From: ANDOVER@delphi.com
Date: Tue 02 Jul 1996 - 06:49:17 EEST
The Outer Atomic Explorers and the White Moon,
or How We Made the Useless Discovery of Dragon's True Relation to Time,
By Flatius Amensis
Part V of V
"The ship needs to be repaired again -- let's go south to the coast, since we
can descend at an angle, and see if this "closing" is real and if it is still in
force. If it isn't working, we can go to Machine City."
As the ship staggered southward and downward, and the healer cast spells,
Matobolus and Setondal began to explain things to the weary crew.
"That ship, the one that sent those strange messages to us, and nearly collided
with us -- that was ourselves."
He ordered Flavius to play the message again, and told the machine to run it
backwards. They heard their own machine sending itself a message! "No wonder
you couldn't translate it!" he said to the priest, "It was simply backwards --
and it was just ourselves talking!"
"You mean that we sent messages back and forth to ourselves? "
"Yes, that's it."
As they spoke, given the steep angle and speed of their descent, they began to
approach the ragged coastline below. If the Storms below seemed strong on the
land, they were nothing as compared to those on the Sea.
Setondal slowed the ship even further, but as the ship began to pass over the
Sea, it plunged seaward. He was forced to increase the speed of the generator,
but nothing much happened. If there was a curse, it must still be in effect,
thought Matobolus. "Turn back, quickly!" he ordered, and the navigator
complied. The minute they were over land again, things "settled" to the level
of disorder they had come to expect in this tattered Glorantha.
The sense of dread that all the crewmen felt was increasing again. "We aren't
that far from Machine City," warned Flavius the Greater. "If that story is
right, that's one of the places where those "Gift Carriers" are likely to be."
Matobolus slapped his head. "Somehow I am not thinking right -- that's a good
"What do we do now?"
point!"
"Let's stop and grab someone who can give us a local perspective on what's going
on. We need more repairs anyway."
"O.K. Do it."
Setondal said musingly, as he adjusted his generator to slow speed, "No wonder
True Dragons sleep so much -- their own clock and that of the world are going in
opposite directions. I wonder, is that why Dream Dragons exist -- is it their
way of dealing with a "backwards" world?"
Matobolus said in a strange voice "They must know what "the end" of our world
is, because it is in THEIR past; it is their beginning."
Flavius the Lesser said, "can the speculation for a moment. I have a target."
The detector revealed a barbarian priest of some sort, most likely a Storm
priest judging by his behavior, a few hundred yards below them. The priest was
peering in a puzzled, but wary fashion at what must have seemed to his primitive
eyes some sort of creature of the Air.
It was a matter of seconds to cast the requisite spells to Stupefy him, to land,
to bind him, and to lift off.
"We still need to find a landing place that is safe," warned Setondal. "I can't
keep this up much longer."
Matobolus nodded. When they landed, the sorcerors were told to start searching
once again for food and other materials, while the rest of them questioned the
Storm Priest. They used the spirit machine to paralyze his allied spirit, then
awoke him. It made sense to let their own Lhankor Mhy priest -- a fellow
Lightbringer of sorts -- lead the group in this process, but it soon developed
that the priest was even more terrified than the simple act of being kidnapped
by strangers might make him.
When he realized that this was a group of Godlearners, it took a mighty effort
to keep him from slaying himself!
Once prevented from suicide, the priest swore by the Wind that he would tell
them all that he knew on one condition -- that they told him nothing! "The Gift
Carriers will come for me, if you tell me your Secret;" he babbled, "they may
come for me in any event. And if they do, I am lost, forever!"
This is the oddest form of "torture" I have ever seen, thought Matobolus with a
sort of hysterical mirth -- we are forcing him to tell us what he knows by
threatening to tell him what WE know. He hasn't even asked for us to release
him!
The priest told them in greater detail of things they had already learned from
the Yelmalio documents they had obtained earlier. Like the Yelmalian, he knew
relatively little of the West, but knew the tales of Peloria, in detail.
Given their recent discovery, the interrogators were most interested in what he
had to say of dragons and dragonnewts. And he told them of things they had not
heard of before, the tale of Ingolf Dragonfriend, the Dragonnewt's Dream, the
Rise of the Lunar Empire, the destruction of the Temple of the Reaching Moon by
a Dragon, Argrath and the great Hero Wars, and the final destruction of the Red
Moon by the Dragons.
The sense of unease grew on all in the cabin as the two-day interrogation went
on, most notably on Matobolus himself, whose usual careful attention to matters
of dress and coiffure was disappearing. Nonetheless, the sorcerors of the ship
were securing what they needed for further travel.
As the priest spluttered to a stop, Matobolus ordered the party to release him,
called for the evening meal, and then told the crew that he himself would keep
the first watch. "We can decide where to go on the morn," he said. The last
sight they saw as they fell asleep thinking furiously and writing.
Flatius was the first to wake in the morning. It appeared that Matobolus had
fallen asleep over his scribbles of the last night, but when Flatius touched his
shoulder, he discovered that he was dead. A
pparently Matobolus had stabbed
himself in the neck with his pen, and bled to death over the notes he had
written.
The End
Post script: Matabolus killed himself last night. He wrote semi-coherent
notes to himself, but it is not clear whether he slew himself out of a prideful
despair, or whether he was the first of us to die at the hands of the Gift
Carriers of whom we have heard so much. Despair, after all, is one of the
"gifts" of the False Gods.
I myself think that it was discovering that his boundless hopes for the
future of Man were futile was what caused him to slay himself.
These were his final notes:
Only the dragons have seen it both ways.
Dragons go the other way in time. Their emblem of circularity is real.
why dragonnewts seem so strange.
Was the Dragonnewts dream a practice run by the dragons for something they did
"later"?
Dragonnewts evolve in one time direction, and become dragons, evolving back the
other way. No wonder their emblem is what it is. Could that be the Left Hand
Sight? When the dragonnewts go away, they come back as dragons. So the
sleeping dragon underneath us may be a dragonnewt that we passed once. From
their point of view, the great dragon is the END of evolution, their final goal,
not their beginning!
That means the last dragonnewt to become a Dragon will actually live the
longest.
The white moon, travelling one way in time, and the red moon, travelling the
other way, collided and destroyed EACH OTHER. Their essences were too
different. In a way, the moons are the opposite of the dragons. The dragons
travel the circle of time, the moons cannot.
The dragons fled the white moon just before it was destroyed. That must be why
the story that the dragons destroyed the red moon came into existence. But the
dragons, having travelled both ways in time, knew what had happened.
No wonder they act so rarely --
Can we change anything? No. Freedom to change lies only in ignorance. It is
the knowledge of the Gods that binds them. The more they know, the less freedom
they have. The more they have done, the more they have limited possibility.
Am I saying then, that an ignorant peasant may shape the world more than a God?
In a sense, yes, for what is know cannot be changed. Only the perception of it
may be. We cannot alter the history of these moons, or the presence of the
dragons, or the circular nature of Gloranthan time. Freedom lies in the unknown.
That must mean that the True God has no freedom at all -- that explains why he
does not act, for ALL that we see IS his action. The Lesser Gods, false or
true, are limited also. I guess these Dragons are too.
So that means that shaping history requires the proper mixture of power and
ignorance then?
like the Unholy Trio, or Arkat or . . . "We Godlearners?" Yes, that seems
unfortunately to have been the case, doesn't it?
We can no longer change what we know.
Or, apparently, the self-wrought destruction of our people.
But once we did change things, is that not true? Ahh, that might have been the
problem. We violated the nature of Gloranthan reality. We destroyed our own
paradise.
From the Dragon's point of view, it disgorged Tatius and the moon priests,
rather than swallowing them! Hmm, if Time flows differently inside the dragon,
I wonder what happened to them?
The Minarian Memory Removal was not a removal, but an insertion of new
knowledge!
And that means that the Dragonkill War was not, from the Dragon's point of view,
an act of destruction, but one of creation! Thousands of people born from the
mouths of the Dragons? Where were they before?
And Ingolf Dragonfriend was born from a Dragon (or became a dragon?), not eaten
by one. Is that what he meant by Kapertine, and how it could not be understood?
And Chaos created the Spike, rather than destroying it.
And Umath brought Earth and Sky together before returning to his mother's womb.
All my hopes for Man were false. Man measures NOTHING. And nothing is very
strong.
I wonder ---- is this better the way Dragons see it -- an evolution rather than
a decay?
But for us it means that we are creatures doomed to endless de-evolution --
Not entirely self-wrought.
The last things Matobolus wrote were covered in his blood, and I thought it
best for the doubtful sanity that the rest of us retain that they remain so. I
leave his writings here for those who wish to decipher their meaning.
I wrote this story from the point of view of Matobolus and left it here
under this rock, as a tribute of sorts to our dead captain. If the Knowledge we
have is to have any value, it must be preserved. I have not written what is
apparently now our "Secret" for that might be enough to cause these writings to
be destroyed.
Apparently, there are creatures out there that will seek us out wherever we
go, or there were such creatures long ages ago. Whether they still exist we do
not know. On the other hand, at least this new, and apparently useless,
knowledge of the nature of Draconic Time may be permitted to survive even the
Gift Carriers.
We have been divided amongst ourselves, but have finally decided that we
cannot live and will not be allowed to live in this strange world that we have
travelled to, and must go on.
If our machine can take us out of Glorantha again, we may find some other
world or travel to some other Gloranthan time, before or after the Gift Carriers
exist. We know we cannot affect those things within Time that we have already
learned; we cannot avert the destruction of our own people. But if we are
lucky, mayhap we can return to Chaos and thus to our own or some other Time.
But I confess this fear -- which I have not shared with any of my fellows --
that the great creature of Chaos might have left us untouched because he knew
that worse would befall us than aught he could do.
And this hope -- that even the Dragon's perception of time running backwards
may not explain everything.
There was a White Moon, after all, at the beginning of Time, too. Is it
possible that the White Moon was created in what we consider the early times,
ran "backwards" past the "Creation" of Glorantha and then past its "end" and on
until it was destroyed in the collision with the Red Moon? Viewed from both
Time and Space, then, is not Glorantha as circular as the Moons were?
Learning has failed us, however, and only hope remains. That might have
been the lesson of Matobolus' life and death. We will find out.
Best wishes, dear reader ! Say a prayer for us -- that we may fare well --
Flatius Amensis.
Jim Chapin
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