In Arms We Trust

Part Five of Five

by Vasilis Adams A.

Intermittent soft whirs first caught his attention, then a burst of awareness almost drowned him. An awareness so ubiquitous, profound and agile that for an instant he thought he had given up the spirit.

Can it be true?

Vast expanses of space were at a hand's reach, time in discrete degrees of lapsing undulated by him like surging waves of contraction and dilatation. Dr. Lovesigh saw rainbows of forces charge through electronic gates and ions veer over cascading tiers of conductances and fluctuate in electromagnetic glow as they entered and exited circuit components.

Fantastic!

An increment farther, clusters of stars and galaxies hung suspended, motionless, and scintillated like clear and brilliant iced bursts of pyrotechnics on a pristine noel night. While a part of him marveled at the whirlpool bustling all around him, another spoke of his perception participated in a cyclone of directed activity.

There was a long silence.

Somewhere in this convolution, he thought recovering, is the little fellow's port of entry. Not that I know what I'm looking for.

They hadn't given him a whole lot of time to familiarize himself with all the controlling maneuvers. "Use your sense of will," they had said simply, "and the signals generated by electrochemical convections will trigger the interface implants."

The place is tremendous, he monologued in his mind, and nothing is intact.

"Here goes," he gruffed as if speaking out loud. He braced and willed himself to the machines input ports.

He reeled and swirled while he flashed through what must have been multitudes of ICs and miles of conductor. He felt a desperate need to shrink for cover.

I'm going to retch.

He willed his nonexistent eyes to close -- but by that time the vertigo ebbed. He was, or an extension of him, before unending rows of contacts, bright, shiny, gold pins inside their female counterparts.

Ganga O. Din! It's working. As an afterthought, I wonder if I'd sound silly asking for sea-sickness medication to be injected into those life supports? Then, I can't retch. That's all behind me. He brushed the idea aside.

Upon closer examination of himself he saw that indeed he was not all there. What was, didn't amount to much. Traces of spoke-like, quasi-real, energy threads were the sole continuation of his awareness at where he was. Behind him lingering 'contrails' of charged ions shimmered briefly, then dwindle into nothingness.

Anxiety suddenly latched on to him again as the ethereal trail ceased to show the way back through the labyrinth of printed circuit boards. His stomach went sour.

There's no stomach, he reminded, and not enough of me here to be abandoned. Besides, his backup had that purpose, to reconstitute any small part of him lost or damaged. They had assured him of that much -- or had they?

When his apprehensions abated he turned his efforts to the job at hand: on the ports for the chimp's entry.

***

"There's a -- some technical difficulty," Chickbrow's voice intruded amid the darkness of distance.

"What is it?"

"I don't know exactly how this could be." Chickbrow seemed to gag on his own words. "Dr. Lovesigh, a band of ant-mites have been detected; left behind inside the mainframe."

Lovesigh's nonexistent stomach now displaced his missing Adam's apple. The old urge to heave-ho was intolerably demanding just then. But his old man's pride was like a young lad's arrogance, neither conceded to reason. So he suppressed it as though it was capable of really taking place. And coolly asked, "What's it mean, Chickbrow?"

"The fields in the computer -- they've all gone haywire. They're reversing the 'mites' programming."

"Get to the point, man." The manifest aloofness was slowly foundering.

"The 'mites are waiting, their priming phase before reversal activity starts. They're loading their program to disconnect you. You are ... in a way ... being rejected by the ALPHA."

"Poppycock!"

"I don't know how else to explain it. The 'mites cannot program themselves and we didn't do it, so it leaves only the computer." Chickbrow's voice choked with restrained anxiety.

Lovesigh chilled all over. "Why?"

"Non-compatibility. It's all I can think of."

Lovesigh's thoughts fled back to when his body and brain were intact and an incident like this would have occurred only in the worst of nightmares.

"Can't you stop them!" he called out. But the speakers outside placed no hue of undue urgency in his appeal.

"Yes. We can pass a somewhat higher current through the interfaces to your synapses, and electrocute them ... but, Dr. Lovesigh, this will have the same effect on you. It will burn all your existing connections with the ALPHA and -- "

" -- and I'll be stranded, isolated. A brain with no extensions. Can't the backup repair the damages?"

He caught a sound akin to a weighty sigh.

"Neuron tissue, as you are aware, cannot be made to regenerate. The backup is only a map; a map of your brain's molecular structure plus your DNA configuration. It's merely a quantitatively duplicate record of your brain. We can't get out of it any more than we put into it. Ineffective with burnt out neurons. It cannot generate living cells ... "

Chickbrow, tight-lipped contorted his face and shook his head. He looked manifestly annoyed, almost ruffled, and much inconsonant to his characteristic composed, organized self.

"We are doing all we possibly can, Dr. Lovesigh. I personally do not suggest the electrocution alternative. It will have irreparable damage results. But if you can wait, the isolation will be temporary, we'll send another -- "

Lovesigh's audio went dead.

He waited as a montage of images of all of the Apocalypse unfolded before him. The last reserves of hope perished with what followed.

"Dr. Lovesigh, a faction of renegade 'mites are going for -- possibly started on -- the life supports -- we'll have to burn them out -- "

"And leave me here! A thinking blob of gray jelly devoid of any likelihood to ever commune -- No thank you!" The metallic voice clipped abruptly.

Then, it came on again just as suddenly with the distinct cocking click of an empty gun. "Mr. Fagan ... ?"

Quick, sibilant whispers filled the charged atmosphere.

There was a heavy hush after. A nod by Chickbraw.

"Dr. Lovesigh," Fagan cut into the silence smoothly, "there is a last alternative, as you may have speculated." Fagan's voice revealed uncanny calm, and several heads turned in his direction to witness the cause of it.

"The backup," said Fagan, as though commenting on tomorrow's weather, "can be used -- Mr. Chickbrow assures me -- to create an animate shell of your brain's morphology, provided it uses living brain tissue. You only then have to will yourself to transfer and occupy the prepared topology."

The quiet now was ponderous.

"$|=-0(+^!&*&^$!!)x@\*%#*/@`~!'</\/>!!!"

The screeching garble pierced the skin itself. All those near the speakers jumped back, hands over ears. Except Fagan.

"Sir?" Fagan asked.

"Will I be permitted, Mr. Fagan, to have the prerogative of keeping this solely between the two of us -- and the government of course?"

"Not intended otherwise, Professor." Fagan reassured, and looked away from the monitor.

Further down the counters and racks of equipment Champ stopped his jumping and all his snorting in a typically rollicking fashion. A speck of discernment seemed to flicker in response to the situation on the surface of the chimp's deeply embedded eyes. A crown of remote sensors ready and on stand-by glinted on top of its dented forehead. Fagan now fully cast a look in Champ's direction, what appeared to be a look of gratitude. For the first time, in place of anxiety, a hint of mischief mingled with release of relief glimmered in Fagan's round innocent eyes.

***

[The news services, radio and television, did not lag behind. UPI and GAP, as well as Reuters and newspapers of what once was referred to as the Eastern Block covered and reported every development concerning the weird phenomenon that steadily divided the world once more into two major camps: Those supporting the views of the East and those of the West.

But below the pompous and loud declarations and vivid waving of hands, I had detected an undertow of a totally different nature that was in the fermenting stage.

Since science and politics were at a loss, world religious leaders on five continents began dealing out much needed consolation. Questions demanding answers were speedily reviewed by Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox, Hebrews, Muslims, Hindus, observers of The New Time Religion, and other sects and creeds. Through faith, they could govern the world much more solidly it seemed now than their divided counterparts had managed through political government. Quickly, copies of the Old and New Testaments, the Koran and Holy Parchments were divulged into and analyzed hairsplittingly. Answers were expediently interpreted from sacred scribes and discharged to an eager and anticipating populous.

Like brush fire, one such answer spread faster than any other: The End had begun.

Almost all religions hold some form of this in common: an End, an Armageddon, in which evil and total catastrophe would triumph; where neither rich nor poor, young or old, strong or weak, would make any difference; where the common denominator would be one, " ... to dust we return".

The first gauge of this undercurrent was felt on Wall Street where market indices started unexpected fluctuations. Much religious-oriented stock began changing hands. Vatican controlled shares gained, and philanthropic institutions like UNICEF, hospitals, schools, The Salvation Army, and a plethora of archdioceses' assets shot up into the hundreds of points.

Although the End foretold of absolute and total annihilation, hope of absolution was not ruled out. The God of man was a merciful God. Man's atonement could alter His decision. Faith en masse might curb and mitigate His anger to reconsider, religious leaders called out in swiftly increasing congregations. "Repent" was the password to salvation.

Fear dominated and loosened tongues as information from guarded and classified reports started leaking to stubborn and persistent journalists and reporters who in turn communicated their scoops to editors' desks. One such bomb of data had somehow sneaked out of Abe Fagans's group and into Ed Smythe's hands. P.P.]

***

As he read the well-documented piece, he threw several examining glances at the young man standing across his desk.

"Your sources, Andrews?" he asked tersely.

The anxious reporter had been awaiting eagerly for just that question.

"Johnas Sloan."

Smythe cleared his throat. He knew about him. Sloan, after a successful but short political career, deemed he would gain the additional popularity needed for an election, working next to the quick-rising now controversial figure of Fagan. The MA had no other issue equal in importance and stature. The public relations department Sloan headed had no meager share in the project's prestigious and fringe beneficial returns.

Smythe had a gut feeling concerning Sloan's involvement and regarded the copy before him once more. It justified an exclusive edition that would haul in a small fortune. The source was solid enough, but the repercussions from an already sensitive public would be unpredictable, maybe hysterical. Patroni had been prolific enough in his descriptions to warrant due prudence to the subject. "A city," he wrote in his last reporting, "is being brought down to its knees by irresponsible rumor-mongering. If it is not stopped, the consequences will be the gravest and befall on the innocent as well as the guilty."

The chief editor put the copy sheets to one side of his ruffled desk top. "What is a PR man doing in NASA's research department? Sorry, Andrews, this stuff might be real, but I'm not about to chance the paper to a suit by the government."

The young reporter's mouth dropped open. When he recovered, he took a step towards his editor's desk. "Sloan does work for the government and his testimony alone vouches an okay by the higher ups. Why pussyfoot now, chief, when we got such an exclusive on our hands?"

"Your story is good, young man. Too good to come this easy and without a hitch. And don't call me chief!"

"What hitch?" the youth asked, uptight.

"I can speculate on ten this minute. Give me a minute more and I'll raise that to twenty. I don't know the specifics in this case, is what I'm trying to say. But when you get to where I'm at, you can bet your inexperienced seat of your pants that nothing -- nothing is given for free."

Smythe took out a handkerchief and sneezed into it. "Sloan is not Fagan. You bring me a written release signed by Abe Fagan and you'll get your exclusive. Nothing less."

"You're filibustering, chief. And you're doing it at the expense of this paper. A world capital is about to be blown to outer space -- the story of the century -- and you talk about signatures?" The reporter's neck veins puffed out like thick blue cords.

"I'm doing just that, yes! I'm filibustering! Have you asked why? Could it be because I don't want ten -- a hundred -- more cities blown, not into space, but to kingdom come? Could it be of the panic your story'll instigate? Not to mention mass hysteria, runaway rumors, a frantic chain reaction benefiting only muggers, thieves and vandals. After you cause it, Mr. Hot-shot reporter, try stopping it. Anarchy is like a rolling snowball. It grows by destroying all in its path. Even this half-arsed government is better than anarchy. Mob rule you cannot stop. And when fingers get nervous and panicky, mushrooms start sprouting."

The reporter looked dazed.

"Oh, don't tell me your powers of inductive reasoning don't grasp that one?"

"You mean, nuclear blasts?"

The other dipped his head.

"It's a newspaper story you have, not an ultimatum, Mr. Smythe. No war that I know of has been declared because of a free press."

"Free and responsible, no. But free as a lunatic? I wouldn't want to venture in being the first -- and the last."

The young man, not over twenty-five, nodded, a smirk of contempt made his left nostril tic.

"May I have my story back?" he asked and extended his hand.

"As long as you work here, your stories are the paper's. Yours is only the by-line," Smythe responded.

"All right. I quit! Now, give it back!"

"Not on your life! Besides the fact that you wrote that story while employed here, and it's the legal property of this newspaper, you should never, I repeat -- never, use the imperative on your boss, young fellow."

Andrews, about-faced and with twitching shoulders, walked out. At his desk he opened the top drawer and withdrew, along with other personal things, a second print-out, stuffing it in his pocket cautiously. Then, as quickly, he took it out, studied it and almost tossed it in the trash can. The grin of awareness replaced a smirk of loathing.

"Hell! The hell to you!" He exited the NYS building.

***

Abe Fagan could have used an extra pair of hands. As intermediary between the Pentagon and White House, IBSEH and NASA, and his supervision over the up to then most crucial assemblage stages of the MA had made him wish his day could have an extra eight hours.

He felt a wave of relief that the press was not a part of his concern. Johnas Sloan was a competent and tactful PR man. He had proven as much when he held the same post next to the President. The present position was in no way less sensitive, and discretion was of paramount importance. Yet, being primarily a managerial administrator, Abe Fagan held certain reservations. He was aware that Sloan's ambitions did not stop at his previous or present position. The taste of power had a sweetness about it, was enticing, especially to one who was so closely involved in its analysis, censuring procedures, and its source. In Sloan's mind, nested knowledge and information only a handful had access to. Any tottering or wavering of nerves or loyalties on his part could be no less than disastrous. But Johnas Sloan was steel molded into human shape. Impenetrable. Tensile. Unyielding. He gave and took only as much as he deemed necessary. He was beyond any influence other than his own. He was his own man. So much so that it made Fagan irascibly uneasy. But the man had unequivocal references, one such from the very President of NewStates of NovaAmerica.

Fagan's foremost headache that day was in another realm. As long as Sloan's ambitions and expectations did not interfere with the situation at hand, he was entitled to his private handful of wishful thoughts. Fagan's own miracle worker was absent at a most inopportune time. He had sent him away and now, amidst the most critical phase of the MA construction, he alone had to overlook on the job. Although his was a purely coordinating function behind a desk in an office cluttered with specifications and blueprints, he was nevertheless the one single person, other than Lukas, who had knowledge of the MA as a whole. Be it even in layman's terms. Some of its conceptual aspects he thought he understood. But in its totality -- only one could comprehend that. And he was eight thousand miles away. The interfacing of the giant MA's module could not wait for Dr. Lukas's return. Lovesigh's sanity, life even, depended on it. Not to mention the military.

"What's the hold up about, Mr. Fagan?" the four-star general's sharp voice penetrated into his ear. The phone line was a scramble line directly connected to the Pentagon.

Fagan was well aware of General Moffet's concern. The project would next go into his lap and the General wanted no undo delay. The General's pressure came directly from the Chief Executive via the Department of Defense.

"General Moffet," Fagan prompted patience, "as long as Dr. Lukas is not personally present to direct the module linking, I have to rely solely on a sparsely few knowledgeable engineers and several hundred rackfuls of plans and documentation."

"Mr. Fagan, we all have impossible target dates to meet. Justifying why we cannot meet them doesn't change them. Dr. Lukas' job to gain us time has achieved success. It's utmost vital that in this period of grace I have the MA in my hands, assembled and working. The defense of this country and the outcome of the next IBSEH meeting pivots on this."

The tenure of the General's voice was matter of fact, leaving no margin of compromise.

Fagan put phone down. Lukas did succeed. Valuable days had been somehow credited to a world resembling sweating dynamite. Fagan knew also the reason why the General needed the drive; to have a sound leverage, an ace up his sleeve, when IBSEH met. Professor Bodin had almost disclosed top secret information that was guarded vigilantly in SIA vaults. How this was passed on to the other side ... he dreaded to think. Officially, only five were aware of MA's supplementary potentials: The President, the Secretary of Defense, General Moffet, Lukas and he. And only Lukas was in a position, the singular position, to decipher the exact repercussions in realizing these peculiar capabilities.

As Professor Bodin had stated, and late last night Lukas conveyed to Fagan, the "machine's" limits were not those so cautiously unveiled by Lukas at IBSEH. There was more, much more, to the five-story windowless building of steel plate and degaussing systems that represented the MA: A twenty-five foot high building raised on a distant and isolated grass valley to which the entire country's electromagnetic network was tied to. Fagan was well aware too that Secretary of Defense Milton Petski would be literally helpless when the Drive was assigned to the Pentagon; General Moffet would not hesitate in the least to use the MA in its near full capacity.

Other than the President, the General reported directly to Xenon Glixxon. Fagan and the President new this. And it drove one, the latter, to drink. And when the President went on a drinking spree--he forgot. He couldn't remember. He couldn't recognize his own mother. President Reginald Pilgrim although extravagant in his life style was a fair man at the core, Fagan saw, trying hard to revert through legislation morsels even of civic and civil rights back to his constituents. But Xenon's SIA spies were everywhere. And General Moffet, too, dogged the man relentlessly.

The hero of the 2020 coup had one last ambition, to become Chief Executive himself, and like a competent politician, his platform would have to rest on the most controversial of issues: A foolproof defense system when it was time to leave the planet. In addition -- his 'coup d'etat' -- would have to be a foolproof suicide machine for the enemy. A machine whose vast sophistication could turn the tables and ricochet the attacker's missiles back to and upon their origins. The trump card, Fagan was almost certain, the General held was this.

No one then would dare fire a single missile while the country was being evacuated into space and another world. Unless they thought it was a bluff. Then perhaps one or two non-atomic war-headed projectiles, harmless in kill-power, would be tested. Justification might then be given for the General to moderately retaliate with a half dozen of his nuclear loaded ICBM's from orbit to an equal number of key targets. Enemy ground-to-air missiles would be useless. The MA extended its unique effect even to these, to airborne but friendly craft.

As well, other large or small land areas could be linked to MA. Theoretically, the entire globe, in its whole, could be covered by a blanket of protection and be impenetrably shielded, even from a hypothetical alien invasion. But these potentials were still far ahead and in the middle of a continuously increasing list of MA priorities. And having the Priest's head as springboard.

Fagan's concern that day -- the second day after the lopsided and freak phenomenon halfway across the world occurred -- was that which had been shared by the President too: Avoid a spontaneous act of aggression.

Avoid War.

He had very little to say in this other than to meet deadlines and provide assessments by assigning one of his teams to interpret computer run-outs. His personal political power ended there. But inside him where reason and logic dwelled, at some deep buried and long ignored warm place by his heart, in recollections perhaps of innocent childhood years, Fagan felt another kind of power, a strength upon which all other powers was founded. A priority that yielded life as a civilized progression of being: purposeful, prudent, humane. Strategies could be compromised, he reflected. Principle, no.

It was then Lukas came to mind. He cringed back on his chair. How, he wondered, could a man given to the cloth, dedicated to the service of an infinitely more stringent duty, committed to a philosophy so stoic and antithetical to the consensus of modern ways -- how could such a man survive, reconcile with a conscience left raw by today's taciturn and callous-oriented societies?

Fagan at once realized that two of the five who knew of the potencies of the MA could not, by conviction and debt to the whole, follow the unwritten rules of the dominance game.

When he punched the last of the numerical code series that connected him to Lukas's computer, he had already decided on his own platform and only wanted to convey this resolve.

***

That same morning, Father Lukas boarded the small white kaique and was on his way to the island of Aggistri. The crowded docks caused delay in the scheduled time of sail. People poured in to the port from other islands and countries washed by the Mediterranean. The European press capitalized on the spectacularity of the latest and most influential two day old phenomenon. The recent passing of Doan's Comet seemed to have predisposed en masse a near hysterical public reaction. Allusions to the Comet's effects were made with strong support by certain scientific groups. Whispers of The Second Coming were not left out, either. In both cases, the word "Repent" was on the lips of most.

"Repent," too, echoed from Father Lukas who sat next to Alex. The other man glanced at the priest, then across to where Frank and Barbara sat. The other two had not heard through the low grumble of the boat's engines.

"Repent, Dr. Lukas?" Alex asked.

Father Lukas, who had been gazing out of the port window over the waters of the Gulf of Argosaranikos, returned from his distant thoughts.

"I guess I was thinking out loud, Alex. Seems the fear of the Lord gains popularity when all else fails to explain."

"Sort of instant faith?" Alex tried at humoring.

"Right. A catch-all word, Repent; John the Baptist couldn't have done any better. Only, fear is not respect and certainly is far from motivating brotherly love. No, Alex. People are scared, and faith is not the product of duress, but of love deeply felt."

Alex, since early that morning at Lukas' apartment, wanted a chance to speak to the other about the more subtle sides of the MA. But everything had happened so quickly after his arrival there that they had only a short time to exchange words. And now, here with Frank, whom he hadn't seen since they were kids, they were sailing to an unknown to him island that his sister and brother had been side-tracked to yesterday. He had seen in the meanwhile enough of the invalid city to make his own assessments of the phenomenon's after-effects. The nearest closest parallel in his mind was the San Francisco earthquake. Instead however, of the earth, here gravity quaked. And none were prepared for such.

Although the MA had vast capabilities and potentials unexplored as yet, Alex could not attribute this disaster as being MA's making. No Earth technology had the knowledge or means to implement modulations on a gravitational field. Or were these mutations?

He shifted restlessly in his seat. The sunlight bathed the interior of the quaint little ship as it mildly rocked through its course.

"Dr. Lukas," he ventured, "Professor Bodin accused us yesterday of something quite serious." He licked the salt off his lips. "My own conclusions, if I were in his place, wouldn't have been much different. The association of the MA with the phenomenon would have been -- is -- the most natural one. Is it possible that a completed and functioning MA exists somewhere causing all this?"

Alex's somewhat loud tone must have spilled the words over to be heard by Frank and Barbara, for both stopped their conversation and looked his way.

"No," the priest said equally loud. "We don't have such capabilities, Alex. The MA cannot affect gravities. Gravity is not an active form of energy like electro-magnetism. It is static and an absolute. As such it cannot inhibit any circuit of the MA, and vice versa. A simple analogy is that of a conductor being affected by an alternating gravetic field -- if such a field was possible. There would be nil effect upon the molecular structure of the conductor other than change in its weight."

The priest appreciated the other's inquiring mind. He was also concerned about its analytical strength. Sooner or later a question would be asked that could not be so easily explained away. Before that happened, he must have grasp of the entire picture. At present, like a jigsaw puzzle, it was a collection of odd bits and pieces, most of which seemed to come from a number of entirely different puzzles -- perhaps six in all.

So far.

There was no doubt in his mind that there was more behind this. Coincidences did not arise in such fashion. Accidents did not occur in clusters as in this case. Propelling these events had to be a scheme. A purpose with orientation a definite goal. Not knowing its aim made him cautious and reserved.

He didn't want to rush at explanations or take more than anyone necessary into his confidence. He did not do this out of mistrust, but for their own protection. It was his nature to load responsibility upon his shoulders alone. He'd rather burden himself than let loose facts irresponsibly; and at the mercy of irrelevant, incorrect and deadly implications and interpretations. His mind could endure the collective pressure of six. Six, yes. For, from induction, he was sure that Mark too was among them because of some calling, the same one, that converged them 'all' to a meeting place. Mark also must share a mind not uncommon to his sister Amanda and brother Alex. But who or what was directing the performance? To what end?

And -- were there more like them?

At that point, he called upon his mother, upon this most beloved by him person. He willed into the wrist communicator he had worn before leaving home that morning.

The computer back at his empty apartment burst soundlessly to wakeful activity. The interfacing IC module within the device responded unprotestingly to the influx of electrical impulses and put the intercontinental call through.

The ringing at the other end was interrupted but a weak "Hello?" and a conversation commenced as the Priest must have appeared immersed in thought to the other three.

He asked about her well-being, about the parish and the children at the Sunday School. He assured her that her younger sister was fine in health and that the apartment she had insisted he used was of the greatest help.

The mother then spoke to him about how things were in NewStates. How people were returning to religion, back to God and the Gospel. How the "old country" incident had begun changing people, and each passing day was flocking believers closer to Christ.

Father Lukas's face hinted a smile as in his head, privately, he listened to his mother's voice and words describe crowded churches and mass media preachings, tell of all that was good in man.

"... My Lukas, even the most dedicated to the material life are being converted overnight," she said, her voice breaking with emotion. "They are spending dollars by the millions. It must be to form congregation centers for the faithful to go and be absolved. People no longer care about wealth or property; they donate openheartedly to the poor, to orphanages, hospitals, churches; they are giving all they have, their last dime, my son, to save their souls."

"Mother," he said, "it is only sad that man gives when there is no other course to follow. But ... I too share your joy, this turn for humanity."

"Lukas, my son, all was not for the worse; we grieve for the misfortune of the city, but so much good has come out of it. I am sure, not one but two or four other cities like the old capital can be built from all this money."

When the silent conversation drew to a close and the link cut. The priest could not help but broadly smile, openly.

Not many seconds went by when the heartfelt smile began to fade. In its place came a solemn expression of disappointment. In his mind, he asked how much money was absolution bought for these days?

A lot, came the answer. To whom? he then asked. God is paid in faith, not currency.

   Anthony Lovesigh waited patiently in Champ.

He exhaled.

Champ the chimp, too, exhaled.

Wasn't it enough that he had spent the last four years in a wheelchair, expecting death to knock on his door at any minute of any day? To have his brain removed and encapsulated in an ornery machine? Be bounty hunted by insubordinate and conspiratorial insects?

No.

That was not enough.

Fate had marked him for well more; had strewn his Calvary with all manner of ensuing affliction. The most recent, his imprisonment in a ridiculous monkey's hairy body. All for trying to save a doomed Earth.

A mother Earth that screamed to be helped and which expired on a year to year basis from her peoples' senseless mistakes. Peoples he wanted to take faraway, to distant stars so as to alleviate Gaia's back-breaking load. Give her a breather. Free her from a besetting cancer that would soon suck all life from her.

But beyond all else, his heart ached, and at the same time thrilled in anticipation, at the prospects of using his new fringe, perchance to reach her.

"Dr. Lovesigh," interrupted the man holding the phone and on whose lap Dr. Lovesigh glumly sat reflecting. "Excellent news. Fagan found him!"

Chickbrow's enthusiasm was quickly sensed and conveyed. And all hell broke loose for Lovesigh.

He did two somersaults, land jarringly on a hard floor, climb up an exposed conduit, fling himself across space and swing breezily and single-handedly from a pendant fluorescent light fixture.

"Quick!" Lovesigh cried, fighting for possession of the chimps speech centers and its incongruous mouth. "Sho-ho-w him a bana-ha-na."

"Here, Champ -- ," coaxed David Chickbrow, Managing Director of Mite Industries Special Projects Division, and procreator of the professor's most recent misadventure. "Banana, boy!"

Champ plummeted down, all of five meters, waded head down and serious to the other, and climbed back on the lap. Chickbrow could not help but witness the chimp's eyes glow now with some sort of delight and veracity. He wasn't at all surprised.

"Tha-ha-nk you."

Granted that his host this time was benign and an exceptionally stocked subject of nano-technology implants that provided him with a consortium of new, and some fascinating even, abilities to toy with: short-range telekinesis, libraries of memory, marginal speech and detection of telepathic waves, a vastly improved biochip synergistic processor, and more. Dr. Lovesigh, nonetheless, hard as he tried could not cope with or have any control upon the beast's strange feral moods and bizarre, sometimes extraordinary and uncannily, 'human' reactions and appetites. No one possibly could, whether inside or outside the beast. Who wants another person under his skin, and for who knows how long, he thought.

"Low tones, Chickbrow, ple-he-ase," he managed to say between bites, chews and gulps. The chimp ate humbly, stealing quiet quick glimpses at his bearer.

***

[From the archives of Starseed and spy satellites. P.P.]

On a flat top plateau five hundred meters below the mountain's summit, what had been a ghostly stir all this while, suddenly began sending rumbling echoes through adjoining valleys and gorges. It lasted a night and a day. The townspeople of nearby villages, shaken by the Athens and Athos calamity, threw curious and suspicious glances in the direction of the snow-covered, cloud-shrouded mountain peak.

What they didn't see was that in the midst of drifting mists, solid ices and falling snow covering the plateau, a highly accelerated unfolding was triggered into full force. The plateau's five square kilometers of what had mostly been glacier-covered land transformed drastically. Hot tropic currents commenced conducting under its bedding. The warmth soon seeped and penetrated into the surface ice stratum. The temperature rose to an ambiance of twenty-eight degrees Centigrade in a matter of hours. While the melt soaked throughout the plateau's surface, aestivating and frozen, but preserved, exotic plants, trees and shrubs, long in the deep freeze of ice, began to awaken from a deep timeless sleep.

A few hours later portions of what seemed the red shingles of roof tops appeared, protruding in spots over many hectares of melting ice.

And with the passing of each hour, beneath the grounds, in ancient bored tunnels, the same breath of life spread. Animals that had been hibernating for millennia shuddered as the arousing even whiff of life sighed around and through them. Their long dormant hearts resumed once again to function, beat to the rhythm of the awakened.

The rapidly subsiding and remaining glaciers snapped and cracked with deafening booms and collapsed with earth-shattering groans. When some heaved over the edge of the soaring plateau, smashing upon others below, the assailed terrain jarred and pitched, shuddering and grunting with a fierceness of a pregnant Earth giving birth, moaning in exhubillant splitting pangs of agony.

When night gave way to twilight, on the second day, structures could be discerned with certain clarity. They rose through the entire field, each a monument of ancient grandeur and architecture. Columns, broad steps, huge walls build with cyclopean marble cubes, buttressed inclined roofs -- all glistened as if they were built only yesterday. A small city of fresh clean marble, onyx and alabaster spread upon a lazy green pasture with rolling hills beyond. When the last of the glacial ice thawed a vista of grand broad structures not unlike regal palaces emerged.

Their fiery bronze and copper doors glared the light of day. Plush gardens approned the ancient architecture weaving exquisite patterns of foliage and color into sublime embroidery. Dew drops still clung to every surface coruscating rainbows of splintering rays. White statues and tall urns and amphoras lay amid the wealthy flora. Interweaving depiction’s on the tympana, below the pediment of the edifice roofs, portrayed stories of feats and deeds of another time.

When the sun peaked over a jagged outcrop of mountain its first rays shed upon a small city it had not day-lighted for millennia. Soon, this day and those following it, swirling mists and an overcast of low clouds would rise and rim the plateau; protect it by hiding it in a barrage of thick fog around the perimeter that rose into a cloudy dome above it.

***

[It had been Sophocles's cunning and craftiness that enabled the four to reach the port of Piraeus. "I used all side streets and isolated roadways," he had told me. "I snaked the Opel over dirt roads on the mountain sides of Mt. Hymittos to circle densely-populated city sectors." A press sign had stood out in big bold print and was affixed on the right of the car's windshield. This and Father Lukas' esteemed presence, recognized from the press photo releases, had gotten them through traffic snags, often with the aid of a police escort. Once outside the city's periphery, the drive had no longer been hindered by overwhelming traffic conditions. Most traffic had been in the opposite direction, towards the infested center of the city. P.P.]

It had been at this time, on their way to the port to board the sailing vessel to Aggistri that the priest's wrist communicator first activated. Outwardly calm, he had willed the connection to take place. Fagan' voice had been distinguishably troubled, but steady too. He had relayed the General's call, synoptically giving to Father Lukas the latest demands upon him.

"Lukas, it's not for me to say, but the man is too anxious. It's like getting a new toy for him. Here we hardly know ourselves the potential of the MA, yet he wants to announce its completion and its stand-by use ... against the other side."

Father Lukas had pretended to be looking out of the Opel's window -- engulfed in reflection of a sort.

"Abe, I empathize with your concern. We also have the government's commitment that this project be a passive, defensive tool. Even Glixxon's. A binding solemn promise not to us only, but to its citizens, and the world." He took a deep breath. "What prompts you to an otherwise conclusion?"

"General Moffet supports that the time you've gained for us was solely for getting the MA ready for use. Unless you are hiding something from me, that was not my understanding."

"Nor mine, Abe. And as far as keeping you in the dark about anything -- you of all people know me and my intentions best. It's a written agreement between the President and myself that I undertake the construction of the MA on the irreversible condition that it be utilized as a defensive means to promulgate peace. If he or any of his staff do not honor this contract -- are at default -- they will see to it, at their expense, that the MA be disassembled and all plans and specifications reverted to me for classified storage under strategic auspices, or be destroyed, pending my decision. As you can see, Abe, General Moffet has only so much elbow room."

"You place so much trust on a word given?"

"It's more than a word, Mike."

"Principle of the thing, right?"

"Isn't it time we took principles at their face value?"

"Lukas ... it's what I wanted to hear from you. But let's put the principle aspects aside for now. Do you believe -- really believe -- that a man with fifty years of military impetus bearing on him will let business papers deprive or break that momentum? The man's life, his very soul, has been dedicated to the study of warfare. You think scribblings on paper will magically spur in him nobility, pacification, to bow out gentlemanly from glory road? Especially with the toy he'll be getting? He can override your agreement using a hundred loopholes, Lukas. He won't have to do even that if he succeeds in getting the machine now. Of course, there'd be a few million or so fewer inhabitants on the planet Earth, but by that time he would have had things his way. Who bucks such power, Lukas? He'd have us all by the gonads -- sorry. What I want to say is that no one would dare stand up to him. It'll be too late. In brief, it's too much power in the lap of one single human being. Will you chance your faith on such a fate?"

"Faith is my work, Abe."

"Lukas, the General is a soldier. He's trained to survive by killing."

"A good soldier is first a reasoning human entity, and General Moffet is a good soldier. One of the best, Abe. I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But if your views are proven to take their course ... I ask you to have confidence. Don't lose trust. The fulcrum of a democracy -- of a faith -- is tempered by its attained moral freedom. One must respect freedom of choice or one is constricted to ever doubt. We will be cautious and realistic, but not at the expense of reason and prudence. Besides, Abe, Glixxon governs here. It's his word that's law -- for better or for worse. And Xenon Glixxon wants live people to rule over. Here and the stars."

"My own personal objective for this second, hasty, call of the day, is to clear in my mind and confront alternative possibilities that may arise. Possibilities I'm deftly against, as you are too, Lukas. If you harbor alternative fail-safe solutions, then I say no more. As long as you are aware of my own feelings about the General and the use of the MA.

"The second point arising from the Pentagon's call is, to what degree of potential should the interfacing cover?"

At this, the priest hesitated for he wanted to be there at this critical stage. The omnicell was the soul -- the chromosomes and genes, so to speak -- of the complex machine. In theory at least, the meter high plasma-solid-state and neuron-grafted cube, submerged in a liquid superconductor, could be biased to "life" through a rather simple sequence of instruction. Again, in theory all its responses could be monitored and checked at staffed terminals in a central well-guarded control station. What was absent in theory, though, was the initial reaction at energizing the MA, the transient phase, till quiescence was reached.

Conceptually, it could be interpreted in human terms as the giving of life to a dead person who has never lived. Although the cube's constituency was of semi-inorganic and quasi-artificial chemistry, once energy flow was introduced its entire molecular structure would reorient, not so much on the solid outside cube-shaped shell, but internally -- where the plasma/neuron content allowed more liberty to molecular migration: Freedom to arbitrarily, at first, choose stabilizing couplings. After this initial allotment took place the analog conductor, which the plasma transformed into, would strive to reach optimum links with adjoining couplings. The final stage being a dynamically balanced plexus equivalent to a central nervous system. A hybrid of organics and inorganics that spelled out artificial intelligence ...

Father Lukas grimaced.

At this point came another crucial interface: To connect this, the MA's brain, to the "body" it would govern; to a specific, initially limited electromagnetic network. This network would be its "five senses". With it, the MA would be complete. It will have an awareness which degree would depend on the size of the network. Its extent could be varied in steps -- from a city's telecommunications and power network ... to that of several countries ... continents; and whose blanket of protection would cover each homogeneously like an invisible ozone layer.

The key, however, was the critical and tricky immersion of the awaiting cube-core into the ultra cooled superconductor. Fagan would have to supervise that alone. If the cube-core was not cool-treated properly, before lowering into the liquefied gas, minute cracks would form on the transparent carbon shell and leakage would be inevitable. The ten billion dollar cube would then be destroyed. The guidance operator for the fringe minor and project SEPTOR destroyed.

The same could ensue if too much power were applied at irregular intervals during the primary molecular orientation. These delicate procedures, along with several other concerns and anxieties like General Moffet, must have been bearing indeed fierce pressure on Fagan.

The priest felt momentarily at loss at the other's terrific burden of responsibility. He replied silently in his mind:

"Abe, let the cube pre-cool at minimum rate. Raise the superconductor temperature to maximum allowable tolerance at the time or immersion, and lower the core with lights out and with all vibration-generating machinery in the building shut off. Lower it gradually and evenly -- and something new here -- use fine oil spray to shower the core during the entire process; it'll prevent any maverick static discharge. As far as the degree of potential, I can't give you an answer, Abe. Not right now. Install the cube, keep the trickle current nominal, and once you're ready to energize, call me."

"It's December third today. Happy Birthday, Lukas Mettropoulos."

***

Amanda Rhodes sat on the porch of the half finished house. Her great-grandparents had run out of money, never finishing the bedrooms on the upper floor. Only a large living room with a small space for a kitchen divided by a low-built bar-counter partition existed, along with a storage hall and a pantry that led into a tiny bathroom. Amanda, over the years managed to finish building, furnish and tidy the quaint place; thought of it as her true home. And legally it was. The aging grandparents, two years before, had bequeathed to her the house. The same house her loved grandmother had stayed at during those far back summer excursions ...

During their trip to the island and then the connecting ferryboat to Litokhoro the previous day, Mark and she had begun a conversation reminiscent and nostalgic of old days. From the train station where they had first glanced upon each other till they had arrived the night before, they could only touch upon a small quantity of the avalanche of memories from their past. So much was still left unsaid ... but both Mark and Mr. Archondraki's son, Theodoros, had been exhausted and went to sleep the instant they laid on the beds she had prepared for them.

She did not wake them this morning. They needed the rest, especially Theodoros whose head wound was still fresh. As for herself, the clean brisk sea air and soothing calm of the locale had already had its healing effect. Looking in the mirror this bright morning, she saw that her cheeks had taken color and the dark rings below her eyes had practically faded away. When the others come, she thought, they won't be scared away.

It had been Father Lukas's call that woke her at dawn.

He had said that Frank had been trying, tried all day the day before to reach her. Not being able, he had managed to locate Mr. Alexiou and learn of her call to him and what had happened.

The priest excused himself for taking the liberty of asking for her village home's telephone number and for the early call. He told her of Alex's unexpected arrival and of their thinking of coming.

She had welcomed the idea.

There would be enough space for all to sleep over when she cleaned and tidied the two storage rooms below the living room. But the priest had mentioned four coming. She knew Frank would be the third, but had not ask who the fourth visitor was. Automatically, she assumed him to be either Frank's friend, Sophocles, or even perhaps Niko Alexiou.

Her spirits after she had hung up were high enough that she felt fully awake even though the sun had not yet risen.

Mark will be here, too, she thought. Only mom was missing from this family reunion. But since her mom's second marriage ... her mother had another family to attend to, and two teenagers to contend with. These were her half-sisters, which came after their mom's remarriage.

Amanda missed them. All of them.

Her mother and new father had never shown any special preference to any of the children. All five were their children. And Amanda was grateful for the uninterrupted harmony in the new family.

She was happy for her mother.

As she looked over the stretch of sea spanning the Gulf of Thermaikos and beyond, to the more distant shores that almost enclosed it, she felt a longed-for peace comfort her. The morning chill and dew did not seem to bother her. They only enhanced in her a kind of joy for being where she was, on a small tree-covered village not too unlike the island of Aggistri, away from a troubled city, and amidst dominating scents and fragrances of jasmine, lemon, pine and the occasional drift of iodine from the sparkling clean sea.

She anticipated Frank's coming and Father Lukas's. He was such a capable and knowledgeable person, she considered. She had meant to ask Frank how they both turned up at her place that day, but everything happened so quickly and unexpectedly that noon. The excitement of seeing Frank there, right before her, had left her empty to inquire. And the day before, that unexpected traffic jam, Theodore and the change of plans ...

What a terrible hostess they must think of her: To invite them to dinner and not show up.

"Oh my God," she whispered, hiding her face in her hands.

But she'd make up for the disaster, today and in the days to come. She had bought, when she arrived the other day, a leg of lamb, fresh and unfrozen, a local tender product of the village that, cooked with quartered potatoes spiced with bay leaves, cumin, coriander, black pepper, a dash of ginger and cinnamon, onions and crushed garlic; all in the roast's own natural juices, would make a king lick his fingers.

Then there was the garlic-spiced dip tzatziki and the eggplant salad, marinated squid and smoked herring fillets with garnishings of onion and parsley, lentils and haricot beans. Also, hot out of the oven crisp bread, native feta cheese and olives with a little oregano sprinkled over all.

She had started on these preparations since late the night before and continued through her early wakening that morning. She wanted to bake mousaka, and mushroom brioche and vegetable cobbler from fresh topical mountain greens -- but time flew.

Greek cuisine was not unlike Italian; she knew Frank would enjoy it, but the priest?..

His squid stew, which she had tasted two days before, was exquisite, succulent. A shadow of a doubt made her forehead crease. What if her efforts were not good enough? What if the other found the meal too rich or not rich enough?

As Amanda dwelt on culinary speculation, her eye caught the distant white dot of the ferry ship that slowly grew larger as it approached. From the kitchen came the irresistible, luscious garlic scent of the cooking roast. She would run down to the jetty to meet them.

She placed the cup of half-finished Nescafe on the concrete balcony floor and unwound the warm woolen blanket from around herself. The early day's cold had mildened into coolness with the rising of the sun. The glistening dew on trees and green shrubs was drying, and now a crystal bright atmosphere spilled over and embraced the white sandy shore and the span of balmy azure sea.

She then turned her head and her stare rose -- and rose, and rose. The massif soared, two miles up, reaching for the blue sky itself. It wore a crown of snow from early Autumn to late April. She could see on this seaward side a line of vast precipices cleft by tree-filled ravines. She had a peculiar love affair with this particular mountain. For some unexplainable reason she wanted to know all about it.

To the south was Metamorfosis and the main range separated by a depression from Kato Olympos, or Low Olympus, a region of wooded hills rising to 5200 ft. North, in the shape of an amphitheater enclosing the Mavrolongos valley, rose High Olympus, the highest peaks grouped round the center of the massif. She had been to both. Drunk the dark red wine the local villagers produced. Ate their juicy pork and calf sausage. Had danced the Karagouna with them. And two years before, had -- with two of Litokhoro guides -- ascended up the west flank.

It had been August and the arduous ascent took two days. The night they had spent at a refuge. Finally, Mytikas, the needle, the highest of all its peaks (9,570 ft.), the Pantheon was before her.

The 'Throne of Zeus'.

A ripple of chill ran down her backbone.

At that time she had felt as never before. She belonged there. Her soles felt nailed to the glorious curvature of the snow-covered arete...

She shook off the trance, entered the house quietly and looked on the boy that slept quietly. She spread the blanket over Theodoros and felt his forehead. He was only mildly warm. The fever was leaving.

As she closed the door behind her, she made a mental note: to look for a pineling when she returned. Christmas was around the corner -- and who knows -- maybe they'd have to spend some of it here. Anyway, the spirit of the holy days would do no harm.

No harm at all, she thought with hope.

Invigorated with the season's thoughts she headed to the concrete jetty of the dock. She threw a last but lingering look as though bidding greetings to the cloud-profused peak of Olympus. When she faced the white looming massif the ever-present urge to be here this day -- to be in its immediate vicinage, in its shadow -- seemed to abate some, as though a long standing but neglected promise had only now, that day, been mollified.

***

Johnas Sloan bought a second newspaper that day. He looked at the edition space; the number had not changed. The New York Star had not run off a special edition. The information he had given to that rookie reporter went to waste.

Anyone else would have cussed out at the streak of bad luck he was having lately.

First, that clumsy scientist at the IBSEH meeting.

Sloan had provided him with enough classified information to get himself shot thrice if he was ever found out.

But, no, Bodin was too wrapped up in his secular revenge and rhetorics to strike off an effective confrontation, an ultimatum, between their two governments.

No, he just had to indulge in theosophy and theology when he ought to have been convincing the others that it was the MA, Father Lukas's brainchild, that was bringing the very spite of God upon the Hellenic city. Instead, the man had let the shrewd priest sway them all off balance, managing to delay things for two precious weeks when everything was at an optimum point.

Johnas Sloan did not swear out loud.

He merely lit a cigar and continued his thoughts in private over his broad desk.

The elections were less than a year away and their candidacy was in. Their platform would be stronger than ever if the issues were powerful enough, if the issues went his way as planned at the beginning of this Athens turmoil. Opportunity had knocked a second time. The first time he was not prepared. He didn't know the subtler aspects of the politics game.

He was convinced now, though, that playing straight was only for fools, naive laymen that feared to get their toes wet or soiled. Yet, it was this dirt, the wrangling in the grit and slime, that showed that a man had truly labored at his job. It was proof that risks could be rewarding.

Opportune conditions and deft action brought success. And his was almost within touching distance ...

If the reporter had managed to sell his story to the most credit-worthy newspaper in the northeastern part of the country, he, Johnas Sloan, would have locked a firm hold on the trophy.

His platform since his first term at office was one of nearly McArthian conservatism. A strict policy based on western -- Mayflower-Puritan -- worth of values, enlightened by a preacher-type, John Birch style caucus from which ricocheted all non-native influences.

The others can have their worldization, he commented silently, but what I want is old fashion red-blooded American spit shine to run this country. Good ol' Anglo-Saxon and fighting-valor Viking stock of 'Yankee Doodle Dandies'. Self-sufficiency and the good old Gospel were the true panacea for all the ills the country had.

And Xenon was a hundred percent behind him.

The suffering of the country could end as soon as the wound was decontaminated from infiltrating foreign rut. What was taken to be extreme Puritanism, today, after the Athens incident, would be welcomed and embraced as true enlightenment. The true way. His and Glixxon's way.

However, he needed people to know the true and severe extent of events. He needed a large circulation and a credible newspaper to carry his story. Once the truth was released and people recognized him for what he was, a preserver of the sober, Lord-given law, a God-fearing leader with foresight and proven dedication, then his candidacy to the Vice Presidency would triumph.

Triumph overwhelmingly since the instrument capable of uprooting a world capital literally from its roots, would at last come into proper hands; in the hands of an experienced President whose job would be to best utilize such power for the people and his Nation, his Federation -- for The World Confederation whose heart beat right here, in the common core of NewStates, NovaAmerica. He, Johnas Sloan, would be right there to dispense empirical political support to the new President. He would provide, at a price of course, secret knowledge accumulated from years of close scrutiny and eavesdropping on communicates and private conversations concerning the potentials of the MA.

But he had to let the tiger out of its cage first. When the public learned of the fierce powers that were loose, they would then learn, in a most original fashion -- from a press of the other side -- what unleashed this cause of the Apocalypse. He would then be in the unique and singular position of one with esoteric information and influence and, as Vice President, one closest to the prime executive power.

A hint of a smile brushed his lips.

The remaining step in the power ladder would be a small one.

The Presidential candidate, his partner, although trustworthy and right for such times, would quickly outlive his popularity and know-how; for, his tact and political skills were practically nonexistent, and his uprightness far too noteworthy. People supported an honest leader, but as soon as they found honesty to be an obstacle to diplomacy they'd not hesitate to look for another. One with as much cunning as equity.

It's too soon for thoughts like that, Sloan's logic reckoned. At this time, the intercom buzzed.

"Yes?"

"Sir, a newspaper reporter is here. He has no appointment and insists on seeing you. Says you'd see him. His name is Andrews ... "

"Send him in, Mrs. Griffith."

The young man burst in a second later.

Sloan offered a seat, not showing any kind of perturbance at the other's entrance.

"Mr. Andrews, right?"

The other nodded hastily and was about to speak.

Sloan raised his hand in a gesture for the other to wait, and dialed a number. He spoke calmly for less than a minute and hung up.

"Mr. Andrews, a good reporter does not abandon a good story. And I believe it's the reason that brings you here."

The other nodded again, but guardedly.

Sloan opened a personally engraved pad, jotted several lines, and tore the leaf off.

"A job. A new job, Mr. Andrews. Fifty percent raise, a bigger newspaper, and most of all, a professional and receptive staff for good stories."

Sloan extended his hand and the reporter took the note. He read it and when he looked up, the other man's hand was again extended. He reached over, grabbed it and with the resignation and helplessness the young are often confronted he shook it with anything but vibrant enthusiasm.

As the reporter closed the door behind him, Sloan activated the intercom.

"Mrs. Griffith, get me General Moffet. On a private line, please." Sloan tried to imagine how a distraught public could be appeased and be directed to turn upon its leaders. "Hello, General. Soon as the boy lets go of his story...well, the ball is ours to take from there. Nobody'll trust a President who brought this calamity on to them."

As soon as Andrews exited the building, he withdrew the leaf of paper from his pocket. He looked at it with a kind of introspection, made a face and with head shaking crumpled it and tossed it in a trash can. "You're goddamn excreta, Sloan."

***

[From NYS morgue and the archives of Starseed. P.P.]

The world of Christianity looked forward to the approaching birthday of the Savior. Along with its coming it symbolized a rebirth of hope and peace.

The other faiths did not lag in their concern. The Hebrews held special synagogue services for the unfortunate city. The Moslems prayed too for the stricken capital. Buddhists and Hindus were not ignorant of ancient Athens, and in their fashion contributed their sympathy to the grieving population of modern Athens.

EU had called an immediate session of its federations. Unanimously, a trust fund was opened and supplies of food, clothing and medical stocks from EU's surpluses were sent.

The United Federations(once called United Nations) Security Council headed by NewStates did not fall far behind in declaring the situation a troop priority emergency. When PATOS troops were suggested to be flown in, the non-affiliated Hellenic Government reacted with a resolute and loud "No!" So civilian personnel were flown in instead from the world over by the hundreds. Soon first aid material came, accompanied by doctors, nurses and medical technicians.

But not a single troop was admitted.

Parallel to the plight of the sick and the wounded, buildings had become a hazard to occupy. Many collapsed killing and heavily injuring their residents while others were ready to topple over. More cracks and weakened structural members were discovered. But more serious was what the engineers labeled, "negative earthquake effects". Structures were built to resist an earthly gravetic effect; the reinforcement was calculated and molded to impede sheer stresses and concrete loads based on positive weight not on negative, or on imaginary, factors. Most buildings had suffered major faults; many had to be demolished.

The Olympic Games' facilities were carefully re-examined to re-asses their structural integrity since they would be housing close to twenty thousand athletes from around the globe and their attendants.

The Athens Metro was quickly given its final touches, and all its engineers, inspectors and workers, but for a skeleton crew, were inducted into the city's emergency corps.

Some heavy equipment had been flown in while the rest was hauled in by sea and land. Cars, buses and trolleys obstructing traffic were shoved by giant mechanical shovels and forklifts on to sidewalks and stacked on one another. Pickup and dump trucks were the only means of transportation and dominated the city's avenues. Once in a while, a bicycle and moped would intertwine between the rubble and debris ferrying commuters.

The city center was beginning to resemble a vast bombed site. From it, timidly at first, the inhabitants made their way to the suburbs; from the equally crowded suburbs they streamed beyond. The ones that had transportation left for the second, long abandoned home in a far away village.

Although buses came from all over the country the National Roads leading into and out of the city could accommodate only so much traffic. Some of the younger generations took backpacks and camping supplies and headed for the nearby Mts. Hymittos, Pentelli and Parnitha. A few remained near their homes, some even ignored or didn't care about the warnings and continued residing inside their homes. All, unexceptionally, spoke of the catastrophe; a wrathful scourge not unlike that befallen on a Sodom and Gomorra.

But why? people asked. What was it all about? Why here? Why befall on this one spot of the globe? The place that institutionalized the principles of Civilization? The place that, in a few months' time, would harbor the Games of Peace? This could not be considered the twenty-first century, people shouted in their anger and at being displaced from place to place. This is a tragic, ironic -- a mad plunge into Dark Ages.

The fear, the thoughts, the impressions of these minds plus uncounted others throughout the globe -- in unison, in singular atonement, in living resonant brain waves, uncontainable in compassion and empathy -- generated gigawatts of mental activity.

Such was the intensity of this massive source, that ectrospectra (ethereal) wave bands were affected.

Stimulated by this surge of power was the deeply hidden Starseed.

The field effects of Starseed rested outside conventional wavelengths. Its register of functionality lay millennia in the future of any earthly capability or, for that matter, comprehension. Yet, several strings, in several of the eleven dimensions it was aware of within its ether of surveillance, were being stirred at this moment. The logic-circuits that constituted the ultra-sophisticated machine could not quite reason. But could learn to, with time. In the beginning they could only sort logical inductions and deductions. In turn, the results were checked by juxtaposing them in a memory-processor which acted according to pre-ingrained probability programs.

Based on population trends and tendencies the memory-processor regulated the quality and quantity of the planet's civilization best suited to its idiomorphies and idiosyncrasies. Each new breed of the species colonizing a habitable new world followed more or less the same pattern: An initial cut off from the rest of the populated galaxy to permit optimum adaptation and cultural ties in the new world. Later, with minor further adjustments, the new world was introduced into its galactic family.

The period of technological development took seven to twelve millennia. Although galactic guidance was never absent in the first forty millennia of the planet's prehistory, forming civilizations were minimally interfered with after that. The first governing rule was that each world was to be treated similar to a galactic citizen -- from conception to maturity -- its individuality, character and independence were its inalienable and protected rights and each world constituted a sovereignty within itself.

Even though, in the millions of habitated planets of the galaxy, very few went astray, there were precautionary and fail-safe measures intrinsic with the colonization-civilization processes. Only one hundred and twenty planets in the million and a half year-old galactic colonizing history were unforeseeably destroyed. Each case had been solely an accident from without, accept one; that being a case of an indigenous planet virus gestating beneath that world's crust that bloomed into death forty-six thousand years and two billion inhabitants, after colonization. Since that tragedy (a stigma upon galactic government), no other habitated world had suffered destruction from within.

All manner of protection was enforced to give ample warning of any internal threat, whether be it a skin-eating virus or any other form of world-cide. In the far history of its creation, i.e. from the original dozen planets where life rose spontaneously, but on which human beings did not deviate from the species (as explained by the optimum-intelligence biped theory) other than in minor physically adaptive characteristics, the Galactic Community abided by a second governing rule: In the practically infinite universe where space travel opened up, each and every living being was to have its full allotted life time to life, but not before the dynamics of a working space migration program was conceived and implemented by each new world; with or without the incognito guidance of the Galactic Community. The reason? As was each Galactic citizen a unique form, able to stand independently and confidently, collectively or alone, similarly a new world had to be tempered in strength, stability and agility so as to be able to survive in the awesomely complex network of a vast concept such as The Interstellar Unions of Peace that composed the Galactic Community.

The new colonists' primal axiom of each attempt to habitate a planet in the Galaxy must therefore be first challenged by being abandoned to statistical verification. For, before actual interstellar travel, there must come the motive. A strong enough and radical motive to allow re-evaluation of conventional stereotype, physical principles and astronomy. The edge of isolation, the rim of the known would then be scaled as galactic statistical records had shown, in one subtle leap; a scaling so refined and plausible that its discoverer would on first sight disbelieve its underpinning simplicity. The discoverer would also see the fallacies in previous pragmatic physical applications: That all does not obey a single unifying law. He would see that if such was the case, of a universal-mutual-interactive physical reality, the first violation, that of nuclear fission would be also the last: i.e., since one principle would govern all, then each of all of the parts would suffer equally drastically if the principle had been violated. No matter what the distance between them, all would have been affected by that first nuclear blast of a sun.

But they had not.

Physical reality was not one but Plural. Each physical reality was tangent to the others. Each with nature's built-in buffer zone: huge to microscopic worm holes, energy-venting and/or -absorbing Universal 'valves'.

All physical realities touched all others: independent within themselves, but common at their borders to the rest of the universe.

These borders, the limits, this tangential contact with the Whole, was what the discoverer would be expected to recognize and use -- use it to jump to unthinkably far away stars -- the Universe's edge or the Beginning.

Till then, the doors to the Community would be as open, or as closed, as a gaze or glance at a star-filled night sky.

However, the remaining intact rhomboid, and the partial hedron of the second, both of which comprised Starseed, was not programmed to speculate or be solely an observer of its environment. Since it was merely scraped when it ought to have been turned to fine ash, it saved, along with itself, a triggerable transcontinuum communicator.

The device was directly tied to the sector headquarters responsible for colonization and civilization of its regional planets. The device, among other things, allowed all programming to be bypassed and adjustments be made manually by that sector's overseers. The communicator part of the device, however, had long ago ceased to function since its working depended on the input power of a whole unit: of two integral and functioning rhomboids.

Although the spot checks by alternate means on the progress of this planet found it a rapidly evolving world, there were no indications of significant deviation from the statistical norm. Since during this last phase of preparation for star journeys was critical in the sense that the inhabitants by themselves were let to discover the means to reach other worlds, the overseers interfered the least. This isolation lasted from the self-destruction of the rhomboid ancillaries to actual evidence of attempts for interstellar travel.

Albeit, the overseers had not taken under consideration the survival of one para-functioning rhomboid and a partial of the second: A means by which ordinary colonists could be inhibited with "godly powers", according to topical interpretations, which in effect were merely the results of a science more than a million and a half years ripe.

Such was the case with the planned incarnation of deities during the first forty thousand years of prehistory. A prehistory that was necessary for optimum chromosome and gene development and adaptation to the new planet, and of course, for re-tempering the galactic huminid species. For it did not take long after colonization began, to discover that Hominid Sapiens had a tendency to degenerate. Unless primal conditions could be recycled, accumulated millennia of an abnormally protected Hominid Sapiens reflected on the very genes themselves.

The effect was eventually total lack of defense mechanisms, from antibodies all the way ... to the will to live. At first it was thought to be the aging of the species. But further study proved that it was not. Like a bird in a cage or a flower removed from its natural habitat and taken into a home, although cared for and amply protected, it, nonetheless, lost its incentive to live. The galactic Hominid Sapiens therefore discovered that it was not aging as a species, but was actually withering.

It was wilting from lack of primal, instinctive stimulation.

Without the excitation of instincts in any animal, even in a thinking one, the stir of life ceases. This was the case with the galactic Hominid Sapiens. It lost the perspective and retrospect of its nature. So, after the first mistakes were made of colonizing planets without the two stage preparation -- prehistory first and then technological historical civilization -- the Galactic community set on a vital and self-preserving track; that of systematic, symmetrical but spontaneously engendered world growth; which, regretfully, did not preclude forms of the animal fighting instinct, but only if unavoidable, and strictly contained and meticulously checked.

Species 'refreshening', it was called, although aging was not the problem, but perhaps one day could have been.

Yet, in all the sophistication and complexity of the Galactic Community, in all its wisdom ... a maverick hexahedron rhomboid was not foreseen.

Unthinkable to ever occur.

Nor was the effect of its pseudo-initiative appraisable since its creators lacked knowledge of such happening.

Already the damaged ancillary rhomboid had anachronistically produced an extraordinary figure upon the world. This new world, unprepared, found in its midst a simple Carpenter who could work miracles: A man endowed with incomprehensible godly gifts and whose short life had altered the world's philosophy by the roots. Though the philosophy in itself was a well-meant code of morality and ethics, the crude native recipients had not matured enough to fully appraise it and therefore appreciate it for what it was.

Although in later millennia that same basic code of virtue and justice would be subsequently introduced and followed, with only few added refinements, the still-archaic-period failed to distinguish the Universal Truths that were unveiled to it so untimely.

Many interpretations and misinterpretations were given.

Dogmas, sects, and subcultures sprouted.

Other "prophets" came too; although these were not under the rhomboid's influence.

The colonists as a youthling civilization were torn by dissension and conflicting faiths. The anachronistic exposure to the far-advanced humane codes of the Carpenter brought such strife among the immature minds and emotions of the colonists that regional nomad groups began to form, each attached and committed solely and fanatically to their own interpretation of the faith.

Technology had thus halted.

Scientific investigation had then abruptly ceased.

Enlightenment in any form other than theophronistic was hence condemned and punished severely.

Knowledge that had taken centuries, even millennia, to accumulate, and its essence to be refined and recorded was suddenly banned and destroyed.

Libraries were burned.

Tablets and parchments filled with experimentation, research, cataloguing of natural phenomena and observations and treatises of physical and scientific empiricism were wiped out in the blink of a historical eye.

The healthy course that had passed the critical stage, and was intended to develop in continuity -- five centuries before the birth of the Carpenter -- had now, with His premature birth, been deviated; to be thrown soon into a thick darkness.

For centuries to come.

Yet, such setbacks were not out of the norm. The galactic overseers had recorded several. They were attributed to local idiomophies and were accepted as such.

They were the hardships that tensiled each new colony and collectively recuperated and refreshed the genes of the species. Lives, often entire races, were begrievably lost. The law of the fittest, most tempered gene could not be ignored. It governed above the gallactians. The Law of Nature governed, and they survived because they acutely acknowledged it.

But, here, the fomentings were not due to a natural flow of things.

Causality had been crudely and intentionally abused with. And the outcome was not that of a pragmatic continuum. The rhomboid was altering events to a statistically unpredictable outcome.

Miracles could not coexist with scientific feats.

Miracles could not be reasoned out.

The Athens phenomenon, although attempted to be scientifically explained, had no basis for ever happening. It was of the same vintage as that of the miracle worker, the Carpenter, but in reverse.

 [To be an inmate in the 2050s did not involve prisons. There were no prisons in the civilized world anywhere. People conformed, where shot or used to further medical knowledge. You always had choices. Surprisingly, a few did 'chose' to participate in aiding the sciences. If your body got raped in old fashion prisons, in the modern clinics it was forbidden. However, all the rest that comprises a human being was left at the discretion of the medicos. P.P]

Erik Bludrose, tall and strangly, had an old but prominent scar splitting his mustachioed upper lip. He wanted to forget an empty-headed body that breathed and waited for him back at College Federal Hospital. Also, a smart computer full of that body's identity, or, its soft-brain.

Bludrose was drinking nights at The Old Ye Pub hoping to scramble his own gray matter into proper functioning order for the next day's work. It was Monday and the establishment belonged to him and Lou. Or almost.

Lou, the burly custodian, leaned heavily on the counter, gave a dog's yawn and went back to staring through puffy, half-closed lids at the other half of his clientele.

The intruder at the other end of the bar was a stranger that had been nursing his tumbler for the past half hour. He was short, balding, and in his left hand was a folded white handkerchief making frequent trips over a glistening, pinkish forehead.

The wire-rimmed spectacles suited the little fellow like a stethoscope did a doctor, Bludrose considered. He too eyed the stranger.

"My name is Fagan," said the short man, finally, approaching Bludrose. "I -- you see, there is a problem ... " he wiped his face with the handkerchief, "a man is trapped inside a ghastly thing."

The bartender yawned again, dragged the towel from his bulging shoulder and commenced rubbing the glossy counter.

Bludrose took a long swig from his beer. "With me, it's this heady computer," he said, nodding a headful of straw curls.

Fagan momentarily turned and stared at the barman. And gulped down the remaining contents of his glass. He looked around as though unsure of where he was.

Bludrose was not too sure either. The All Ye Pub was not to be found on any map. You sort of bumped into it when nothing else worked, and forgot it as soon as you stepped out into fresh New England air. The research facilities of the University made it convenient. They were near enough not to put one entirely out of reach. But tonight Erik Bludrose wanted to place light-years between academia and himself.

"Always a drag Mondays." He grinned comaradiriely at Fagan. "The place starts winding up on Thursdays. By Saturday it's Wonderland."

His beer was getting flat and the reek of souring, spilt liquor of days ago was slowly trespassing into his rosy glow. The man, now two nose-lengths away, had the roundest, most transparent eyes he had ever seen. They reminded him of ... yeah, a saw's eyes --

"I need your body," the man quickly whispered to him.

Bludrose leaned forward.

"I know you have one. I want it."

Bludrose slowly placed a long arm around Fagan's hunched shoulders and moseyed to a table in the far corner.

"Your drink?"

"Orange juice."

"Lou, two more.

"Mr. Fagan," Bludrose began, meticulously, "there is protocol, perhaps even a modicum of propriety, to such manner of transaction. I am neither shocked with or against gay, but -- "

Fagan gasped. His face immediately turned lavender. "I want your brains out of the Alpha -- like yesterday!" Fagan bludgeoned each word like a chiding schoolmarm out of a Dickens's tale. "And, you're a pervert!"

"Who are you?" A change now brewed in Bludrose's ash-blue eyes.

"Abe Fagan, Logistics and Programs Planning, Committee Chief. Dr. Bludrose, you have a convict's live body with a scanned, empty brain on stand-by. I demand you relinquish your -- the body to me."

Bludrose let his breath out, measuredly. His eyes reclaimed their focus and studied Fagan. He steadied his elbow on the table they had been sitting, made a fist, and pummeled softly but deftly the man from the government on the nose. "It's impolite to demand."

Fagan bound up and pranced, holding his face.

"Lou, be kind enough to give us your towel?"

***

[From the archives of Starseed. P.P.]

The rhomboid hexahedron completed its thirtieth anniversary of reactivation that past September. The 'destinations' were prepared. Their abode awaited. Unaware, they had been manipulated a step closer to their manifest destiny and absolute reign. Soon, the roles they would play would be revealed to each.

The rhomboid self-checked one by one its five vertices and nine edges. Then its six facets. It then went over the one remaining hedron of the other rhomboid with the hairline fracture in it -- even now it leaked a trickle of force.

Inconsequential.

The 'destination' hybridized to this hedron had shown adequate control of the energy expulsion and only a single chronic side-effect. With periodic assistance, to strengthen her, the 'destination' satisfactorily adjusted over the years. Since reaching full maturity, that September, no irreversible catastrophes resulted from the destination's/hedron's effusion. The unchecked negative gravity it now intermittently generated was the price that had to be paid for overall success. Amanda Rhodes -- Minerva, the rhomboid corrected -- will forthwith rebuild a new Athens from the rubble; one infinitely more suited to the crafted design the newfound, yet limitless, power source afforded.

The machine, suddenly halted its ruminations ...

The gene in the 'destination' Anthony Guildersleeve Lovesigh had been deactivated -- but not purged -- when the back up copy was put into effect. No means known to earth-man at this time could record, reproduce or destroy the gene found in the Olympion strain.

Time, however, could. Time took its toll even in the ultra-constructs of the galactian science. Time, it seems, was the enemy of Gods as well, and the toll had been five when the cold fusion took out five hedrons. Therefore, this cycle, as the three cycles before the Carpenter, could not be a duplicate of the original, when in the beginning twelve had reigned.

Contingencies.

The master data allowed them, pending a rigorous logic audit. This was to be a less than fifty percent deviation like the last one -- near critical. Or, more accurately assessed: a basic alteration, where the missing five 'destinations' would be supplanted by emulation proxies, like the five had been before this cycle. As with the Carpenter -- a devastating departure from the norm, yet necessary -- this was still the only remaining, prime option.

  Mite Industries Special Projects tracking sector resembled a hybrid of the Wall Street Exchange at peak hour and, what used to be, the Strategic Air Command at drill-time.

Chickbrow left the vault door behind. An orchestration of whines and clicks commenced when electronic locks and hydraulic tumblers secured it.

NASA was never like this.

He felt entombed within Tutankhamen's Pyramid.

Several familiar faces scurried by, hardly aware of his presence. Paranoia in their eyes.

Knitted brows straightened and the frown lines on his forehead smoothed out. His stride quickened. On the way to the complex center he unbuttoned his collar.

The place reeked of sweat and souring coffee.

The double, glass doors whooshed shut when he crossed the threshold and entered the glazed island, cutting off the noise asunder.

"Sorry to get you up," Jeremy said, his back to him, his eyes darting over three monitors. He shot a glance at a digital read-out then back to the monitors.

Mike Stromberg's raspy voice groaned next to him. "Take a look." He handed him a pad and scooted to his console.

Chickbrow pinched his ear. "Give me relative course shift."

"Twenty-eight degrees, eight minutes ... "

"Just rough stuff, Mike."

" ... and accelerating."

Chickbrow's black- looked into Jeremy's light-blue eyes.

Jeremy tried to remain calm. He knew better than to antagonize that falcon gaze. Something about that look gave him the spooky feeling that he was on trial for his life. The feeling may have been incited by his boss's rather gaunt face, his spearing fixed look and withdrawn smile.

Still ... Jeremy had been with him all through the five years, attending him as if Chickbrow's edict was a mark on his performance. He weighed his words painstakingly before he spoke again. "Came out of the jump to reconnoiter ... as per standard procedure ... and got locked in a gravity well."

An acrid burning scalded Chickbrow's empty stomach.

 [From the Ark's recorders and the ship's automatic and instantaneous conveyance of its data to Special Projects. P.P.]

"Finished with the beacon?" Lovesigh prodded, locking SEPTOR's rocket controls into sync mode with Special Projects, and getting back to the half-done programming and computations.

They had distanced themselves equally far from each member of the binary star. The sheer forces were awesome on the hull, but it slowed them down enough and kept them from being swallowed up. It gave the Earth team time to prepare, check and recheck calculations of numerous scenarios.

The temporal space-time continuum fluctuated dangerously close to discontinuity. This meant two different and diverging space-time realities. A new matrix of probabilities was being inbred while Lovesigh and the others toiled. Soon -- the possibility was always there -- the continua could divide to spawn more probabilities ... ad infinitum. Already their time had started to slow down compared to Earth's.

"They'll all be old men by ... "

But something nagged and troubled Lovesigh all the while. It hectored him with little regard for his priorities. And barren of respect for precedence.

Surrounding the craft were haze-shrouded sectors of otherwise black empty space. Ahead were the orderly swirls of a pumice-black and rust-red vortex generated at the poles. Stars oddly enough did not take to the proximity of such disruptive forces. Although a few strayed at times and gouged into the vortex point-core and erupted it.

Lovesigh sat lotus fashion on the matted deck.

The chimp today feasts on his mood of silence, he thought.

He whisked the hairs of his new convict's body off the silky filaments of the fiber optics and espied towards the large bulbous beacon fastened to the cabin's center.

"Bo's'n Champ! Report!"

Champ, in his goatskin briefs, waived his sinewy arms over the lackluster dome. To Lovesigh's mind came caricatures of demons prancing around hellfire, the ones he had seen in his books.

"Checking the quantatron," Champ hollered back.

"Your 'magic' touch no doubt," Lovesigh said, catching his scruffy kelembia under his legs. "All I taught you gone to waste?"

The chimp pantomimed with more gestures. Now his hands traced and his fingers pampered the onion head of the beacon like a clinician practicing the treatment of a pregnant woman. One that gave birth to fields so dense and finely tuned to direction and displacement that not one photon of light could break out of their hold. Shadows so empty and black were these and discharged such suction- and vacuum-capturing energies that they easily ripped off chunks, whole clumps off, the very quintessence, the infinitesimal grain of the known and unknown Universe. To capture it all in the net. No known energies to man could escape the fine steel-glass lattice, the plexus of the optic-fibers net.

"The pauper mystic," Lovesigh mumbled, somewhat less preoccupied, under the snarled hairs of his fat mustache. Then louder, "The exotic little chimp-Pan, complete with a manly, hairy chest."

"I prefer lost soul to Pan," replied the chimp.

Lovesigh's temperament seemed to have changed with the change of his body. The one Fagan had found. He had become more caustic now. More picky and haranguing. As though part of the convict remained, possessing and not letting go of the body that once belonged to him. And the chimp paid. He had called it lost soul once or twice before. Deservedly, he thought. In a Galaxy of stars, planets and space-time the monkey would insist that all these were simply a foreground. Behind which thrived a spectral stuff he labeled 'alter grain', packed with phantom particles that permeated the vacant span of another more integral universe: that he called God-grain.

And all this ... since he had found the chimp vagrant and wandering around the jump pods and beacon some days before. It was supposed to have been programming the equipment for their next leap. But instead he had discovered the Champ blind as a desert mouse on the outlying ship's solarium. A scrawny shaggy-skin creature plodding aimlessly under hot white light. All skin and bone with a gaping hole now -- where only a dent had been before -- big as his toe, between its epicanthic, chestnut-brown eyes.

Lovesigh grinned. "Remember how many hours you were in that kiln, chimp?"

"Enough," Champ came back.

"Huh ... "

Enough not to yet have recovered, Lovesigh thought. Lost still in inky holes and whirling twisting devils. He shook his head and spurred his new convict's hands to tease away at the optic fibbers' snags and snares.

Lovesigh didn't like it. Blind and branded would make it hard to work with the chimp. Lovesigh thought, stretching back his numbing shoulder blades, got to teach him survival; awareness that dangers stalk a blind chimp. Half dead he was in that sea of light.

"Your way with the feel and touch can't cure you."

Ah, but how did the ape manage to pick up a still-burning 'star'? Or whatever had come through the hull without as much as making a pock in it? Did it with naked hands at that. And lived to tell about it.

Lovesigh coughed and returned to the present with a pinched sour look on his face.

But got him a pair of bloated hands. Two charred balloons hanging down his sides. A useless chimp you had to feed and toil over like an old nanny for days.

"'Old nanny' indeed!" Lovesigh pouted.

Yet, since then, the gouged chimp, in its restlessness, betrayed an eerie flair.

Lovesigh flinched.

Champ had begun to read books!

More than books!

Read things on the metal vessel using every exposed inch of his body (but the puffed up hands): the country's restless history of the ship's wall material; the civil strife and political unrest of the continent the steel floor plating came from; of the optic fibbers' origin and the worn life of the slaving women sweating in sooted radio-active workhouses in Africa and Asia, who toiled for months over the machines and raw ingots that produced the unimolecular optical twine. Lastly, the chimp had touched its head upon the beacon.

"Part of a great ship, the great arks that hang around Earth. The beacon summons -- " and Champ had suddenly plummeted into a mysterious, almost catatonic silence.

" -- the little 'stars'?" Lovesigh had added excitedly, bending over and mildly shaking the rehabilitating ape.

Lovesigh had to wait.

"The arks," Champ had dribbled out much later, "the optic fibbers computer and net, the beacon, this ship ... are not the means by which to be saved."

"Gibberish! The Arks are ready and supplied. Waiting to free humanity from the oncoming catastrophe--"

Lovesigh looked away. "Where did that tiny 'star' come from?"

"They are only spores." The chimp looked uncomfortable.

"Spores?"

"Spores of sustenance revived."

The chimp had faced unblinking the rising shine of one of the pair of suns coming into the ship.

"What sustenance, chimp?"

"Our sun is a positive aperture," the chimp had continued, "to networks vaster than the matrix of your fiber optics net. With black, negative, counterparts -- everywhere." It had raised a twiggy arm and Lovesigh followed it as it swept across a giant map of the Galaxy on one wall, and stopped at its other spiral.

Lovesigh had allowed himself a crooked smile, "Sol?"

"Sol, and elsewhere too. All anomalies, even those that the fringe simulates, harvest all loose energies, into separate super-condensed stuffs."

"The place of our departure? The little 'star' had come from there?" Lovesigh's voice was low and shaking.

"Yes. Not star, and not only from there. Everywhere, from here as well." Champ had clammed up after that.

Lovesigh made a face and squeezed his smarting angel eyes. He glanced at the beacon and the chimp. With the passing of the days he had come to know better. He challenged less and less the ape's accuracy, or ask how he knew. The chimpanzee proved seldom wrong.

And was a beggar for trivia.

"Explain 'arsis', Champ."

"It is the accented or stressed syllable in a metrical foot," Champ spoke while he worked, "as distinguished from thesis or the unstressed syllable."

"Sein und Zeit."

Champ, Lovesigh saw, took a hefty breath. "It is the analysis of man's 'being in the world' ... "

 [From Special Projects recorders. P.P.]

Chickbrow pointed to the screen, "the source of our problem, Mr. Fagan." He waited a while. The other, who had arrived only a few minutes after Chickbrow, studied the heavens in front of him.

Fagan shrugged. "Can't say I follow."

Jeremy and Mike nodded in unanimity.

"Space is colorless, Mr. Fagan, empty space that is. It's not totally black. There is background always -- direct, reflected or refracted light, gamma and cosmic rays, and a variorum of energy fields. The Universe does not stop because it cannot be seen.

"Yet, there, between the binary," he indicated by enclosing an area in a dotted red window, "the Universe -- as we know it -- does in fact stop." He pointed to the broad-spectrum meters lining the screen's bottom. All were pegged at zero radiation -- and then some.

"That," he pointed to the gossamer of sparkling dust, "is the Orion spiral as SEPTOR sees it. Twenty-eight degrees longitudinally, the highlighted area, is the source to which our craft is being diverted. So strong is the interference that it disrupts our tachyon reception even."

A high-pitched whine from Mike's console intruded.

"Dr. Krell on the line," a nondescript voice called out.

"Put him through." Chickbrow hunched his shoulders and flipped the com switch. Then to Jeremy, "Tell countdown to keep us posted every minute on the minute. The last minute, every ten seconds."

Seven minutes remaining, the speaker echoed.

***

"Lately you've been reading more than me. And some fancy software at that." Lovesigh grunted. "But I'm no dimwit, makeshift soothsayer."

The chimp turned from the beacon and blinked at him once.

"You think I don't know the difference of a quark and a muon, a neutrino and a tau, an anomaly and a sun?" he said, pushing himself up from the matted decking.

Champ hunched his shoulders.

"What else can you call them? They've been 'stars' since we were thrown here."

"They are not just 'stars'," Champ said, patiently and returned to pampering the cylinder that was the beacon.

"Twelve hours ago there was a whole swarm of them outside, like giant glow-flies, surrounding this probe. And twelve hours before that ... and before that .... Why do we attract them?" Lovesigh stubbornly grilled on.

"Why us?" He had observed them gleam and glow through the visors and monitors. "Why here, Champ?"

Champ worked mutely, pushing at keys. Securing the beacon and doing his routine checks.

"The little 'star', or part of it, you had left behind sprouted an oasis, right in the midst of our vivarium, overnight! What are they that they are able to flourish such potency?" Lovesigh went on, in spite of the churning in his chest.

Champ did not turn from the beacon. "This, the greenhouse, we, help summon them to this place."

Lovesigh snorted, but deep down he was beginning to allow room for more reconciliation, without further cavil.

He crochet gently with the thimble-tipped fingers over the last configuration on the gossamer optic fiber plexus. At times a harpist could not render more grace. But now he felt apprehensive, sapped and preoccupied. The convict's body that they had given him was not all that young, or strong.

The intertwining abruptly gave a rippling surge as the final sheers were restored into their individual mesh. Lovesigh rubbed his tearing orbs and his shoulder.

Shortly after, a jet acre scooped off the ship and billowed above it dividing the emptiness of interstellar space, threatening to hoist them up after it. Four tie lines stiffened.

"More slack," he shouted. The snare, he watched on one of the monitors, rose higher still, spreading as it did, till it no longer bulged. Now the oblique flossy quadrilateral hovered rigidly like a huge black slab torn out of a starless night sky.

Lovesigh tapped on the keys of his computer, testing one of the rising carbon steel twines. "It's over us, and holding, Champ."

"Before the night is out you too will see, fisherman of stars."

"More pauper's prophesies?"

The chimp turned away, as though the faculty of speaking stung it. The shifting light from the consoles in the otherwise darkened cabin bleached all sparkle from its already dim eyes. Robbed even the whiskery dimness from the hollow cheeks.

Lovesigh did not like the shadow on the chimp's face.

"Champ, what is Information Rate of a Source?"

Champ looked at him a bit, "A number that measures the observer's average uncertainty on what letter the source will produce next with regard to past data concerning the message and a statistical knowledge of the source."

"Keats ... any verse or two."

Champ was thoughtful.

"Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down;

The voice I hear this passing night was heard

In ancient days by emperor and clown:

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn;

The same that oft-times hath

Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."

Lovesigh detected more clouds gather on the chimp's puzzling countenance.

  "That sums it up, Dr. Krell."

A long silence followed.

"Dr. Krell," Chickbrow called into the communicator, "are you still there?"

"Yes."

"Sir?"

Four minutes remaining.

"I heard, David."

"Shall I stop the countdown?"

"Might as well. It makes no difference. A minute to us may be a day to them. We can't synchronize. But there's still instantaniety in communications!"

Chickbrow glanced at the other three.

"The time continua are different. And the reason we still have instant comms is the negligible mass-energy involved. David, too late for anything, but -- "

"They're accelerating. Reception, that's breaking down too now ..." Chickbrow reported.

All four stared at the intermittent and erratic rips and wavering stars on the tearing hologram above them.

"It's slowing down our tachyons. Time scales've gone haywire, all over. Unbelievable!" Dr. Krell's muttering could barely be heard. A few seconds of silence hung like stale air. "No wonder SEPTOR cant jump -- mass-energy is too great. Tachyons can't function at light-speed, or below it. The beacon-net circuit can't create a strong enough field to overcome and oppose the singularity's -- "

"Damn!.." Chickbrow whispered.

"We need a miracle."

Fagan sweated lavishly.

"SPECTOR is slick as a bullet, or a jumbo cannon shell." Krell finally spoke again. "Its jacket -- the outside layer -- is steel-glass, designed to withstand nominal micro-meteor impacts and permit minimum conductance to extraneous fields. Its durable, solid, and, I believe, it will cushion near-relativistic acceleration stresses."

Chickbrow looked at an ashen Fagan.

Mike and Jeremy cued their agreement by nodding.

"It may. Not much of a choice, is there?" Chickbrow said.

"Splendid. And now the miracle ... "

***

While the twin suns and the anomaly between them and the beacon spawned the 'stars', the expanse of net would offer protection by capturing them. Lovesigh puffed as he and Champ, with hands now completely healed, together disconnected and hauled the tarnished, grim mass of the beacon back into the vivarium. Stationed it directly under the greenhouse's transparent bubble-domed ceiling and the net's geometric center.

Champ loped about barefoot. Lovesigh regarded the chimp with no less awe.

The feel is guiding its steps. Never tripping, never bumping. What more do those blind eyes see? he queried silently.

Lovesigh could not quell his yearn to see it too. Curiosity conjured up all manner of visions in his burning mind.

A sliver of pearly sun, one of the double giants, lingered yonder on the false horizon that was part of the overhanging net's edge. Then just a cyan glowing from behind the trammel. Lovesigh lumbered to the heavy steel taffrail-like protection around the gallery deck of the vivarium. Leaned his weight on it. He gazed over a measure of tranquil azimuth through the steel-glass bubble. He abided, waiting for the 'stars' to come. Not long and the glum dead expanse will do the dance of light, he thought. His rumination then wandered.

Green and blue vistas of a far away world drifted his way. One so markedly different from all this. One his parents had reverently, and often nostalgically, revealed to him bit-by-bit. Had lived on in harmony to the end of their lives. A world Peri wanted to reform.

One Penelope adored.

"Mending airy circuit nets," he whispered, longingly, privately. "Knitting kisses over a pretty velvety body -- Penelope, Penelope, such gentleness, such pristine beauty, to lose a lifetime so early in life." Lovesigh reminisced twenty years past.

All that had been before they and SEPTOR passed through the arched toroid gateway of the fringe and the other smaller fringes that the ark produced along the way ahead of them and into the open paradoxes in the warp and woof of the space between the vortices of the universe.

All that, before SEPTOR passed via one of the biggest man made anti-anomalies, and passed through the minor ones produced by the beacon-net pair and the pods, into a future. A future that had not yet come to Earth. Expelled here, at the Galaxy's other spiral. The back of beyond.

But what of the world left behind. A world that was rapidly being depleted of its life sustaining properties, robbed of the life force which made it wondrous and rare? A world cheated of reason and balance anymore. What will they return to, to tell of their Odyssey?

Lovesigh had heard grim tales and gossip meandering around, of disparaged ones who had chosen to leave it by dying. A creed of believers that would thrust themselves without the protection of steel-glass into the shadow of artificial anomalies, as that cast by the beacon, and disappear.

It was said that they sought escape in solitude and new frontiers. Liberation from the people-swarmed, people-consumed continents. From people packed together like hives; people hungry who were hunted singly relentlessly for merely objecting to their condition -- because they sided with a conjecture of an old, unproved hypothesis.

The creed initially emerged as a bizarre coalition of beliefs in the ancient faith and a recent but untested theorem. The archaic scriptures spoke of a life after, and the theorem had supported that all information entering an anomaly is preserved -- the code of life included ...

For most citizens there was not enough to this way of life, Lovesigh thought, Glixxon's debasing way of life, to care any more.

***

Ahh, but computers too can be an insidious lot, Lovesigh now admitted with no change of mood. 'A life-sustaining region' the Modified Alpha had said for this locality of the galaxy. They had packed the probe, their ark, like Noah's Ark: greenhouse, vivarium and small life, terra-forming equipment, a monkey with half the libraries of the world in its brain. But as yet, no life-sustaining planet(s). But two naked suns, some strange little 'stars' floating around and a gapping black cosmic garbage-disposal right smack in between. Luring SEPTOR like a fly into black light.

Lovesigh felt a tugging at his sleeve and turned. Champ stood beside him.

"Eat before the shine rain comes."

His face and eyes were straggly and melancholy. In its extended hand was a flat plate of seasoned gri-gri meat and green herbs.

"I'm not hungry." Lovesigh watched by the electronic lantern's glow the luster-speckles in the other's blind irises. They reminded him of the 'stars'. Lovesigh's voice softened. "A heavy stomach does light work, chimp."

Champ's other hand fondled the plate.

What's eating the chimp? It was not like him, this discomfiture. Lovesigh could not explain.

"It is tin with a ceramic layer baked on." The chimp commenced to scan and thus read in his visionary and arcane fashion the plate's history. "It comes from a sky ship's galley."

"Read me its age," Lovesigh asked, forgetting more important things.

"Older than you. Much older. The metal was mined on the other world. So were the minerals of the coating."

"Earth, blind chimp. Earth, the blessed."

"Yes, Earth." Champ patted the plate. "Gaia."

"Earth, Gaia, no matter -- we are its seedlings scattered, by intention or not, here: a mote of matter in parched space amidst dunes of invisible lethal radiation and sterile seas of vacuum and illusive cryptic little 'stars' to harvest, instead -- instead of -- "

He lulled.

" -- of fruit-bearing green turf and pregnant frothing blue surf. They come, Dr. Lovesigh."

  The tracking sector complex of Mite Industries Special Projects was quiet as a church on Monday. For the past few hours there had been not much more than murmurs and whispers. Technicians with tiny phones stuck in their ears and scientists with micropads clenched in their fists huddled in pensive, scattered clusters.

Behind the enveloping glass panes of the control center Jeremy, assailed by the mulligrubs, lackadaisically massaged the sides of his head with his thumbs. Mike, himself hounded by blue devils, slumped in his chair chewing on the wood of an old pencil.

Fagan dried the drops from his bristly brows.

Chickbrow was mulling.

Dr. Krell had explained very simply a very complex supposition. The essence was, that SEPTOR use its retro and attitude rockets to accelerate further towards the black hole. Then, at a critical point, when its drift equaled that of the surrounding flux heading for the hole, jump into the hole. He explained that since the direction of the jump was not in opposition to the pull of the singularity, the tachyon generator pods would work.

They did. SEPTOR had been saved. Empty of its crew.

The uninhabited craft drifted in orbit around Earth. Its automatic telescopes and biosphere-sensing apparatus were sending in a flood of crisp, intelligible data.

The data was checked and re-checked. But the results did not vary by much: the Poles were missing, the seas too, and the atmosphere, and life.

"All those jumps," Chickbrow could still hear the Professor's matter of fact and lulling articulation, "were so much time stored."

"How much time do we have, Dr. Krell?" President Pilgrim had asked on the direct line.

"Oh, the black hole devoured most of it. And, let's see, there's the return trip -- we managed to do that in three jumps. So we saved some time there. My calculations pretty much verify the rumored ones. Say twenty years, plus/minus five, Mr. President."

"And Lovesigh?"

"Mr. President ... it was a black hole. Lovesigh and the chimp are sophisticated organic matter. SEPTOR is not. Who can say? What you're looking at right now in front of you is only our own time-line. Sir, we are monitoring tachyon and chronon particle penetrations into only our Universe. One Universe of theoretically an infinity of them. And we are being given only one result, one single outcome, of an infinity of combinations/permutations of the same event: the ark passing through a singularity. In the outcome we are now witnessing," he hesitated, " there may not be survivors, Sir. And, regretfully, it's our outcome, the real and only outcome."

Chickbrow had left the public announcement system on and the commendations followed (probably a third Nobel was in the making somewhere in neutral Sweden for the Professor).

Special Projects was now The Special Projects Group and funds restrictions were immediately lifted. While the untenanted SEPTOR circled the Earth of twenty years into the future, somewhere in 2072, somehow relaying images of a dreadful prophecy, an ambivalent new perspective involving the planet seemed to be in the making.

But people, Chickbrow reflected, don't really want to migrate to the stars because their home was condemned. They'd want to go there, sure, but they'd want a home to return to.

In the twenty-first century folk worked together to save SEPTOR, and it proved to them that this oneness had also achieved to warn and prepare humanity; to show the yield that was man's folly.

"Dr. Krell," he spoke cheerlessly into the link. "Can't Earth be saved? If there was an all out effort, couldn't we change the future?"

"In a finite universe there are finite possibilities, and our Universe is finite, David. Then again, there are finite choices -- but by no means are these few."

"Then there is a possibility since choices exist?"

"Existed." There was sternness now in Krell's tone. "There is trend along with choice, and man's overall tendency has been to consistently make the wrong choices. We, ourselves, have elected to stray to the edge of the cliff. Millions upon millions, a history of choices are now proving themselves fallacious."

Chickbrow frowned. "Then we'll drag it all with us to wherever we go."

Jeremy and Mike listened, apparently in no mood to contribute.

Chickbrow glared around him like a snared lynx.

"David," the Professor, sensing the other's distress, inverted to a fatherly tone, "man learns from his mistakes."

"Not quick enough."

"Quick enough?"

Quick enough to save man with respect and pride, he almost lashed out. "To survive without decimating and ravaging first. Quick enough to quit being arrogant adolescents, get our act together, and start strutting faith in ourselves and some trace of propriety and honor -- dignity too."

"Dignity?"

"Have we outgrown that word, Dr. Krell?" He dampened a pinch. "Or have we elbowed it aside?"

"I didn't know Indian people had so much romance in them. You so eloquently just pointed out one of my fallacies! Ignorances, really. That's what the world is, ignorant, not arrogant."

There was a pause on the phone line.

"No, I don't think dignity has been outcasted," Krell said. "It's a brittle word and needs to be protected. So we lodge it somewhere deep inside of us, and forget it, like honor. Ill-used so often."

Again the communicator went silent for a moment. "You want to hear of another, second miracle? This line is coded, isn't it? Nobody can listen in?"

"Yes."

"This has to be kept privy. Otherwise, it won't work."

Chickbrow looked at Fagan, Mike and Jeremy.

"Indian's word."

"Good enough."

   Lovesigh amputated from his reverie and inclined his head back.

The heavens, as he examined them, held only the new map of the firmament. But shortly as his feeble eyes adjusted a shimmer spread on the sky. Pinpricks of flickers, vestiges of glints and glitters.

Speedily a brilliant haze scattered amidst the empty tracts of the nebula clusters. The ghostly grain grew more resplendent, till in his imagination's ear whispers of seared and violated space 'hissed' above them.

Lovesigh quickly covered his eyes with his sleeve, "The beacon, Champ. Power it!"

Champ pushed the plate into the other's hand and foundered to the vivarium's middle.

"Activate! Activate!" Lovesigh shouted, disposing of the plate, and himself trudging to the net's controls.

With the flat of his palm he threw his whole weight over a thick ebony quartz on the power node at the topmost of a support pillar. A thin whine rose from the ship's guts. "Down, down," his face buffed red, the eyes goggled.

The hovering square net over the ship and a stretch of surrounding space flourished darker still. A melanite regularity, whose sable sharp edges Lovesigh could spot from where he stood, covered them.

A sector of the Galaxy simply vanished. Instead, Lovesigh could discern chaffs of palpable vermilion and almost hear the crackle from the web as fields bent, coiling around the interstices in live mauve lightning.

Lovesigh turned. He leered. A cataract of dense stench poured down on them. "Deteriorated oxygen."

He'd never get used to the wretched sight, to what emanated from the beacon's sullied hulk. His face slowly took on the cast of a moldering tombstone and his bulging eyes grew to puffy circles of white.

"Things Champ cannot see," he moaned, rubbing an abused shoulder.

Above the chimp towered a cone of viscous emptiness. A shaft so hollow of light that the glow of the vivarium's dimmed lanterns seemed to careen to it. He felt his own sight being trawled from its sockets to the black abyss. Some long-forgotten nightmare tore at Lovesigh's mind, but the only evidence of distress was when he spoke to the other.

"Get away from that thing!" he shouted, his nerves thrumming wildly. He felt himself being towed lightly to the humming beacon, away from the net's controls.

The chimp staggered, its face impassive, its hair on end, ploughing under the vacuous shadow towards him.

"What do you see?" Champ asked. Lovesigh braced him by the arm.

"Lights, the size of fists -- no one alike -- all glow, no body, sallying down." He spoke and rubbed his chest.

"The net?"

"Ah, the net holds, high and mighty, chimp. Blacker than a raven dipped in pitch. But it tends to its job. To left and right, all around, the light-spores are being baffled and sluiced into streams, are listing out of course and snared like birds of fire." He stammered breathless, until his knees sagged.

His bones and muscles seemed to be melting. He slowly sank on the iron deck trying to remember something. It was urgent.

"The 'stars', Lovesigh?"

Lovesigh brushed a wetness from his forehead and cheek. Tried to focus. "The 'stars' are a dancing, rainbow jewel tonight. The lights are everywhere. These are not shallow colors ... " His look lingered briefly on Champ. "We float on rippling radiance laced with sparkles where the 'stars' smash and break into the nets surface."

... Such lightheadedness, he pondered dazedly, and blinked in an effort to clear it away.

"Are there many to catch?"

"Enough ... " He lost himself in his words.

Lovesigh's fingers numbed. He was becoming disoriented among the syllables and their articulation. The silent rain of lights around him somehow made all utterance redundant.

"Chimp," he breathed heavily, "help me -- "

The chimp kneeled beside him. His narrow face was now drawn.

"What's happening?" Lovesigh gasped.

Champ fidgeted, his eyes glistening, attentive as a true friend's eyes, wise.

"They're calling for you," he tried to soothe.

"Calling?.. " Lovesigh struggled with the pain and to understand.

"Share with them -- "

"Whom, chimp?"

" -- be born from your shell again, Lovesigh."

Lovesigh listened mouth agape, his nape tingling.

"The black stars are extensions of the fringe. Like the beacon, the fringe allures all life force," The chimp wooed him and rocked gently holding him caringly in its long lanky arms. "The spirit energy, Lovesigh. It is in its design. The fringe reclaims and forges it into spores of sustained consciousness." It waved a hand over their heads, "and sows them throughout."

"Our souls?" Lovesigh blurred.

"Not a soul is lost to the Universe, Lovesigh."

He subtly remembered. The chimp's nano-implants. No, no it had to be more than that. The head gash! Yes -- another eye that saw all that other eyes could not. "They were wrong. You can see, too."

Lovesigh's tenor changed.

" -- star-struck, not wounded," he dribbled, and clutched at the chimp's hand. His expression smoothed. He began, but so late, himself to see more.

How divine a plan. He was instantly astounded by the lucid images taking shape in his mind, as clear and obvious as a remembered dream.

The oasis, right there in front of him. He tried to raise a pointing finger. The vivarium's atmosphere. The spores broke its chemistry down to its elements, and quicker than the primitive indigenous algae, so impending life could breathe. The little bright 'star's' partiality to darkness in the deep soil of the vivarium was to protect sensitive, neonatal life forms evolving into full bloom.

The chimp, right there in front of him, was the answer. Alpha's artificial processors had not the affinity the chimp -- all brains -- had. Unlike Champ's inherent organic constitution, the wormholes broke the Alpha's inferior synthesis down to subatomic states, to its quarks and gluons, quicker than the electronics could reconstitute them, so impending solutions simply annihilated. The wormholes were partial to deep or -- or animate space: to balance the receptive, born-anew fractal or other 'life forms' evolving into full bloom. They and the fringe were the terrarium of the Universe.

A tiny wormhole end guided in the organic chimp brain.

A tiny 'star' flowed, guiding, in the chimp's veins.

"You will live for ever, chimp ... "

"We all do. We just don't know it, Lovesigh."

"Antonio, Champ," Lovesigh whispered, while his eyes begged to close.

"Which Antonio, the old master wrote of five?"

"You learn well, chimp."

"You teach well, Maestro."

There was a blur. His shoulders heaved. A stinging-hot, bone-splintering agony crushed Lovesigh and swept to his hands, down his crotch, toes. He strained for a shallow breath and -- "Whoosh!"

  Chickbrow detected a kind of puckish fun-lovingness there. Dr. Krell's composed, bearing and phlegmatic diction hastily turned ecstatic.

"Our Universe may be finite -- but I've got a hunch its not the only one around. That black 'pit' of a hole slung SEPTOR way out. I think we've maneuvered SEPTOR into another space-time continuum, altogether. Anchored it to an Earth of another, but analogous, universe."

The three men slowly stood up and walked to the communicator.

Chickbrow nearly quailed, "You mean that's not our Earth?"

"It doesn't have to be. Tachyons, and their imaginary time sub-particles, chronons, can't propagate through time alone; that's like someone sitting in a chair here on Earth and waiting for the passage of time to transport them to the moon. There has to be spatial displacement involved, too!"

"If I copy," Chickbrow broke in, " you're saying those pictures we're getting from SEPTOR are not of our future? But the future of an ersatz -- a proxy Earth?"

"May not! Chickbrow, may not! be our own future. The Uncertainty Principle says it. Not me.

"On the other hand, it might be our Earth at that. Time, you see, stops inside a black hole because there cannot be spatial displacement. There's no room for it. So, that leaves us with time displacement only. But by the aforementioned, this is a paradox. And a paradox is what's needed for chronons to work. It's the only condition to translate one of the three spatial axis, twist it into a time axis. Then simply treat it, move through it as you would stroll down a street, turn right, or left, and stroll along another street, soar up and up in a RamJet. In fewer words, we'd be able to move through time as we would through the other three dimensions. No difference whatsoever.

"But here we're looking out, not co-existing within the singularity. So, there is no past or present looking out from a singularity, only a future. Things outside a singularity, if they could be observed, would dash about with ungodly speed. Many times that of light. Within a blink of our black-hole-observer billions of years would have elapsed -- galaxies born, matured and died -- all in this instant. So, in transpiring through the hole, even by a spontaneous jump, who can say that SEPTOR was not delayed an infinitesimal of a blink? But still to emerge in our Universe, with merely a shred of detainment of twenty years or so."

"But the space/time factor -- aren't you ignoring it now?" Chickbrow rebounded.

"I don't know, David. That's the funny part. Paradoxes work within their own very esoteric, awfully private laws. So ethereal and touchy are these that if we were to intrude upon them, upon this other, second, miracle by conventional scientific analysis, or simply locution, we'd be ruffling the very time-space fabric or, worse, cause the miracle -- the paradox -- to fail."

A long pause.

"I'm aware of that."

"That's why he didn't tell the President!" Fagan broke in.

"What's that!" Dr. Krell blared over the line.

"Mr. Abe Fagan is here with me," Chickbrow appended, disturbed.

"Oh, Chickbrow ... " the voice groaned, "you had given me your word!"

Fagan looked bewildered.

"Sir, I didn't realize the gravity -- it's only three more people who know -- "

"Three! Here I groped in dilemma whether to tell you, and just you alone. Kept back information from the President. And you say only three!"

"Dr. Krell," Jeremy tried to mollify the afflicted man. "I'm not going to talk about it -- to anyone. Not to my wife even."

Mike, puzzled at the turn of things, snorted. "We really need guys like you," he mumbled, under his bulky orange mustache, "with all this joy breaking out all over." Then more loudly, "Sir, I'm not going to talk about this thing -- even at confession. And I'm an Old Catholic!"

Fagan's eyes began to twitch. But he remained silent.

"No, no -- it's the knowledge of it," Dr. Krell bellowed. "The knowing itself is what effects the outcome. This new modicum of knowledge now vacillating in three additional brains -- your brains Mr. Fagan, Mike and Jeremy -- brings into play a uniquely separate causality. Even mere thinking can warp the quantum mechanisms -- more so the hair-trigger delicate balance of the chronon clockwork." Then, as though to himself, "People are timid creatures, they won't want to stick around to find out if Earth will end up like that. They'd want OUT!"

"You want them to believe that that's our Earth?" Fagan now pointed to the hologram cube hovering above their heads, unaware that the other could not see it.

"Don't you, Mr. Fagan? If it is our Earth we're getting those signals from, how else will we change its future? Save it? But to get people involved building more space arks instead of more Earth-sapping, air-choking industries and people-cluttering institutions and plants. Now's the chance to channel industry not to industries -- and to this mad and frenetic proliferation that's suffocating us -- but direct it to charting other voyages, for other new Americas, Australias. But out there this time. Trundle humanity from its blissful hara-kiri. Jiggle people out of their stupor so they neglect to go on killing this planet."

"It's a decoy, Dr. Krell." Fagan's tone was dead somber. His eyes stopped their twitch. "To say the least."

"An honorable decoy, wouldn't you say? Or do you endorse that cinder upon your screen? 99.99 percent of Earth's population, Mr. Fagan, is ignorant that a Universe exists. Ask'em, 'What's that thing sparkling up in the sky?' They say, 'A Star.' And you ask, 'What is a star?' 'A thing that comes out at night.' And that's where most people's learnedness ends concerning the magnitude of what surrounds us."

" 'Man learns' your own words, Dr. Krell," said Chickbrow in all his earnesty. "Dr. Krell, don't dignity and honor infer truth? Hoodwinking mankind, is it really the solution? There's a Chinese saying by Lao-tzu, 'A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.' Can't this be that one, first, and significant step/choice that is not fallacious, out of the history of choices? Wouldn't we be only burgeoning the world's ignorance, be furthering the exploits of a dastardly few, by withholding this knowledge?"

"If you tell the world," Krell parried, "that that may not be Earth, our future, do you think the world would benefit from the doubt? Look around you, Chickbrow. Bona fide power thrives on the doubt of the populous, on the little man. If man does not scuttle his fellow man, man scuttles his environment. When man seeks power no means -- whether these be education, principles, cultivation, morality or ideals -- ever found have barred his way. Trend, Chickbrow, has a robustly frightful and protracted impetus in our case -- thousands of years of lowly, dishonoring, and contemptful choices.

"Only if the charred remains of Earth blare bluntly at them, like a tombstone epitaph, will people -- emperors included -- get the message. Authority, someone had said, rarely survives in the face of doubt. We need authority, spit-shine law, the rough-rider redneck here and now, to eradicate all doubt. Man is lazy and gets bored easily, David, Mr. Fagan. All else he'll humor away -- all but raw consternations like fear, alarm, shock. These proved to function in the past. We may believe in God, but it’s in arms we trust. Arms and armies, clubs and gendarmes, witch-hunts and pogroms, inquisitions and persecutions, Xenons, Colonels and Generals, government men and Gestapo men, covert operatives and SIA scum got the ball rolling ... "

Mike had noticed it first.

A slow undulation of colors on the globe depicted on the overhead screen. Every time Chickbrow or Fagan spoke the sphere's surface texture seemed changed by a bit -- the hews appeared less parched-reds and desert-ambers, and more fertile-browns; even small specks of greens dabbed the Earth here and there.

He nudged Jeremy and both observed these pigments fade as Dr. Krell finished rebutting.

"Duress, Dr. Krell, works ephemerally, not enduringly. In the long run that which survives is that which humankind has sustained by its freedom to choose -- may that even be its very own end. It's called responsibility and accountability. If men and women are inept it is not because they are inapt. It’s because the attitude as such has been fixated, drilled, into them, misled them. Arms we trust -- worthy of such trust --, Dr. Krell, are arms of flesh and blood. Not of burning steel and smoldering powder. Human and warm, embracing and feeling arms that soothe wounds; not compound them. Not gouge them deeper into pain and affliction ... "

Not only were the greens and browns spreading now, but there were smidgens of resonant cyans emanating from vast, deep-seated canyons while pearly, frosty whites glimmered at the Poles.

Mike nudged Chickbrow to turn to the holograph, and looked at Jeremy, and Jeremy returned Mike's look and buoyed up.

Chickbrow put a hand on Fagan's shoulder giving a heartening clasp. Mike and Jeremy patted him behind the other shoulder, esprit de corps fashion.

Fagan, surprised but cheered by his aimcriers, drove on, cleaving through Dr. Krell's tenuous grounds and despondent argumentation, atomizing the other's motives and goals.

Every once in a while the two mite-techs would glimpse over their shoulder, and when the professor happened to speak they would cough and belch and Mike would let out air in loud raucous fits.

The introspective faces from those outside turned to the screen one-by-one.

As each pair of eyes beheld the metamorphosis, a maelstrom began to brew over the Earth. A pandemonium of blooming wrought forth more pasture-greens, azure-blues, and feathery drifts of whites. The shrill of cheers and applause infiltrated the sound-proofing.

"What's all that din, Chickbrow?"

When Fagan turned, a new Earth confronted him. One he had seen many times and was so familiar with.

"It's only another miracle," said Chickbrow. Then, with ebony-blue eyes wise and smiling, "Dr. Krell, about doubt. Roosevelt, I think, said, 'The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.'"

Mike grunted with pleasure and graciously flipped the com switch off.

Uninterrupted now, Fagan watched their bonhomie future-nest forge anew before them, by them, and splurged a lavish smile. Dimple and all.

  [From the archives of Starseed. P.P.]

As then, ten millennia ago, seven 'destinations' was the theoretical maximum of the lone rhomboid's and its partial's capacity. Plus the emulations, and the plant on Olympus. It all tallied to near one hundred percent of its available potential function. Here, it, as well, had to provide additional resources for the flawed 'destination' that leaked raw force. But it was not an impossibility. There were more than enough precious metals and stones in these caves.

The same algorithms were promptly adapted with new profile data input. Even prior to this, the rhomboid made maximum use of all information available to it. For reasons of its own, while one 'destination' had been still in its infancy, the rhomboid had taken a bold step. It had merged the profile of the Carpenter with that of whom was to be born as Lukas -- or, Zeus -- so as to accommodate more space in its now-limited buffers.

As the labyrinthine processor began to re-form the revised scenario, one where again in effect seven and not twelve deities would govern, several inconsistencies arose, threatening a paradox loop.

The hexahedron once more abruptly suspended all activity.

In addition to the damaged hedron, identified as Amanda Rhodes, the internal misalignment of the remains of the second rhomboid and the intact hexahedron itself, caused by the displacement of the cold fusion of long ago, posed other plausible deterring effects. Random radiation particles, over the centuries of its inactivity, caused several of the rhomboid's own separate functions to fuse and eventually inhibit (replace) in essence many of those of the 'destination' program. As consequence, each 'destination' possessed a maintenance routine irrelevant and alien to its purpose. One that was inharmonious to its individual role. On the other hand, actively ingrained upon their Olympion gene was a technology not yet to come for ages.

The machine, in next to no time, retrieved the most current history files of all seven. It scanned the contents. Although they had individually experimented, none of the seven 'destinations' had shown any dynamic tendency of utilizing the technology they had access to collectively -- except one, Lovesigh. His concept of the fringe and its implementation with the fringe minor in this age and epoch was a confounding, but irrecoverable, anachronism.

A conditional chain was promptly invoked. The chronotropic (time-activated) gene predominated in all of them, or else the 'destinations' would not have gotten to meet and know of each other; would not have the relentless urges, to converge at a set place of purpose, as programmed. Below the Mountain. And, following that, the final abode. Atop Olympus. Even with the violent biological side-affects of that one 'destination', she had finally succumbed to her gene's control.

Although the urge was ever-present and strong enough in the being of Lovesigh, he was no longer directly controllable since the transplant.

Affirmative.

All the rest of the 'destinations' were acceptably mature and totally unaware of their integrated implication. The plan had a higher success probability than not.

But ...

Not yet.

The one-to-one correspondence, parity, was not observed. And it was a requisite.

Without the full tenure and harmony of the entire group, unity would not hold. The sequentially coupled hedrons could not function if parity were disrupted among their remaining number. And since a majority of seven was the least functional affinity of quantity ... six would not do; not without the return of the seventh 'destination', the re-culturing, full re-activation and re-enforcing of his aestivating Olympion gene.

Soon ... He will return soon.

The urge was powerfully irresistible in the 'destination'. Before being separated from his original body, an overwhelming number of invisible but present psychic dendrites had manifested and established themselves in the energy fields of the Professor's abstract mind. And these were transferred as well to the new body. They were strong and relentless enough to bring him back quickest possible.

The supply of raw material in the caverns of the cave was almost inexhaustible. There was more than ample time to wait for the Professor's reclamation.

The rhomboid restored the files to its archives and proceeded to the next phase.

Wait.

***

Alex Rhodes upon seeing his sister broke into a big smile. He embraced her dearly and spun her around.

She was so fragile.

So much more so than any of them.

Amanda Rhodes herself had not felt so rejoicing since that long ago time when she and her entire family had the Thanksgiving diner, a year before the freak accident had taken her father.

This was a thanksgiving in a way, too. The four newcomers after getting adjusted to the clean fresh smells, the birds chirping, and the green that surrounded them congregated on the broad front porch of the house. Amanda had coffee and tea ready and served.

Theodoros and Mark had awaken and dressed by the time she returned from the dock with the guests. The introductions took place.

It was while they sat sipping their cuppa that Amanda was able to study the handsome woman across from her. She was a slight taller than herself with fair short straight hair, almond-shaped honey eyes, and softly contoured facial features. She had a mesomorphic built, well proportioned, that gave the impression of a fit, even agile, female with a defined inclination towards athletics.

But Amanda was looking, unconsciously so, for something else.

What had attracted Frank to Barbara?

Amanda could not know at this point. It was too soon. But the wondering was there.

Up on the surface she felt at peace that Frank had found another; someone who unlike her would not disappoint him, or burden him, with her quirks and oddities. Someone with whom he could have spent the rest of his life, were it not for ... for the divorce.

He did say ex-wife? she inquired in her mind. Suddenly the realization snowballed in the form of a hundred other questions. The most burning being, why?

As these thoughts rummaged through her, she was deftly conscious of a tie with Frank. A tie that had yet not broken; not able, or apt, to be severed. She felt, and was curiously taken back because of it. Not jealousy for the other woman in his life. Inklings of envy, yes, but strangely, no shattering let down.

Frank had been bluntly matter of fact that morning.

"Barbara -- an old and good friend here, Amanda Rhodes." And, "Amanda, my ex-wife Barbara."

At this, Amanda was more confused than surprised. Too much had been thrown at her, too abruptly. But she managed to conceal it. She simply looked at the honey eyes and saw no menace in them. On the contrary, she thought she detected concern. And something else ... so very familiar to her. Long suffering.

"Hi," she had said. "I'm glad you could make it." As for the rest, if and when Frank decided it right, he would speak to her.

But Amanda wanted so much to talk with her brothers Mark and Alex she had not seen since that tempestuous decision she had made to leave for Europe five years before. Although it had been Frank she was leaving. Her summer trip to the Continent had stretched that winter into a year, and that into years thereafter. Along with the man she loved, she had left behind a family she had very strong bonds with.

It had turned out into a kind of insular existence, hers had. A kind of death.

Nevertheless, she had wanted to put things into perspective then. Although she did not realize it then, her emotions and reason governed. Beneath the storm of her feelings had been an ever present side of her that needed answers. This is what she had been seeking as well, by coming and residing in her father's birthland.

The connection was a vague one. One that she could not rationalize. It was just there; like her father had been, to listen to her, so as to calm and comfort her when the magic came.

"Dad, I'm sometimes frightened, and I don't know why. Where does the magic come from?" she had asked shortly after she had told him and later shown him what she was capable of doing.

"You feel afraid, Amanda, because your reason cannot follow your actions. It doesn't understand and neither do you of how it is that you can control things simply by just thinking it."

"Can you?" she then asked.

"Oh dear, dear, no," he replied. "But it's not wrong," he consoled, and took her close to him.

"Are there others?" she continued her questions, for the first time feeling light at unburdening herself of this thing that found her not long ago.

"Yes, my Amanda; history and the world are full of unexplainable happenings." He reassured her as she sat on his lap closer to him.

"What are they?"

"Well, the Universe for one," he explained. "It came out of nowhere. There was nothing there, and for some un-understandable reason, from nowhere, in a matter of fractions of a second all that was needed to make all the galaxies, suns, planets -- just popped into being."

"Like miracles?"

"Like miracles. Only some of them are not widely talked about."

"Why?"

"Owhh -- because of what we said before. It's hard for folks to understand miracles. And people like you and I are frightened by what they don't understand."

"But, daddy, Jesus made miracles and people are not afraid of him. They love him."

She remembered her father taking a deep breath and sigh.

"Hon, it took many-many years for people to love Jesus. Matter of fact, in his time, only a handful loved him. And that because they believed in him and in what he said. In what his words symbolized. Not because they understood his miracles."

It was upon the reference of this subject that Amanda realized the repercussions miracles can have. Christ was first crucified, then loved and later worshipped as being part of God. She became instinctively aware that to deviate from the comprehensible into the incomprehensible invited this same danger. Death.

She paled.

Her father knew what she was thinking. The words he uttered next, may very well have been why she was well and here this day. A great part of her was implicitly enlightened.

"Thousands of years ago, even before the coming of Christ, there were events taking place."

He continued.

"There had been happenings occurring that were so great and far off, so far back in time -- and so inaccessible even to present man's capabilities -- that people separated them from history. They called them myths. In ancient Hellas, where some of your ancestors lived, these myths played an important role in the shaping of Creation. What I'm saying, Amanda, is that there are incomprehensible aspects in the evolution of humanity that -- although are shied away from -- are inescapable in the long run; in the course of forming civilizations."

Nineteen years later and after exhaustive efforts, Amanda was well aware that her piece of truth never ceased to surface. Three days ago one phase of it was involuntarily witnessed by Frank and the priest. A priest that to date she did not know how it happened that he was there; at her apartment when it did. He had said that he had come with Frank. But when she had opened the door that afternoon there was only Frank, no one else. He could of course have been a few steps to the side, out of view, or maybe the shock of confronting Frank unexpectedly blanked all else out. She could not say for sure.

And there was Barbara.

What was she doing here?

Was she, like the rest who flooded the city, assigned to come, to observe something or other? Was she representing, sent by, a newspaper, a science foundation, a private or public concern? How did she fit in this series of queer incidents?

And Mark and Alex to be here -- but they were not unexpected; they had written to her. Their arrival was awaited for.

Then again, what a coincidence for Alex to seek the Priest; and the Priest to know of her whereabouts, as Alex had told her on their way from the docked boat a short while ago. How did Father Lukas find her? Alex had said by calling Frank who in turn the night before had visited Mr. Alexiou and got the information from him. Still, it had been Father Lukas who got through to her early that morning although Frank said he was trying all night to, but could find no available empty telephone line.

Was it her imagination? Or were things relay focused around the figure of the Priest?

She shook her head to clear it.

What was she doing, trying to do? Make something out of nothing?

What mattered was that they were safely together on a beautiful Aegean shore and an enchanting nearby village, miles away from danger. Frank was with her once more; something she could not begin to be grateful for. The time is when I need him most, she thought. Her brothers were right next to her too, to share past family memories in a warm zestful way the three of them only could.

She was in fact happy.

A feeling she almost forgot.

Yet, a feeling she believed she now deserved and needed so awfully much. Amanda, since her life began, was at peace with herself.

***

[From the archives of Starseed and spy satellites. P.P.]

Mt. Olympus wedged into the crisp blue of the morning sky like a marble monolith over the earth. The bright, pristine day exposed the minute details, the ravines and gorges carved on the mountain sides and minor summits. If one did not look close or scrutinize the site with binoculars or a telescope, the mists and white cloud-cover above a certain segment -- a plateau, half a kilometer below the peak -- could not stand apart from the rest of the snow and ice surrounding it.

But beneath the fluffy overcast, a small city rose and spread over graceful slopes and green pastures. The dome of haze and clouds sheltered it in the event that curious and wandering eyes should ever fix their look in its direction. Since the city's rebirth and resurrection, after two millennia of frozen stillness, fauns, stallions, foxes, capricorns ... a menagerie of unique animals and an Eden of exotic plants spurred to life upon it.

As the cycle of creation on the surface neared its completion, buzzing and winging, flourishing, fecund and prolific, beneath the soil an enormous plant labored to supply the kilotons of heat energy needed to preserve it.

This branch-off of the hexahedron's compiler system performed in true concordance with its every bit of programming, down to the minutiae of molecular structure and weather control.

The ancient habitat was ready to receive its gods. Nectar and ambrosia, the elixirs, that would sustain them to life for the next three thousand years, were to be ready upon their arrival --

-- When suddenly ... a great reversal began ...

... All that had appeared in the span of two days, now, abruptly, began to retreat ...

... The animals got summoned back down into their hibernation spaces ... the butterflies, the ladybugs and dragonflies followed ...

... The outside soon transformed, became deserted of the motion of thriving and flourishing, empty of life stirring, of wizardry and magical deeds; of incredulous but sturdy powerful wonders and marvels manifesting on the impromptu ...

... A freezing mist came upon, enveloped the Divine structures, the Palaces of Gods; and it spread over the entirety -- in mournful silence, melancholy quiet, across the Alyssum -- of the billowing dew-dabbed fields of the plateau. Then snow fell. Dense, thick snowflakes ...

... The paralyzing cold froze the snow even more, making it impenetrable and indistinguishable, till the place was no different than its surroundings ... than that which it had been before the thaw.

***

The pain dispersed. The last of the maelstrom in his mind cleared away. Everything appeared different, more comprehensible than he had ever perceived before, as if he had looked at life through a veil, until now.

He regarded the reclining, motionless chimp next to him. A trickle of blood stained the bridge of its nose.

"The star abandoned you! Fool chimp!" he blustered. "You're going to die -- "

While the words still spilled out, he ran to the beacon. His convict's shoddy body no longer weighed him down, forcing him to drag along like a sloppy walrus out of water. Discover he did the thrusting pain in his shoulder was not there either.

Suddenly his awareness exploded.

He thought he too was going to be left blind, until his senses told him differently. Yet in this increment he saw around him what his otherwise simple sight could not have beheld in a lifetime. Lovesigh gawked, utterly bewildered.

The chimp stirred and lay still again.

Lovesigh yanked his stare free from the uncanny iridescence of the net. Got a firm grip on the beacon. He put both shoulders to it, "Move, clambering junk pile."

He pushed, tipping the issuing onion head off to one side. The black funnel slowly pitched, leaving the net's center above and crawled to the net's edge.

Two passing streaks at that moment deflected violently. They swerved into the jet spray of the beacon, through the transparent bubble ceiling overhead without breaching it, and dashed on the steel deck, splintering and showering an umbrella of sparks. Lovesigh left the beacon.

"How big a piece!.."

Gingerly, and with the aid of his net-picking thimbles, he culled a loose fragment and trotted to the chimp. He leaned over Champ's head ready to release it in the break of the wound.

"It's not necessary," the ape said, and waived the hand away.

He jarred back, dropped the 'star' morsel, which slithered away to its core, became one with it, took on an ethereal form and shape, rose from its knees and walked away.

Lovesigh's head turned from one to the other in rapid succession.

"Did you see that?"

"No, Lovesigh."

Lovesigh sat up and studied the chimp dazed-like.

"You're not Champ," he said.

The other nodded.

"A 'star'?"

The other nodded.

"Champ's gone."

The other shook its head. "'Stars' are symbiotes, not usurpers."

"Where is..?"

"Where do you think?"

Lovesigh grimaced, his face becoming a checkerboard of emotions. Reluctantly, he wiped a quaking hand over the numb soreness of his forehead -- and quickly brought it back down.

It was bloodied.

" -- Me!"

"He will soon finish re-orienting your genes: hostility-inclined temperament, tumorous lung. Also your old afflictions that you brought into your new body: fluctuations in enzyme and hormone consistencies, dyspepsia, hepatic and pancreatic exoncomata, muscular dystrophy, et cetera. Your ParaDi ... and eliminate, purge you, as well, from a certain predilection; and of other vestiges that ... that are not supposed to be there -- in you and in your kind, that is."

"Why -- "

"He knew that your body could no longer endure. It was a body too used up, too weak to harbor the life-strength you have. He knew you were slowly dying today ... he must love you, Lovesigh, to do this. Another's body is never easy work. Especially one with so many complications cropping."

"Who are you?"

"A heart that loves Chross, and Champ. What's left of my body lies in the depth of a South African lake... " A hand showed the other galactic spiral. " ... while he wandered the seven Great Deserts, for years, searching. Only to find me here. He has little need of food, water and most other earthly things. Champ is hosting, besides me, a star-handler. What you call a doctor, a white doctor, but who is also Stargifted, has the knowledge of gene-redirecting and gene-retouching, of gifted Risidua of Essence. I'm Olivia. I was Chross's black bride-to-be. Killed and thrown in the water, in a sack of stones."

Lovesigh's cheeks chagrined. "I don't understand..."

"Nor do I. Perhaps not Champ -- rather Chross, fully even -- "

Lovesigh's eyes turned over. Only the white was there. He staggered, his arms groping.

"I'm blinded!"

"No, old nanny, I'm the blind one."

"Champ! Chross!"

"The same. Other than loss of sight, how do you feel?"

"Fine, but how -- "

"No time for explanations, Lovesigh. You do feel well?"

"Yes. Matter of fact, I haven't felt like this since...since -- "

" -- since your figs were plumbs?"

Lovesighs face blazed cherry red.

"Don't fret, Lovesigh. Olivia can only hear 'you'. Not me. And that because you're talking out loud. Just think your words, I'll hear them."

"You're trembling."

Olivia, Lovesigh discovered, was holding his outstretched hands.

"Are you all right?"

"I think so."

"I too was afraid when I was going over. And terrified after. When Chross found me I discovered that I was still aware of everything.

"Not afraid," Lovesigh said. "Eh, just, surprised." "Chross/Champ, you there?"

"Yes, Lovesigh."

"What's happening? Why do I feel the way I do?"

"Doing some surgery ... you'll have your sight back."

"Answer my question, Champ/Chross!"

"I've set a trimming reaction through your DNA. About thirty years worth. And rooted out a few other 'behavioral intruders'."

***

"What manner stars are you?" they saw and heard Lovesigh ask.

SEPTOR's instant communications had come to live once again.

Michael, Fagan and Chickbrow tilted their heads. They raised their sight up as one and looked hard at the broad cube visor. They attended the inside not of an empty vivarium this time. With the replenishing of Earth, came the brief return of the two as well.

Down, down through the night side of a future Earth ... Down, down from the fibers of Lovesigh's net a deluge emptied. Brothers and sisters, recently lost. Parents and grandparents, not long gone.

"That's ... it can't be -- "

"Yes, Lovesigh?"

"She was -- is young. I'm ... "

Lovesigh now looked down and away. His eye caught the glossy back side of the plate Olivia now held. He gazed with a cleared mind at a bracing, red-haired youth, staring him back with pert cyan eyes.

The star in Champ's body smiled kindly, "Not any older-looking than Earth-born, star-struck Champ -- would you believe one hundred and fifteen."

"Chross, why all the secrecy? Why not tell me from the start?"

"Would you have accepted it? An ape from the wild telling an old nanny like you that the Universe had chosen, out of the billions of years, this very interval of its history, our lifetime, to desegregate the corporeal and the incorporeal?"

The monkey bared its clean white teeth at him.

"A verse, lad. Any verse. Nanny indeed!"

Lovesigh grimaced at the sprite tone, made a lemon-licking face, but capitulated with a rare intensity at the woman of light that approached.

"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace ... "

Down, down drifted Penelope, a newborn babe in her arms, undulating greetings to Lovesigh in cottony white opal, in warm chrysoberyl, in scarlet almandine, in haunting lapis lazuli, in emerald olivine ...

***

[It is the eve of The Games of Peace for humanity. Athens -- the World -- shines in splendor, glory and light once more. The pledge of truce intrinsic to the Great Idea is here to be affiliated today, too.

For me it is not a time of doubt, but of an approaching resplendence of never before that draws near....

...Captain D. P. Chickbrow is piloting and Champ Jr. is co-piloting Ark 2, the first official and fully operating migratory vessel to leave Earth by means of the fringe heading for the Vereniki constellation located above Virginis as seen from Earth. They will attempt before this two jumps, one for Sirius and one to the Orionis system. The craft-city also serves as a shell to protect its two thousand occupants from adverse conditions on some newly visited planets as an orbiting station of temporary quarters. Now that a plethora of new, livable worlds is being indexed, the demands of the powerful and their power have become diluted in view of the unmistakably huge supply of beautiful and livable worlds out there. Glixxon and his staffs are slowly, but steadily, elbowed aside and are withering away through attrition; they are simply disintegrating into bad memories.

Peri had not been done away with by SIA. He had convinced them that his acceptance and entrance into University was on a Glixxon Merrit Scholarship. After serving two terms as Foreign Minister in his country and following the publication of this book, he was elected in 2053 Prime Minister of the Hellenes, serving this office for three terms. As well as attending to his current Office, he is today Chairman to the newly formed world organization of the Nations of Peace.

Father Mettropoulos and Mark Rhodes, under the auspices of the PM and the Ministry the PM formerly headed, had located the abode of Starseed. Beneath the City of Monasteries lies now another city, one of scientists and the most recent technological equipment known to mankind. All endeavoring to break into the codes of a seemingly invincible and inaccessible Rhomboid Hexahedron. The lone and damaged hedron, however, had presented less of a problem. It is still issuing forth, even today, unreservedly, unbelievable amounts of information on epochs and accounts upon which light has never before been shed or that had been shrouded in deep and unfathomable mystery and mysticism.

The little live stars, Residua of Essence, had at some time somehow infiltrated the hedron. Their pacifying effect, we believe and hope, had been the true cause that brought about its incredible disclosures, and most recent suspension of all, but the most essential of its activity. Strange as it may seem, these little stars are all around, sparse but everywhere. They are similar to those that had been observed in SEPTOR's recovered transmission. The bulk of these aware little starlettes profuse, changing and alternating into various shapes, transmorphing as they call it; but we can only communicate with them thus far in a remote and incredible way -- only in our dreams.

A large sum, as well, of data had been collated from the archives of the remaining, active but flawed, hedron of the mostly destroyed second hexahedron using the new capabilities of the completed and functioning MA (Modified Alpha). This link disclosed the following.

Besides having been the plot of Starseed to deify Dr. Lukas Mettropoulos, Dr. Anthony Lovesigh ... the seven of them, there was a longing there too. Strange as it may appear, the machine had a dream. A vision of itself. More than implementing these fantastic scenarios, it had a craving -- its own irresistible urge. It had grown so far and so deep into its role that it would not (or could not) cut loose, disassociate itself. It had itself become assimilated into humanity. And it desired to be among humans. It needed and yearned to belong. It seems, the machine while learning how to think, had as well somehow learned how to feel. And felt its loneliness.

Frank is taking newspaper assignments in Hellas and lives with Amanda. Sophocles and he are permanent and the best of colleagues and friends. Amanda continues her teaching at Mr. Alexiou’s school. She is also Attending Scholar at The Hellenic Conservatory of Music and composes for the classical guitar. Her malady did not surface again since the intervention of MA in the shutting down of Starseed. Today she has two daughters of her own.

Barbara and Mark had decided to travel throughout Hellas together, making Litokhoro their permanent home. Currently both are immersed in writing their memoirs -- "get it all out in the open," says he.

Theodoros Nikolaos Alexiou had been told about the contribution of Theodoros Alexiou Sr., his grandfather. He was later given the unburied manuscript by me in a formal post-humous Nobel presentation ceremony at The Congress of The Nations of Peace.

Upon further analyses and study it was discovered that the prime numbers in Dr. Lovesigh's equational solutions designated additional micro-wormhole ends -- our brains. Further study is now under way to make their function(s) known.

The six (most likely seven) candidate Gods-to-be, along with their unique anxieties, have been purged of all traces of their unique 'Gifts'. Along with the restoration of complete normality and humanity to these eclectic few, another restoration too has been voted by The Nations of Peace to take its long-awaited meritorious place: The Edict of Spontaneous Truce.

It is a decree by which The Athletic Games return permanently to their place of origin and be hosted -- as far as their Earth-born founding place is concerned -- in Olympia of Hellas; while the newly formed Social Games (i.e. debatative exhibitions and competitions of contentions by dialectic argumentations and elucidations of global range and degree) be conducted by, political, business and religious representatives from each group and in rotation with respect to the venue of country.

The last corporeal remains of Dr. Lovesigh's brain could not be removed from the machine by the mites. No matter how severe and elaborate their programming, they could not undo any part of, or disconnect the tissue. Scans have shown this tissue to have grown dendrites deep into the metal, i.e. into the spot-welds of the interfaces -- the MA itself. The brain (or its dissevered carcass) does not decay. It remains. And a voice too. A distant, familiar voice that answers to the same name. The voice comes and goes at its own volition, but is always there in Earth's time of need. The voice tells Fagan and Michael to "... Trust less in Gods and Arms, more in Children and in Man." It talks of an "Olympion of Olympus and the Games of Peace ". And the voice speaks then of "a way to Penelope". A Penelope of an Ithaca among the stars. A Penelope that lightly and quietly trickles down to us in our sleep of night yarns from her loom of fabrication. Beckons us to reach for her. An ebullient yet ever-patient Penelope of the firmament that "nurtures all our Hope and Grace and Expectation" upon the ward and woof of her mesh. The Lovesigh voice talks also of a Penelope that does not perish. In whose arms we trust the gift of sustenance, of life and more. The voice cites of the last but most precious gift of all. The gift to pardon. At least once-uttered by all, but least heard of all, it seems, by one and all,

"The quality of mercy is not strained;
It dropeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed --
It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes."
-- W.S.

Chronicle of Affairs
Pericles Philippou
President Of The Hellenes

Olympia Olympics
The Athletic Games
15 August 2076]

© 1999 Vasilis Adams Afxentiou

A short biography. I am an ESL/EFL (English as a Second Language/English as a Foreign Language) teacher in Athens, Greece. I have been teaching English on-and-off since 1968, and full-time for the last fifteen years. Prior to that I worked as a Technical Specifications Writer for seven years and as an Engineer for five years. I was born in Thessaloniki, Greece. I went to university in the United States where I received my degrees. My writing credits include published fiction and non-fiction appearing both in Greece and in the USA. Some stateside publications I have written for are Greek Accent, National Herald (Proini), and Crosscurrents. I have received several Distinctive Certificates from WD Writing Competitions held over the years, and also Honorary Mention in my Greek works(narrative and poetry) here in Athens. In Greece I've been published in 30-Days, Key Travel News, Greece's Weekly, Athena Magazine and had a weekend travel column in a local newspaper. My email address is vafx@hol.gr for your comments. Some other e-zines that have puplished my stories in are The Domain, Ibn Quirtaiba, Cosmic Visions, Dark Planet, Basket Case, BORNmagazine, Aspiring Writer, ThinkB, Appalachians, Newwords, Zine in Time, and a couple dozen more.

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