Day Four

This room, this tower, was located millions upon millions of light years away, was seen to the laughing controllers of the great silver ships as a quick run through dusty nebulae, past black holes and red giants. It was located in a trinary system, the main sun burning hot and blue, balanced by the orange glow of the two lesser suns, which appeared no larger than stars and brighter than the moons that clustered around the planet. There were thirty four, some resembling crumbling potatoes or large splotches of white ink against the deep violet sky. Orbital mirrors directed the sunlight and created a period of artificial dusk every twenty six hours, though true night never came.

The planet had no name, was consumed by a connected series of settled territories that made the surface resemble a balding porcupine. Wide expanses of ocean, forest and mountainous terrain were left exposed but there wasn't an inch that hadn't been explored, pondered, and shaped by the slow and steady hand of terra-forming. Even a small patch of desert remained, and on it was the heart of the linked cities. Its towers rose seemingly needle-thin, until one realized they were sometimes thousands of meters in diameter, made possible by super-cooled alloys and the lighter gravity. Lights sparkled with vigor and purpose, fed by and feeding the rest of the Universe, the home of the College Narrate.

The room was a cylindrical dome at the peak of the tallest spire. Sounds became lost in the great expanse hundreds of meters above the heads of those who entered, the walls and ceiling a nondescript brushed porcelain. The temperature was warm, a constant and unexpected breeze slid playfully around the walls though there were no windows and no viable source. The floor was soft and felted, muffling sharp noises. The whirls of blacks and grays that decorated the odd carpet gave the room a dizzying sense of motion and visitors felt unsettled no matter how often they came. This impression certainly exacerbated by the incredibly singular resident, the swirl of misty forms known as the Council.

No one knew its true origins, could only guess at what occurrence had spawned the hyper intelligent entity. When not conversing or when disturbed, the Council seemed nothing more than a gray haze in which flashes of translucent colour raced madly, a soft deep hum in perfect fifths filling the room. Figures boiled beneath the surface, each eerily familiar, each a tug on ancestral memories long forgotten.

A composite of animalian beliefs, the Council displayed the face of its company's progenitor, the long ago creation myth that lay dormant in the imaginative properties of its viewer. Bearded gods, mono-cellular organisms, forms of dust and blood and bone, dragon beasts, electrical impulses and shades of blue. Each personality spoke with a different voice and often debated amongst themselves but all were calm, musical, certain in their place and power. New forms occasionally appeared but were thin, stretched, as if their presence had not yet extended completely into racial subconscious. The disappearance of a mythic presence happened rarely, but was noted with alarm by those who could be called close to the Council, and mourned greatly for the loss of the tale.

For the Council was the sum of its stories, crafted new visions of the subtlest order. Through the senior administrators of the College, it trained Storytellers to resonate with their purpose, to deliver to civilizations unnumbered the Council's narratives, to shape and guide the guts and minds of their leaders. When the College was founded, rumours ran like wildfire through the upper echelons of society, wondering if the bizarre being was working for a more ominous agenda, attempting a bloodless coup and controlling interest in the mishmash of governing organizations that established order in the Universe.

Seven thousand years later and all doubts of the Council's benevolence had proved baseless. Rulers, from theocratic dictators to communal elders, who welcomed the wandering storytellers prospered and overall peace spread like a hush. As it had explained on numerous occasions, the Council's goal was not to eliminate warfare, suffering or death. It recognized the necessity of destruction to a people's growth, however, wanton and needless aggression was re-directed, channeled into an overall understanding and appreciation of eunoia, the benevolence a civilized, sentient being felt towards his neighbors and the composite totality of the state. Slowly, it had become unfashionable to wage war.

Alone in the room, the Council seethed, roiled with unexpected complications, wondered why an innocuous bit of news tossed off by the Head Advisor of Deliverance disturbed it so. Normally it rested in the windowless tower, felt the motions of the minds below it, their thoughts like clouds of bubbles that sang strange, never-ending melodies. Each sentient being was a path, traced lines of shadow over the brilliant whiteness of space. The lines intersected, frayed, broke apart and re-joined forming letters of a language dictated by the dreams of genetic code.

The Council had been shaped from the whispers of the words written most sharply across the soul. Even now, with science a tired dream and every wish a possible reality, civilization still closed its eyes, walked away from the fire and sought the dark places where the claws and teeth of a nightmare history dwelled. The Council stood guard at that gate of stone, eliminated the hind-brain fears that reduced the intelligent being to an animal that lost the ability to reason and hope.

Those who sought out the Council assumed it kept surveillance with sophisticated recording devices, projectors, psionic agents who gathered secrets. One amusing rumour said the Council could see through the eyes of every race it represented and flickered from face to face in the span of a blink. Others assumed the tower itself was a form of recorder... that the Council was a true Oracle and knew the eventual fate of the Universe itself... that the godlings told it all they had heard to avoid their names being erased from the Book of Time.

Ordinary vision was certainly possible; the human aspects [for humanity had filled the cracks of the civilized Universe like putty, had proved astoundingly capable of adaptation and inter-breeding. What seemed to every sensible scientist as a weak and wild-eyed excuse for a sentient species had bloomed like a fire-petaled peony and thrived in the great gulping expanses of space. There were races that loved and laughed and mourned more deeply than any human, but none did it all at once or drew so much wisdom from such a relatively short life-span. Ultimately, the Homo Sapiens, with a few important evolutionary changes, became the dominant form of intelligent life. Many key scientists, being forced to witness their mistaken published predictions thousands of years later, simply gave up or, oddly enough, became spelunkers. The Human Margin for Error, as the theory was later dubbed in jest, was attributed to a form of planetary claustrophobia.] sometimes enjoyed using an approximation of normal senses to put more nervous guests at ease.

The Council would limit itself severely to put its next visitor at ease. For most who spoke with it, being kept slightly off-balance helped tofacilitate the flow of information, the sparkle that adrenaline provided to their normally cloudy thoughts accented the key points of their perception grid more efficiently than a spotlight. It was unfortunate that certain individuals, such as the high-strung Head Advisor of Deliverance, would simply light up like a sparkler, their limbic systems firing on all cylinders and obscuring the thread of themselves. Occasional face to collective entity communication was required as some never learned to handle the impressions that rumbled up their spine, settled into their minds like a bird to its nest. When the Council responded, it was never heard, only felt and suddenly known.

What did the message mean?

The Adam archetype still stared out at the room, its golden, muscular form and dark curls perfect. A long snake as green as the breath of spring had coiled around a leg, then the torso, sinking pearly fangs into the spot above the heart. Despite the turmoil billowing within the Council, the human progenitor remained visible, motionless, now entered into a debate with the other personae.

"The Head Advisor, while meaning nothing but innocent social discourse, has brought to our attention something that was not there before, something that has apparently existed for some time now and escaped Our attention."

'Re-create the experience,' murmured the Brahmid aspect from within, 'we cannot judge when one of Us limits our perceptions so greatly.'

Adam appeared to sigh and his form broke into a rush of misty tendrils, flowing into the center like a cloud of silverfish. The Head Advisor of Deliverance, known to a few stubborn friends as Ovid Dea-Pereleon, appeared before the Council as he had been a few hours previous. The real Ovid was fitfully sleeping in his bunk, would have been gripped with paranoid fear had he known the Council could spin a facsimile memory of him from nothing.