2013-01-01. Love Not War.
[speaker-mute]
Revolt of the Rebel Angels: The Future of The Multiverse – Book 2; Chapter 5 ~by Timothy Wyllie
Book 2, Chapter 5
[/speaker-mute]
[speaker]
The Serpent’s Penance, Enter Gabriel Stern, Predatory Evolution, and the Planetary Heartbeat.
The day finally came when the masts of the invasion fleet could be seen on the horizon. A ripple of panic ran through the crowds who were gathering on the shore. Children, with their sharper eyes, could be heard counting the boats; some losing count and having to start over–much to the annoyance of the adults around them. Soon the babble of childrens’ voices, all at different stages in their count, became so chaotic and confusing they had to be hushed into silence by their elders. Finally, the senior girl at Zandan’s most prestigious kindergarten was elected to do the counting. This produced the most curious sound effect.
The crowd was absolutely silent, all listening to her pure, young, voice, as it steadily counted the masts from right to left. It was as if her piping soprano counting had a sonic shadow, as thousands of young voices whispered the count along with her. It was a most curious sound. I’ve never heard anything quite like it since it seems the sort of occasion that would precipitate it is unique to that one time, on the cliffs of Zandana’s southern continent. Soon enough this chilling, whispered, accompaniment descended into susurrate rustle, as further ships’ masts appeared over the horizon, requiring a constant reevaluation of the count as young eyes competed to see the next mast come into view.
By mid-afternoon no more ships materialized and the count stood at one hundred and eighty-seven, although a couple of twins insisted there were three more smaller boats which couldn’t easily be seen behind some of the larger vessels. It struck me as unusual that no one seemed to possess a telescope, only to find that Zandanan scientists had made little progress in the development of optical lenses. They claimed they had no need to develop such powerful magnifying devices.
They’d shown little interest in astronomy and as far as most of them were concerned their world ended at the shores of their continent. Some small advances had been made in grinding corrective lenses for their older citizens’ spectacles and this had led to further refinements, including the development of instruments for microsurgery. After watching Caligastia’s immense criminal infusion of technical information back on Earth, I found it an amusing idiosyncrasy to observe that while the Zandanans appeared intrigued by microscopic life, they appeared to have no interest whatsoever in the macroscopic.
I believe it was only after the invasion that the first telescopes starting appearing on Zandana. But that was not the only consequence of the barbarian incursion, an incident that forever transformed life on Zandana, as well as a strategy now being taught at the Melchizedek galactic universities, in courses on social enmity resolution. It was only after the fleet were fully visible and dusk was starting to fall that the crowds melted back into the city and their homes for the last night of normality. They knew the fleet would anchor well offshore. Thanks to some cunning midwayer disinformation the barbarians had no idea about Prince Zanda’s plan.
Like all warlike people, the invaders believed their enemy would be as perfidious as they themselves were, thus they’d become persuaded by their own military preparations that Zandan would be bound to defend itself. Carefully seeded propaganda by midwayer counterespionage controllers running agents in barbarian territories had prepared the way. I was told later that rumors swept through the fleet while it waited out the storm prior to the invasion, warning the soldiers of the hideous advanced weaponry that Zandan had recently developed. Of course, it was a well-placed two-pronged deception. There was always a chance the invaders would turn tail and run at the thought of Zandan’s killing machines, but it was in the Trojan Horse aspect of the disinformation campaign that the Princes had put their hopes.
If the barbarians continued to advance, Janda-Chi, who had dreamed up the midwayer campaign, made the point; by generating an excruciating level of fear in the barbarian forces, their relief in being greeted by beautiful women and not some horrific super-weapon would surely be made all the more poignant, rendering them that much more vulnerable to the amorous attentions of the cream of Zandana’s womenfolk. As darkness finally fell on the night before the invasion I found myself, once again, on the horns of a dilemma. Did I really want to be around when the boats discharged their barbaric hordes?
Would it be wise to avoid the possible consequences if the tactic failed? On the other hand, I couldn’t wait to see the faces of the loutish invaders when the women come forward dancing and singing the ancient songs, placing flowered leis around their thick necks, stroking their muscular bodies with scented tenderness. I imagined their rough faces softening, as Captain Cook’s sailors surely did as the first Europeans in many millennia to sail the Pacific, when they found themselves being welcomed by the beautiful and sensuous women of the South Sea islands.
If you were to wonder how I could have been on Zandana 57,000 years ago, while my imagination was drawing on a memory of an event on Earth in 1770 AD, apparently fifty five thousand, two hundred and thirty years later, then I should remind you of the strange characteristics of a watchers’ associative memory, and the nature of time as we watchers experience it. For us it all seems to be happening at the same time, just as a two-hour film can be thought of as ‘all happening at the same time’ when it rests as a singular item in its can. I thought to spend the dark of Zandana’s night up at Prince Janda-Chi’s headquarters–now charmingly called the Love Room–in the hope I would be inspired to arrive at the decision whether to leave; or, whether to stay for the inevitable fireworks.
“How many boats was it in the end?” Unava had evidently pulled himself together and was back under Janda-Chi’s guidance. “Let’s call it a hundred and ninety… there’s some disagreement about the smaller ones… “ Zanda replied. “We’re having a midwayer checking it out but the opposition are throwing up veils as fast as they can. Good thing is, it keeps their midwayers close to the fleet… they can’t spy on us.” “Last thing we need.” Unava agreed with a little more obsequiousness than I felt comfortable with. It was exactly the sort sycophantic attitude that had been expected of us by many of the junior celestial beaurocrats back on the Local System HQ. It was precisely one of the attitudes we were rebelling against. I felt even more irritated as I saw heads nodding among the assembled council members. I wondered if I was picking up on the Princes’ frustration with Unava, because the feeling of anger was so sudden and came on so unexpectedly.
Apart from a few watchers, some companion angels, a Melchizedek representative of Zandana’s Seraphic Overgovernment, of those materially present in the chamber, only Unava could actually see the two Princes. The council, now gathered around an enormous scale model of the entire southern continent which stood on a basalt slab in the middle of the Love Room, could only hear Zanda and Janda-Chi telepathically. I thought this made the council members’ acquiescent gestures look even more ingratiating. “So, it was reckoned about sixty active soldiers on each boat, yes?” This was Unava again, encouraged by the support he was getting from the council. It was then I understood the dynamics of the meeting. Unava had apparently held tenaciously onto the view that the strategy I’d suggested, and which was so quickly adopted by both Princes, was both immoral and absurd.
He’d attempted to subvert the approach, predicting the inevitable decay of social morality if the project were to go forward. I could see he’d made a fool of himself since his personal motivation was so obvious to everyone but him. Reading his aura I observed that he was fiercely–for a normally passive Zandanan–protective a new mistress, a sensuous young beauty who had applauded the strategy with somewhat more enthusiasm that Unava thought seemly. He didn’t want to be seen by her as trying to forbid her taking part–I could see from his emotional body he was terrified she’d leave him. So, as will many powerful men in similar situations, he tried to use his political influence to achieve purely personal ends. I could also see that he’d only just come to his senses, but as Prince Zanda’s Chief of Staff, he must have been quickly pardoned “Could be fifty, Unava, probably not as many as seventy… we decided sixty on each was fair… when you were, ehem… well, off saying goodbye to your lady friend.” Zanda seemed pleased at seeing Unava wince.
I’d absorbed the pleasure he could take from turning the knife on one of his underlings before. Possibly there was more similarity between Caligastia and Zanda than I’d supposed… but, then, both Princes had supported Lucifer! The touch of arrogance I’d seen in Zanda had become metastasized into Caligastia’s brutal indifference to human welfare.
Like me, the council could hear Janda-Chi in their minds. “So, one hundred and ninety boats, with about sixty fighting men in each… what’s that? About eleven and a half thousand about, yes?… shouldn’t be a problem, right?” More nodding of heads. They all knew there were at least five times that number of women volunteers and that wasn’t including the back-up contingents. “Everyone in place?” Janda-Chi was fussing around making sure last minute details had been taken care of. “Everything’s in place, chief.” The senior midwayer manifested briefly from his perch in subspace to assure the assembled company that his corps of midway creatures had everything under control.
With that, everyone in the chamber heard Prince Zanda’s booming voice in their minds. “Well, everyone. This is it. Tomorrow we’ll know the truth. Will we keep the integrity of our beloved Motherland? Or will we disappear into the dust of history? Will we continue to develop our beautiful culture, invigorated by new genes? Or, will Unava be proved correct and we’ll all descend into immorality and dissipation?” There was a long telepathic silence in which I could see the Elders holding themselves in various displays of belief and righteous hope. Then the booming, confident, voice continued. “They won’t risk the reefs in the dark. Anticipating they’ll set sail at dawn, they’ll be on our shores by noon. I’ll expect all of you here, in the… in the Love Room;” I was amused that Zanda would allow himself to use the slang term. “Be here three hours after dawn and we’ll have a working breakfast ready for you. “So sleep well tonight, for tomorrow we’ll need every bit of our energy to support our brave womenfolk. Tomorrow our women will save the Motherland.
Tomorrow we will save our world. “Dream well, my brothers and sisters.” And with that the telepathic circuit closed down and the council members filed out talking quietly among themselves. The die was cast. There was no going back now. I was going to have to hurry to see if I could hitch a ride with a vacant Transport Seraphim who would be traveling without a passenger back to Earth. I only hoped it might chance to be the one who’d treated me well on my journey here,. There was no time for official authorization, but I felt that if my seraphic sister knew the original idea for the strategy came from me, she might possibly make an exception. Perhaps her amiability was a signal she’d taken a peek at what was to happen tomorrow. Although, to be frank, even if she was available I’d no way of knowing whether she’d summon the courage to break the rules.
Seraphs are not widely known for defying authority. At best, it was going to be a long shot. As a consequence, I decided to leave my decision as to whether to grab a transport and be back on Earth within a few hours, entirely up to the Tao–to the natural rhythm of Multiverse affairs. If my friendly transport sister finds it in her heart to take me into her embrace, I will leave. If not, I will stay. It’s as simple as that; and it’s the way we watchers can wend our way through the Multiverse, knowing by doing this we will be continuously in the right place at the right time. I can easily forget this as I grow progressively closer to Mein Host and mortal affairs in general. Observing the decisions you make to take action rubs off on we who observe.
Didn’t your Werner Heisenberg propose something along those lines in a quantum mechanical context? So much am I being affected by mortals these days, with your ability to come up with creative solutions, that it makes me realize I came extremely close to hubris in claiming the love strategy as mine. The truth is, while I’m writing these words it’s coming to me that the “Love not War” campaign, which jumped so spontaneously into my mind, was actually generated in the future by Mein Host. I cannot claim it originated soley with me. Whether I end up back on Earth tomorrow, or whether indeed I stay for the invasion, I am writing for both of us when I say I can barely wait for tomorrow to see how it all pans out.
The very fact that both Princes of Zandana so readily accepted the idea of using the women to subvert the barbarian invasion frankly astonished me. Whether or not the strategy would turn out to be successful, I found their openness and enthusiasm a charming contrast to the compulsively belligerent response I would have received on Earth, had I ever been rash enough to raise the idea with Caligastia or Daligastia. Was this a difference in between the characteristics of the Princes on the two worlds? Or, was it in the nature of Zandanans to be more sexually liberated than those on Earth?
Mein Host tells me he knows of no time in human history that the Love-not-War tactic has ever been used, not in all the many wars and skirmishes that have been recorded. The closest to it appears in a Greek play! How typically human, I thought. Then, when he tells me that it occurs in the Greek comedy Lysistrata by Aristophanes and it’s the women who come up with the idea, yet with one important and revealing difference, it further confirmed for me one of most noticeable differences between the sexual dynamics of the two planetary populations. In the play it is the women of Greece who withhold their sexual favors from their own husbands and lovers. From the Greeks! They agree to keep their men out of their beds as a way to force them into a negotiated end to the Peloponnesian War. That the ploy finally worked turned out to have as much to do with the eponymous Lysistrata dangling a gorgeous young beauty–significantly enough named Reconciliation–before the Spartan and sex-starved Athenian delegates, than in the Greek’s forced abstinence, demonstrates more about the intensity of human sexual needs.
Although Lysistrata is a theatrical comedy, Aristophanes raises a significant issue in intimating that sexual hunger trumps nationalistic belligerence when the choice is presented. And perhaps he also suggests the answer to my observation that Zandanans in general were a gentler, more passive people, than the male and female mortals I’d observed on Earth. I wasn’t present on Earth through the earlier times of human development, having arrived here with Caligastia’s mission half-a-million years ago, so I didn’t witness those eras for myself. It was in the training simulators back on Local System HQ that those of us due to be sent here had a chance to view what we were getting ourselves into. There, in the spacious sim-chamber, I was able to see and experience the intense predatory violence on all levels of biological life.
When I first viewed the historical recordings of the period in which true humans were evolving from their primate ancestors, I was almost overwhelmed by the constant state of terror in which they all lived. I hadn’t studied Zandana in the same way, but I had noticed on some of my earlier trips, that with the exception of the large bears living up in the mountains, there seemed to be a remarkable lack of large predatory animals. I thought it most unlikely that the relatively gentle Zandanans had killed them all off by the time I first got there. The worshipful reverence with which they held the bears, their general love of animals, and the complete lack of animal cruelty, suggested to me that they had a more placid evolutionary journey than your early ancestors. I derive from these observations of two different planetary populations that there will likely be a direct correlation between the degree of predation mortals have had to historically confront in their biosphere, and the intensity of their sexual desires and procreative needs.
Was the gentler nature of the Zandanans due to a less violent and demanding evolutionary journey? And since there would be a diminished pressure to procreate, might this in turn have produced a more stable, equable, and sexually liberated society? Or, was Zandana a more typical planet, more like the worlds that refused to support Lucifer and weren’t directly affected by the consequences of the rebellion? Finally, I wondered whether I’d become so conditioned by my observations of the behavior of human beings on Caligastia’s Earth, that I’d come to believe that fear, chaos, and belligerence, are the natural estate of mortals?
This was only a preliminary supposition based on the most minimal of samples, so I will reserve any final judgment until I’ve had the chance to observe other inhabited worlds. My point is that there had to be a different essential quality between how these two planetary populations have developed. To have produced such a ready acquiescence of the Love not War tactic among the Zandanans, and for it to be so hard to imagine happening here seems to point to a fundamental distinction in the way a world is prepared for intelligent life. We’re told during our training that Earth is an experimental planet–one in every ten worlds is so classified–on which the Life Carriers, the Multiverse biologists are encouraged to make any adjustments to the planet’s evolutionary strategy deemed necessary.
Could one of the most basic ways of manipulating the contentiousness of a given planet’s mortal population be by controlling the level of predation in the evolutionary process? Mein Host is reminding me that I can’t put off revealing much longer whether or not I hitched a ride back to Earth and therefore would have missed the action on Zandana. Well, here’s how it worked out. When I arrived at the Subspace Transport Station dawn was rising over the ocean. I could see the boats quite clearly now, clustered with soldiers, their long lances sticking straight up in the air, making the boats appear from this distance to be a swarm of a hundred and ninety-seven aquatic hedgehogs. There had to be more than sixty fighting men on each of those boats! I admit, it looked terrifying. I could only hope for the best. With a strong breeze I estimated they’d be onshore by midday, possibly a little later. I could see from the promontory on which the Station was perched that the beaches sweeping away on both sides of me were clear of people as far as I could see in both directions.
So the trap was being set! Before I dragged myself away to see about the Transport schedule I was already starting to hear the pulsating rhythms and the tonal chanting of the invading forces echoing over the water, ebbing and flowing with the wind. The music, if I can call it that, was surprisingly moving. It felt familiar, although I was sure I’d never heard such sounds before. I stayed listening far longer than I intended. The massive chorale that issued from more than ten thousand rough barbarian throats was far sweeter and more sonorous than I would ever have expected.
The drumming, which I could hear more clearly as the fleet drew nearer, was as complex and richly patterned as anything I’ve ever heard. Mein Host, who has played guitar and percussion in bands as different as rock ‘n’ roll, modern jazz, and progressive fusion, is expressing his surprise at this. He appreciates how challenging it is to get even a few human drummers all working together! ‘How is it possible,’ he asks me, ‘that a coherent rhythm of any complexity could ever be maintained by so many drummers, in almost two hundred boats sailing under the stiff breeze, and distributed over a wide swathe of ocean?
They wouldn’t have even been able to hear one another to keep the rhythm!’ Ah! I reply, I feel another digression coming on. You see, they weren’t listening to one another. Their boats were too far apart and the wind too strong for that. What they were listening to was the heartbeat of Zandana–at least, that’s how they would have explained it–so they didn’t need to hear each other. They drummed to the beat of the planet herself. And, since every boat had its own group of drummers, each boat was both independent and yet united into the collective by the rhythm of the planet.
Contemporary Earth scientists are familiar with the Schumann resonances, Extra-Low-Frequency (ELF) waves from a low of 7 Hz, rising in a series of harmonics to around 60 Hz. These resonate as a standing wave within the Earth/ionosphere cavity, with a wavelength equal to the circumference of the planet. The most prominent mode, or frequency peak, on your planet occurs at 7.83 Hz. Each planet obviously possesses its very own signature resonant frequency, since the precise tuning of the standing wave is dependent on the state of the upper wall of the closed atmospheric cavity, as well as the surface characteristics of the planet itself.
That these frequencies can alter slightly due geomagnetic and ionospheric disturbances demonstrates how sensitive a planet’s resonant ionospheric cavity is to any external electromagnetic disturbance. I am told there are celestial beings who can hear these constantly shifting frequencies as the music of the spheres; each astronomical body, from asteroid, to planet, to any solar event, each contributing its own unique range of frequencies. Here, I’m using the Schumann resonances as an example of something more subtle; something I doubt if contemporary geophysicists are yet fully aware of, since they’d have to be able to compare enough inhabited planets to make the proposition stick.
Scientists attempt crude approximations of this when they crash space vehicles onto the moon and study the chemical composition of the debris thrown up by the explosion. But what I’m pointing to here requires a somewhat more advanced technology to detect and yet, idiosyncratically, it can be “felt,” or experienced in some way, by a sensitive mortal sensorium. Just as each planet possesses an unique Schumann signature resonating in the ELF range, there is also the “sound” of the planet herself.
Think of striking a large metal sphere with a hammer, it will produce a tone–not with quite the resonance of a gong or a bell, but it will make a tone. And any alteration in the material, the density, or size, will produce a slightly different tone. This is essentially how a dolphin’s bio-location functions, by bouncing tightly focused sound waves off an object. Since everything in the Multiverse is vibrating over a wide variety of different frequencies; from a rock, a snail, a human being, a planet, or a star; every material object has its own unique “sound.” If it can only be heard. We’re taught in our training sessions that each planet produces a rhythmic, pulsating sound, audible to those with the sensitivity, or the technical mastery, to detect it.
It’s this rhythmic pulsation that is every bit as much an unique signature of a particular planet as are its Schumann resonances. This “sound” is also easier to identify, so we’re told, over interplanetary distances, using a technology far more advanced, yet not dissimilar to the laser microphones that are used to listen to conversations in a room with windows. The vibration of the voices in the room will create a sufficient sympathetic resonance in the glass for a laser microphone to bounce a light beam of it, reflecting it back to be analyzed by a device that then reconstructs the original speech. Thus, each planet has a distinctive rhythmic pulse, a resonant frequency unique to that particular world. It was this deep regular heartbeat of Zandana that the invading barbarians were using to build upon, amplifying the beat with their drumming and singing, to create a pulsating wall of sound which swept over the surface of the sea in a veritable sonic tsunami.
I’ve already said how moved I was by the sound, which was at first mystifying and I was told initially rather frightening for some of the older city dwellers–yet as the fleet approached closer, the rhythmic complexity and the delicate choral mastery, cast the “barbarians” in rather a different light from what I’d expected. This was going to be even more interesting than I’d anticipated.
I am a Watcher Angel and my name is Georgia.
