O.A. Explorers & the White Moon Part V (End)

From: ANDOVER_at_delphi.com
Date: Mon, 01 Jul 1996 22:49:17 -0500 (EST)


The Outer Atomic Explorers and the White Moon, or How We Made the Useless Discovery of Dragon's True Relation to Time, By Flatius Amensis

Part V of V

"The ship needs to be repaired again -- let's go south to the coast, since we
can descend at an angle, and see if this "closing" is real and if it is still in force. If it isn't working, we can go to Machine City."

As the ship staggered southward and downward, and the healer cast spells, Matobolus and Setondal began to explain things to the weary crew.

"That ship, the one that sent those strange messages to us, and nearly collided
with us -- that was ourselves."

He ordered Flavius to play the message again, and told the machine to run it backwards. They heard their own machine sending itself a message! "No wonder you couldn't translate it!" he said to the priest, "It was simply backwards -- and it was just ourselves talking!"

"You mean that we sent messages back and forth to ourselves? "

"Yes, that's it."

As they spoke, given the steep angle and speed of their descent, they began to approach the ragged coastline below. If the Storms below seemed strong on the land, they were nothing as compared to those on the Sea.

Setondal slowed the ship even further, but as the ship began to pass over the Sea, it plunged seaward. He was forced to increase the speed of the generator, but nothing much happened. If there was a curse, it must still be in effect, thought Matobolus. "Turn back, quickly!" he ordered, and the navigator complied. The minute they were over land again, things "settled" to the level of disorder they had come to expect in this tattered Glorantha.

The sense of dread that all the crewmen felt was increasing again. "We aren't that far from Machine City," warned Flavius the Greater. "If that story is right, that's one of the places where those "Gift Carriers" are likely to be."

Matobolus slapped his head. "Somehow I am not thinking right -- that's a good point!"

"What do we do now?"

"Let's stop and grab someone who can give us a local perspective on what's going
on. We need more repairs anyway."

"O.K. Do it."

Setondal said musingly, as he adjusted his generator to slow speed, "No wonder True Dragons sleep so much -- their own clock and that of the world are going in opposite directions. I wonder, is that why Dream Dragons exist -- is it their way of dealing with a "backwards" world?"

Matobolus said in a strange voice "They must know what "the end" of our world is, because it is in THEIR past; it is their beginning."

Flavius the Lesser said, "can the speculation for a moment. I have a target."

The detector revealed a barbarian priest of some sort, most likely a Storm priest judging by his behavior, a few hundred yards below them. The priest was peering in a puzzled, but wary fashion at what must have seemed to his primitive eyes some sort of creature of the Air.

It was a matter of seconds to cast the requisite spells to Stupefy him, to land, to bind him, and to lift off.

"We still need to find a landing place that is safe," warned Setondal. "I can't
keep this up much longer."

Matobolus nodded. When they landed, the sorcerors were told to start searching once again for food and other materials, while the rest of them questioned the Storm Priest. They used the spirit machine to paralyze his allied spirit, then awoke him. It made sense to let their own Lhankor Mhy priest -- a fellow Lightbringer of sorts -- lead the group in this process, but it soon developed that the priest was even more terrified than the simple act of being kidnapped by strangers might make him.

When he realized that this was a group of Godlearners, it took a mighty effort to keep him from slaying himself!

Once prevented from suicide, the priest swore by the Wind that he would tell them all that he knew on one condition -- that they told him nothing! "The Gift Carriers will come for me, if you tell me your Secret;" he babbled, "they may come for me in any event. And if they do, I am lost, forever!"

This is the oddest form of "torture" I have ever seen, thought Matobolus with a sort of hysterical mirth -- we are forcing him to tell us what he knows by threatening to tell him what WE know. He hasn't even asked for us to release him!

The priest told them in greater detail of things they had already learned from the Yelmalio documents they had obtained earlier. Like the Yelmalian, he knew relatively little of the West, but knew the tales of Peloria, in detail.

Given their recent discovery, the interrogators were most interested in what he had to say of dragons and dragonnewts. And he told them of things they had not heard of before, the tale of Ingolf Dragonfriend, the Dragonnewt's Dream, the Rise of the Lunar Empire, the destruction of the Temple of the Reaching Moon by a Dragon, Argrath and the great Hero Wars, and the final destruction of the Red Moon by the Dragons.

The sense of unease grew on all in the cabin as the two-day interrogation went on, most notably on Matobolus himself, whose usual careful attention to matters of dress and coiffure was disappearing. Nonetheless, the sorcerors of the ship were securing what they needed for further travel.

As the priest spluttered to a stop, Matobolus ordered the party to release him, called for the evening meal, and then told the crew that he himself would keep the first watch. "We can decide where to go on the morn," he said. The last sight they saw as they fell asleep thinking furiously and writing.

Flatius was the first to wake in the morning. It appeared that Matobolus had fallen asleep over his scribbles of the last night, but when Flatius touched his shoulder, he discovered that he was dead. A pparently Matobolus had stabbed
himself in the neck with his pen, and bled to death over the notes he had written.

The End

Post script: Matabolus killed himself last night. He wrote semi-coherent notes to himself, but it is not clear whether he slew himself out of a prideful despair, or whether he was the first of us to die at the hands of the Gift Carriers of whom we have heard so much. Despair, after all, is one of the
"gifts" of the False Gods.

      I myself think that it was discovering that his boundless hopes for the future of Man were futile was what caused him to slay himself.

      These were his final notes:

Only the dragons have seen it both ways.

Dragons go the other way in time. Their emblem of circularity is real.

 why dragonnewts seem so strange.

Was the Dragonnewts dream a practice run by the dragons for something they did
"later"?

Dragonnewts evolve in one time direction, and become dragons, evolving back the other way. No wonder their emblem is what it is. Could that be the Left Hand Sight? When the dragonnewts go away, they come back as dragons. So the sleeping dragon underneath us may be a dragonnewt that we passed once. From their point of view, the great dragon is the END of evolution, their final goal, not their beginning!

That means the last dragonnewt to become a Dragon will actually live the longest.

The white moon, travelling one way in time, and the red moon, travelling the other way, collided and destroyed EACH OTHER. Their essences were too different. In a way, the moons are the opposite of the dragons. The dragons travel the circle of time, the moons cannot.

The dragons fled the white moon just before it was destroyed. That must be why the story that the dragons destroyed the red moon came into existence. But the dragons, having travelled both ways in time, knew what had happened.

No wonder they act so rarely --

Can we change anything? No. Freedom to change lies only in ignorance. It is the knowledge of the Gods that binds them. The more they know, the less freedom they have. The more they have done, the more they have limited possibility.

Am I saying then, that an ignorant peasant may shape the world more than a God? In a sense, yes, for what is know cannot be changed. Only the perception of it may be. We cannot alter the history of these moons, or the presence of the dragons, or the circular nature of Gloranthan time. Freedom lies in the unknown. That must mean that the True God has no freedom at all -- that explains why he does not act, for ALL that we see IS his action. The Lesser Gods, false or true, are limited also. I guess these Dragons are too.

So that means that shaping history requires the proper mixture of power and ignorance then?

like the Unholy Trio, or Arkat or . . . "We Godlearners?" Yes, that seems unfortunately to have been the case, doesn't it?

We can no longer change what we know.

Or, apparently, the self-wrought destruction of our people.

But once we did change things, is that not true? Ahh, that might have been the problem. We violated the nature of Gloranthan reality. We destroyed our own paradise.

From the Dragon's point of view, it disgorged Tatius and the moon priests, rather than swallowing them! Hmm, if Time flows differently inside the dragon, I wonder what happened to them?

The Minarian Memory Removal was not a removal, but an insertion of new knowledge!

And that means that the Dragonkill War was not, from the Dragon's point of view, an act of destruction, but one of creation! Thousands of people born from the mouths of the Dragons? Where were they before?

And Ingolf Dragonfriend was born from a Dragon (or became a dragon?), not eaten by one. Is that what he meant by Kapertine, and how it could not be understood?

And Chaos created the Spike, rather than destroying it.

And Umath brought Earth and Sky together before returning to his mother's womb.

All my hopes for Man were false. Man measures NOTHING. And nothing is very strong.

I wonder ---- is this better the way Dragons see it -- an evolution rather than a decay?

But for us it means that we are creatures doomed to endless de-evolution --

Not entirely self-wrought.

    The last things Matobolus wrote were covered in his blood, and I thought it best for the doubtful sanity that the rest of us retain that they remain so. I leave his writings here for those who wish to decipher their meaning.

    I wrote this story from the point of view of Matobolus and left it here under this rock, as a tribute of sorts to our dead captain. If the Knowledge we have is to have any value, it must be preserved. I have not written what is apparently now our "Secret" for that might be enough to cause these writings to be destroyed.

    Apparently, there are creatures out there that will seek us out wherever we go, or there were such creatures long ages ago. Whether they still exist we do not know. On the other hand, at least this new, and apparently useless, knowledge of the nature of Draconic Time may be permitted to survive even the Gift Carriers.

    We have been divided amongst ourselves, but have finally decided that we cannot live and will not be allowed to live in this strange world that we have travelled to, and must go on.

    If our machine can take us out of Glorantha again, we may find some other world or travel to some other Gloranthan time, before or after the Gift Carriers exist. We know we cannot affect those things within Time that we have already learned; we cannot avert the destruction of our own people. But if we are lucky, mayhap we can return to Chaos and thus to our own or some other Time.

    But I confess this fear -- which I have not shared with any of my fellows -- that the great creature of Chaos might have left us untouched because he knew that worse would befall us than aught he could do.

    And this hope -- that even the Dragon's perception of time running backwards may not explain everything.

    There was a White Moon, after all, at the beginning of Time, too. Is it possible that the White Moon was created in what we consider the early times, ran "backwards" past the "Creation" of Glorantha and then past its "end" and on until it was destroyed in the collision with the Red Moon? Viewed from both Time and Space, then, is not Glorantha as circular as the Moons were?  

    Learning has failed us, however, and only hope remains. That might have been the lesson of Matobolus' life and death. We will find out.

Best wishes, dear reader ! Say a prayer for us -- that we may fare well --

  Flatius Amensis.
Jim Chapin


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