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2012-01-01. A Glimpse of An Extraterrestrial.
Confessions of a Rebel Angel; The Wisdom of the Watchers and the Destiny of Planet Earth. – Book 1B. Chapter 7. ~by Timothy Wyllie
“The City of Dalamatia, a Young Girl’s Discovery, Thermonuclear Anxiety and the Nature of Fandor Telepathy”
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Confessions of a Rebel Angel. Book 1B. Chapter 7. A Glimpse of An Extraterrestrial.
Although the Prince’s staff had obeyed their instructions to remain strictly celibate and not to procreate sexually until many tens of thousands of years had passed, it hadn’t been long before many of them paired off. The reason offered for this procreative prohibition made perfect sense to them at the briefing: if they were to have physical children with material bodies over the half a million years their intervention was planned to take, their progeny would end up far more numerous than the native population. And that wasn’t the point at all. But they were lonely. They may have been superhuman by purely human standards, their superb physical bodies continuing in perfect health as the centuries passed, but it was impossible to deny that there were only a hundred of them.
Fifty only, if they were looking for sensual companionship, which was a very small pool of potential partners. After the unintentional and premature appearance of the first midway angel co-created by one of these unions, and the Prince’s blessing to the rest of his staff to follow in the couple’s footsteps, the yearning for real physical offspring was allayed for a while. Because the midway birthing process occurred on the subtle energy level, without any of the physical discomfort or the long gestation period associated with human birth, in a remarkably short time many hundreds of midwayers were being co-created. While these strange creatures were technically the staff’s offspring, they could never be described as children. All of us were fascinated getting to know and understand the individual midwayers as they appeared. Similar to us angels, they were created as functional beings, yet with far more personal autonomy than the higher angels.
While the midwayers had little choice but to subscribe to the general plan for uplifting human consciousness and preserving the integrity of the planet, many of them had some radical ways of going about it. This allowed for sufficient variations in knowledge and opinion to keep the discussions that would often continue through the warm tropical night interesting—at least for a while. Although the staff were informed about the midwayers in their training and preparation programs back on the System’s Headquarters Planet, none of them could recall exactly what had been said about how many midwayers to expect.
Therefore, it was still something of a surprise when the numbers kept increasing—thousands upon thousands—until a full complement of fifty thousand midwayers was reached and the river dried up. I know this might sound strange to contemporary ears, but consider that we angels were also conceived and materialized in very large numbers, as, indeed, are many of your lower orders of animal life. In many fish and reptile species, only an extremely small proportion of eggs will come to fruition. In the higher orders of celestial life, when large groups of angels are manifested simultaneously, each act of creation is fully successful. There isn’t the profligate waste we see among some animal species in the evolutionary worlds. So far, so good, we all thought.
We’d been on the planet for more than seven thousand years by now, and, with the growing number of midwayer offspring, we felt we were fulfilling our mission with spectacular success. It was still the early days, so I’d like to think we weren’t deluding ourselves. Dalamatia, the city on the Persian Gulf, was now long completed, having been based on the plans the Prince had brought with him. With small adjustments for topography, the city was roughly circular and set among gently swelling hills with their valleys traversed by streams.
In some cases the water needed redirecting to maintain the integrity of the high surrounding wall, so a system of waterways and irrigation ditches was dug, which then needed to be maintained in the fields and grasslands surrounding the city. The city was divided into ten smaller sections, all grouped around a central three-story temple set in its own grounds and surrounded by massive old-growth trees. These beautiful old trees were carefully preserved and incorporated wherever possible into the layout of the city. In the center of a small courtyard in this Temple of the Unseen Father grew the shrub that was intended to sustain the staff through the many millennia they were expected to be on the planet.
At the center of each of the ten subdivisions was a large, two-story structure housing the administrative offices of the appropriate council, which, in turn, were surrounded by the modest bungalows of the staff and their companions. It wasn’t an easy mission—that was clear from the start. The natives’ mix of fearfulness and aggression shocked everyone and added to the caution the staff needed while making the bricks required for all the building work. Some of the structural work on the high wall surrounding the city ended up more slipshod than called for in the plans because so many of the staff were needed in the fields and to guard the bricks while they hardened in the sun. After the wall was completed, life became more secure and the dangerous wild animals, accustomed to moving through the city on their hunting forays, no longer forced the staff into a regular sundown curfew.
There was also the premature arrival of the midwayers. While helpful in some ways, this also slowed down progress as the staff struggled to find their emotional equilibrium. The surgeons of Avalon might have created the most excellent physical vehicles, but only by taking over the bodies and living in them could the staff’s subtle energy bodies be developed. If I were to make a more critical observation at these early stages, I would say that the enthusiasm with which the staff started on their long mission was progressively diminished by the continuing distraction created by the addition of so many midwayers. Without having adequately prepared their emotional bodies for the natural frequencies of the planet, the staff were prone to making ill-considered judgments, which then needed to be undone whenever possible. In some cases it wasn’t possible, and their foolish decisions resonate down to this day. Let me tell you about one of these errors that still causes confusion and terror. To back up for a moment: My passing reference to the Temple of the Unseen Father, placed reverently in the middle of the city, underscores the centrality the Creator played in the staff’s lives.
So perhaps it’s the time to convey what I mean by this Unseen Father who was so important to them. In all simplicity, the Father aspect of God was spoken about as “Unseen,” because that characteristic of the Creator had disappeared so far into the Creation as to warrant the term unseen. The purpose of this, or so the Melchizedeks teach, is to allow mortals, on whatever planet they may live, to develop sufficient emotional and spiritual stamina to sustain the indwelling of this same Unseen Father. In those early days of human development, while the Indwelling Spirit was expressed in some of the more advanced mortals, it lay largely dormant and unrecognized in most.
The staff’s sacred task, as they understood it, was ultimately to uplift and inspire the native population with the faith to develop the necessary spiritual wherewithal to know the Unseen Father through personal experience. That was the hope anyway—to reassure these primitive humans, only too accustomed to a hard and often perilous life, that a God of Love was only a heartbeat away. As you might imagine, it was no easier to make a case for a God of Love then than it is now! A memo I happened to see from the head of one of the ten councils, optimistically named the College of Revealed Religion, revealed the problem they were having.
The note complained about the difficulty of penetrating the fearful nature of the few humans they were able to lure into spending time with them. And these were the special ones. Even with the few successes they claimed, once the natives returned to their clan or tribe, they invariably reverted to their original tribal superstitions. As the memo suggested, there was one approach the members of the council had been resisting, but they believed it would be more effective—at least in the short term.
Members of the college were divided about it, the memo reported—not about the technique’s efficacy, but about the morality of it—and were seeking a general consensus. It would be far simpler, the memo argued, to take the natives’ natural fear of ghosts and spirits and the crude ceremonies developed to assuage them, and transfer that to a fear of God. This way, they reasoned, they would be putting the fear to good use. A fractious debate ensued among the other council leaders, all of whom, I might add, were chosen for their leadership qualities before their arrival on the planet. The head of the Council on the Arts and Science, for example, was passionately opposed to the proposal. “If we agree to this idea of fearing God,” he insisted, “we’re going to regret it later.
We’re not here to make people afraid of the Creator. They’re already terrified enough!” “We’ll never make any headway the way we’re going,” the revealed religionists argued equally passionately. They were aware that they’d fallen behind the other councils and during the thousands of years they’d been there had only convinced a mere handful of natives to believe in their Unseen Father. “Redirecting their natural terror to a fear of the God we know to be allloving might seem radical. Some might even suggest that we’re taking the easy way out” (some had!), and more angrily, “Let them come and try! Let them come and talk of love to a man terrified of his own shadow!” “Listen! This is madness!” another council member retorted. “Don’t you see what will happen? If you persuade them that their fear of ghosts is really a fear of God, then they’ll blame God for every earthquake, volcano, or hurricane. They’ll not only end up fearing God, but they’ll be angry with God for every natural disaster that He didn’t stop.”
So the debate veered back and forth until expedience won the day, with the confident assurance that they could always switch it back at some later time. What they couldn’t know, of course, is there wouldn’t be a later time. I’ll spare you further arguments for and against, because the consequences of their final decision are so obviously still being used by religious leaders of all stripes to instill guilt and to terrify their followers. There were other errors of judgment, too, generally as a result of one of the councils attempting to move ahead of the others. One glaring example stood out and was often referred to sardonically when other concepts designed to accelerate the upliftment process were introduced.
This occurred after the Council on the Arts and Science had some tentative success introducing methods of working with fire and metals. Great patience was required from the council members, because even the most advanced of the natives appeared to have an unshakable fear of fire. Two of the staff had returned in their flying discs from one of their mapping trips with several large lumps of meteoric iron, and, because meteorites remain on the surface of the ground and could have been found by any passing nomad, they argued that it would now be appropriate to demonstrate what could be done with the metal.
Mining for iron or copper had already been rejected by the council as moving too fast, so the ready access of the meteorites and the advantage that the iron-nickel alloy in the meterorites needed no smelting made a persuasive argument that the time was right to introduce the concept of metallurgy. Initial attempts were all failures. Although the natives were fascinated by the meteorites, carefully weighing them in their hands and pretending to throw them at one another, once the fire was stoked to melt the metal, their fear got the better of them. It took several centuries before one of the natives finally overcame his terror of red-hot metal and managed to fashion a crude metal bowl. Sadly, when this particularly courageous man was sent back to his clan, he was promptly killed for sorcery when he tried to demonstrate his new skill.
However, when one person achieves a breakthrough, others soon follow, so within a remarkably short time softer metals like gold were being melted down and poured into clay molds in a number of the surrounding settlements. Encouraged by these breakthroughs, one faction of the council pushed hard for what they believed was the next logical stage: the development of steam power. They were so insistent that the majority of the council gave their permission for a trial run. Like many of their subsequent attempts, this one did not succeed. In fact, although steam power has appeared intermittently as an energy source in various subsequent civilizations, it wasn’t until the eighteenth century in Europe that steam was used to drive an Industrial Revolution that would sweep the world. “It’s just steam—don’t you people see? It’s only steam? Here, look at it. Steam . . .” and the staff member would soon be shouting at the retreating backs of the few petrified natives curious enough to watch. But it was hopeless.
The Council on Arts and Science tried to introduce steam power on three different occasions, producing in each case the same fearful response before recognizing that the explosive power of steam was simply too terrifying to be of any value. Like much else, they put that off, too, until a later time; a time that would never come for them. The best the Prince’s staff could hope for in those early millennia was to gradually shift the native tribes from their nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life to the way of the herder. This, the staff was told back at their briefing, would demand a new sort of caring for animals, and it would introduce greater social stability due to the predictable seasonal movement of the herds. Over time, and as information on animal husbandry was gradually spread from the city, some of the more adventurous natives learned to further domesticate their herds.
Domestication was a subtle business. Progress needed to occur as naturally as possible. Simple breeding programs proved difficult to initiate, for example, until a native family spontaneously fenced off a small section of grassland and herded some wild cattle into the enclosure. This then required the family to build a dwelling there to care for the cattle, which, in turn, led naturally to small farms as others copied their example. It also wasn’t difficult to teach some of the advanced females they had drawn into the city about seasonal planting, because they grasped the advantages of stability, of home and hearth, far more readily than their menfolk.
The women also turned out to be more courageous than the men when it came to handling fire, so from this new manner of living it became a straightforward matter to establish methods of food storage by cooking, drying, and smoking meat. The staff were encouraged to see that the natives were soon coming up with many of these advances for themselves. Then the information would spread even more rapidly among the tribes who continued to follow their herds, leading more and more of the nomads to settle down to a domesticated lifestyle. Small settlements of humans started emerging, clustered together for safety from wild animals and the occasional band of marauders. The constant fear of famine gradually diminished over the centuries as the natives became more confident in their ability to grow food and preserve it through the tough times.
Gathering together in this way created different social demands from those the tribe faced when they were constantly on the move. The herd was generally regarded as communal property, and the tribes needed to travel light, so personal property held little importance for them. That all started changing as different families congregated in these farming settlements. Then they were all too quick to stake out their land. Although the natives were still communal by nature, one of the intriguing features I observed in those early farming families was that as they fenced off their properties, it seemed to me they were also fencing off their minds. When a local crisis wasn’t forcing them to band together to protect their farms, I noticed a growing element of competitiveness between some of them. With a heritage of tens of thousands of years of nomadic life behind them, in which a tribe lived and traveled as a single, largely undifferentiated, consciousness, these feelings of separateness and individual identity created new and troubling tensions in the tribal unit.
The staff was continuing to use their somewhat limited telepathic abilities to reach and call in those humans sensitive enough to hear the subtle telepathic whispers in their throat chakras. Naturally, the native to whom the telepathic signal was directed was initially terrified by what seemed to be happening to her—which is where we angels were able make ourselves useful. Working through dreams, in this case of a young girl who was open to telepathic contact, it took all our ingenuity to subtly smooth out the way for her to make the long journey to the city. In the situation I refer to here, the girl in question, I’ll call her Onya, was sensitive enough to have received the telepathic call quite clearly. At thirteen years old, Onya was already showing signs of an exceptional intelligence, and her tribe, one of the more primitive on the Arabian Peninsula, was starting to whisper about her sorcery behind her back.
This spelled certain death for the girl, as was the custom of the tribe, and it was just a question of time before they came to sacrifice her. There was nothing any of us angels could do about this in a practical way, of course. We are required to be unsentimental when we observe the brutal customs of some of the indigenous peoples. In this case, however, the staff wanted to get the girl out before she was killed and gave us permission to intercede in any way we could without showing ourselves or making the situation worse. There were only two of us working on the case, and, having no midwayers with us on this one, we knew we had no choice but to handle this in Dreamtime. Fortunately the girl was remarkably sensitive and enjoyed lucid dreams, but what convinced us was my colleague’s observation that Onya was prone to sleepwalking. This we could use to our advantage.
We needed to be careful not to frighten Onya, because any excessive fear tended to overwhelm her psychic sensitivity. We massaged her dreams for a while, gently guiding her attention to the mysterious city at the other end of the rainbow. When her dreams became lucid and she became more confident at wishing herself wherever she wanted to travel, it was toward the city we’d turn her curiosity. In this way she was able to develop a subconscious awareness of the journey and what was to come, and she was bright enough not to share her dreams with anyone else. When I overheard a group of the older tribesmen (and they were all men) talking about sacrificing the young sorceress at the next dark of the moon, I knew we had to move fast.
The very next night, after the usual carousing ended and sleeping men and boys were sprawled all over the encampment, Onya embarked on the dream that saved her life and changed it forever. My colleague and I guided her feet as she sleepwalked between the prone bodies and threaded her way through the thorny brush at the edge of the camp. Still fast asleep, we coaxed her farther and farther until she reached a small valley about three miles away. Some days earlier, with the help of a materialized midwayer whom the staff had reluctantly spared us for a single afternoon, we’d prepared a well-hidden bower where Onya could find herself when she awakened. Her body was exhausted at the end of her walk, so she offered no resistance when we carefully shepherded her along the bank of a stream to the bed of long grass we’d arranged, hidden away under a tree with low-hanging boughs. I could see what a shock it was when she awoke at sunrise to find herself alone and in a place she didn’t recognize.
After the initial surprise wore off and she’d splashed her face in the stream to make sure she was awake, she set her face firmly in the direction of the city, picking edible berries off the bushes as she walked. Because she was already subconsciously aware of the easiest route from the dreaming, all we needed to do was redirect the awareness of any large predator in her path. I had to call in my colleague once on the journey to handle a large cat, now long-extinct but then local to the area and in the tiger family, whose hunger swamped my single influence. Together my colleague and I were able to bend the animal’s will and reorient him toward a small herd of antelope grazing in the next valley. With that small crisis averted, and the girl happily unaware of the behind-the-scenes machinations making her trip possible, she came within sight of the high walls of the city at noon on the third day of the journey. A small group of the staff—two females and one male—accompanied by two female humans walked slowly out to greet the solitary girl. All five stopped about a hundred yards away, extending their hands outward in greeting. A combination of Onya’s unusual courage, her curiosity, and the reassuring telepathic tendrils that the three staff were projecting at her all contributed to rooting her to the spot. The two women, only a few years older than the girl and carefully chosen to look like her, approached Onya, making kind and caring sounds in a shared language.
Once again I was happy to see the value of the preparatory dreamwork we’d done with Onya, because she easily mastered the instinctive fear so easily provoked by the unknown and appeared immediately at ease with the impressive presence of the three staff. Once in the city there was a short ceremony of greeting traditionally held in the temple, after which, recognizing the girl’s exhaustion, she was shown to a modest one-story dwelling, where she immediately collapsed on a heap of cushions and animal skins in one corner of the room. Excitement and fatigue briefly fought for her young consciousness before she slipped in to a dreamless sleep.
When the morning sun flooded over her face, she awoke with a start, staring around the small room and trying to grasp onto something familiar. Strange and unrecognizable scents wafted in with the breeze, and she could hear the chatter of voices in an unknown tongue passing in front of the house. One particular smell was so enticing she was drawn from her bed to the open window to see on the other side of an open roadway flanked with cottages similar to hers a small conical structure with smoke drifting out of the top. A woman Onya would have recalled as being one of the two who’d met her the day before seemed to be pulling a steaming brown lump out of the fire. The girl watched for a couple of minutes, the memory of the past few days swimming back into her consciousness, before the smell of baking bread overcame her fear of the fire she could see gleaming in the mouth of the oven. Gathering her courage, she slipped over the windowsill and cautiously followed the smell to where the woman had already piled half a dozen baked pieces of flatbread on a rock behind the oven.
Bread had been made possible some years earlier when certain of the wild grasses growing abundantly in the fertile lowlands surrounding the city had been cultivated to produce a domesticated barley. Onya wouldn’t realize until later, when she was required to work in the fields, just what a laborious process it was to pick the barley and remove each hull, one at a time, until her hands were chafed and bleeding. But this was after she’d been living in the city for a while and, like so many of the others, Onya had become mildly addicted to delicious, warm flatbread, straight out of the oven. The woman watched as Onya, even dirtier than most new arrivals she’d seen, edged carefully around the oven, trying to ignore the glowing red mouth before finally getting to the pile of bread, the source of the smell now filling her head. All this was entirely new to Onya, and she clearly wasn’t sure what to do next.
Glancing up at the woman, Onya saw that she’d momentarily turned away to feed the fire, and, moving so fast I didn’t see her do it, the girl grabbed a piece of bread and was halfway back to her cottage before it seemed to leap from her hands, skittering over the sandy ground. She was crouched on her knees blowing on her scalded hands. With concern on her face, the woman stopped feeding the fire and went over to comfort her while making motherly cooing noises. With an arm around her slim shoulders the older woman walked Onya back, picking up the bread on the way and making a show of putting it quickly into the folds of her robe.
This drew a quick grin from the girl, which the woman returned with a beaming smile as she ushered the waif back to her room. She made sure the girl was comfortable before hurrying out, then ran back into the room only minutes later with a white paste, which she smeared on Onya’s hands. Sitting cross-legged opposite Onya, the woman solemnly broke the bread, and when the paste had dried on the girl’s hands, handed her a stillwarm piece. Onya was hesitant to take it after burning her hands, so the older woman gestured toward her own mouth, popping in a piece and munching enthusiastically. Onya cautiously reached for the offering, broke off a small piece, and put it in her mouth. The two females were looking into each other’s faces, both copper skinned with long dark hair, before Onya’s grubby face broke into a huge smile and she started chewing with the gusto of someone who hadn’t eaten for a few days.
Having filled her stomach, Onya let herself be tucked back under the skins, and, secure for the first time in as long as she could recall, she fell into a deep slumber from which she didn’t awaken for two days. When Onya finally opened her eyes, her face lit up as she saw the woman who had befriended her standing in the middle of the room. Clenching and unclenching her hands without feeling any pain, Onya extended them out to the woman with a surprised look on her face. Taking one of the girl’s hands in hers the woman sat down next to her on the sleeping mat. “My name is Watami. You, Onya,” she said, with lots of gesturing. “Me, Watami.” The girl was still drowsy with sleep, but she nodded and repeated Watami a couple of times quietly to hers elf while snuggling up to the older woman. “We need to get you cleaned up,” Watami whispered after holding Onya’s frail body in her arms: “Tomorrow your new life starts, Onya.”
It was some fifteen thousand years after the mission arrived and the humans in the settlements within the radius of a few hundred miles of the city were growing accustomed to the Prince’s staff, although the midwayers still remained imperceptible. The Prince, of course, as was true for the rest of us angels, also remained invisible and unknown to the native population. In this way the humans, already struggling to cope with all the rapid advancements stimulated by the staff ’s intervention, could focus on matters that really concerned them. The humans would only have been bewildered if midwayers mysteriously appeared and disappeared in their lives, just as knowing that angels were observing them would have inhibited their natural behavior.
Onya, the young adventuress, was drawn from the very limits of the staff ’s telepathic reach, and because her tribe’s migration route only tangentially touched the settlements of those natives familiar with the staff, the tribe had heard merely vague whispers of the strange visitors. And the little they were told made no sense to them with their rigid understanding of their small world. There was good reason for this. Cautious at being worshipped as gods, the staff had long stressed to all natives drawn to the city that when they returned to their tribes and settlements, they should emphasize that the staff were ordinary people, just like them, who came to help from far away, from beyond the farthest sea. For many, the staff remained a mystery and were easily dismissed as one more mystery in a mysterious world. For Onya’s tribe, more primitive than most due to their unfortunate ceremonial tradition of sacrificing their brightest children, rumors of the visitors caused some initial fearfulness.
When they encountered no hostility, however, the tribe hurried on its way, quickly forgetting the young Onya who had disappeared only a day before the moon sacrifice. In the city Onya was encouraged to rest, to catch up with sleep, and get used to being washed and clean. This final requirement was made at the insistence of a growing number of citizens, both for obvious reasons and prompted by what they were learning about the transmission of disease. When Onya finally emerged from her cottage, she was accompanied by Watami, who, because of her connection with the girl, was assigned as her mentor. This was the way of the Prince’s staff: the newcomer benefited from a familiar presence in her or his early days in the city; at the same time, it allowed Watami to learn what Onya knew while she was teaching her.
In this case the match was exceptionally fortuitous, because once Onya felt secure in her new home, Watami found the girl intensely curious to learn about everything. Onya, in turn, never having been cared for in her tribal family, adored the older woman and focused on remembering everything she was being told. After five days, well-fed on all the strange new foods, clean and clothed in the white, woven robe worn by both women and men, Onya was taken to meet her future companions and teachers of the council faculty. The staff, recognizing her high natural intelligence, had placed her in that faculty upon her arrival. Crossing wide streets, flanked by cottages with natives not unlike herself tending small plots with grasses and flowers she’d never seen before, Onya wanted to stop at every new sight.
“You will find out more when we get to the HQ. To the HQ,” Watami said slowly, annunciating clearly in the language they’d developed between them from the few words they shared and pulling gently on the young girl’s arm. In this manner, stopping and starting as Onya caught sight of one puzzle after another, the two young women crisscrossed their way through the neatly kept streets, with Watami trying to keep up with the constant questions. “That’s a way of bringing water to our fields,” Watami said, as they passed an irrigation ditch with a charming little waterfall. “The skins you slept on in your room? That’s how we treat them to make them soft,” the mentor said in answer to Onya’s wrinkling her nose at the strong smell of animal urine. “You see how the ox helps us carry heavy loads,” she said, soothing Onya’s fear of this enormous creature plodding along with two large loads of bricks strapped on its back.
A pigeon flapped low overhead before landing on the roof of one of the larger buildings. Onya could hear the sonorous cooing of other birds greeting their companion on her return, and, turning quizzically to her mentor, she found Watami with her finger up against her mouth in the universal gesture of silence. Somewhere, from one of the cottages they’d just passed, came the sound of what Watami later said was a flute, while both stood silent and still, listening. Watami’s eyes were closed and her head tilted in concentration as the sound of the flute joined the gentle murmuring of the birds, caressing their happy gurgling with a ribbon of sound, before swooping and soaring, the long descending note echoing in its cadence the flight of the returning bird. “Beautiful, isn’t it?!” Watami opened her eyes to see tears running down Onya’s cheeks. It was the first time she’d seen the girl cry, and she was clearly touched that it was beauty and not pain that made her weep.
“The birds. The pigeons,” she continued gently, after letting the girl weep out her tears, and resumed her running commentary. “Do you know what we use the pigeons for?” Onya wiped her face with the sleeve of the robe, a puzzled look appearing from under the cloth. “When we travel away from the city on long journeys, we always take some of the pigeons with us. Then, when we need to get a report back to the city, how do you think we do it?” Onya had no answer for that. It seemed to me she was more intrigued by the sound of the flute than particularly interested in birds. Birds she’d seen before. “We tie a tiny, very light, object to the pigeon’s leg and when we let the bird go, it flies right back here to its home and family.”
Continuing when Onya still looked mystified: “We agree before we set out which object to send and what it means. So, when we get where we’re going we can send a message back. It’s been a lifesaver a few times when we’ve been able to call for help. . . .” She could have been talking to herself. Onya was running ahead while Watami still gazed up at the pigeons. When she caught up with the girl, she could see what was drawing her attention. On a broad, green swath of grassland were two of the most enormous birds Onya had ever seen. These weren’t the large vultures she’d seen picking at the carcasses of dead animals with their long curved beaks—and they were scary enough! Stand five men, one on top of the other, and they might not be able to reach the crown of feathers tufting from the top of one of these birds’ heads. Watami pulled on Onya’s arm, urging the clearly terrified girl toward the birds, who by this time had noticed the two humans moving unsteadily toward them and were starting to make encouraging clucking sounds. Getting closer to the birds, it was hard to miss Onya’s change of behavior.
Her initial fright and reluctance were seemingly magically replaced by the broadest of smiles. She broke away from Watami’s grasp and was running toward the birds, who were preening themselves in the sun. They were evidently even larger than Onya had thought they were. I saw her stopping some yards away, the two fandors towering above her, and I waited for the inevitable trick the birds enjoyed playing on the newcomers. It was all in good fun, of course. The fandors were turning out to be so useful to the staff that they were seldom reprimanded for their jokes. Onya stood gazing up at the two colossal birds, who’d moved farther apart from one another as the girl approached them, forcing her to crane her neck from side to side. I saw Watami slow to a halt perhaps twenty yards away.
She knew what was going to happen. She’d seen it a dozen times—with some bizarre results. Without a sign, as if they were one, the two birds suddenly, and with a massive snapping sound, both extended their enormous wings so as to surround the girl in a dome of golden feathers. The fandors, their sleek heads bent down toward the girl, I knew were watching intently for her reaction. This was what was important to them. The birds were what we came to call “semitelepathic.” You might think of it these days as a term for an extreme form of empathy. Because of this, fandors were able to pick up a human’s intentions and assess the person’s emotional state with extraordinary accuracy.
The massive birds were first discovered by a couple of the staff from the Board of Animal Domestication and Utilization (I use the titles the councils gave themselves) on one of their flights over a chain of mountains on one of the great southern continents. High in the Atlas Mountains, as the sun was rising over the jagged peaks, the staff members had caught the glint of gold far below them. Descending quickly, they lost the glimmer in the deep shadows. Floating farther down into the broad valley over which they thought they’d seen the majestic column of shimmering gold. Feeling oddly safe, all the pair wanted to do was to settle back and enjoy the show. Fortunately for the people back in the city, the viewing panels, as well as being the windows for the crew, also acted as flat-field recording devices that caught the birds’ helical dance for posterity.
It was only then, when they were viewing the images back in the council HQ and they could slow them down, stopping the display when needed, that they saw what the crew had missed in the moment: the obvious gleam of intelligence in the eyes of the birds diving so close to the craft. Of course the pair was frightened at first, as the two staff told their colleagues when they returned to the city. Neither had ever encountered creatures like this on their planets of mortal origin. “Yet what was so astonishing,” said the female crew member, Böni, one of the head officials in animal domestication, “was that the fear passed in an instant. One moment we were terrified—the whole world around was exploding with movement—the next we were lounging back in our seats, laughing happily and admiring the spectacle.” “Couldn’t take our eyes off the birds,” the pilot added, “and then this warm glow spread through us.” Böni was nodding in agreement, encouraging him to continue.
“How could this have happened, anyway? We searched through all those valleys . . . found nothing!” “When we gave up looking,” Böni broke in, “and we must have been down there for more than an hour, only when we threw up our arms in despair, certain of never finding anything . . . only then . . . did those birds appear. It was almost like a joke . . .” her voice drifted off thoughtfully. And, of course, when they came to know the fandors better, they realized that it was a joke. A practical joke. The first of many. glistening mirage, they cruised through the morning mist, the electrogravitic drive train of their craft leaving a rainbow trail of water droplets, as they searched the adjacent valleys for whatever it was they might have seen. Still nothing. After a while the pair gave up looking, and, deciding it must have been the sun glistening off an exposed seam of mica, they set the controls of the craft into a gentle vertical climb.
Then, as they looked up from the instrument panel, they saw that they were surrounded by enormous birds swooping and soaring in a spiraling double helix and rising with their craft in an updraft of their own. This wasn’t the one flash of gold the pair expected to find; this wasn’t one of anything. This was dozens upon dozens of improbably large birds—maybe more than a hundred, they agreed later—some with wingspans of forty feet or more. Soon the sun was blotted out by circling wings as the craft and the birds rose together. If they could have seen it from the outside, it looked like a majestic column of shimmering gold. Feeling oddly safe, all the pair wanted to do was to settle back and enjoy the show. Fortunately for the people back in the city, the viewing panels, as well as being the windows for the crew, also acted as flat-field recording devices that caught the birds’ helical dance for posterity.
It was only then, when they were viewing the images back in the council HQ and they could slow them down, stopping the display when needed, that they saw what the crew had missed in the moment: the obvious gleam of intelligence in the eyes of the birds diving so close to the craft. Of course the pair was frightened at first, as the two staff told their colleagues when they returned to the city. Neither had ever encountered creatures like this on their planets of mortal origin. “Yet what was so astonishing,” said the female crew member, Böni, one of the head officials in animal domestication, “was that the fear passed in an instant.
One moment we were terrified—the whole world around was exploding with movement—the next we were lounging back in our seats, laughing happily and admiring the spectacle.” “Couldn’t take our eyes off the birds,” the pilot added, “and then this warm glow spread through us.” Böni was nodding in agreement, encouraging him to continue. “How could this have happened, anyway? We searched through all those valleys . . . found nothing!” “When we gave up looking,” Böni broke in, “and we must have been down there for more than an hour, only when we threw up our arms in despair, certain of never finding anything . . . only then . . . did those birds appear. It was almost like a joke . . .” her voice drifted off thoughtfully. And, of course, when they came to know the fandors better, they realized that it was a joke. A practical joke. The first of many.
Georgia.
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The following is an excerpt from the Timothy Wyllie’s book series on rebel angels, specifically an account as described by the angel referred to as ,’Georgia”.
Click on book to view more at Amazon.com.
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