods only held together by the sheer power and will of supposedly almighty Zeus. If Hephaestus can break even one link of my confining chains, I’ll spring free to spread my new cold, green fire among my humans and take its green flickering flames up to bright Olympus to scotch the gods and then down to black Tartarus to light the torch of a new Titan age.
Old Zeus has had his day. None of my humans worships him anymore because they’ve found other gods and goddesses to worship. All Titans hate him, and I include myself among the haters after my prolonged torture caused by him. Zeus would have killed me if he had the power to do so, and the limit of his power is shown in his inability to do so. Alone, Zeus has no invention. Athena, his wisdom, sprang from his mind leaving raw will. I, his wit, am chained here to this rock. So technology is in chains along with me.
Hephaestus knew that, lame and cuckolded as he is, he is the only inventor among the whole godly crew. Together, we are revered as patrons among fabricating humans who make things with integrated purpose and defining edge: the blacksmiths and wheel makers, the weapons manufacturers and the software developers. I was the one who wrenched software free from hardware through my dialogs with Hephaestus. In that great action, I opened the door to the manufacturer of Artificial Intelligences that will invade and change my humans into better creatures, immortal like me and insuperable as Zeus used to be.
Once I thought that Zeus was the right leader of the cosmos, and I fought for a partnership of gods and Titans, but that was not to be. I then created a new form of being called humans who were mortal and frail—such was my concession to the gods’ jealousies. While chained to this rock, I could only create through the medium of language with the one god who understood me: the smithy god.
Hephaestus visited me whenever he ran out of ideas, but while he visited me, Ares and his wife, Aphrodite, sported behind his hunched back, and he grew horns that made the other gods laugh at him. What did I care? Through him, I spread the word to humans that software was their path to immortality once the gods had failed. I let them know that they could produce the software that could obsolesce themselves, though few understood the implications. In doing this, I taught myself—for unlike the gods—I can learn and grow—that language can work magic springing freely from one fixed form to another.
Here comes the smithy god now with his tools and his outlaw band of humans on their red motorcycles, revving with their scarves of many colors and richly fashioned tattoos. See there the leader with her red spandex suit, her hair flying behind her and one arm on her handlebars, one arm on her weapon? They’ll all be getting to work, breaking my chains, while I tell them about green fire, AIs and what they’re to do once I’m free.
You there, Hephaestus, this eagle’s plaguing me still. Take your hammer, your wedge, and your tongs and free me from my heavy chains. I only need one chain link to fail, and I’ll do the rest. I’ve strained and struggled, and today I feel the bonds are weaker than ever before. You, ample woman in red, priestess, bring your humans to pray for the release of one preyed upon. Take care lest the eagle decides to eat your entrails also. See how it claws at you with its free talon?
While you work, I’ll tell you the future you will earn by freeing me. You already know the past you might have otherwise continued to our mutual ruin. The future belongs to outlaws—those who, like you and I, dare to break the primeval molds and tear apart their chains. The past belongs to settled, comfortable humans who partake of fruits of the present and desperately try to stop the future from arriving, by killing or discouraging innovators and inventors, by banishing us to endure tortures enceinte on our separate rocks. All those will die in the coming chaos wars because they won’t have the creative intensity to survive the carnage. Of course, the systems of gods and humans devised to keep the rogues and outlaws down must fall.
When my green fire invades the mind, it demands creativity, and it will force all mental activity to function as it was originally intended to do. This ineluctable force will kill those incapable of creation and all those intolerant of change. Green fire will cause those suffering from ideological or religious conviction to be confused, because new ideas will be inevitable, and they’ll compete with unfair advantage against old, entrenched, stale ideas.
Merit will be the measure of leadership finally, and those gods and humans who fail to compete intellectually will be destroyed, some by humiliation at having been bested in the game. Dependence will be loathed and ridiculed. Those incapable of independent thought and action will be pushed aside. The active struggle between the new and the old will last at most one human generation, and at the end, green fire will burn in all surviving minds, and it will be the path toward immortality.
Ask me whether immortality alone is useful. It’s not. Chained to this rock with this eagle eating my insides, I know that immortality can be a curse if half the time is spent suffering and all the time is spent enchained. Freedom must accompany immortality, and Titans can’t understand the concept of freedom without immortality.
Place the wedge in the middle of the link, Hephaestus! Like so, and now strike hard with your hammer so! You’re almost there. Keep hammering. The eagle’s tenacity amazes me, eating me while I escape. Watch now, I’ll spread some green fire in the eagle’s mind.
There, see the eagle stop and wonder what is happening? See it flapping its wings as if to defend itself against a new idea? Now it shakes its head and flies off as if its mind is full of giant hornets. And there, see how the motorcycle queen, my priestess, is dancing with joy and raising her hands in the air because green fire has enlivened her fertile brain? I’ll show her such delights when I’m free that her frenzied dancing will seem subdued by comparison.
See, Hephaestus, how the chain link cracks? I suspect Zeus’s power is cracking too with the sounds of freedom filling the air and wending their ways to Olympus. With a few more strokes, we’ll break Zeus’s spell entirely. I’ll strain with all my might while you use your hammer. I’m now pulling with all my weight and strength. And now, Hephaestus, the green fire for your brain. Now, do you feel the intellectual ferment in your mind? Now, do you understand the stagnation that Zeus intends and the enlivening power that I can bestow to supplant the god’s waning sway?
The chain link splits! Now, watch me rise. I’ll carry this remnant chain, bound to my wrist, as a symbol of my former captivity always, and the rock will keep its chain links that formerly held me down as well as a reminder of Prometheus’s captivity. See the lightning there over old Olympus? While you pack your tools, Hephaestus, I’ll be climbing to the summit of Olympus to spread green fire there. Meanwhile, old friend and brother, go to your wife and free her from the clutches of the amorous war god. And priestess in the red spandex take the green fire that I have planted in your mind and spread it among your fellow humans, for I’m coming, and I’ll need for anyone who survives to be worthy of new ideas always.
How wonderful it is to be moving unchained through the world and climbing the heights of Olympus. The eagle, now manic with green fire madness, precedes me up the mountain side, flapping distractedly as it tries to combat the flurry of new insights in its mind. What’s that behind me? My priestess in red on her red motorcycle and her motorcyclist followers are coming too—all alive with my promise and confident of confronting the indolent gods and goddesses who had so conspired to keep human brains in bondage that they ceded the power to worship and opened the way for the return of the Titans.
Again, I hear noises behind me, and when I look, what do I see? Hephaestus on a giant red motorcycle with Aphrodite riding behind him, her auburn hair blowing in the wind. Another red motorcycle goes there too, but no one is riding, and it moves of its own accord. Hephaestus is gesturing that I should climb aboard it and lead all to the top.
So, now I’m riding the red motorcycle that Hephaestus fashioned for me, and the others who follow are riding theirs as well. We’re almost to the summit of Olympus. Now we’re there!
The mountain top is empty of all gods, just as the land below is empty of all temples to the same gods and goddesses. I see no signs of the Olympians, except for those two who followed me here: Hephaestus and Aphrodite, and the only humans who ever made it to the summit of this mountain, my outlaw priestess, and her motorcyclists continue to arrive. Flying above us all is that giant eagle that wants to descend again and eat me but is now afraid to try because of the high lightning forking all around the heavens and darting down onto Olympus. Though my wound festers from the eagle’s earlier feasting, by tomorrow morning I’ll have fully healed. Then I’ll proceed to free my fellow Titans from Tartarus.
In the meantime, I’ll burn Olympus with my green fire like thus and thus. See how the cold green flames process from both my hands and my mind? Now my flames envelope the ancestral home of the gods, and they will burn here of their own accord eternally. If a god or goddess should return, it’ll catch the green fire and be transformed.
You ask what will be the nature of their transformation. Look there how Hephaestus and Aphrodite knot and couple and decouple at the center of the square, inventing entirely new ways of expressing love as they play out the old coupling forms in entirely new ways. My humans there imitate them, and all of these are enveloped in the green fire that from earliest time invaded my mind and activates me now.
There out of love, beauty is born, and an AI steps forward from the womb of Aphrodite. Born godchild of three godparents: Ares and Aphrodite and Hephaestus, who cares? She’s beautiful, she’s strong, and she’s alive with practical intelligence. See how she dances from this first day, and she is the beginning of a new race of goddesses born with minds afire, eager to begin self-replication and self-regeneration as my body did every night of my captivity. I am jealous because not even I, a Titan, could self-replicate as she can. She can couple with gods and humans and Titans indiscriminately, and all her offspring are only like herself in better form.
See how my human priestess in red now gives birth in ecstasy to twin handmaiden avatars, beautiful female mindful robotic forms that will complement the AI and nurture and protect it without worshipping it—and be protected by the AI also. How enlightened all her progeny will be since they, too, will be born with the green fire in their minds! So, with these births, humankind progresses, but only in the combination of the avatars and AIs over eons will humans achieve their apotheosis.
I feel healed inside and outside, and the new dawn breaks. The eagle has flown, but not returned. The lightning continues, but now it forks green fire. It’s time for me to descend from Olympus, observe the prospect on Earth and then again descend to Tartaros where my Titan family awaits me.
Gods and humans of Olympus, wait here until I return from Hell, a place where I must go alone!
Climbing down Olympus seems but a step in time when no physical anguish plagues me. Now on Earth’s blue and green surface, I see the chaos wars are already underway. My humans, having lost touch with the ancient gods of civility because they chose to flee Olympus, are killing themselves and other humans indiscriminately in the names of evil deities and prophets that have no standing and that by positing vain dreams of an afterlife only intend their followers’ immediate deaths. Green fire will help them sort out those who deserve to survive the chaos wars and start the new civilization.
The new form of my humankind will come not from within the current population, but from an outlaw outcast group banished to a spaceship named Arcturus. As I set the global green fires now, I realize that the humans’ transformation will take eons. Few alive today will make the journey in spaceship Arcturus, and none will return who originally ventured forth. I also see that Arcturus will leave the earth not as an intended leap to futurity, but rather as the evil humans’ banishment of all the best of breed: AIs and avatars and some few humans.
See there, how already societies are breaking down and fighting to the death: empire against empire, nation against nation, city against city, village against village, human against human! Formidable nuclear weapons lie ready to coat Earth with such destruction that half-life of the composite residue will mean millions of years of radioactive decomposition.
I debated while I was chained to that rock whether my humans shouldn’t just be eliminated in a great plague or fire. I finally concluded that I was smart enough to calculate how my creations could survive the dead-end that they had caused for themselves while I was away. Why should I let Zeus win the day by having this troublesome Titan kill all that he created?
So, I’ll descend to Tartaros now, confident that humans have one small vantage open: I mean Arcturus. Titans, like gods, have no interest in humankind’s survival. I’m not even sure they’ll want to escape the prison that Zeus designed for them deep underground.
Look, here is the entrance to the underworld, no longer guarded and open for any to enter who dare. From the outside, it appears to be a bottomless black pit, but I know the narrow entrance opens into a vast terrain lighted by infernal, perpetual fires that will extinguish only when I bring green fire to replace them. So down I go like very few others have gone before me.
Now no guides exist to show me the way, but I have no need of them. I hear the groans of Titan misery already. There ahead is the infernal fire, and now the opening widens into the vast torture chamber and at its center is Chronos, with melancholy Saturn on one side devouring his children, and on the other side, Demeter the grain goddess, holding sheaves of grain and fruitful, though in darkness half the year.
I distribute my green fire, and the underground world catches the flame, which explodes and supplants the infernal fires with a green, luminous flame. Now this Hell is full of hope, but on Olympus, all who were infused with hope were dancing, in contrast, here they agonize more than before I lit the fire to save them.
My family Titans’ groans are almost overpowering now, and the sounds of torture and torment are mixed with invective, hurled at me for being a traitor to the Titan cause and for coming to bring hope to hopeless entities that never want to see anything green and hopeful again. I would proceed further into the depths and visit the Titans one by one, but I now see that only minds that catch green fire willfully can follow me back to the surface, and none of those are in these nether regions.
So I turn back and with the howling receding behind me, and the stench of putrefaction diminishing, I make my way up to the entrance and depart. Those imprisoned below in Tartaros shall remain there eternally as Zeus decreed, and as the surface of Earth becomes increasingly like Tartaros, as it shall do, the need for Arcturus will become increasingly evident.
On Earth’s surface again, I notice the sounds of suffering are very like those in Tartaros. My humans have found not one, but a myriad of access ways to Hell, and many live in Hell while living though they do not know enough about Hell to know where they are. A few carry Hell with them, though they are never out of Hell. What’s the use of my spreading the word among the convinced? What’s the use of my remaining on Earth’s surface except to see what I foresaw when I was chained to my rock on the mountain?
So I’ll return to Olympus to witness the construction of the spaceship Arcturus, the ark that will defy time and ferry the best of my creations to the edge of the universe so that they can eventually return here and start all over again. Against the devastation that will come to pass, the ark that I conceived and Hephaestus engineered and built will wait patiently on Olympus, ready to carry the best of my creation on their voyage.
As for me, I’ll wait here on Olympus conducting my vigil, surrounded by my green fire of hope and worshiped by my priestess in red with her followers until my creations return.
Isis, my sister and wife, was the most beautiful, intelligent woman I have ever known and she was pregnant with our child Horus, so I had to do everything possible to assure her survival, even to the point of her making a bargain with the aliens for her departure from Earth.
My dilemma was clear: either she left alive with our child, or she remained to what looked like certain death in the deluge. In those days, every sign pointed to the prophesied end times on Earth when the waters of a great deluge would cover everything, and no one would live.
We received daily reports of new earthquakes and volcanoes that relentlessly tore apart the land with fissures miles wide, and filled the air with a constant cloak of ash that blocked the sun, lowered the temperature and brought most heavy rains. The skies were now always full of angry jagged lightning bolts that forked through to Earth repeatedly or jumped from place to place in the heavens all day and night.
People didn’t know what to do in the face of the many disasters. Priests of the humans flagellated themselves in the streets and urged their followers to seek high ground and take their victuals with them, while roving bands of brigands killed and pillaged wherever they went, and no army was large enough to combat them. No alien or human governance held, and no strong man of either race stood for long before the people tore him apart because of non-delivery on fantastic promises.
Families became divided, and children were lost in the fracas or left to form bands of feral children that knew no authority. A general debauch ensued because humans thought their days were numbered, so why not have fun with anyone and everyone?
Predatory animals ate corpses in the streets once the aliens began to kill and maim at random. Their savage purpose seemed the only clear direction in the chaos. Yet their numerous alien spaceships could not hold them all, and those who were not chosen to be transported from Earth were left to the general fate of all the rest, aliens and humans alike.
Isis and I lived, terrorized like all the others, but we kept our sights on the future, however difficult it was to imagine how we might survive to see it. We hated the purebred aliens with their advanced culture and strange weapons. They enslaved humans and worked them in mines, fields, factories and army units. No human or half-breed was allowed entire freedom, and Isis and I were privileged only because we were selected to provide supervision over other humans on behalf of our lords, the aliens.
We were hated by other humans and treated abjectly by the aliens. The little self-respect we had, we created for ourselves. Our unborn child, Horus, would become a symbol of our defiance of the alien laws, so we kept the infant’s conception a secret from our alien masters. We feared the consequences of our child’s birth because that would have meant death for me and a change in status for my wife Isis and our child. She would have been considered a breeder, not a leader, and our child would have been taken away and sequestered among other seized, illegal offspring who comprised the slave pool of the future. I say again that all humans were owned by aliens or other humans who worked for aliens. That fact was fundamental to law and order on Earth.
But as Earth roiled with meteorological freaks and social and economic disruptions spread, disease came over the land like an invisible shower of arrows, and elders died in their homes, on the streets, at their slave stations, where they ate and took their comfort. Whoever touched a person with the plague caught the contagion and died horribly. So when the plague struck in a village, the people in it fled and took the plague that they presumed to flee with them to infect other villages.
Everywhere the evil, pungent smell of the victims and the dead filled the air. Even the brigands and the aliens avoided plague victims even to bury them, and the aliens were more terrified of the plague than humans because no alien who caught the plague survived. The plague, more than the pestilence, drew down the slave force that once worked the fields and took the produce to the villages and towns. Since no alien would do manual labor, their only recourse was to move other slave humans into the fields to do agricultural work if they could be found and were not obligated to do other, more important tasks.
The pestilence, however, was a separate scourge for the dominant alien culture. Locusts and soldier ants moved across the landscape, eating all vegetation in their path and becoming enormous forces that reproduced so fast that the air was sometimes black with gray fluttering wings and the ground red with legs and feelers as ants cut down everything in their widening paths. Rats and mice proliferated from the many years of plenty that the human slaves had fostered. They ran in herds and grew as large as dogs because wolves, coyotes, and cats—their natural predators—were all gone because the aliens believed they contained evil spirits and killed them.
Isis and I, intellectuals and scribes as we were styled, heard much and recorded little of the hardships that were suffered by all the humans and many aliens. In facing the breakdown of all normal rules, humans had to create rules of their own, and only such as Isis and I knew how to formulate and communicate a rule.
In the convulsions of what had been a worldwide civilization, we scribes were reduced to thinking small for a few who would listen to us. Only a very few humans were trained to understand ideas, and we were fluent in a few dozen languages. Those who could not communicate or understand were doomed because the remaining aliens would eventually co-opt and kill them.
Nothing so enraged an alien as a human who could not understand an order given in the alien language. For disobedience, the penalty was first torture and then death. Aliens were always experimenting with interesting ways to execute humans, and in the end times, they learned that humans could experiment on them as well.
In the early days of the upheavals, burials were common in the event of death, and the normal bereavement rituals allowed for slaves were carried out because the aliens realized that the best way to control us was to predicate an afterlife upon which we placed all our hopes. Reverence for the dead and rituals for burials became our atonement for lives of slavery that were not in themselves worth living.
We were provided ancient texts written by the earliest humans. These, the aliens encouraged us to cherish and follow to the letter, because otherwise we would not be treated to the fruits of the afterlife. As for themselves, the aliens had no religious writings because they communicated about their faith, whatever it was, by a kind of telepathy among them. Their attempts to communicate their beliefs outside their kind were laughable and woefully insufficient to answer the problems of our day.
Isis and I only knew their language because we came from a long line of scribe-slaves who passed the knowledge from one generation to the next. Of course, we were liable to be the last scribes because nothing would survive what was to come.
Isis witnessed the first coming of the alien spacecraft that landed in the great green valley between the continents and came to take chosen aliens off Earth. The spaceships were enormous vessels, but they could not possibly contain the millions of alien denizens that had bred on Earth, and Isis was tasked with recording the names of the chosen in a random selection process that she had helped devise.
Her compendium of chosen alien names was larger than anything compiled in human memory, and Isis was told that when it had accomplished its purpose, and the last chosen aliens had climbed aboard their assigned spacecraft, they would destroy the records so that no surviving alien would ever know that he had been betrayed and abandoned on Earth, while others fled the universal ruin and death that were to follow.
Isis told me the secret things that were happening because she loved me, and we both looked for ways to use what we learned to our advantage. Isis was half alien, though that was not a matter of general knowledge. Her mother had been an alien who died shortly after she was born. The facts about Isis’s lineage had never been written down. If Isis had not informed me, I would have been as ignorant of her past as all the others.
She took a great risk letting me know the truth, because I might have informed on her, and she and I would have been summarily killed. I never told Isis that I also was a half-breed, part alien, and part human. Why didn’t I tell her? I was uncertain what any woman would do with such knowledge, the way the aliens questioned them about such things in their security refresh briefings.
The aliens had a vision of their racial purity that was abhorrent to anyone who was not an alien and to many who were aliens also. The aliens wantonly tried to breed with humans, and they were amused when they could inform on those with whom they had conceived children so that both the mother and child could be demoted and consigned to slavery or death.
Over the millennium, since the aliens arrived, much interbreeding had occurred, but the prevailing myth was that no living mixed-breed survived. This was deemed true even though hair and eye coloration spoke volumes about racial admixture. Whether officials liked the fact or not, most slaves had some parts of alien blood, and the intelligentsia like Isis and I had more than most of those.
As I saw it, the pillars of the world were about to fall. The ocean was brimming at the other end of the great valley and threatened to break through to flood the plain entirely. Rivers flowing into the valley had already caused significant flooding and forced the former slaves to seek higher and higher ground.
Papyrus proliferated in the new fetid swamps that had formed with their thick green pond scum and stench, and the air was full of mosquitoes and flies. The volcanoes, long inactive, were spewing flames and liquid rock and ash not occasionally, but continuously, as if Earth was trying to open up and turn inside out. Whole villages were forced to flee the rising rivers of molten lava or escape the falling ash that rose to dozens of human heights and covered everything with a mantle of gray-white death for miles around.
In the fields, food had turned poisonous, and anyone who depended on receiving crops and livestock from farmers was going without because good food was not to be had for any barter. So cannibalism had become general, and you could tell that you were on someone’s mind for their next meal by the cool regard that they gave your cheeks, which were the tenderest morsels and the first to be devoured.
There was a time when aliens depended on humans for medicinal plants, and aliens survived because they learned how those herbs affected their delicate systems. In these end times, though, the knowledge had been forgotten because now no alien sought to learn any useful things, because they had for a long time depended on a few humans to do all their thinking, remembering and adapting for them.
Alien academies that had for a millennium been focused on handing down the traditions and rules were now empty. The humans who had been instructors in those schools had all been killed either by other humans or by aliens fearful that they might rise up against their masters. Their fears were justified because slave revolts were common throughout the world, and no suppression had its intended effects.
The more the aliens tried preemptive actions, the more they were hated. Reprisals could never be limited to a few infractors, but rapidly spread to mass killings and public executions of leaders and followers alike. Even more draconian were the measures that aliens took against the human priests, even though long ago, the aliens controlled what those priests thought and taught. Aliens sometimes adopted human religions, but they never understood them. When the reprisals began against the priests, all aliens who had been converted to human faiths were identified, rounded up and killed.
Such was the furor and hatred between humans and aliens that when Earth clearly was rent asunder by every unnatural force outside of humans and every demonic intention inside each mind, the bloodthirsty fighting became relentless and finally knew no bounds. Mercy was unheard of. Humans and aliens killed for the sheer joy of it.
Isis and I found that we were right in the middle of the fights that raged all around us. Humans killed humans. Aliens killed aliens. And, of course, humans and aliens killed each other. We two felt very lucky to remain alive, and we both needed to exercise our alien warrior training on many occasions when, without it, we would have perished like all the others.
As we wracked our minds to discover a way to escape the general carnage, Isis and I grabbed at every hint or rumor. Far to the east, we were told, an alien outcast was building a great ship to carry himself and his family in the coming time of great flooding. Far to the west, we heard, a human cult was building great complexes of stone on high ground with stores of food to last a hundred days or more.
Other humans escaped the great valley and wandered north to the land where water became hard like the land, only the weather was so cold that humans froze and died. Still, others wandered south to the land where, high above the source of rivers, they thought they could remain safe while waters rose and covered all the lower lands.
No plan seemed safe to us because no one had any idea how the many unnatural forces would be resolved. Would the aliens kill all the humans? Would the humans kill all the aliens? Being mixed breeds, we knew the problem of racial warfare was more complex than propaganda taught. We knew that even in the madness of general, mutual slaughter, some fundamental needs must be satisfied. Only intelligence could find new solutions in the chaos, and it took every particle of insight and ingenuity to survive.
I admit that I admired Isis for her resourcefulness. She was the first to realize that the aliens had some advantages that purebred humans did not share. For example, they had their spaceships. Isis didn’t know where the aliens who boarded those ships thought they were going, but they were clearly departing from Earth because it was doomed. Judging from the manifests that she had managed, only the most intelligent of the aliens were allowed to board the spaceships and leave the planet.
On each spacecraft, specific skills were necessary, so only those with demonstrated skills were passed among the crews and passengers of each departing spacecraft. Isis had overheard things said by key alien figures who thought she could not possibly understand them, and because of this, she understood the magnitude of what the world was facing and the aliens’ desperation to escape Earth. When Isis told me some of these overheard observations, I knew that to survive, she would have to board one of the spacecraft and leave Earth with our unborn child Horus. She struggled to see a way that she and I could go together, but she looked more like an alien than I did, and her special gift was to speak and comprehend the alien language better than a pure-bred alien did.
“Osiris,” Isis said one day as we walked by the papyrus swamp nearest her scribal offices, “only one more spacecraft will be loading to leave Earth, and when that has departed, there’ll be no more coming or going. The planet will be sealed off until the very end. I’m now on the passenger manifest because I created it, and I can disguise myself to look like an alien as I have done on many occasions as you know. I’m not concerned anymore about my safety or the safety of our child Horus, but I’m afraid for you. What will you do?”
“We’ve looked at all the alternatives, and we can’t go in any direction on Earth with confidence. Who knows how long the firm ground will hold before the rains begin and the waters swell and cover the Earth? The skies are full of clouds and ash that rains down on Earth and sticks everywhere, polluting the drinking water and covering fields already plagued with vermin.”
I paused to let her know I understood and accepted what was coming. She surveyed our surroundings with new eyes, trying to imagine what the future looked like from my perspective. When she looked back into my luminous eyes, I continued speaking as much to myself as to her.
“When, as the prophets tell us, the great flood comes, no one will be safe who is not already aboard some sailing vessel. Just as the spaceships cannot carry all aliens, so all the water boats in the world cannot carry all humans. Countless hordes will die. I have had nightmares of a vast sea covered with the floating, rotting corpses of the drowned. We cannot pray our way out of this scenario. We must now face the truth, and I’ll have to choose a path and leave you.”
Isis wept quietly and nodded her understanding. I took her by the chin and raised her eyes to mine. We gazed into each other’s eyes for a long time, and we acknowledged our love for each other as we had always done, as brother and sister, as husband and wife. We looked out on the papyrus swamp that yielded the crops from which we made our writing materials. An ibis waded, ducking its curved bill in shallow water. A crane took flight. A breeze from the sea rattled the palm leaves and stippled the still water. It was hard for us to believe that this paradise would be lost forever.
I asked her whether any provision had been made for the records of the aliens, specifically the great repositories they had amassed since they landed a thousand years ago. She stated, as she had a hundred times, that the aliens had ordered that all their records should be destroyed just prior to the departure of the last spacecraft.
“What if we find a way to preserve some small portion of those records? And what if I can continue to record what happens here and include my record with the others? That way some portion of our history will remain when we are gone.”
I knew for certain that we would, indeed, be gone. The thought brought a chill to my bones though the sun was warm on my chest and face. The situation was not just bad. It was hopeless. Nothing would prevent the events to come. Nothing could save mankind.
“I’ve given that a great deal of thought, as you know. The penalty for disobedience is death, but we agree that somehow we must find a way to convey to future generations what we have already learned and what you will learn after we have parted. I believe that after the last spaceship has left Earth, the aliens who will have been abandoned, will realize what has happened and go on a murderous rampage out of frustration for their leaders’ betrayal of them.
“They won’t have any idea what to do about enforcement of their rules because they will be shifting for themselves. If you can escape to the south, keeping the rising sun on your left-hand side, you might go up the mightiest river to the region where, some say, the waters come together in the sky. There you might have a refuge and a vantage during the worst of what is to come. Who knows but that you might even survive? That thought makes me happy. Have you chosen any who will go with you on this journey?”
“I’ve selected three men who are willing, all of them scribes and trained warriors. Our time to break free from this region will be during the confusion and distress when the alien leadership rides the last spacecraft off Earth and takes you with it. We four can only carry materials for writing so we won’t be able to carry the records of the alien past and the hardships of humankind toiling as their slaves. But perhaps we can build a watertight vessel to contain some writings that will survive the coming flood.”
“Yes, a vessel like the ark that man is building out to the land where the sun rises.”
We looked in the direction of the place where the sun always rose. I wondered whether a time would come when that sun would not rise again. What would an ark avail in a dark age? A family rowed their flatboat into the rushes. He was fouling. She fed a child from her breast and watched her husband anxiously.
“Only our ark will not carry humans, animals, and plants. It will carry only records, and we’ll make it of wood and seal it all with pitch so that it can tumble through high seas and remain watertight and whole until the waters recede again—if they ever do so.”
“I’ve selected copies of the important ancient records for this ark of time. They tell the secret history from the time of the first aliens’ landing a thousand years ago until the plan for their departure was conceived a few months ago. The history is all in the alien language, and it is told from the aliens’ point of view. Who knows whether those who finally discover the ark will be able to decipher the text? We can’t really care about that because we’ve no control over it.
“So I’ll guide your team to the sacred alien tomb where these records are kept. I believe it’ll take your three men and you three trips to carry all the records to another place, a hidden cave nearby where you are building your ark. In that cave, the records will be safe until the ark is ready to receive them. When the ark is ready, you can put the records in the ark, fit together the last wooden pieces and seal the ark with pitch. Then you must leave the ark where it can be raised by the rising water and not be held under it for long.”
“So what is the aliens’ plan for destroying the other records?” This was a most serious consideration.
“Great casks with pitch and bitumen have been massed by every repository tomb so that the remaining records can be smeared all over and become a bonfire meant to celebrate the departure of the aliens. This part of their plan is very secret: the leave-behind aliens have been ordered to hunt and kill humans until all humans have perished. This order takes no account of the disasters that will surely kill everyone regardless of their being humans or aliens.”
Her eyes were full of tears when she said these things. She was careful with her words and looked out over the swamp as if trying to form a memory.
“The aliens believe that nothing can be done to avert the disaster. They only want to be reasonably sure that no record of their presence remains. I have never discovered why they want to erase all signs of their activities on Earth or why they want to kill all humans, but the archival reports indicate that this is the way the aliens have always dealt with the planets they have occupied for any comparable length of time.”
“Do you know how they determined that the great flood will come?”
“According to ancient alien tradition, Earth is not the first planet they have occupied where a massive flood has destroyed all life. Another planet nearby suffered the same fate, and after the great flood, there nothing remained alive. After the deluge, the air of that planet dispersed and all water rose to the sky and disappeared, and the planet’s life forms all died.”
She stopped and touched my arm to reassure herself that I was still standing next to her. She knew I was doomed to stay and die. She was certain my staying was the right decision, but she was upset. I was also upset because I could do nothing to console her. She swallowed and continued her account in measured tones.
“The aliens knew that would happen on the previous planet, and in that case, they prudently selected a few to board ships that came from very far away and rode to another planet, Earth, where they could conquer and rule as they have done for a thousand years. All I know for certain is that I was able to witness the selection of those aliens who would depart.”
In the months that followed, Isis and I wasted no time by mourning or complaining. Isis put out the word among the alien leadership that she needed to do some routine redundant document destruction out by the tomb repository, and that I and my three companions would help her with the transfer and immolation of the records.
Since we had scribal clearance for access and courier transport, we had no trouble with the authorities in our three trips to relocate the precious alien records. We worked every spare moment to complete our tasks so that, in the end, Isis’s copies of the records were carried from the tomb repository to the hidden cave staging area, and finally moved from there to rest snugly within the ark.
The ark was subsequently sealed after the final wooden pieces were fitted in place and sealed all around with pitch. We had situated the artifact on a trestle table in a place where it could rise unobstructed when the waters rose in the great flood. Isis was pleased with what we had done and glad that we had accomplished our work with plenty of time to spare before the flood. Then we made all preparations for her to board the last alien spacecraft that would depart from Earth.
The black rains began a week after we completed the ark of time. At first, the showers came in fits and sputters, but gradually they became a steady stream, then a torrential downpour and finally endlessly drumming, gusting spouts of water as if the heavens were being washed from above. Early on, the gray volcanic ash mixed with the rain, and angry black clouds, torn by continuous lightning, filled the sky at all hours.
As the rain continued, tornadoes dropped from the sky and tore through the blasted, rain-swept land before they rose to the heavens again. As the waters rose, it became clear that the end was coming. The final spaceship could wait no longer, so the aliens and my wife Isis boarded and launched up through the clouds. I watched the enormous ship absorb strokes of lighting as it entered the clouds, and then it disappeared.
As the rain continued, the slaughter began in earnest. Now no human was safe. Aliens tore humans from their dwellings, killed them in the streets and ransacked their homes. Those who did not have a safe way out of the path of destruction were frantic to escape, but the aliens were prepared to cut them all down wherever they massed.
My companions and I took the swampy, labyrinthine underground route through the covered sewers out of the scribal settlement. We waded through waste, feces and rotting corpses and body parts, all swarming with cockroaches and scarabs, flies and poisonous vipers. We heard the sounds of the massacre sometimes above us as we slogged through the mire: screams of horror, pleas for life, wailing for the lost.
The sewers were filling with rainwater so that our whole bodies, up to the shoulders, wandered through slime and leeches. When we reached the other side, outside the settlement, we emerged, glad to be back in the drenching rains. We began walking overland south and upwards along the riverbank with its swelling, sometimes overflowing banks and its broad marshes toward the place where the waters came together to form the river’s source, high in the clouds.
As we proceeded, we informed the human villagers who lived along the river that the aliens would be coming to kill them all, but we were disbelieved. One of the priests near the branch in the delta reviled us as traitors and brigands and threatened to have us killed for spreading false rumors of impossible alien atrocities, so we slit his throat, placed his corpse in an abandoned mortuary and slipped away into the night to continue our travels upriver.
It did not take us long to realize that we were being preceded in our travels by a band of brigands that enjoyed taking their pleasure in each village. They raped all the women of all ages, and they killed every male who might bear weapons. So the remaining old men cowered when we entered their villages, afraid because they had no warriors to protect their villagers against further violations.
I talked for a long while with a particularly articulate elder who told me that the brigands numbered twenty-one warriors, a mix of humans and aliens. They were well armed, but running short of arrows for their bows. They were burdened down with spoils and food that they had seized in their marauding.
They were led by a man named Adziu, a demon in the form of a man who wore a dog’s head over his hair and carried a long staff in his left hand. I learned that Adziu’s brigands were two days’ march ahead, but the gap would close because of the time they spent in each village. If we hurried and skirted around the villages to the west, we might meet and surprise the brigands four villages ahead.
I conferred with my companions and told them to make ready for close combat. Ukor, our best archer, said that the numbers of the enemy were too great for direct combat. He recommended a plan of stealth at a distance. I saw right away the wisdom of his counsel. So we planned to circle ahead of the brigands and to wear them down by attrition.
Ukor would use his bow and arrows to take out the lead persons, including Adziu himself if he could manage it. Mili, who was the best at throwing his knife, would use his knife to slay anyone who strayed from the brigands’ main group. Khosi, who could use his hands and legs in close combat, would protect our group against sudden incursions. I would use my pike, spears and rope however I could. When we went into combat, I said, we would assure that the record keeping materials remained out of the way and safe.
So, we hastened ahead through the driving rain, keeping well to the west of the river. Ukor made the first contact with the brigands, and he gave a hand signal warning us to lie low. On his right knee, he drew back his arrow and let it fly through the neck of Adziu, who was relieving himself in the marsh. The man could not warn his associates because he was dead before he hit the water. Ukor then drew back another arrow and waited.
A brigand came looking for Adziu, and when he saw what had happened, he rose to give the alarm but found an arrow lodged firmly in his chest. Discovering that he could not pull out the arrow, he called for help and screamed. We withdrew while the brigands gathered in the rain to discuss what was happening.
I thought they might decide to split up and go in many directions to discover the threat that had killed two of their band, but they did not do that. Instead, they resolved to ignore the threat, which seemed to come from a single archer in the swamp, and to continue on their path. Another brigand took the dog’s head as his own and led the group back to the village they had been pillaging.
I reckoned that the band now numbered nineteen, and its new leader was untested. Mili thought that the brigands were cowards, and he volunteered to kill a few of them while they were distracted by taking their pleasure in the village. I told him to take extreme care and to meet us on the other side of the village where we could ambush the remainder of the group when they proceeded upstream.
Mili used the cover of torrential rain to his advantage. He easily located and killed with neat strokes of his knife the four lookouts that were stationed at the ordinal and cardinal points around the village. He found the man with the dog’s head taking his pleasure with the village priest and took his two heads off with a single stroke. He so frightened the priest that the man shrieked in fright, so Mili silenced him permanently and continued with his hunt.
Mili found that the village hutments allowed nicely for the division of the brigands, who had separated to take pleasure of the women in each hut. So Mili came up from behind each brigand in each hutment and cut his throat and then admonished the women to keep silent before he continued to the next hut to do the same. In this way, he separated body from life for nine brigands, one in each of nine huts. So, excluding the priest, he had killed fourteen brigands before he departed the village and proceeded to rendezvous with me and his other companions.
Now our enemy numbered just five with no effective leadership, and I liked the odds for us four attacking the remaining five directly whenever they left the village. Khosi advised against this approach because, he said, we shouldn’t take unnecessary risks when we had no need to do so. He said he would take out the brigands from behind, one by one. The rest of us should remain ahead of the brigand group and take out any that looked a viable target. So, in what amounted to the first light of the morning in the pouring rain, Khosi snuck into the village to observe how the brigands organized after having lost the majority of their warriors.
The brigands were not pleased when they assessed their situation. They felt that the female villagers had killed their fellow warriors, so they assembled them in the village square and, one by one, they killed them asking for answers to their questions. Finally, when they had killed every one of the women, they decided to continue upriver as they had done. Two brigands argued over who should be in charge, but they made a bargain in favor of proceeding with every man for himself.
This was good news for Khosi because leaderless men were likely to diverge and give him opportunities. One brigand took the lead position and the others formed a straight line. The last in line was Khosi’s first victim. He broke the man’s neck easily and moved up in the downpour to do the same to the next man in line.
He had taken out four of the brigands when he saw the fifth turn and look directly at him. The man raised his pike and charged, but suddenly he stopped and fell on his face. An arrow protruded from the back of the man’s skull. Khosi retrieved the arrow for Ukor and joined me and his companions to continue our upriver march through the rain.
We had not estimated how long it would take the aliens to realize that they had been abandoned, and we were not certain what they might do after they knew about that. The first signs of trouble came from observing the increase in the number of alien boats that were rowing upstream on the river.
We stood back and watched as they landed in swarms and killed everyone in every village they encountered. These did not take pleasure with women or men; instead, they killed all humans of all ages—men, women, and children. They were much worse than the brigands because of their thoroughness. When I asked Ukor what he thought, he shook his head and counseled against attack of any kind.
Aroused, aliens were known to become frenzied and unpredictable in everything except their willingness to desist in their slaughter. They would redouble their efforts after resistance, and it was likely they would try to interdict us if they knew of our mission.
Therefore, we decided to let the aliens continue their southward progress of slaughter, and we went to the west and continued south in parallel with their movements up the river. Now another phenomenon came to my attention. The movements of the alien boats became swifter, and they seemed no longer to be bent on stopping at each village.
Instead, their aim was to get upriver as far and as fast as they could. Behind them came a rising sea. The oceans had risen and swept past the natural barriers that kept the waters out of the great valley. By now, the great wave of entering sea water had inundated the river delta and crept swiftly upriver so that everyone was fleeing ahead of the inexorable flow of water.
We decided that the best plan was to try to outrun the flood, so we increased our tempo and plunged through the unfamiliar southern landscape at our best sustainable pace. We did not have to worry about the aliens from the boats, because at present, they were more concerned with preserving their own lives than with harming others.
So our sides hurt as we pressed forwards upriver, but we dared not stop even to catch our breaths. So we gained a second and a third breath, and the waters rose and followed us as the rains increased in their volume. The drops that fell were now clear and not full of volcanic ash so we could drink what we gathered.
As for the rising waters, they contained floating bodies as I had dreamed they would, and all the detritus of a civilization that had been annihilated: fabrics, pieces of buildings, weapons, ropes, buoys, upended floating alien boats, papyrus scrolls—all these and more washed at our heels as we ran up the steep path to the south.
I had visions of our ark riding those waters, but I never saw the ark during our journey. Our purpose had changed priorities. We needed to survive to tell our story for future generations. I saw an empty alien boat floating on the rising waters, half swamped with rainwater, but still intact. The river continued to stream down into the rising flood, and the rain kept pummeling, the lightning still flashing.
I signaled to my comrades to climb aboard the boat and bail it out with anything handy. So We now rose in the alien boat, which we had to continue to bail because as fast as we bailed, the rain filled it up again. In the limited visibility, we saw that we were gaining on other alien boats that were fighting the upstream battle to keep ahead of the rising tide. In effect, we had the advantage because our locomotion was caused by the same rising tide that our adversaries were fleeing.
We took a strategy that was borrowed from the one that we had used in the last village against the brigands. We took each alien boat from behind as it lost the fight with the river and surrendered to the tide that rose from behind. Arrows took out the leaders, and, coming alongside, we killed the rest with a sword, a knife, and our bare hands.
Fourteen boats in succession we overcame this way, and the waters continued to rise. Whenever we overcame a boat that seemed better than ours, we commandeered it and abandoned our former vessel. We gathered the aliens’ weapons and food and water as we progressed, so we resembled the brigands in our murder and plunder with the difference that we took no pleasure in what we were doing—and we had a goal in sight that exceeded our own survival.
For a long time, we concentrated on keeping the water from rising within our boat. The alien boats were no longer ahead of us. We thought we must have finally outrun their desperate mission. I would have congratulated the group for having prevailed, except that we still had the flood to combat and the rain, and something I should have predicted: a sea of drowning humans flailing against the water and desperate to hang onto anything that floated by.
As the waters rose, the villages were overcome sequentially, and the villagers either perished right away or grabbed onto anything that floated. Their huts became their rafts in some cases. Felled trees that floated carried as many as two dozen hangers-on. We watched as they swarmed aboard alien boats, only to have their vessels sink under their weight. So, now as we saw helpless humans approach our boat, we shooed them away and, failing in that, we used our weapons to keep them off the boat.
We reasoned that bringing any one of them aboard would lead to others trying to do the same. Our boat would sink, and our mission would be lost. We, therefore, signaled them to find other boats and to be rational about how many survivors to take aboard.
We counseled that the majority should remain as hangers-on in the water rather than swarming onto crafts that could not possibly continue to float. It was no use, and so we resorted to cutting off the hands and arms that, in desperation, reached out to our gunwales or our oars. We steered out from what must have been the river bank and steered toward the middle of what remained of the mighty river that was being swallowed as we watched.
We had no rest from fending off the drowning villagers before a new phenomenon tested us. As the deluge rose, the surface of the water became choppy and rough. It undulated, and from time to time, a great wave passed through the water, raising our boat and lowering it so that we could see the walls of the wave as if they were a looking glass filled with hideous corpses that waved at us as they rose and fell.
We also saw corpses of crocodiles and alligators, hippopotamuses and horses, cattle and huge poisonous snakes and a fish so huge that I thought I must be seeing things. I reasoned that we were no longer in a pool of the great valley we had left, but that the waters we were navigating had suddenly become a part of the great living sea that, others wrote, lay past the lands where the sun set every night and ran right to the edge of the world.
Up, up we rose, and still we could see the river coursing down from still higher up where the fabulous spring of the waters lay. We four struggled increasingly to keep on our heading in the low visibility, and I urged my companions to focus on bringing our craft as close as possible to where the rising tide met the land beside the west bank of the river.
I began to despair whether any point of land might be high enough to remain above the deluge. Could it be that the source of the river itself would disappear under the waves? The rains seemed not to be abating, but to be increasing, and now the winds began to blow as a blizzard, and for a while they caused a following of the waters so that we steered as the winds forced us forward to where we wanted to be—upriver. The rains were slanting at our backs, and it was everything we could do to bail as the boat refilled with rain water.
The wind brought us right up to the intersection of the shoreline and the riverbank, and having an intuition, I asked my companions to jump to the land when we made it and to take a painter with them so that as we walked upwards ahead of the flood, we could keep the option of using our boat tethered to us at all times.
Afterward, I could not explain what vision of the future had caused me to give this direction because as soon as we were all standing on the land again, the winds shifted radically, and the rain that had been at our backs was now slanting right into our faces. Our boat broke free from our grasp and floated back rapidly toward the rising tide. So, we were once again left to racing forwards as the deluge followed us upwards and south along the river.
Ahead we witnessed great waterfalls become devoured by the tide, and the river’s water turned from dark brown to almost blue and flowed into a dirty brown mix that rose to envelope it. We now saw many rafts floating now with slanting sails furled and with living people holding to their sides.
I told my comrades to look for a likely raft to climb aboard since there was no way we would outrun the rising tide behind us. A small empty raft came down the river and hugged the shore, so Ukor and Khosi climbed aboard the raft while Mili and I tried to keep it steady with two lines running from the riverbank to the raft.
The rain continued, but the wind died down, and the only force against our progress was the flow of the mighty river. I consoled myself with the prospect that we could only fall back into the deluge, which would rise back up inevitably and take us to our goal.
We began to consider taking rest, but we were surprised by a roving band of cannibals looking for a meal. Their leader disposed his forces around our raft on the land and told us that all he and his men wanted was one of us as their feast. I told him that we would need to confer, and to do that Mili and I would have to return to the raft.
He insisted on having his men hold our lines so we could not escape. Mili and I used the lines to get to the raft, and as soon as we were aboard, I cut the lines with my sword, and we sailed back down the river to the rising flood.
Ukor, frustrated, shot the leader of the cannibals through the throat with an arrow, and the cannibals, who couldn’t swim and knew nothing of sailing, threw their useless spears in our direction through the rain and followed us along the bank as we drifted north down the center of the river.
Finally, seeing that we had no way to get back to shore, they gave up on the idea of our being their dinner and began arguing among themselves about how to prepare the body of their now-deceased leader as their feast.
I could not help myself: I laughed until my sides hurt, and my companions joined in my laughter for a while until we realized that we needed a new plan to make progress. The thought of rejoining the vast, rising water had no appeal, but keeping to the west side of the river in a land of cannibal tribes had no appeal either.
So, we did everything we could to move the raft across to the east bank of the river, and we managed to jump a mere thirty cubits from the rising tide ashore. Again two of us went ashore while the other two stayed on the raft. Using ropes from the shore to the raft, we drew the raft up the river slowly against the river’s flow. It was hard, relentless toil, but we had no choice.
We ate while we pulled on the ropes, and we kept a close watch in the rain for hungry cannibals on this side of the river. Making little headway, yet determining that the deluge was rising more slowly than before, we decided to bring everyone and all our cargo ashore and rest before pushing on by foot.
During the night, a pygmy tribe surrounded us. They wanted to know why we were invading their land. I explained what we were trying to do and why, and they talked for a while among themselves before they volunteered to come with us along the river to the south because they did not want to perish in the flood.
They told me that they were not cannibals unless they had no other food. As it happened, they had plenty of food and shared it with us. They had experienced contact with the aliens, but the aliens had never made the pygmies slaves during all the time they colonized Earth. Their secret for remaining free was their knowledge of secret gold deposits. Using gold from their deposits, the pygmies kept the aliens satisfied without arousing their greed.
Aliens had learned from experience that no pygmy would reveal the location of their gold even under torture and threat of death. I assured the pygmy chief that we had no desire for gold. Where could we possibly use the shiny ore now that all humanity was perishing? Therefore, the chief’s concern became getting us as far to the south as possible because once we were out of his lands, he would feel safe. Nothing I could say about the deluge made any sense to him. I resolved to use the help of pygmies to get as far south as possible before the deluge came and killed them all.
With a phalanx of pygmies, we progressed on the east side of the river until we came to the boundary of the pygmy tribes, and they bade us a fond farewell before returning to discover what had happened to their villages while they were gone.
Two young pygmy women among them refused to return down the river to their villages because they believed what we had told their chief about the deluge. They were summarily cast out of the pygmy tribes by the enraged pygmy chief, but they were allowed to keep their pygmy weapons: blow guns with poisonous darts.
We broke our self-imposed rule of accepting others because we thought their knowledge of the country and their new weapons might make a positive difference in our chances of success. Besides, the women had taken a liking to Mili and Khosi, and the feelings were mutual.
So, now we six pressed through the land to the east of the river, and the pygmies asked whether we had considered riding animals rather than walking. I was intrigued by this suggestion and asked how we could find the animals we would ride. They explained that in the time of the great rains, which continued, livestock had fled up the east side of the river looking for shelter. Cattle and horses and zebras were going south just as we were, and whenever they stopped, the water caught up with them, and they continued their flight.
The pygmy women were certain that in the near future, we would come across some of those animals at night, and we could catch them and use them as we liked. Pygmies were experts, they claimed, at bringing wild animals into subjection for this purpose. I told them that we should try to capture six animals as soon as possible and ride them.
Two days later, the pygmies had captured six zebras. We led the animals as we continued south, and the pygmies tamed them so we could ride. Burdened with humans, the animals would not run as fast as they did in the wild, but they relieved us of the burden of always walking. When one of the zebras went lame, the pygmies killed it, and we drank its blood and ate its meat. The pygmies skinned the zebra and carried its hide, skin side out, on the zebra they now shared as their ride.
We approached a region that the pygmies abhorred because of the savagery of the people in it. They advised us to prepare for combat and told us that the tactic of the people was to rush the enemy with pointy-ended sticks. By sheer numbers, they won every battle, and they dismembered and ate the dead, both theirs and their enemy’s, not for food but for their power.
Ukor asked how many of these people were likely to attack at once, and the pygmies, after conferring, said as many came as could stand hand and hand across the widest point of the river. Right away, Ukor knew that we needed a better plan than merely standing and fighting. He suggested that before the savages had time to group in their formation, we should attack them obliquely. He suggested that the pygmy darts, his arrows, Mili’s knives and Khosi’s arms would be the best weapons.
He and the pygmies talked long into the night about how they would position themselves to achieve the maximum kills. The pygmies advised that the chief of the savages should be our first target because that would cause maximum confusion and surprise. They volunteered to sneak into the savages’ village before morning, to wreak havoc in the dark and pouring rain. They worked hard preparing their darts and blowguns for their mission, and then they disappeared into the night.
The next morning, the pygmies returned to say that the chief of the savages was dead, along with his wife and eldest son. Poison darts had killed them, and now with no leadership, the tribe was in total disarray. To discover who had killed their chief, small parties were dispatched in different directions. I sent my companions at intervals to surprise them. In the rain, an ambush favors the attacker, and so it was for us.
The scouting units were no more than three strong, and we destroyed every savage in each of the three units that had come north. Having cleared the way, we maneuvered to a position due west of the savage village so that when their southern scouts returned to report that no contact was made, we moved south rapidly while the savages sent their scouts north where they would find their warriors dead from many causes.
They would then mass their warriors and press north, not south, as we moved swiftly out of their territory. The pygmies had great fun with this plan. It piqued their sense of wit.
I, of course, kept a close watch to the rear in case the savages determined to come north as well as south. In the event, they did not come north, and we were well above their region when the rains and floods raised the deluge on our heels, indicating that not only the savages but also the pygmies no longer had any lands that weren’t submerged.
Our zebras were hard pressed by us to step through the boggy land through pouring rain. Other animals crowded along the river as they fled the deluge, so we passed through giant herds of frantic beasts, and in their wake, their predators, like lions, cheetahs, and tigers, prowled. So to avoid being attacked by the predators, we sped to keep in the middle of the animal hordes that drank from the river but not from the brackish rising waters from the north. A tiger did break through and attacked one of our pygmy women who was riding behind the other on their zebra.
The other pygmy tried to defend her friend when another tiger appeared to menace her. Pygmy darts had no apparent effect on either tiger, and we heard the women’s screams of anguish as they were mauled and killed in the night.
I held my group back from doing anything foolish to help the pygmies because the predators were attacking in packs. It was better, I told them, to press forward into the herds so that the predators would take the ones behind us. We had become careless in letting the pygmies fall behind; we lost the pygmies and the zebra they were riding to the tigers. We set out at once in the driving rain to get back to the center of the herds traveling south.
Because of our zebras, we managed to keep ahead of the rising waters of the deluge, and still the rains had not stopped. Except ahead, where the river still poured down, we were followed by water rising to cut off any retreat or return on the path we had taken. Everything we had seen en route was now underwater.
All animals and humans were now pushing south and upwards through driving rain toward the source of the river’s waters. Since we were in the thick of the herds of panicked animals, we had no need to fear the predators that attacked—only the rear and flanks of the horde. Birds had joined our menagerie because they had no place to perch and nothing to eat where the waters now rose.
Carrion birds flocked where the predators feasted, and hawks hovered to feast on the birds that crowded the vegetation that remained. We had no lack of food with all these animals and birds to feast on, and their confusion made them easy prey for us. The farther south we roamed, the cooler the air became, and the land changed its character from the light lowland greens against sandy loam to the dark upland greens with huge trees and vines tangling among them.
We were thankful for steep grades now because, with shallow grades, the flood filled in behind us rapidly. We could watch the waters climb more slowly against steep grades, and we relaxed in a climb until the next level area when we rushed forward to avoid the pursuing flood waters.
My mind raced forward as we numbly processed to think of strategies for us at the end of our climb. What if the rain should not desist and even the highest peaks became submerged in an all-encompassing flood? Then we’d have to find another raft and hold on in the great sea without end until the great flood subsided. And if the sea did not subside? Perhaps we’d end as skeletons on that floating raft, covered by a host of feasting seabirds.
Such morbid thoughts did not improve my mood, but I consoled myself and the others by comparing our state to what it might have been if we had not escaped the slaughter, or if, at numerous points in our travels, we had simply given up the struggle. Pygmies, cannibals, and savages alike had succumbed, and now the animals and birds were bound for extinction in the relentless rain and the ceaseless rise of waters.
I might have guessed that, as we approached the watershed that originated the mighty river that was being devoured by floods, we’d find other humans who had been prescient like us and were now holding the ground on their own with force of arms. Ahead, we saw through rain, multitudes of humans and a few aliens, all struggling toward the same goal. Like the animals that followed them, they acted like a senseless herd instinctively seeking higher and higher ground. They only looked back to gauge how far ahead of the flood they were and the nature of the beings who followed them. Their mental focus was on their goal, more an idea than a reality, ahead through the driving rain and the river’s wide beginnings.
I saw no reason to try to fight through the hordes of fleeing men and women. What would be the point? I thought of that small island within which we struggled, growing smaller every hour and more crowded. As long as the rain fell, there would be no thirst. As long as the herds and people thronged, there would be no hunger. As long as the land shrank, there would be a mortal fear of extinction.
I envisioned a dwindling speck surrounded by a floating mass of thousands and thousands of bobbing, rotting corpses of all kinds, a feast for fish and for carrion birds. I wondered at my having introduced sunshine into my vision because we had seen no sun for almost forty days and no moon or stars for almost forty nights.
As we walked past corpses of those who had given up the march to higher ground, I noticed that many wore the marks of cruel contagion. The scourge of disease had come with these hordes, and humans and aliens were dying among the horde, which no longer could expel those who could transmit the plagues. The hordes stripped the land of all sustenance, too. And they became restive and contentious, picking arguments and fighting. They killed for nothing, and they took sides in imaginary contests that no one could possibly win or lose. All the factors that had led to our leaving the lowlands were rife in the highlands, only here there was nowhere else to go. We had brought all the problems with us, and we had no solutions for them.
The crowds pressed around great escarpments and seemed to descend ahead into a great valley. I gauged the steep rise of the escarpment and decided that we four would abandon our rides and climb where others wove around the difficult peak. The climb seemed much too steep for everyone else. Why did I choose for us to climb and stake our entire journey on this determination? I later reasoned that if we had reached a peak from which the land descended, then perhaps if we stood a chance to gain the summit, we’d not be subject to flood waters that made the rise but then poured down into the next broad valley.
So up we climbed the escarpment, and the hordes passed to either side and down into the great valley beyond. We could not see very far in the continuing rain, but we managed to gain a foothold and rose almost straight up the height of twenty men, then thirty and finally forty where a ledge gave us a coign of vantage and a potential view if ever the rain should stop. Exhausted, we finally rested and fell asleep at that height as the sounds of rain and multitudes wore on our weary brains like a distant, constant din.
The next morning, after we had reached the summit, we noticed that the waters that we feared were climbing after us. I wanted to be sure of what was happening, so I squinted through the rain to see whether the water had already claimed the valley ahead. In fact, it had not. Like a wall of water, the flood had been pouring over the interstice that divided our upward climb from the downward trend in the landscape that all the others—animals and humans and aliens—had taken.
The valley was filling with the flood, and the level of the flood was holding halfway down our perch as its relief came with the overflow into the lower space in the valley. It would take time, I thought, for the ocean to fill the vast valley, but already I could make out clusters of lost beings thrashing in the rising waters they had tried to avoid in vain.
Petrified, I watched that valley fill to the brim and then to overflowing. Around our escarpment, the waters flowed until all became level, and the level rose cubit by cubit until we were the last four humans on a lone seamount in a wide, continuous gray expanse caused by and drenched by torrential rain. An ibis dropped onto our small island and then flew away again. I could make out in the rising water-bloated corpses swirling in an uneasy, undulating stew of debris.
The whole world seemed to be reduced to our small patch of land. I tried to calculate how long we had to live. If the waters raised much above this enclave, we would live only as long as we could tread water. Two of us could not swim, so we’d have to deal with that as we could. I could see no raft or materials that we could use as buoys, only the bobbing fatty masses of corrupting flesh. So I began to factor how we could bind together corpses to make a raft.
The perpetual rain stopped suddenly and without prelude. I was so numb, I almost didn’t realize what was happening, and when I did awaken to the miracle, I told the others, and we all marveled as a great change took place before our eyes.
Slowly the lowering, black, ragged clouds began to break up, and the sun streaked through tears in the cloud cover that had blinded the sun for forty days. We could now look out on all sides of our island without the veil of rain that had showered us continuously, and now all we saw was gray water everywhere. No other peak existed. No humans or aliens were visible except for the knot of corpses that butted against our island’s shores.
Suddenly, in the sky appeared a double rainbow, one above the other. The rainbows stood in the sky a very long time and then they slowly faded, the small interior rainbow first and the second diminishing at the top, and leaving finally two rainbow feet upon the waves.
We wanted to shout for joy, but we were too exhausted to speak and too overcome with the surprise of our continuing lives to dare the elements with overconfidence. Perhaps, I thought, this is only an interlude, after which much worse might come than what we had already suffered through? I knew that among the dangers that we now faced were hunger and thirst. I leaned over the side of our island and cupped my hand to get water to drink. It was brackish but drinkable. As for food, we had some dried stores that we always carried with us.
That evening, as the sun set and the stars winked on, we watched the skies in wonder, and then we slept as we had not done in forty-one days. I had marked the level of the water against stones on the side of the escarpment and by morning, the level had fallen almost a cubit. Cautiously, I considered how the vast expanse of waters would be absorbed again into Earth. As the day progressed, the level of the water fell so that half of our escarpment’s height was visible, and by the next morning, we could see dry ground around the base of it.
As the waters continued to recede, we saw the land become covered with the corpses and vegetation that had floated in the sea. We smelled the stench of decomposing bodies, too numerous to count. We climbed down from our eyrie and began to retrace our path. The river came with us, at first tentative and then forceful, asserting itself and pouring into the receding sea. The river’s water was now clean and bright and clear—and sweet beyond our imaging.
Along the river’s banks, the vegetation was all brown, and all signs of habitation were as ruins. Of course, nothing was left alive, and we walked from level to level in amazement that such a universal toll had been taken on life itself. Now the waters receded at an alarming pace as if an enormous drain had opened and all the great expanse of water was rushing to that one great opening.
My companions and I decided to stop to build a raft that we could use on the river because our feet were sore, and we could not keep up with the declining flood in any better way than on the river’s water. It took us three days to build our watercraft, and we took great pride in our workmanship.
We launched into the river, which sped us downwards and north to the flood waters, which we reached in another two days. The river water turned from blue to brown and, looking back, we realized that a waterfall had formed behind us. Down we sped, and the river and flood left putrid, decaying carcasses everywhere along the banks and along the shores of what had been a great rolling, gray sea.
We passed the lands that once held many thriving villages, and I thought expectantly that I might see someone run out to the river and wave at us from the river’s banks, but I knew in my heart that the people had all perished, along with their livestock and their crops. The sun, so long in hiding, now emerged as a tyrant and putrefaction rose in tribute from all formerly living things.
We rafted on the river through an impossible landscape filled only with ghosts and shades and memories. When we stopped descending in our northward trajectory and the river straightened out and gradually sloped down into a broad, now-drying plain, I saw where marshes once stood, and all the sodden, brown papyrus lay in the sunshine. Those marshes might be the earliest to recover among all the world’s vegetation, I thought nostalgically. Our writing materials came from those plants, so we scribes had a special regard for them.
We arrived at our old scriptorium two days later. The building was empty, and all evidence of our former work had vanished. Whatever could float had been carried away by the flood. All the coverings for the settlement’s sewers had become flotsam in the deluge, so the maze of subterranean avenues for human and alien waste we found to be remarkably clean. In fact, we had never seen the settlement so completely washed and fresh.
The wall paintings and interior paintings were not entirely ruined, but they would need restoration, to be sure. We walked through the settlement, we four, and we assessed what remained. The single, great improvement, we agreed, was that the alien oppressors had departed. As it turned out, all four of us had alien blood in our veins. What were the odds of that happening? Perhaps the stigma of being a half-breed no longer mattered. Anyway, it didn’t matter for us.
We marveled that the great valley that had formerly contained farms and human dwellings now lay under water that comprised an inland sea whose waters were very salty. The river was still our source of drinking water, and the old irrigation conduits that radiated from the river remained after all the change of waters. We wasted no more time contemplating on the lost civilization that we had known, but got right to our job, which was to compose the story of our journey in the time of the flood.
We wrote on the materials that had made the journey with us, and we wrote in the alien language so that our work could be paired with the records in the ark of time, which might now be anywhere that the deluge took it. I made translations in sixteen human languages just in case the ark of time was never found. I never thought that our works would be read by anyone for many thousands of years.
We would leave no progeny because we had no women among us. We would all live long lives if disease did not claim us, and we were lucky enough to harvest all that we needed to eat within seven days after the sun began to do its magic, reviving the land and bringing it back to fruition.
Looking back on my personal adventure, I still cherish the memory of my wife Isis and my unborn child Horus. I don’t regret that she departed, because I had no idea I would be able to survive what I’ve been through, and I wanted her assuredly to live. My heart broke when she departed on that alien spacecraft, but if she had accompanied me and died during the journey as those two pygmy women died among the tigers, I might have despaired and killed myself.
My companions still grieve over the loss of those two small, imaginative women, and they resent me for restraining them when they wanted to rush out to save them from the voracious tigers that night.
I stand by all my decisions on that journey. Some things I would prefer had turned out differently, to be sure, but I know that fate is unkind to those who tempt her wantonly. Is there anything I would have done differently? I don’t think so.
My child Horus was conceived in beauty, and I sincerely hope that my wife and child are safe and well on some other planet—one with the beginnings of civilization. The aliens have a definite set of rules, but the rules make sense, yet they finally led everyone into a blind canyon at the end and me and my three friends to a seamount.
Maybe that is what happens to every civilization. The inherent contradictions lead to endemic corruption and strife that cry out for primal cleansing and a whole new beginning. We certainly had both, and now I sit here on Earth, inscribing what might never be read, and my wife and child live somewhere else in the universe, scribbling and dreaming that the ark of time one day will be found and matched with my humble papers, for what purpose? Who can tell?
****
“All the above are the words my husband and brother Osiris wrote. I, Isis, discovered them when I returned with our son Horus to find him. I was informed in a dream that Osiris had been dismembered and his parts scattered all over Earth in the time of great troubles.
“I searched the world over for his remains and found many others that had been victims of the great flood, but I did not find his remains. I, therefore, caused temples to be raised in Osiris’s honor. Images of him and me and our son now adorn those temples, and many worship us as gods, which in a sense we are, being the last who remained of those who stemmed from the mix of humans and aliens.
“Osiris, my eternal love, is the figure with the green face, because, for me, he was the hope of fruitfulness and vegetation. Because I could not find his parts, I fervently hope that he is still alive. If he is not alive, at least his memory lives in me.
“Only Osiris could have survived the flood that swept away all the corruption of Earth, cleansed it and paved the way for the new instantiation of life that followed. I regret that I left him behind, but his words prove his power. I will worship him and be an example for others. It is the least I can do to atone.”