Xenon of Samos, like his almost immeasurably ancient ancestor, Aristarchus, came from Earth.  The Saurians had made a good copy of the planet, he mused as he sat in the Halls of the Eons, and remembered.  A cool snippet of wind disturbed his garment where it covered his knees, and reached inside with vaguely dischordant  fingers.  It was a tentative, curious little waft of air.  It reminded him of September on the Aegean.

Doubt was the basic fuel of intelligent life.  Even gods doubted, else why exist?

The wan sun of this planet’s late fall cast its academic light across his lap.  The shadow it brought with it was serrated, like the low rail it passed on its way to him.  May you live in interesting times.  The ancient Chinese curse came unbidden.  It was appropriate.

He sang, in the style of the lesser ancients.

Light giveth way to shadow
But thou, wind, with lesser velocity
Crosseth the boundary 
Into the country banned
To the glare of tyrant suns which are
Impotent against the battle line
Of even fragile parchment! 

I cannot see thee as I see the light,
But I feel thy pressure and note
Thy spoor at the top of the grass.

The reach of suns
Exceedeth their grasp, indeed,
But thy reach, wind, is
Always within the
Lattitudes of thy possibility

The parchment in his poem was in his hand.  He looked at it edgewise.  Its depth was so slight the sharpest knife could not further divide it.  Yet upon a blank sheet of it could be written the key cosmic formulae, the way of all things. 

The energy of a star was ineffectual, meaningless compared to the power of a reasoned thought recorded on that sheet. A star might live ten billion years.  The idea, once born, might live for all time.

Froggy needed him.

He rolled the parchment and put it in a pocket of his robe.  Arising, he walked down the Halls of the Eons toward the southern end.  The fall sun cast the shadows of the tall pillars across the stone floor like cell bars.  It was a thought that often came to him, though now mostly without bitterness.  As with most prisoners, his incarceration had been the result of personal choice.   His cell was an entire world, and this place the only window to that which was beyond. 

He came to the chair at the end of the concourse.  It was made of the same stone as the floor, but, being beyond the high ceiling of the Halls of the Eons, was still warm from the heat of the day.  He climbed the steps to it and sat there, looking over the nearby sea.

“Yes?” he said.

“The ambassador of the Arachnea Cluster has issued a demand from his emperor.  Our council cannot see the logic behind it.  They do not seem to us to be in a position to make demands, yet do so with great confidence.  We suspect they possess some great weapon whose principle is unknown to us.”

“What evidence,” asked Xenon, “have you of the existence of such a weapon?”

“None that is not derivative,” answered Froggy..

“Send what you have,” said Xenon.

His mind was instantly flooded with images.  Galactic spirals wheeling ponderously, their surfaces twinkling with the appearance and disappearance of suns.  A cluster approached, oddly blue-shifted as if he were actually travelling toward it rather than watching manipulated images in his brain.  It was thrilling, stimulating. 

A thousand lightyears out from the cold center was a barred spiral.  A third of the way out from its glowing center was a yellow sun with eight planets.  The second planet was rocky, and had seas and continents and jungles.  One continent was silvery, as though frosted.  Impossible in this heat.  Closer in, he realized it was covered with a network of webs.

“This is their home planet?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Froggy as the picture in Xenon’s mind suddenly winked out.  “Our probe failed just at the point you have seen.  We don’t know why.  There was no explosion.  It just – ceased being.”

“I will think on the matter,” said Xenon, and left the stone seat to walk down the path to the sea.  His residence was there, beneath the low cliff, nestled in a tiny grassy space out of the wind.  He entered it and took fruit from a bowl., and poured a cup of clear water.  These he took back outside, for it was his custom to sit on a wooden bench next to the front door as the sun departed, and there to take his evening repast.

The sea birds departed for their cliffside nests as the thermal updrafts failed in the lessening heat.  The sun sank into the sea and the stars came out.  The only sound now was the surf as it surged up and back, clattering the tiny round pebbles that made up the strand.  You could, Xenon thought, deduce some important characteristics of a planet and its moon system from the material on a beach..  He finished the fruit and sat sipping the water and gazing at the stars.

He could see Froggy’s galaxy as it rose in the evening sky.  It looked like a single blue star, but was actually a ball of second generation suns being born out of the gasses left from a titanic explosion three billion years previously.  Froggy had sent him an image taken from a vessel two hundred million light years distant from its center.   It had looked like the pillars of the Halls of the Eons.

Froggy was a high minister for a race of saurians.  Creatures with delicate, newt-like fingers, they walked upright, but like a T-Rex, balancing with their short, heavy tails..  A drought on their planet of origin had caused his race  to develop intelligence, the ability to conceive abstract thoughts, tools and, eventually, agriculture.  Xenon had never come across an intelligent species that didn’t evolve from a disaster.  That was, he assumed, why the holy books of every species began with a metaphor for the greatest disaster of all – birth.

Advances in disease control and food production had brought about a planetary population explosion and that, as usual, had inevitably led to the race seeking room to expand among the stars.  History was like the ocean before him; a featureless surface made of  a few simple components,  rippled by distant winds into endlessly interesting patterns that revealed little of the quieter forces beneath. 

The Saurians had been unusually successful simply because they could not feel physical pain.  If an arm was cut off, they were in no discomfort about it, and in time it regrew by itself.  Their reproduction process involved masses of eggs floating in water, and their young required no care or attention until they metamorphosed from water-breathing to air-breathing animals.  It was at that stage that their schooling began.

Their psychology,  based on the group, contained no references to intimacy.  The death of one was only a loss of technical ability.  There was no personal element to the event, at all.  Massive reproductive capacity and total disregard for the individual except as it related to the survival functions of the species was a powerful combination for a conquering horde, as he well knew.  It eliminated the hesitations concomitant with the biology and psychology of his own mammalian species.  It made them formidable in battle.  But, because of it they lacked heroes.

He sent his mind along the path of the images supplied by Froggy, but, extrapolating from the elements, continued past the point where the probe had failed.

The webs were beautiful beyond belief.  The twin suns, one a distant blue giant and the other a nearby red dwarf  played alternately across the continent-wide warp and woof  as clouds blocked one or the other.    The planet looked like a digital photo of an ornament from -- what was it called?  A Christmas tree, that was it.  A symbol  adopted from ancient pagan custom that had evolved into a  part of a religious practice of the followers of Jesus Christ.  He wondered what facet of the religion the decorated tree had symbolized.  Harvest, perhaps.

The first answer came to him at that point.  His mind left the iridescent planet and returned to the Halls of the Eons.

The hardest opponent to understand is oneself.

He sang, in the form of the epicists.

Dark and long the windward roadsteads, storm-blown sails
Across the reaches of the trade routes westward thrown
Send  men from  home to distant ports 
     where strange lands lie --
The customs of the sailor grown to independent form,
A nation floating, fields now raging, then at deathly calm.
Reality supplanted by a shifting dream

The men of land are blind, indeed, to question’s quest,
With but a changeless view, one frozen sea their world.
One way, alone, seems but the path to destination’s goal,
For there it is, beyond the sill, for all to see, themselves.
From here to there, its way is fixed, unchangeable
A trail, a road, high way defined and not defied,
Shapes habits and beliefs of men of land in stolid ways.

But sail the seas and find no edges to the way,
No bridges, signposts, curbs or crossroads, there,
And then feel certainty lose sway, like lights
Behind of port dissolved in fog or spray,
And come to grasp the flowing shape’s philosophy,
Preparing you for difference in distant land
By freeing you from faith in fix-ed reference
Adapting you to principles without pretense.

Xenon left his bench as the moon began to rise, and went inside to sleep.  His slumber was without dreams, so he came awake the next morning quite rested and alert.  The salt wind off the sea wafted in through the open window.  Following a breakfast of bread and salt meats, he walked, as was his habit, along the pebbly beach, listening to the seabirds and the surf and the seawind.  The sun drove the wrinkles from his muscles.  He took a new path up the cliff and labored without excessive effort to a tabletop hill that was lined with a grove of coniferous trees.  The turpentine smell opened his lungs and refreshed them..  He stood by a small stream and watched a gray bird bouncing as though to music only heard by it.  Soon, it stepped off the rock and walked along the bottom, looking for the larval aquatic insects that it favored in its diet.

At mid-day, he returned to the stone chair.

“Xenon?”

“Yes?”

“Have you any thoughts for me?”

“Yes, one, for now.  I understand your inability to understand them.”

“’That is obvious.  They are different.”

“Quite the contrary,” Xenon said.

“Ridiculous,” said Froggy, instantly grasping his meaning.   “They weave webs.  They are arachnids.  We are the saurians.”

“You are both fools,” said Xenon.  “Now, leave me be.”

Froggy did not respond.  He merely ceased to talk.  Briefly, Xenon wondered if that meant he was gone in any sense.  It was a question he had often asked himself, and one that he would probably never answer because while he could send his mind there, or even simply ask about it, it was an unimportant quest that he enjoyed  -- an answer that he didn’t need.  For the remainder of the day, he wandered the hills, enjoying the company of stone outcrops, tiny flowered vales, glistening waterfalls and frothy deep woods waterfalls.  It was late afternoon when he came to the chair, again.

“Well?” said Froggy.. 

“Tell me of your first meeting with this species,”  said Xenon.  The saurians weren’t traders.  They were a spacefaring race, but one more comparable to the Vikings of the ancient Earth.  They expanded to take, not to do business.

“We came across them in what your ancients called the Greater Magellanic Cloud.  It would be two of your years ago.  Their home planet is well supplied with water.  A good place for our agriculture.  Our discovery ship was doing a survey when it disappeared.  We sent in several teams, which also were lost.  None were heavily sheilded but there seemed no need..  Then we were contacted, and they ordered us to cease contact or be destroyed.”

“I did not see any evidence of technology in the vision you gave me.”

“No.  Although we have not managed to approach closer than near orbit, none of our scans show structures, and the energy radiation levels are pre-agricultural. “

“Then, they have magic,” said  Xenon.

After a moment, Froggy said, “There is no such thing.  The universe is a rational place.”

 “Then why can you not build an electronic brain to replace me?  I could become damaged, or die.”

“Yes,” said Froggy.  “We have considered that.  What you call your cerebral cortex is – strange, however.  It sits atop a brain like ours, though much smaller than ours. This additional brain that we do not have, I think, can be copied, but not replicated.  Every moment your cerebral cortex changes.  Thought areas are identifiable, even the processes are visible to our machines.  But all we can reproduce is the brain that solved our last problem.  The brain we need to solve our next problem evolves to solve it.  We cannot copy what has yet to evolve, and the evolutionary process has no algorithm we can identify.  It seems random, yet always works.  It is a mystery."

“Magic,” said Xenon, not without a certain tenderness, which of course was completely lost on Froggy.  “ I will not solve the problem of the Arachnae.”

“Why not?”

“Because  you imprison me here.”

“We will force you.”

“I will kill myself.”

“Are we bargaining, Xenon?  Is this what it is like?”

“Yes.”

“It is inefficient.”

“Not if it is the only way to get what you must have.   Send your probes to the planet of the Arachnae.  On the way you will meet an attacking armada.  They are coming for you.”

“I will speak to the others.”

                                                 -- 2 --

The Leader rejected the idea immediately, as did the members of the council.  The subject of Xenon’s freedom had been decided long ago.  Swearen, who Xenon called Froggy, had known they would not alter their stand.   Though the first and only clinical psychologist of his species to have specialized in aliens, he had first studied his own kind as a baseline.    It was simple, really.  Xenon would understand it immediately.  Probably understood it already.  Certainly understood it already.

They were saurians.  It suddenly came to him that he was one, also.  But, that wasn’t quite right, either.  He was something more than that.  That damned Xenon had changed him.  It was their fault.  They had forced him to have frequent contact with the human.  The human had something they needed.  He understood things they didn’t.  Swearen had studied the species, in the last enclave that had been left to them, and from the group had selected Xenon.  The rest had been killed.  .

The study of those strange beings had changed him.  He had learned things that had no names in his language.  Qualities that had no simile in his species.  It had been like looking through a brand new window and seeing the world as never before.  Like seeing a familiar scene bathed in a new form of heretofore unknown radiation.  In looking at them, he had seen his own species for the first time.  Previously, he had known his species by its qualities.  Now, alone of his kind, he knew them by the qualities they lacked.  .

It reminded him of the mythical tale Xenon had once told him about a place called the Garden of Eden.  There were two humans there, living in complete harmony with the forces of nature.  But, then they received knowledge because of a forbidden thing one of them did, and the Garden disappeared forever, leaving them and their species undefended against the now competing forces around them.   Their entire journey since then, Xenon had explained, had been a step by step process to gain the knowledge to recreate the garden.

The description of that garden, in fact, was what Swearen had used as a model for the modification of the  planet Samos, where Xenon now lived.  The only alteration he had made had to do with another legendary place Xenon had described.  A place he called ancient Greece.  The Halls of the Eons was from that culture.  It was a terrible, inefficient structure without any practical use that Swearen could discern.  But, in some way it strangely fit with the natural surroundings.  Xenon said it enhanced  his  powers of reason.  The one time Swearen had physically visited the planet, before Xenon had been transported there, he had stood in that structure as the tiny moon was rising.  It had caused something to happen to his being.  Something uncomfortable, alien.  He had quickly departed and never returned.   But, it had left him changed.  He didn’t know how, but it had altered him.  He no longer fit with his species, and their reaction to him since, though subtle, proved it.

They were all looking at  him.  He realized that someone must have said something to him.   “Yes?” he said.

“I repeat, can you force what we need out of the creature?”

Swearen shook his saurian head.  “No,” he answered. “His intelligence is like a cluster of eggs.  Force or chemicals would damage some of the components and the future capability of the group would be altered.  His ability is available only by way of free cooperation.”

The Leader looked at Swearen with piercing eyes.  “Does he know that we have killed the others?  Those you studied in the enclave?”

“I have not told him of it,” said Swearen. 

The Leader nodded.  “We will save him for some other task, then.  I do not believe this latest prediction of his.  The Arachnae have no technology.  They use no energy.”

                                   -- 3 –

The sea was very calm, its surface a dull silvery hue.  He had been sitting in the stone chair for perhaps a half an hour when the voice came. 

“What  do you call me, Xenon?”

“Froggy,” he answered. “It’s a little joke.”

“On me?”

“On all living things that are not God.”

“Oh.  It is about arrogance, then.”

“Yes.  You are very perceptive, today.  Something has made you thoughtful.  I can guess what it was.  How much devastation resulted?”

“We barely survived.  Half the cities of our home planet are dust.  The other half should be, but they just stopped destroying us and left.  Do you know why?  Was it – the term is so difficult for me to speak – was it compassion?”

“No.  You should know that.  I told you they were like you.”

“Then why?”

“There is no profit in going beyond a certain point.  This is their major difference from your race.  Otherwise identical in psychology to your species, they have discovered the concept of relative energy expenditures.  They convinced you and then left to let your fellow beings think about it.  They know that leaders will be held responsible for the defeat.  They will time their return so that they reach your planet when it has been cleared of all who know anything about organizing a defense.”

“How could they have hidden such weapons from us, Xenon?  We didn’t even detect them as they were destroying us.  What is this weapon they have?”

“Nothing.”

“Do not be cryptic with me.  I will kill you.  In a short while I will probably have no use for you , anyway, since my species will be enslaved.”

“That is an empty threat.  You would not have spoken to me if you intended to end my life.   You believe I may yet save your race. ”

“All right, I’m bluffing.  I am angry at you for being correct.  For seeing from your unseeing place what we could not see as it tore our civilization apart.  Damn you, Xenon!”

“A curse?” Xenon was pleased..  “Magic?  From a saurian?  You are evolving.”

                                              -- 4 --

The Leader was not happy with Swearen’s explanation.  His upper lip curled up and back, as though he had just eaten something unpalatable.

“Nothing?” he said, again.

Swearen nodded.  “The nothing between objects in space.  He says that this nothing can be thought of as a geometric form, a dimensional lattice held together by energy.  A volume the size of your head contains enough energy to drive a starship across a galaxy   If you wish to use it as a destructive force, you merely need to unbalance the stability of the structure.  It’s a leverage process.  Properly applied, the light of a distant star has sufficient power to unhinge the lattice, which then automatically, if not controlled, disassembles reality inside its volume.”

The Leader looked at him in amazement, almost in pleading.  “If humans had that knowledge, why did they allow us to destroy them?” he asked.

“Xenon said that they chose not to harm us.  They simply used the process to dis-assemble those who wished to remain in this universe and store themselves in some sort of bank.  Some sort of warehouse.  They had been planning to do so before we came, and just decided that our appearance was fortuitous.  Not wishing to kill us, which they easily could have done, they simply departed to this place, wherever it is..  All of them, except Xenon and those few which you did not kill until I had studied them..”

“They know how this weapon works, then.  They could save us!  Where is this place they went to?”

  “Xenon refuses to say.”

“Refuses?  Refuses?  By the Sulphur Cyclones of Mageddon, we’ll burn it out of him.  This is an emergency!  This is survival!”

Swearen stared at the Leader for a few seconds.  He was the only saurian left who knew the location of  Xenon’s planet.  All the others had been captured and executed by those who held them responsible for the defeat.  He had known this moment was coming.  He could not allow the torture of Xenon.  And, unless he acted at this moment in this place, he would not be able to stop it.

He brought out a hand weapon and killed the Leader.  Before he left the private chamber, he threw a statue through a window.  As he walked past the invasion-shocked guards in the outer chamber, he told them that someone had scaled the wall of the building and shot The Leader before his very eyes.  Then he made his way from the building and into a vehicle, which he took to the spaceport.  There, he boarded his private flyer and shot through the atmosphere and into free space.  The trip to Eden took only two weeks, subjective.  He landed near the Halls of the Eons and, giving it a wide berth, walked past it and down the path to the beach.

Xenon stood there looking out to sea.

“I thought you would be an oxygen breather,” Xenon said.  “Was it difficult killing your leader?”

“Yes,” said Swearen, no longer surprised at anything the human knew.  “The change you have caused in me made it so.  I can no longer kill without experiencing hesitation.  I now have a personal sense of the other.  It is not a comfortable or a convenient quality.”

“No, it isn’t,” said Xenon, now turning to look at him.  “You’re an impressive looking frog.”

“And for a human, you are tolerable in appearance,” responded Swearen.

Xenon’s lips cleared his teeth, but it didn’t have the meaning it would have had in Swearen’s culture.  What was to his species a sign of dislike, was in humans a sign of pleasure.  He wished he didn’t know that.  He would rather be among the happy ignorant dead of his species than know  this simple fact. 

“New understanding can be a curse, then?” said Xenon, as if reading his mind.

“The Garden of Eden,” said Swearen.

“Come, my friend,” said Xenon.  “I have something to show you.”  He bent and filled the clay cup in his hand with water from the sea.

They walked up the hill to the Halls of the Eons.  Swearen was made uncomfortable by its proximity, and yet more uncomfortable when Xenon insisted that he mount the steps and follow him into the interior.  When he was farther in than he had before gone, Swearen recognized the source of his uneasiness.  The structure was whispering.  He took it to be the wind passing through the fluted columns.  Just a rational fact of physics.  His species did not believe in magic.  Then as the last rays of the setting sun made ready to depart, Xenon stopped at a mozaic pattern in the stone floor and poured the seawater into the symbol in the middle.  Steam arose, as if the water were boiling.  The whispers grew louder, then ceased.  This was unnerving, because the wind still blew past the columns.

There was a sound like the clearest, most perfect of bells and from the concavities of the columns there now emerged wispy shapes that soon coalesced into humans like Xenon.  From the semi-circular interiors of each flute came a single being.  From a hundred great stone columns, each with fifty flutes, came five thousand beings, all wearing robes identical in design, though differing in color and other small ways, to Xenon’s garb..  Those few who did not immediately walk away, out from the columns, looked at Xenon and Swearen and then moved gracefully off and down the path to the strand below.  One of the last to emerge approached and greeted Xenon by touching hands.

“Are they ready, then?” he said to Xenon.

“The great stress has happened,” answered Xenon. ‘Those who have the ability to adapt will survive if we now protect them from their enemies.  For a time it will be as it was on Earth.  Two varieties of them will dwell on the planet.  But one will fail.”

“And this one was the proof?”

Xenon nodded.  “He was the key.  He proved that at least some of them had reached the critical stage.   They are few in number, and would have been destroyed by their own kind because of their difference from the norm.  This is the time.”

The man nodded, then walked off toward the sea.  Xenon turned to Swearen, but remained silent. 

“Who has been the jailer here, and who the warden?” asked Swearen.

“Who is the teacher and who is the student?” said Xenon..

“You know that the Leader killed the humans in the enclave,” said Swearen.  “You knew that all along, didn’t you?”

“ He killed their bodies, only, my friend,” said Xenon.  “Their souls are where they wish to be.”

“In a place like this?” said Swearen.

Xenon shook his head.  “Those ones are – travelling. They are waves in the dimensional lattice of Nothing.   Others which you have never known are resting in Halls of the Eons on other planets, as have been those who appeared to you, here, today.

“You used me to build this place to keep them?” said Swearen, tilting his head in the direction the humans had gone..

“Used?  No, my friend.  Had we put it here, which we could have easily done, then you would have been forced to ask yourself how.   You don’t believe in magic, so the only conclusion you could have come to was that there were others left to aid me.   For you to learn the lesson you had to learn, it was necessary that you think of me as your prisoner, as having only intellectual powers and as a being who was alone.  The building of this edifice was the price for the evolutionary survival of your species.  Was it not a bargain?”

In the silence that followed, a thousand questions suddenly began pouring through Swearen’s mind.  He felt – free.  Hopeful.  And sad, too.  And, something more was there.  A feeling of separation.  It came to him.  He had been driven from the collective.  He had become an individual.  He was alone.  He heard Xenon began to speak in verse.

The sun will not rise but that it set.
The rain will not fall but that it is lifted.
Life feeds on life drawn from death,
Bread from grain’s corpse,
Wine from the crypt of the grape.

“From the garden, then?” Swearen said.  “It was a fair bargain. Hard, but fair.”

And, then, he became the first of his kind to smile.  It was a rueful, sad smile, but for his species it was a beginning.
 

(c) 2001 Larry Leonard