Dedicated to my Rebecca, whose eyes are the Beauty of the World.
I
Gha-ou'eag, of the House of Mo-ghou'eag, Elevated Appendage of the Galactic Stretch and Lead, observed the Green Planet with delight through his ship's scopes. Finally that benighted little rock would get what's coming for it!
He remembered the first time news of this distant part of the Universe reached him.
At first he refused to believe it. He refused to believe any sentient species could be so stubbornly unreasonable, unscientific, inumerate and downright obscurantist as to make such statements!
It all started very well, they told him. The species sent out an ambassador to negotiate peaceful future interaction. It was queer enough, but not uncommon among emergent species, to believe that it is better wait to the moment the "agreements" would be violated and then strike with all their hidden force, now with a perfect excuse to wipe out their attackers. He actually respected them for their subtle cunning.
But it all went wrong. The envoy demanded that they both take something called an "Ooth" (the computer couldn't quite translate the strange word) as an assurance of the treaty. He thought at the beginning they offer a joint military expedition to conquer an inferior civilization. Strange guarantee, but quite ingenious and original! He started to like these diminutive creatures, what minds!
The ambassador's entorage passed him some sort of a primitive record-keeping device. Quaint way to write down official proceedings, but we all have our idiosyncrasies, thought Gha-ou'eag. To his shock, instead of opening it, the ambassador dropped on his lower joints before the creature holding the record (could it be that this was the true leader of the mission?), kissed the symbol on the front cover and declared that he and the polity who sent him shall live in peace and abide by the treaty as long as the other side shall do so, so help him "Gud".
Now this was an unwelcome surprise, nobody discussed the existence of a third party! Who are these "Gud"? And why should they guarantee the treaty? We would like to bring our own guarantors! He protested.
The envoy's small, trunkless faces looked baffled. Didn't the computer translate "Gud"? They started explaining and Gha-ou'eag's acid gland bubbled and squirted in rage as they went on.
II
How dare they? How absolutely dare they spout, let alone believe such nonesense?
That was more than a provocation, it was an insult to the entirety of Sentient Cosmos! Why, to think, to have the gall to even consider such an idea was the height of arrogance!
To think the Great Void - this dark, unfathomable mystery can be brought down to something as simple as parental instinct- well that was bad enough, but to argue that the Void Itself had revealed itself to your puny, miserable brood multiple times throughout what is a ridiculous excuse for history?
Needless to say that the envoys never returned to their beloved Earth.
III
He was surprised to find out that the objective chosen by the Intelligence was a relatively small settlement nestled between wooded mountain range. Not even the capital of one of the greater powers! Strange indeed!
Stranger still were the instructions of the Intelligence.
Why keep half the population alive and remove them somewhere else? Why tear open the living spaces? Why ravish the females? Nevertheless, the Intelligence knows all and the bipeds appear to have been thoroughly shocked.
Gha-ou'eag promised to sacrifice another of his hatchlings to appease the Intelligence.
IV
At the moment of victory, when the remains of native armies scattered over the small territory where the Intelligence had directed the forces of Mo-ghou'eag, as Gha-ou'eag waited on his flagship, tapping and sucking his foretentacles in anticipation for the Intelligence to allocate the loot in minerals, planetary core energy, carbon-based organic tissue and sentient nerves, all connection with ground forces was lost.
Not only were the communication lines severed. The upper stratosphere of the Earth darkened, as if in a planet-wide storm. This was odd - the Intelligence insusted that all weather patterns are regional on this planet!
At last, the conquered planet was covered in a thick layer of pitch-black moisture and dust clouds. Even the superocular organs (harvested from the late Great Race of Irin after their defeat) could not penetrate it.
Then a stranger thing yet happened.
V
The other planets in the system- all dead husks, devoid of organic material or anything that may support them - started acquiring the same cover. Where did all these waters come from?
Even the gas giants seemed to have changed their composition. The gravitational pull of one (called "Jupiter" by the earthlings) alone grew so much that a significant amount of the fleet was lost and the survivors struggled to maintain a safe position between its orbit and that of another, ringed giant.
All the moons were similiarly blackened. Atmospheres appeared where no drop of water existed before, or where those water were never in liquid state. The worst was yet to come- a drone analyzing the Darkness (as Gha-ou'eag started to call it in his mind) over a previously amonic planet, called Venus by the benighted apes, said that it composed of pure water- the kind perfectly suitable for human consumption.
What were they playing at?
VI
Whatever they are doing, thought Gha-ou'eag, this is a suicide weapon. The increase gravitational fields of the firmer gas giants would tear the Humans' home planet off its axis, possibly taking it apart. Good! His beaks clacked in joy. At least this abominable idea of 'gud' would be forever expunge from the face of the sacred, all consuming Void!
He looked anxiously for the moment when the Earth submits to the inevitable forces working upon it and hurl itself into destruction.
But not only did the stubborn rock refuse to budge, not a single body in the system, apart from the Mo-ghou'eag ships, appeared to have been affected. Those continued to be pulled into orbit and crash into each other and into whatever debris was already floating in space. All the planets, planetoids and moons of the system continued in their inexorable path without interruption, as if nothing had changed.
Then a crack appeared in all the Darknesses covering them. It widened, revealing pure blue, such as the skies over the humans' heads were when the dropcells started falling.
The Intelligence fell silent. No matter how much he tried he couldn't make it produce an explanation. For the first time in three hundred cycles, Gha-ou'eag felt his digestive tract receding into his body in fear.
VII
The cracks in the Darknesses stabilized and now Gha-ou'eag noticed that in the middle of all of them, a small circle of the Darkness always remained.
The Darknesses resembled now the vision organs of the humans themselves, Gha-ou'eag was not even surprised when it started shifting from side to side, rapidly closing and opening and in general behaving just as a human eye would.
The color of those Eyes started changing from bluebto green to gray and amber, as if containing all colors and not contained by any single one.
Then the Eye of Earth focused on his ship and he heard a strange, terrifying thing speaking through the Intelligence:
VIII
"Oh son of the Serpent,
Most disfavored and dishonored,
Who prides in dead things,
And who knows not life
Thus speaketh the Eternal,
The Master of Man
And King of the Earth.
"Earth I made
And Heavens I strectched
Man I created from the soil
And gave him a living soul,
For I loved him alone, yeah,
Alone I loved him indeed,
And I despised all others.
"For Man' sons I called mine,
And his daughters as my progney I dubbed.
"And thee I made as scourage mighty,
To guide them into goodliness, yeah,
From ancient times I have warned them,
Ere I fashioned your frame, even your very thought!
"And Man at last returned to me
In pure and broken heart
And he gave his pride to sacrifice
And his wrath as incense
Was burnt away and none remained.
"Therefore know ye worm,
Ye horror of distant lands
Ye dragon, ye imp, ye thing abhored and hateful!
Know ye my own pride and wrath,
Long held in Dark and Mist,
As is my honor
I am the Eternal"
And Gha-ou'eag was no more.
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