[speaker-mute]
2012-01-01. Out-of-Body Travels.
“Confessions of a Rebel Angel; The Wisdom of the Watchers and the Destiny of Planet Earth.”. – Book 1B. Chapter 8. ~by Timothy Wyllie
‘Denial and Retreat, the Fandor’s Gifts, an Experience of God, Night Terrors, and the Treatment of Animals”
[/speaker-mute]
[speaker]
Confessions of a Rebel Angel. Book 1B. Chapter 8. Out-of-Body Travels.
Onya was proving to be an exception to anyone who’d previously been introduced to the fandors. As the two enormous birds enclosed the young girl in their feathery embrace, rather than shrinking in abject fear, as had so many previous newcomers, I watched her as she turned in small circles with her arms outstretched, eyes closed in a face lit by a serene smile. The fandors then lowered their heads in what we learned later, when we knew the creatures better, was a reverent bow delivered before those within whom the birds felt the Presence of the Indwelling Spirit. For Onya it must have seemed as if she were in Paradise. The crown of long feathers springing from the heads of the fandors tickled her neck, making her giggle with happiness. Finally stopping her little dance, she opened her eyes to find both birds with their long necks bent; their large, brown eyes filled with friendly intelligence and their wide, flat beaks only inches away from her face.
Beaming with pleasure Onya grasped first one fandor beak, then the second one, in a fond embrace, trying to wrap her arms around their necks and laying her head against the soft feathers edging their beaks. After this odd ceremony was complete and the fandors closed their wings before stalking off on their long legs, Watami ran to where Onya was still standing in what I could see from her emotional body was a state of bliss. From my preliminary reconnaissance of the girl, a report always required before the staff set about their telepathic signaling, I observed that she’d had little happiness in her life. Resented by her siblings for her intelligence, disliked by her mother for her independence, and beaten by her father daily, Onya experienced bliss as an entirely new sensation. “I felt the same as those beautiful birds,” the girl managed to say through tears of joy as Watami held her in her arms.
“I felt so loved by them. I wasn’t frightened at all.” They walked slowly, their arms around each other, across the fandor field to where a stream babbled between watersmoothed rocks and banks of grass nibbled short by the birds. Settling down in the shade of a tree, they could see a small group of humans on the other side of the field, people who Watami explained were like Onya. They, too, had been called to the city to learn all the ways of living better. “When we’ve completed your training, you can go back to your family and pass along what you’ve learned.” Noticing Onya’s grimace at that idea, Watami added quickly, “Of course that doesn’t always happen. It’s up to us. If you really want to stay in the city and we find what you’re good at, sometimes we allow people like you to stay on here.” This must have cheered the girl up. She wanted to know more about her new feathered friends. “Fandors, you mean? Aren’t they wonderful! And that feeling you got, Onya—that was the fandors’.
They can make that happen if they like a person. Or if the person is special in some way.” Onya grew thoughtful at that. “Am I a special person, then, Watami?” “Well, we’re all special, Onya, in our own ways. Looks like the fandors feel you’re special, and that’s what counts.” “How are you special, Watami?” “Remember how we stopped when we saw the pigeons?” Onya nodded, enjoying the sensation of wriggling her bare legs against the grass. “And I told you about how pigeons carry particular objects back from wherever we go? We’re just starting something new. I’ve been in Faad’s council learning how to write. To make marks that mean the same thing as when we talk.” Watami traced out a letter she’d learned in the grass with a forefinger when she saw her charge’s look of incomprehension.
“When I get good at it, Onya, they want me to teach the pigeon handlers how to write the messages on tiny pieces of something we make out of wasps’ nests. This is a lot lighter for the birds, so more can be communicated in a written message than how it’s done at the moment.” Watami must have lost the girl, because, after a long silence, it was back to the fandors. “You know what it’s a bit like?” Onya’s eyes were closed again. “Not quite the same, though. But when I saw the city under the rainbow in my dreams, I felt safe and warm in the same way. I didn’t hear any words when I was with the fandors, not the way I did in the dreaming.” “It’s the fandors who pick their people. Did you know that?” That grabbed Onya’s attention. “They’re generally friendly,” Watami continued, “but if they don’t like someone, they can easily kill you with one whack of those wings. And you should see them run when they have to. Nothing can catch ’em.” “Who are they, Watami? I mean, where do they come from?” “After Böni first discovered them and returned with reports of these intelligent flying creatures, of course everybody couldn’t wait to meet them.
When the birds got over their initial wariness, it turned out they were just as intrigued with us and what we were doing in the city. So they started sending envoys. Three or four came at a time. They’d stay for a turning of the moon and then leave one morning unexpectedly. We wouldn’t see them for a while, then just as unexpectedly we’d wake up in the morning and there would be a bunch of fandors quietly munching on the grass and waiting for us to notice them. “Tell you what, Onya. When we talk to the council, I’m going to suggest that you meet Böni and some of her people. They’ll be very interested to hear how the fandors took to you. It’s extremely rare. I’ve never seen quite that response before, although I have heard about it.” “Oh! Let’s go and do that now. C’mon, Watami!” said Onya, energetically pulling her mentor to her feet. “You can tell me more about fandors while we’re walking there.” “Well, we still don’t know that much about them,” Watami said, enjoying being the teacher, “but if we walk in this direction, I’ll show you something you’ve never seen before.” The couple made their way through the clean, neat streets, crossing over into the subdivision devoted to animal domestication. Onya noticed a subtle difference in the layout of the cottages—they were farther apart, and each had its own couple of acres of land. She saw larger fields subdivided into small sections containing different types of cattle, some of which she’d seen in the distance, roaming wild across the grassland, when she was collecting water for the tribe.
They stopped when Onya pointed out one of the beasts she said was just like the wild cattle her father had tried, and failed, to fence off in the land behind the village. “My father always said it was impossible to tame them, although I think it was really his bad temper.” Watami had seen the deep bruises on the girl’s body after she first arrived and had applied one of her mysterious salves, which largely removed the markings. Onya hadn’t wanted to talk about it at the time, so I could see Watami looking quietly happy that she was starting to open up about her earlier life. Onya was prattling on, oblivious. “Once I heard the elders talking about the good old days, when they were just following the herd. Then they were free, they said. They didn’t have the worries they have now. They complained about the women, too. About how it was different now that they were more settled. Somebody I couldn’t see said, ‘Talk! Talk! Talk!’ in a silly voice and everyone laughed. I didn’t like that.
That’s when I crept back to bed.” Watami pulled on the girl’s arm, seeming to bring her back from her unhappy memories, and they hurried on. “When you first arrived, Onya, the staff thought you’d do best in Faad’s council, where I am. Then you could have studied writing with me. But, after watching you and those fandors together, I think Böni’s going to want you for something she’s working on. I’m not going to tell you what—it’d spoil the surprise. But here, have a look at this before we go in.” They were drawing near a large two-story building set in a copse of tall trees and standing at the nexus of five wide avenues. Getting close, it wasn’t the building that prompted Onya to run ahead of her mentor but what appeared to her to be a pyramid of colored light. “I thought you’d like that!” Watami called out as she was catching up with the girl.
“Can you guess what they are?” Onya looked in awe at this pile of perfectly round crystal balls. The top of the pyramid stood at her eye level. Each translucent globe with a diameter about the length of her forearm glittered in the bright sunlight. Beyond this she could see where another pile of these crystal balls, looking like a truncated pyramid, was starting to grow. “They come from the fandors,” Watami was telling her wondering charge. The cracks and fault lines in the heart of the crystals were refracting the trapped light into constantly shifting rainbows as Onya clapped her hands in joy. “When they first come to the city, each fandor brings one of these as a gift. We don’t know where the balls come from, or how they’re made. But look. Aren’t they beautiful? See how the colors bounce around from ball to ball, Onya?” The young girl was walking solemnly around the base of the pyramid, running her hands over the smooth surface of the globes, peering through the gaps at Watami on the other side, and giggling with pleasure. “Since they’re so beautiful in the sun,” Watami said through the gaps, “we put them out here on the lawn in front of the institute, although we still don’t know what they’re for.
We sometimes see the fandors collecting around the pyramid as the sun is coming up—we think perhaps they’re meditating, or even worshipping. It’s impossible to say, but it made us even more curious about them.” Onya was shaking her head in amazement. The globes were so perfectly round, so smooth to the touch, and so mysteriously appealing; she’d never seen anything like them in her life. There was something else, too—a palpable resonance emanating from the pyramid of globes running up and down her spine as a tingling energy before settling in her base chakra. Her eyes were closed, her head thrown back, and her body trembling with energy when Watami joined her. Out of the corner of her eye, the older girl could see Böni, who would have been watching from the window of her second-floor study as usual, coming over to join them. Watami became suddenly reverential—she still hadn’t entirely become accustomed to being physically close to one of the staff. The size of them and the way they always seemed to know what she was thinking unsettled her. She knew Faad a little better, because she was in his faculty; Böni she only recognized by sight but had heard rumors of her spontaneity and sense of fun. In an early decision, the staff chose to keep themselves apart from the social life of the rest of the city’s inhabitants.
They taught in their institutes and faculties but preferred to live in a compound of their own in the middle of a park at the cooler, northern limits of the city. From there they could come and go in their craft without being observed by the citizens. The original reason for this segregation was a valid one. They didn’t want the perpetual adoration and dependency that humans tended to manifest around them. They believed it was far better to use their one hundred companions, as well as the more advanced humans they were training, to make the most of the social contact with the human newcomers to the city. In this way the natural fear level of the mortals, so painful to the staff ’s greater emotional sensitivity, was easier to dissipate.
I recall back in one of the early briefings on the System Headquarters Planet that the staff was specifically counseled to avoid the temptation to cultivate a close kinship with the humans who had donated their genetic bioplasm to be cloned for their physical vehicles. There was concern that they might even grow to love the humans. However, they were warned that those mortals called into the city would present a different challenge. “You’re likely to get fed up with them,” said one of their more caustic teachers at the System HQ, a Planetary Prince hailing from another world in this Local System, who’d elected to remain in a pedagogic post. “The mortals, I mean. They’ll frustrate you, and you’ll likely get more depressed than you thought possible. Even the best of them are distrusting and cunning. You’ll find yourselves wanting to spend more time with each other—just to get away from them. You’ll need to be aware of this . . .” He stopped talking when a murmur of protest arose from his gathered audience.
Because there’d been such intense competition for the one hundred staff chosen for the mission, I noticed, even at those early stages, a general tendency among them to be somewhat overconfident. Some were catching each others’ eyes while the Prince was speaking and sticking out their chests in postures of imagined success. “You’ll need to know this,” the Prince was insisting, his voice rising over the good-humored protests, “because it is going to be a challenge. Always stay in your heart. Stay open and compassionate and remember: you were like them once!” That quieted them down. “Try not to think of them as animals—not as monkeys just down from the trees. Think of them rather as children, and sometimes as naughty and violent children, too. And always remember: the ones you will be calling in for at least the first fifty thousand years will be the cream of the crop. Don’t think for a moment that all the mortals you will encounter when you travel out of the city will be like them. “It’s not an easy planet, as I’m sure you’ve been told.
The animal and vegetable life is particularly profuse. Our surveys show that there are a frightening number of large animals at the top of their particular food chains who are implacable killing machines. Remember this when you get annoyed with how fearful the people are! They’ve made it through to this point thanks to their cunning, their intelligence, and their capacity to cooperate with one another for mutual survival. They only mutated from their primate forebears half a million years ago! You’ll find it far more challenging than what you remember of your own home worlds, so you’ll need to take a wider view. “I might be proved wrong about this, but from my experience with these early missions, I think you’ll find that this planet is being quietly primed to become an exceptional world. I predict, and you can sue me if I’m wrong, that some truly exceptional humans will emerge out of the planet’s violent and unforgiving evolutionary process. The challenges are such that natural selection is sure to lead to an impressive level of individual intelligence and physical health.” The lecture was drawing to a close. The Prince surveyed the bleachers, taking in the staff packing away their recorders and shuffling on their seats in anticipation.
I remember looking down at the group from the back of the theater and wondering whether they had any idea what they were getting themselves into. The Prince was leaning forward now, speaking more confidentially. “You might even find some of them quite enchanting— but don’t get too involved. They’re heartbreakers. Always remember: to you they’ll be living and dying in the blink of an eye. And to them, your immortality will always be a source of envy and contention.” He let that sink in for a long pause before asking, “Any questions before we break?” I couldn’t see the one who responded. She was down in the front of the lecture hall, whereas we angels were expected to remain in the rear. This wasn’t our show. We were the aides, the trainees. We were expected to report to the staff, not to advise them. For this reason, I didn’t make a fuss when the staff started turning inward over the first ten thousand years, just as they were warned not to. “We’ll show you, Highness! We won’t let you down!”
Not a question, of course, as they were all getting to their feet to leave, and it was encouraging to hear the conviction in her voice. Yet there was also something about her self-assurance that put me on edge. It’s easy to be wise after the event, and many of my observations about the Prince, his deputy, Daligastia—like Caligastia, also a Descending Son— and the behavior of his staff will be colored by my (hopefully) retrospective wisdom. I say, only in my defense, that many of the hints I received at the time, which have flowered here in this narrative with perhaps a higher degree of certainty than I felt at the moment, I pen here for the first time. I do this to try to uncover how everything went so terribly wrong on this blighted world. How could such a well-orchestrated mission, an event repeated at the appropriate stage on every inhabited world in a vast Multiverse and equipped with magnificent deathless bodies and a matchless environment—how did all this fall apart? The understanding that those who ignore the past are condemned to repeat it is as true for angels as it is for humans.
Now, as your world enters the troubled twenty-first century, it’s vitally important that we, angels, understand what occurred behind the scenes so that we too can grow in wisdom. I feel I need to learn everything I can about the fundamental errors of judgment made by the Prince and his staff so many tens of thousands of years ago—errors that contributed so directly to making this world the place it is today. I write this because I want to know what happened.
Onya, back in the city and happily astonished at all she was seeing, was young, highly intelligent, and had a flexible, open mind. Let’s follow her as Watami leads her up the steps into the broad, well-lit entrance foyer of the Board of Animal Domestication and Utilization. Böni was waiting for the pair as they passed through the doors and greeted them warmly before leading them down a wide corridor deeper into the building.
Watami maintained the reverential silent-unlessspoken-to demeanor she always assumed with the staff members, while Onya squealed alternatively in delight, horror, and surprise at the various vivaria tucked into alcoves on both sides of the corridor. Some contained small animals who’d made their vivarium their home; other alcoves contained some of the larger animals standing oddly still, but just as terrifying to Onya, who became quite convinced an artfully stuffed lion was about to pounce. A silvery ripple of laughter seemed to emanate from Böni as she paused to reassure the girl, who was hiding now behind Watami’s robe. “Look closer, little one.” Böni appeared to be speaking in Onya’s tribal tongue, although the girl wasn’t sure whether she was really hearing it or whether it was all happening in her head. “Be brave and look closer. See how we have used the skin of the lion and stuffed straw into it to make it look real.
It fooled you, didn’t it, little Onya?” Böni’s tinkling laugh joining with Onya’s as the girl lost her fear and stroked the soft, golden fur around the lion’s muzzle. “We’re making an inventory, a list of all the plant and animal species we find, and this”—Böni was pointing at the vivaria, some with beautifully represented or painted backgrounds—“is a way of reminding ourselves how richly numerous the species are.” They passed still and silent animals Onya had never seen before. Two enormous creatures that Böni called elephants, their longs trunks stretched high in the air over the girl’s head, stopped Onya in her tracks. She’d clearly never encountered anything quite as large and terrifying. “You’ll see more elephants in your time in the city, and don’t be surprised if there are people riding on top of them.
They’re not as intelligent as the fandors, but they like to be of help when we need their strength.” They reached a large central courtyard bordered on all four sides by cloistered galleries on both floors and echoing with the calls of birds. The center of the space was built up to form what Böni called a very small mountain. It stood at the height of the two-story surrounding structure and appeared to be shaped to represent quite a different landscape from anything Onya had seen before. Rather than the flat and softly undulating plains of the Arabian Peninsula, the “little mountain” reared up out of the ground, its surface sculpted into sheer rock faces, steep valleys, and small plateaus covered with tiny trees the likes of which Onya had never seen before. Small streams fell into miniature waterfalls, trickling down through little gurgling brooks to gather in a miniature lake at the base of the mountain. “This fascinates you, Onya?” Böni’s voice assumed a singsong tone. “You see these little trees? They’re real. Yes, you can touch them. Be careful, though. They’re fragile.” Onya was running her hand over the tops of the trees she could reach.
They were real, she had no doubt about that. “Come on, Onya. You’ll learn more about that later,” said Böni, smiling and leading the way to the far corner of the courtyard, where she gestured to Watami to leave her alone with the girl as they went into a well-lit corner room. “Sit over here, next to me,” said Böni, gesturing to a cushioned bench that seemed to Onya to grow out of the wall. The room was sparsely furnished but filled with flowering plants in clay pots decorated with strange symbols that meant nothing to the girl. The two external walls that formed the corner of the room were arched and led out onto a wide, shaded verandah and a smooth green lawn beyond. Three fandors were grazing in the shrubbery bordering the lawn. Böni filled a pitcher with the water trickling out of a fountain built into one of the walls and joined Onya on the bench. The girl was touching the fabric of the cushions, running her fingers over the surface of the cloth, her face alive with wonder. “You’ll learn all about that while you’re here, Onya.” Böni poured them both water into small clay cups. “You’ll be staying with us for a while. You’re not a captive.
If you wish to be returned to your clan, we can make sure that will happen.” I’d no doubt that Böni, as a staff member, knew very well what awaited the girl if she went back to her tribe and merely wished to make sure Onya realized how fortunate she was to have been plucked out of what would have been certain death. Both were now sitting cross-legged on their cushions facing each other on the bench. Onya took this opportunity to examine the older woman, and this was the first puzzle. She was a tall, slim woman with long, blond hair wound around the top of her head, adding to the impression of height. Her smooth skin, though bronzed by the sun, was far lighter than Onya’s, and the eyes looking coolly back at the girl were of the lightest amber. She had high cheekbones and a long, finely modeled nose set above a full and generous mouth. When Böni spoke, Onya could see large and sparklingly white teeth. At a time when life could be brutally short and it was rare to reach the age of forty, Onya had no way of judging the woman’s age.
She appeared to be young and healthy, but to Onya she felt ancient. It was all very puzzling for the young girl. Her tribe had known about the city for so long, generations passing down what little they knew about the strange happenings on the southern coast of the peninsula, that the city had become a terrifying legend seldom spoken about, and then only in whispered warnings. Yet, here was Böni sitting quietly in front of her, with a kind smile on her face, far from the monster with which parents used to frighten the children of the tribe. “We’ve been watching your tribe for many, many generations, Onya.” Böni must have picked up the girl’s thought pattern because she continued reassuringly. “So we know what they say about us. Don’t worry—no harm will come to you. Unless your clan changes its ways, you won’t need to go back. There’s always work to be done here.”
Onya was looking over the woman’s shoulder, a sudden movement of one of the fandors catching her attention. Within a couple of moments there was a cacophonous flapping of wings, and all three birds were soaring up into the clear blue sky, carrying Onya up with them in her imagination. “Now, that was interesting!” Böni, in her turn, was looking puzzled. “I know you must have bonded with the fandors you met on the way over here, but that’s never happened before in all the time I’ve been here!” Onya’s eyes were open now with a beatific smile on her face. The woman’s voice brought her back to the cool of the room and the look of amazement on Böni’s face. “As Watami may have told you already, we try our best to match our visitors’ natural gifts with what we do here in the city. Seems to me the fandors have already chosen you, so I’m going to suggest to the others that we go along with this—at least, for the time being. Until we know what the fandors are up to.” Böni’s eyes closed for a moment, and in response to her telepathic signal the door opened and Watami came in, her head lowered in respect. “That’s enough for now, Onya. Watami will take you to your new quarters, and we’ll find out more about you and the fandors after you’ve settled in..
I am a Watcher Angel and my name is Georgia.
[speaker-mute]
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.
[/speaker-mute]
