"It's easy for us to make beings like you," said the Parents. "We do it all the time. There's nothing to it. We can easily replace you. Understand, all the mental and physical equipment we have given you is for your purpose. We cannot send you down to Earth without emotions. You will be found out by the Great One of Atalantaya if we do that. You will never get into the city. No one gets into Atalantaya except at his invitation. Don't you think all those starving, struggling, violent savages of the forests and the fields would love to live in his Atalantaya? Wait and see what it is like. See what they suffer. Of course they would. But he controls who gets in, taking from the planet what he needs for his city, his paradise, his utopia--taking what he chooses and locking out all those so that his chosen ones can enjoy it. Wait and see. You must put an end to this. This is important! He has no authority to rule on Earth. This is important to the 'Realm of Worlds.' This is why you were made. You have been born for this purpose."
"I don't want to do it," cried Derek. "I don't want to die. I want to stay alive. I want to keep thinking, being, feeling." He broke down in incoherent weeping and the Parents stepped forward and surrounded him and moved him away from us.
At this point, I knew my first real fear. I was afraid they were going to kill Derek then and there. I couldn't bear it. The pain in me was so all-consuming that it took all the strength I possessed to stand by and do and say nothing. However, I did not feel that there was anything that I could do to prevent whatever the Parents would now do to Derek. I braced myself for unspeakable suffering. But they didn't kill Derek. They stroked him, comforted him, wiped away his tears, told him that it was a great thing that he was doing. And that indeed his death might not come for months, maybe even a year, and that he would have time to realize the importance of his purpose.
As they spoke some of the other Parents began to sing, and underneath their singing I heard the familiar instruments sounding their echoing chords. Finally the Parents opened their wings, and began to rock back and forth with their singing, and we started singing along with them and so did Derek.
"This is unity," said the Parents. "This is peace." They went on in their lofty repetitive style telling him that many living things had long lives but many had short lives; they spoke of how beautiful butterflies of Earth lived for a short time and how some little animals lived for a tenth of the time of a human mammal, and how human mammals lived for a tenth of the life span of the Parents. On and on they went with all of this.
A great silent rain of flower petals began to descend, and they caught pink and yellow and blue petals in their hands and showed them to Derek and told him that the flowers from which they came lived only a day or two at most. Such was the way of the biological or visible life in the "Realm of Worlds."
"But there is always hope that something invisible of us...of the 'we' in you and the other People of the Purpose...might survive," they said. "There is hope. You have seen the human mammals of the planet weeping and sobbing and praying. They have hope, hope that the Maker hears them and that when they die their spirits go up and up and away from Earth and into a realm ruled by the Maker. There is always that hope. All through the 'Realm of Worlds' creatures have such hope. Only on Earth perhaps does it take such an emotional turn, but it is universal."
Derek had calmed down, and when they released him, Welf received him and held him firmly and Garekyn took up his station on the other side of Derek and did the same.
"Now," said the Parents. "It is time for you to know and understand the story of the Great One of Atalantaya who is named Amel, and how he came to do such evil on the planet."
Derek had gone completely calm, but not, I knew, because he was mollified or convinced or elevated to some new level of understanding. He was simply exhausted. And I kept in my heart a deep contempt for the Parents that they had so brutally and insensitively told us that we had been made to die on this purposeful journey. I kept in my heart a scorn for them that they had understood the pain they would inflict on Derek and on us with their cold explanations. I felt a deep suspicion of their prayers, of their talk of the Maker.
I did not want to die either. I did not want my eyes to close on the beauty and complexity I saw all around me. Indeed, they had told us at the very beginning of our lives that we were unkillable, and now they had let us know that they had planned all along to kill us. And what could be the meaning of all their talk of suffering on the planet, of violence, of cruelty, of viciousness?
But I knew better than to voice any of this. I knew exactly what they would say. "You are caught up in these emotions because you're a Replimoid. You are thinking and feeling like a human mammal." But I knew from all the film streams I'd watched that everything on the planet Earth wanted to live, not just the human mammals. I remained quiet. And they began to talk of Amel, the Great One.
II
"Years ago," they said, "we developed and grew Amel just as we developed and grew each of you. But we gave him infinitely more knowledge than we have given you. Indeed, we shared with him all of the valuable knowledge of Bravenna as if he were one of us. And this was to equip him to survive on the planet and fulfill a specific mission.
"Mammalian primates had already developed, packs and gangs of brutal loathsome hairy beings who killed and fought and even ate one another's flesh. These repulsive beings held horrific and absurd ideas, that gods lived in the sea and in the forests, and in the mountains and in the fire and in the thunderstorms of Earth. And they would sacrifice their own children to these gods, slaughtering them on bloodstained altars.
"All through the 'Realm of Worlds' there was horror at this mammalian ascendency on Earth and the horrors produced by it, the blood, the violence, the cruelty.
"We sent Amel, the finest creature we could possibly make, to put an end to this. We equipped him with a plague that would strike down these violent beings, and give some chance to other ascending creatures.
"He was further sent by us to restore and repair all of the many transmitting stations all over the planet that had become idle due to slow erosion or storms or volcanoes or earthquakes with which this planet is tormented heavily as you have seen. We did not design him as we designed you to pass for a mammalian primate. On the contrary, we designed him to be perceived as a god.
"We had long noticed that certain mutations in the hairy primates of Earth could present pale-skinned and blue-or green-eyed primate mammals. And that the tribes in which such mutants were born regarded such creatures with fear and awe, worshipping them as gods or destroying them as evil.
"We made Amel a being of pale skin and green eyes and red hair as a consequence. And we knew that these traits, coupled with his vast intelligence and ability to speak all languages, and his keen ability to provide the tribes with useful information for healing and the making of tools and such--all this would produce awe in the primitive tribes who would then fear and obey him.
"He could therefore use the labor of these tribes to restore the transmitting stations where they had failed, and he could use them to set up new stations for the recording of the changes in atmosphere and water that would follow the releasing of the plague we had given him.
"This being, Amel, was the most powerful and versatile Replimoid we've ever made. He represented the finest of our knowledge on all levels, and he knew all that we knew. He understood that he was to repair as
many transmitting stations as he could before releasing the plague at a predetermined time, and that he would keep working on the transmitting stations even after the plague was released and for as long as there existed savage human mammals to help him.
"We believed wrongly that he understood and valued his purpose, that being of the highest mind, and that being in full control of his primate emotions, he would perform the tasks we wanted and establish a base on Earth from which he could communicate with us as to the planet's future development. We equipped him to enjoy pleasure unendingly with the female or male primates of the planet. We equipped him to enjoy food and drink, and warmth, and the exceptional beauty of Earth. We stinted on nothing to give him the greatest gifts we had to bestow and to make his life on Earth not only endurable but wondrous. And with the healing gifts we had given him, he would be able to inoculate some females of the species to endure with him for many years and keep him company, and some males to breed with these females to provide him with future females."
The Parents went silent.
"Think on this," one of them said. And then another, "Think on it to understand the depth of his perfidy and betrayal."
We did as they asked, of course. We stood silent, waiting, pondering, reflecting. But in my heart of hearts my sympathies lay with Amel, our Replimoid brother, not with the winged beings telling this story.
"Amel deceived us," said the Parents. "Not only did he not restore the film-streaming stations as we had instructed him to do, but he actually destroyed all of those whose locations we had given to him for repair. One by one he broke, dismantled them, and he had demolished the majority before we came to realize what he was doing.
"In fact, Amel destroyed so many of these important bases that we could no longer track him or view him or hear him or discover what other things he was doing. But it came to pass that he was using every bit of knowledge we'd given him to gain power with the savage human mammals of Earth.
"Of course, Amel never released the plague. And we have come to understand that he used the very plague itself somehow to inoculate the species of Earth so that they would never be susceptible to it or to any number of other plagues that we might send.