INTERDICTION

Pierre Iles and Michael Moreno stepped out of the South Tunnel and traded smiles. They were delighted to see the party in full swing all across Luna City’s Central Park. The 40-acre green space under the giant plasteel dome was the verdant hub of a city that sprawled out for ten kilometers in every direction. Luna City was home to twenty thousand and it seemed like every one of them was in the park. Another twelve hundred visitors were mixed among them. The visitors consisted of dignitaries from Earth, representatives from the other off-world settlements, heads of various industries, celebrities from the sports and entertainment worlds and a small contingent of the media. Native Lunatics, who wore garish color combinations to contrast themselves against their monochromatic environment, were easily distinguished from the more conservatively-dressed visitors. Most people were gathered in clusters of various sizes, drinking and chatting. Others, newbies to low gravity, were trying to find their moon legs, bounding about clumsily but otherwise reveling in the new experience.

Pierre Iles was fifty-nine years old, broad of frame and round of features with dark, thinning hair swept back from a prominent forehead. His large brown eyes turned to a squat servo-bot threading its way through the crowd on rubber treads. He waved it over and plucked a pair of nipple-topped champagne flutes off its tray. He handed one to his companion. 

Michael Moreno was thinner, shorter and darker than Iles. Moreno was nineteen years his junior but already had gray mixed into the tight curls at his temples. The two men tapped their flutes in a silent toast, sipped and stood, shoulder to shoulder, quietly basking in the glow of the festive atmosphere.

There were twenty other settlements on the moon; mining camps, foundries, quarries, hydroponic farms, a space-faring supplies factory and the largest off-world shipyard. Between them they housed another fifteen thousand of the Moon’s population. The Venus Orbital Base had a crew of sixty. The space stations at Lagrange Points Four and Five had a combined population of three thousand. The four bases on Mars were home to five thousand colonists between them. There were several hundred miners scattered throughout the Asteroid Belt and even a twelve-man base on Europa. But of all the off-world settlements, Luna City was the largest and oldest. Pierre Iles and Michael Moreno were proud to call themselves its citizens, doubly so now when the eyes of the whole inhabited solar system were on them.

After taking another sip of their bubbly, the two men bounded forward with well-practiced skipping that propelled them through the air in gentle arcs.

A hundred meters or so into the park Moreno paused, stopped Iles by gently grabbing his elbow, and drew his attention to their left where their fellows Bernie Ostojic and Sarah Epps sought them out over the shoulders of a trio of guests. Once Pierre Iles acknowledged them with a raised flute, the graying, round-shouldered Bernie Ostojic broke away from the visitors. Sarah Epps, pale, tall, bald and sharp-featured followed after making the polite excuses Ostojic would never have thought to make.

“I’m glad you gentlemen decided to join us,” Sarah Epps raised a half empty flute in greeting when she arrived.

“Our private celebration ran a little long, I’m afraid,” Moreno offered with an impish grin.

“No worries,” Bernie Ostojic said. “There’s plenty of time to be utterly bored by our distinguished guests. Cardinal Schultz was just waxing poetic on the deep humility we’ll need when venturing out into depths of space.”

“Quite the deep thinker, the Cardinal,” Moreno observed with mocking nods of his head.

“About as deep as a sewer from what I’ve heard,” Epps added.

“It’s not his proclivities, whatever they might be, that bother me,” Ostojic said. “It’s his mere presence that annoys me. Truth be told, I don’t know why most of these people were invited.”

“My good man, you should be celebrating with them,” Pierre Iles gestured to the crowds. “This is a great day for humanity, so I thought it appropriate to invite as generous a cross section of it as our humble little city could hold.”

“This is a great day for us and for science,” Ostojic objected. “As for humanity, there’s a good reason why I’ve spent the majority of my life living as far from as many of them as possible.”

“I think we have our first volunteer for the permanent base on Epsilon 4A,” Sarah Epps said with a laugh and an elbow to Bernie Ostojic’s side. “Don’t we, you curdled old curmudgeon?”

“I can be packed in thirty minutes, young lady,” Bernie responded and they all laughed.

“One mission at a time, my friends,” Pierre Iles raised his flute towards them. “Tonight we drink to the maiden voyage of the ESS Hope!”

“The ESS Hope!” they said, clinked and emptied their flutes.

As one, the four glanced up past the dome to pick out the reason for tonight’s celebration. Locked in orbit one hundred kilometers over Luna City, the Earth Star Ship Hope, humanity’s first manned interstellar vessel, hung in the night sky. It appeared as no more than a blurb of light to the naked eye, but the ship’s winged-arrow shape loomed large on the giant screens raised over the four main tunnels into the park.

Their reverie was broken when the images of the starship were suddenly replaced with a closeup of the United Nations’ Secretary General, Shreeya Kumar. She was on the stage raised at the park’s center, gathered before a gaggle of reporters.

“She’s holding court already,” Moreno observed with wry amusement.

“Of course we’re quite proud of how far we’ve come here at Luna City,” Kumar smiled wide. The arc of diamond studs she wore in lieu of her right eyebrow glittered brightly against her oiled-bronze complexion. “To think that this international colony began as a six-man inflatable tent a mere three hundred years ago! Luna City is a testament to the heroic efforts of the international community, and the starship floating above us is the glorious fruit born of that cooperation.”

Ostojic loosed a derisive snort. “The starship would never have been built if it had been left to her international community.”

“I don’t want to speak ill of the dead,” Sarah Epps said. “But we got lucky when you got ol’ Bailey’s job, boss.”

“Here here,” Moreno saluted Iles with a tip of his flute.

“I was just at the right place at the right time,” Iles said with a dismissive wave of his free hand.

“Well, good thing you were,” Ostojic added. “If Bailey had had his way we’d still be working for the UN and the starship project’s funds would have been squandered on mosquito nets for inordinately fecund Africans or some such other waste.”

They returned their attentions to the United Nations’ Secretary General who continued, gesturing at the four astronauts seated behind her. “These brave men and women will leap into the unknown tomorrow, but they will not go alone. No. We will be with them in spirit…”

“She sure does enjoy the limelight,” Sarah Epps observed.

“They will take our prayers and dreams with them…”

“And talking,” Michael Moreno added.

“Our hopes and best wishes…”

“A whole lot of talking,” Iles agreed.

“Into the great frontier of the cosmos…”

“Without ever saying much of anything,” Bernie Ostojic said, his head cocked to the side, regarding Shreeya Kumar like she was a faulty equation.

“Let’s break up her party, shall we?” Pierre Iles said and, with a sudden leap, bounded toward the stage. Moreno and Epps each grabbed Ostojic by an elbow and the three jumped after their boss.

After a few leaps, Iles and his party landed expertly on the raised platform. Noticing the mayor’s appearance, the reporters lost interest in Shreeya Kumar. They abandoned the Secretary General in mid-sentence and turned like a school of fish towards Pierre Iles. Ian Porter, BBC’s tall, black and veteran correspondent led the pack. “Mr. Mayor, may we have a few words?”

“Certainly, my good man,” Pierre said in his most affable tone, smiling into the small camera hovering over Porter’s crimson-colored afro. “What would you like to know?”

“Let’s start with how you’re feeling tonight, Mayor Iles.”

“I’ve never been happier, Mr. Porter. If I was a religious man, I would say that I had given up my soul to see the Hope built. At any rate, I have given the best years of my life to the starship’s creation. I cannot fully describe the joy I feel to finally see her built and ready to launch.”

“How many years is that exactly, Mr. Mayor?”

“It’s going on thirty-six years,” Iles responded. “I started out as an assistant to the project’s original comptroller and… well, here I am still. I couldn’t feel more proud than I do right now.”

“Deservedly so, we would all agree,” Porter gushed. “What you have accomplished is monumental, without equal in history…”

“What we have accomplished, Mr. Porter,” Iles said gesturing to Moreno, Epps and Ostojic. “My part in this is a small one compared to the work of these brilliant engineers, their hundreds of partners and the thousands of others who have, together, built the Earth Star Ship Hope.”

“Of course,” said Porter. “But there is no denying that these thousands consider you to be their leader, the visionary that made it all possible.”

“What can I say?” Iles asked, turning up his palms. “My people love me almost as much as I love them.”

Everyone shared a laugh.

Nearly everyone. Iles spotted Yukio Endo of the Tokyo Times in the second row. The athletically built Asian had a wispy goatee and a wooden gaze he fixed doggedly on Pierre. When the Japanese news outlet had named Endo as their representative, Iles considered revoking their invitation to the launch. He didn’t however, deciding that allowing the crusading reporter to the launch would show him and any other would-be detractor that he was not afraid of any of them and that he was impervious to their whispering campaigns against him. Iles had even hoped that his show of magnanimity combined with the evening’s historic nature would put an end, even if only temporarily, to their hostility. Looking into Endo’s eyes, he knew it was a vain hope.

“Is it not fortunate for them and for you, Mr. Iles that your predecessor, Aaron Bailey met with so timely a death?” Yukio Endo asked as he squeezed into the front row of the scrum.

“Aaron’s death was not timely, not for us, his family and certainly not for him,” Iles responded acidly. “It was tragic; a tragedy for all concerned.”

“Yes, of course,” the Tokyo Times reporter continued. “But would it not be fair to say that the cave-in of the Ptolemaeus Helium 3 mine allowed you, Mr. Iles, to not only assume control of Luna City and the Starship Hope project, but also provided you with the opportunity to lead the off world community out from under the aegis of the United Nations?”

“No, I don’t think it would be fair to say that at all,” Iles responded with an edge of exasperation in his tone.

 “Your predecessor, Mr. Bailey, he was on record being against the Off-world Independence Movement.”

“Yes, he was. And I was on record being for independence. And none of that is either here nor there,” Iles answered. “The Off World Independence movement began long before either Bailey or I arrived on the scene. It was nearly a century old when independence was finally achieved. Independence is what the off world community wanted and I was merely wise enough not to get in their way. I’m certain that many of you groundhogs wish that your earth-side leaders would be as acquiescing to their people’s demands.”

Iles paused to let the small burst of supportive laughter fill his sails before plunging on. “And as for the tragedy at the Ptolemaeus mine, let me repeat for hopefully the last time; the terrible incident was thoroughly investigated by both Luna City and the UN and it was ruled an accident by both investigations. I resent your insinuation to the contrary. Aaron Bailey and the three men who died with him, Teddy Dole, Francisco Fernandez and Imran Khan were more than our boss and co-workers. In this tightly knitted, off-world community of ours, we loved them as brothers. We miss them as brothers lost. And we have honored the memory of our fallen brothers by naming the moons of Epsilon Eradni 4 after them.”

“That’s wonderful,” BBC’s Porter interjected into the emotionally charged moment. The press scrum shifted, swallowing Yukio Endo into its mass of jockeying bodies.

“Mayor Iles, for the benefit of our viewers, I was wondering if you would care to explain how the starship works.” Porter continued.

“My understanding of mathematics being limited to the fiscal, I’m afraid I only have a broad understanding of how the Hope functions,” Iles said.

“Broad strokes will do just fine, Mr. Mayor,” Porter said. “We’re journalists after all, not rocket scientists.”

“Well, the ESS Hope has two sets of engines. Her plasma engine is not much different than that which you find on most large interplanetary vehicles. Of course, the Hope’s plasma engine is more powerful than any built so far. It can accelerate the ship up to a quarter of light speed. That’s more than twice as fast as anything in space today.”

“Wouldn’t the G-forces generated by such speeds crush a human body?” The question came from somewhere in the back.

“Yes, normally they would,” Iles answered. “But when travelling at those speeds, our astronauts will be safely encased in capsules filled with an inertia dampening gel developed by Barsoom Laboratories on Ares 3.

“The ESS Hope also has the Quantum Drive which, if you don’t know already, was developed right here in Luna City. It’s this Quantum Drive engine which makes the Hope more than a mere spaceship; it is what makes her a starship.”

“And how does the Quantum Drive work?”

“You’ll have to ask my engineers for the specifics. All I know is that the drive consists of several giant neutronium coils through which a graviton current is run. The coils generate a powerful field in which the normally catastrophic energies released by the clash of matter and antimatter particles are harnessed to bend space. This revolutionary new drive allows the ship to shunt instantly through the immense distances between solar systems.” Iles turned to his engineers. “How did I do?”

The three engineers nodded approvingly.

“Why is the Hope going to Epsilon Eridani?” The question came from Telemundo’s rotund and flamboyantly mustached reporter.

“We want a closer examination of the moons orbiting the system’s two gas giants. While they are not habitable, we suspect that two of the moons in particular may be rich in…”

“Mayor Iles?” A short, large-eyed woman with blue hair raised in a crown of spikes interjected from the rear of the scrum. “What do you have to say to those who believe we should be working to improve life on Earth rather than using much needed resources to explore other worlds?”

“I have absolutely nothing to say to people of such stunted imaginations,” Iles answered dismissively. After a beat, his tone softened, becoming affable again. “But to you good people I say this: Some four hundred thousand kilometers away, Earth is a mess. The five regional powers of the former United States of America are at each other’s throats again. The racial strife that tore the old superpower apart is spreading north to Canada and is already consuming cities in Central and South America. Across the Atlantic, the European Union has disintegrated into a gaggle of squabbling states which babble incoherently at each other while Germany’s Fifth Reich and the Russian Tsar plot, plan and prepare to carve them up between the two. In the Middle East, Zion Separatists have begun a new bombing campaign in Palestine and the African and Asian Unions are rattling their sabers, glaring at each other across the Indian Ocean. Certainly, I am not alone in fearing that any of these crises afflicting the globe could easily escalate into a fifth and perhaps final world war.

“The roughly fifty thousand of us living off-world represent a precarious toehold in the galaxy for humanity. It’s an especially paltry presence considering that humanity first stepped on the Moon five hundred years ago. The pioneers of the Apollo era had imagined space exploration would be much further along by 2473, but the centuries of serial war have stymied the effort to colonize the solar system and the vastness that lies beyond it. Given the seeming suicidal bent of our species, this small, off world presence is too thin a defense against the threat of extinction. If we’re to insure our survival we must avail ourselves of the elbow room the galaxy provides us. Not only can the Earth Star Ship Hope redeem the old vision of man’s conquest of the cosmos, the starship may just save humanity from itself.”

Iles raised his arm and pointed at the ship above them. “The ESS Hope, ladies and gentlemen, is humanity’s greatest achievement. We will not apologize for having built her. This starship will open the galaxy up to us. She will…”

The lights went out suddenly. Startled gasps erupted throughout the park. An uneasy silence followed as the darkness deepened into a preternatural, blinding pitch. Mayor Iles stifled a panicked gasp but could not suppress the fit of trembling that rose inexplicably from within him. Pierre took deep, measured breaths, willing himself to stay calm and concentrated on piercing the darkness, but; he could not see a thing, not the stars beyond the dome or even his own hands before his face.

“People of Earth,” a voice, deep and almost booming, resounded around them. “You will not be allowed to venture beyond your solar system.”

The darkness lifted as instantly as it had fallen. The sense of dread remained however. The air was close with it.

Mayor Iles traded confused looks with his engineers. “Have we been hacked?” he asked.

Ostojic and Moreno shrugged. Epps pulled a tablet from her blazer’s pocket and began scrolling through diagnostics. Iles suspected a negative answer would be forthcoming from her search. There was a visceral, concussive effect to the voice that he knew could not be produced by Luna City’s sound systems. And the darkness- he could not think of anything that would have achieved so thorough and chilling an occluding.

On the eve of venturing out into the universe, had the universe come to them? The conclusion seemed inescapable. Pierre should have felt excited at the prospect of making first contact, but he felt only fear. And he was not alone. Mayor Iles saw panic growing in the faces turning to him, looking for – he knew not what. An explanation? A reassurance? An order to run and seek shelter? He had nothing for them. He exchanged looks with Shreeya Kumar. The Secretary General stared back, mute for possibly the first time in her life. For a reason Pierre could neither explain nor resist, he looked up and addressed the stars beyond the plasteel dome.

“Who are you?”

“To speak our true name would crush your moon to dust,” the sonorously rolling voice shook the air. “We have, however, many lesser names given to us on many worlds, most of which translate into your word, Guardian.”

Mayor Iles turned to Sarah Epps with pleading eyes. “Well?”

“Everything reads fine,” Epps answered.

“Where’s the voice coming from?” Iles demanded.

“Nowhere,” Epps said. “And everywhere!”

Pierre Iles returned his attention to the stars. He took a pair of deep breaths before continuing. “Guardian? What is it you guard?”

“We guard that which your civilization holds in little regard; we protect life.”

“That’s not true,” the Secretary General, finding her voice again, interjected. “We value life. Of course we do. We love life, all life-forms!”

“The cruelty you daily visit upon each other readily displays the true contempt you have for the gift of life.”

“We are not perfect, we know but…” Kumar tried to explain.

“You are savages who regularly and callously slaughter your own young, butchering them in the very wombs designed to nurture them at their most vulnerable.”

“Surely Guardian, an advanced life form like you knows that… you must know that is a difficult and a… a complicated issue, one that…” There was an uncharacteristic tremor in Kumar’s voice.

“You mistake this encounter for a negotiation.”

“It can be,” the Secretary General spluttered weakly. “Can’t it?”

 “This is an interdiction.”

“What do you mean by that?” Mayor Iles spoke up again.

“Your vessel will not be permitted to leave the solar system.”

“We built that ship,” Iles said. “We don’t need anyone’s permission to fly her.”

“You are forbidden to venture beyond your solar system!” The voice blasted the air and shook the very ground. Cries of confusion and fear rippled through the thousands surrounding the stage. Iles struggled to keep his balance as the platform beneath him pitched violently. When the tremor passed, new gasps rose from the crowd. The mayor followed their gazes to the nearest Jumbotron.

On the screen, the ESS Hope was enveloped in a bubble of light. Iles looked up and found his ship in the night sky, the blob of light was burning brighter than it should have been. A collective, sharp intake of breath around him snapped his attention back to the screen. The starship was glowing, a dim and dull red at first, but gradually and steadily, both the color and the light brightened. In seconds the Hope was glowing white and as bright as the sun, its every detail all but lost in the powerful light. And then the starship burst silently into an expanding cloud of short-lived sparks which winked out into thin wisps of ash that quickly disappeared into the dark of space.

Iles searched for the familiar blurb of light beyond the dome. It was not there. The Hope was gone.

“No!” Pierre shouted at the stars. “No! You have no right to do this to us!”

“Our right is drawn from the vulnerability of the life forms we defend, vulnerabilities which your civilization, in its present state, would perceive as weaknesses to be exploited.”

“We built that ship to explore the galaxy, not to conquer it,” Bernie Ostojic protested.

“Your history demonstrates that you do not presently comprehend the difference.”

“Of course we know the difference,” Epps objected.

“Your inordinate regard for yourselves has deluded you into believing that your sciences make you the masters and possessors of nature rather than its stewards. Such arrogance un checked would wreak havoc and ruin across the galaxy.”

“Not all of us,” Michael Moreno offered. “Some of us understand our relationship to nature.”

“You have willfully blinded yourselves to the purposes inherent in nature, your own natures included. You outright deny the existence of intrinsic purpose so that you may thwart and corrupt your beings at will. Such hubris will not be allowed to spread beyond your solar system.”

“But your refusal to let us colonize other worlds may doom us to extinction,” Sarah Epps said. “If you know anything about us, about our world, then you must know that is true.”

“Yes, it does appear that your species will destroy itself again.”

The statement stunned the crowd.

“Again?” Bernie Ostojic broke the spell.

“You have destroyed yourselves once before. You seem intent on doing so again.”

“When?” Ostojic asked. “When did we destroy ourselves?”

“It happened several millions of your years ago.”

“It can’t be true,” Porter said, almost to himself. “Surely there would be evidence left behind…”

“The memory of that tragedy is embedded within your race. It is that dim sense of an ancient fall from grace that still haunts many of you.”

“What happened?” Michael Moreno asked.

“You destroyed yourselves and most of the life on the planet with weapons of terrible might, just as you are in danger of doing again.”

Her voice strained, Secretary General Kumar asked, “Can’t you just destroy all the weapons on Earth like you just destroyed the starship?”

“Ridding you of weapons would be futile while you cleave to the hatred that abuses them.”

“So, you won’t help us to survive?” asked Telemundo’s reporter.

“You must, as a species, choose survival over self-destruction.”

“But you’re supposed to defend life, aren’t you?” Sarah Epps demanded. “That’s what you said, isn’t it? Why wouldn’t you ensure our survival by ridding us of our weapons of mass destruction?”

“We defend life. We do not protect civilizations from their own folly. We defend them instead from the malice and avarice of their yet savage, sentient neighbors.”

One of the female astronauts stepped forward. “So there are other civilizations out there?”

“Yes.”

“But you won’t let us near them?” The mayor asked.

“No.”

“B- but we could learn from them,” the astronaut protested.

“You will be contained within your own solar system until you prove yourselves worthy of the sentience with which you are graced.”

“Graced?” Ostojic barked out the question with sharp laugh. “Surely you don’t mean graced as in graced by God?”

“The Creator is the source of all graces, of life and of the very universe itself.”

Ostojic shook his head. “No,” he said. “There is no evidence for God. None…”

“Creation itself is proof of the Creator for those who do not insist on His non-existence.”

“No… no, that’s not good enough,” Ostojic continued, still shaking his head.

“Why are you arguing with him?” Cardinal Schultz pressed through the crowd to confront Ostojic.

“Because I don’t believe his hokum about a creator any more than I believe yours, Cardinal!”

“Don’t listen to him, Guardian,” the Cardinal said, looking up past the dome. “He doesn’t speak for all of us.”

“No, just the adults,” Ostojic quipped.

“Help us Guardian or we may destroy ourselves,” the Cardinal offered weakly. “Ruin the planet…”

“Should your civilization choose to self-destruct, we will erase every sign of its existence you leave behind. We will repair whatever damage you cause the planet through your demise, and then reseed the world.”

“Reseed the world?” Michael Moreno stepped forward to ask.

“We have preserved the genetic materials of every life form your planet has ever produced. It is a small matter for us to repopulate the world should your arrogance end life on it again.”

“The Cambrian Explosion?” Moreno asked, his eyes wide with awe. “Was that your doing?”

“Yes.”

“You said we must choose survival,” The spiked, blue-haired reporter said. “How do we avoid another extinction event?”

“What can we do?” Shreeya pleaded. “Tell us, please!”

“Love one another.”

A pall of shocked silence fell over the crowd.

“That’s it?” Michael Moreno asked after a while. His voice was thin, uncertain.

“It is no small thing that is asked of you,” the alien voice softened. “To truly love each other would upend the world you have created. Only a small number in each age have grasped the truth of love and willingly submitted to its radical transformation of their lives.”

“It’s true then?” The Cardinal asked. His hand flew immediately to his mouth, as if he sought to silence himself.

“What a load of claptrap,” Exclaimed the mayor.

“These visionaries have been generally reviled for sharing their insight and often silenced through cruel deaths. Embracing the truth, acknowledging that your every fellow human being is a miracle worthy of your love, this is the necessary first step each of you must take if you are to create a civilization worthy of admission into the Galactic Communion.”

“Enough of this!” Mayor Iles shouted out. “Why should we want to join your Galactic Communion? You destroyed our ship in an unprovoked act of hostility.”

“Destroying your ship cost no lives. The same would not be true of your exploration of the galaxy, not in your present state.”

“It’s an act of war!” Iles roared.

“You are not ready to be let loose in the galaxy.”

“We discovered the means of interstellar travel,” Mayor Iles said. “We did it on our own. We are more than ready. We don’t need anyone’s permission to…”

A roaring, roiling column of fire fell like a lightning bolt through the giant plasteel dome. It crashed into the stage with a deafening boom. A shockwave of searing heat hurled everyone off the platform. Pierre Iles tumbled head over heels, bowling over several people before finally rolling to a stop nearly fifty meters from the stage. The Moon’s lower gravity softened the fall and crash considerably but the impact was still sufficient to knock the wind out of the mayor. Iles staggered up to his feet. His vision blurred and his ears rang. Pierre was certain that he had mere seconds to live before all the air escaped from under the dome and the deadly cold of space swept into the park. To his surprise however the air remained hot and close. When the fog before his eyes thinned, he looked up and saw the dome was still intact.

Ahead of him, a towering pillar of fire turned and twisted in mid-air. With equal parts terror and wonder, Pierre watched the writhing, living flames slowly take fearsome shape. Six fiery and overlapping wings covered the body of the giant alien. Three pairs of diamond-bright talons protruded from the tapered bottom of the folded wings. Lances of prismatic light flew from the claws, stinging his eyes. Crowning the sheath of wings, a large head with three fierce, beaked faces protruded. The eyes on the faces were black as deep space and reflected light in the same harsh manner as the talons. The alien turned in place. At fifty meters the heat it radiated was hot as a furnace but Mayor Iles noted that nothing burned; not the stage or the bunting draped about it. Stranger still, the living flames engulfed the grass and shrubbery around it but did not consume them.

All around him, people began dropping to their knees. Shreeya Kumar, who had landed a few meters away, was one of the first. Mayor Iles turned to see tears streaming from her eyes and her lips trembling as she stared at the alien. A sickening sob burst from the man at Iles’ left. The tuxedoed visitor doubled over and howled into his own lap. To his right, Ostojic was banging his head on the ground as he wept bitterly. The woman in front of Iles pulled at her own hair as she screeched, “No! No! No!” Off her left shoulder, a nerve-chilling skirl erupted from Cardinal Schultz as he fell to his knees and began clawing at his eyes. Someone behind Iles screamed. He lurched forward at the fresh bolt of terror. And then it was a woman to his right who screamed. He shrank back from her collapsing form. Her cries were joined by another. And then three others around Pierre roared inchoately. Iles turned back to Kumar when she suddenly bellowed in anguish. He watched the Secretary General’s fists clench and unclench in spasms at her stomach. Kumar rocked back and forth all the while crying, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Oh, my babies, I’m so sorry!”

The hellish cacophony of wailing rose up around Iles in an alarming crescendo. The mayor looked up at the alien, intending to demand that it stop whatever it was doing to his people and guests, but he could not find his voice. Instead, Pierre found himself instantly mesmerized by the alien’s fiery wings. They were both beautiful and terrible to look upon, giant peacock feathers composed of high energy plasma, studded throughout with beautiful, iridescent rings and circles of shimmering chromatic lights.

Eyes!

The mayor realized they were eyes as soon as he fixed his sight on one. In that same instant of focus, through a sudden expansion of consciousness that was as frightening as it was exhilarating, Pierre found himself looking into each eye of the alien’s wings at the same time. Through the burning orbs and rings, Iles looked simultaneously out at the universe at large and deep into the quantum depths of matter. In the curious, dizzying, multi-planar vista spread suddenly before him, Iles saw atoms and solar systems whirling brightly through boundless dark. He watched cells and galaxies spin like storms through measureless voids. Between the microscopic and macroscopic panoramas, endless layers of throbbing life unfolded like petals, weaving themselves into numberless strata of sizzling, crackling energies and myriad, dazzling forms. 

The reeling vision strained his mind to its limit. Wanting to take it all in, trying to see beyond the glimpse at the sliver of eternity opened before him, his brain threatened to burst in an explosion of billions of sun-hot neurons. Despite his every effort, Pierre’s expanded consciousness could touch it only fleetingly, the hem of a vast, unbounded tapestry strewn with stars and atoms and… And purpose!

Pierre saw it, felt it like a bolt of electricity. Purpose. It was everywhere, clearly hinted in the grand design which at once infused and enveloped everything. The cycles within cycles and the patterns upon patterns which scientists found everywhere and dismissed as mere regularities, they were, all of them, suddenly, clearly, undeniably purposeful! Every particle, every being was meaningful, made for a specific end, a particular purpose, each one ingredient in an overarching, boundless design. He saw it, the truth, clearly in the alien’s blazing eyes. It was inescapable; the whole universe pointed beyond itself, past the veils of darkness and void to the Giver of Meaning, the Setter of Purpose, the Intelligence which wrought the design, the Maker of Heaven and Earth, the Creator God!

Pierre Iles shuddered at the realization. He shrank from the last gossamer veil separating him from the divine. He was afraid to peer any further, to see past the dark, to look beyond the void, to the truth at the core of the universe. Pierre turned away, collapsing upon himself. His macrocosmic consciousness imploded. In a disorienting, disturbing telescoping of the distance between him and the alien, Iles suddenly found himself beneath it. Only now he was no longer looking through the eyes, but was himself the subject of their scrutiny.

Every eye held a memory and an accusation. In one he saw his old boss Aaron Bailey dying, slowly, painfully under a crushing load of moon rocks. In another eye, the mayor could see what Bailey saw as he died: the dusty darkness illuminated by flashes of his helmet’s flickering headlamp, his last breaths fogging up the helmet’s visor and the dark drops of blood splattered against the glass as he coughed up the last gasps of his air. In other eyes Iles saw the deaths of the mine’s supervisor and the two engineers who were buried along with Bailey. He saw their dying, experienced their death pangs. He felt their pains and fears, their longing for loved ones they would never see again. Pierre heard their desperate pleading with implacable fate and heard their dying prayers for God’s mercy. The alien eyes opened windows onto the sorrows of the loved ones the four men left behind; Pierre felt the heartache of the wives and children, the parents and friends who mourned the men he had deemed expendable, the men whose murder he had arranged for ambition’s sake.

Pierre had never been able to shake the gnawing of guilt he felt over the four innocent lives he ended; but he had hoped that the starship he had sacrificed their lives for would have taken his remorse with it when it left the solar system, quieting the ghosts in his mind. The alien’s eyes would allow no such solace. The weight of the evil he had wrought through his vainglory and brutal ambition brought the mayor to his knees. He tried to look away but could not. All he could manage was to shake his head and moan, “No, no, no…”

The alien’s searing glare burned deeper, laying bare the whole of his life, displaying the entirety of it in an expansive, intricately detailed tableaux which exposed his every sin, particularly the violence Pierre Iles had inflicted on himself, on his own humanity – yes, on the very soul he denied having. He saw with new eyes and watched in horror, not only his most recent tryst with Michael Moreno, but all of the thousands of acts he had committed and subjected his body to in the pursuit of wanton pleasure. Iles re-visited them in the light of his purpose as both a human being and as a man, the purpose woven into his very biology, writ large in his every cell and made plain in his anatomy. Iles shrank in disgust, recognizing, at last, his indulgence of sodomy for what it was, an objectively vile, life-thwarting corruption of his human nature.

Against every drop of his will power, Iles’ gaze was drawn upward to the beaked faces of the alien. He wept, begged to be spared the torturous scrutiny of their abysmal eyes, but his cries were in vain. The faces fixed their merciless gaze upon him. Michael Moreno stared back at him through the same alien eyes. And Sarah Epps and Bernie Ostojic, Shreeya Kumar, the reporters, each one of his fellow Lunatics and guests, he saw them too. And they looked back at him. In another distorting dilation of consciousness, he was soon looking all of living humanity in the eye; and they all stared right back at him. Billions of human beings, each one instantly and intimately aware of each other, everyone recoiling from each other as they looked upon the loathsome monstrosities their souls had been twisted into by their fears and their hatreds, their malice and their apathy, their lusts and their gluttonies, by their every sin of commission and omission. Billions of souls shrank beneath the thunderous groans of their fellows, tortured by hunger and violence under their callous neglect. They shriveled hearing the cries of the innocents butchered daily by the millions.

Humanity despaired as one. Pierre felt the dread as a lance of ineffable and infinite horror thrust through the core of his being. The pang wrenched the ground out from beneath him. He was suddenly falling and screaming, trying in vain to empty his soul of the primal, existential terror that possessed it. His screams joined the screams of others; the collective cry, a soul-shattering roar torn violently from humanity as they flailed about madly, searching desperately for purchase on the event horizon of Hell itself!

With a violent lurch, at the peak of terror, mankind was pulled from the maw of the fiery maelstrom. All across the solar system, humanity, released from the harrowing vision, was left weeping and writhing like unearthed grubs, still in the grip of the terrifying truth of their individual lives and the tragedy they made of their shared world.

On the moon, the alien flapped its wings, one at a time. They rose and fell in a spiral pattern. The alien spun in place on the stage, slowly at first and then swiftly, losing its shape until it was once again a turning and twisting column of fire. The then alien rose, passed harmlessly through the great plasteel dome and disappeared into space.

The wailing, the moaning and the sobbing continued long after the Guardian returned to its post deep in the heart of the sun where it would wait patiently for humanity’s next move.

The End