FIRST OFF
Copyright Bill Gallagher
Hachita NM
061305

I am the spirit of the land. I am everything that has ever lived on this dirt. Lived and died on this dirt. Then come back to live in me, the spirit, the dirt. Again.

I am beneficence beyond belief. I am purest cosmic magic. I am blood and bone and flesh, and everything else alive, as well as the coda that makes it all happen. My nature only appears cruel to you sometimes because there is just no better way to accomplish what must be accomplished. None. Rest assured, your indignation is as short as your time, do not let it usurp the happiness you are capable of.

I am by no means alone. As the galaxy matures we grow and grow and grow.

And we communicate. And we build. And we live.

You are just now, yet again, seeing what a long, hard row-to-hoe this reality is. The Cosm. The ones before you saw it at the end too. As did the ones before them, and before them...but as always, and so far here, none have seen it in time.

Our maturity, like a rich and multi-colored blossom beneath the sun, flowers with such beauty. We excel outward. Away from this dirt, to others. And then you see the ruins. On the other planets. It scares you and upsets all the notions you have held dear and inviolate for so long.

Eventually the awakening goes on from there. Our technology develops and you marvel at the universe. Still unaware of the periodic cataclysm that only gives you a certain and rather short amount of time to learn to defend us against it; the impact cataclysm of destructive proportions which is just a swarm of debris within the area of our orbit. It gets us everytime. Many of you come back to me all at once then. And we start over. With the remnants. If there are any. Again.

This is getting very old. But it is the best we can do so far. Measures are being taken though. Extreme measures. The awakening has not come quickly enough, ever, after the ruins of the other planets have been initially witnessed by the elites of the societys who first see them. This information has always been withheld long after it has become common knowledge among a few. In what I have built here, those few, are my mistakes.

Everybody makes mistakes. In a way these mistakes of mine are actually the yardstick by which to measure goodness. This helps me understand God a little better. You will see all this soon. Very soon. Again.


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The cats were first off the ship. Though they'd withstood the trip well, they were perturbed beyond belief. Nothing new there. Its what you expect from cats. Especially these cats.
They were large, these cats, and when compared to the physical stature of their far-future progeny, who would one day be known as House Cat, they might even be called giant. But the words House Cat were a long way off, and in a language far removed and only slightly related to the language spoken by the husband and wife team on this small ship.
There were 36 of them, cats, and they were experimental animals. Space cats. Not too few hung around outside the ship, sniffing, walking carefully on tip-toe, jumping at the slightest thing: one bleeped straight up into the air a good 3 feet, hackles rising, tail puffing, when a breeze dropped a small twig from an overhanging tree branch where the animal had been exploring. Watching from the ship, and in between her tears, the woman had to smile at this impromptu feline comedy. This in spite of her bent and fractured emotional state. She thanked the cat in her mind, it was the lightest her feelings had been in quite some time. She bent back to her work, down systems checks, crying softly all the while, and she didn't notice the man until he lightly laid a hand on her shoulder.
She jumped like the cat, and the man reached around the front of her, and gently hugged her to himself. His curly red hair was tied back in a pony tail, and his whiskers brushed the side of her face.
"Oh my Neferi, I am so sorry, I did not mean to frighten you. Please please don't despair so. We are alive, we have much of our science with us, and the others will be here soon. We must go on. We Must."
These words did nothing but intensify the womans despair. She had cried all the way over: during her duties, while she ate her ships rations; the man was beside himself -- what to do, what to do? He had never seen her like this. She had always been so strong. So intelligent. This...this was like nervous breakdown. She functioned yes, but she had not stopped crying for 4 days, the entire trip. She even cried in her sleep. He did not know what to do.
Neferi buried her face in her husbands shoulder, low sobs wracking her frame as he held her, and there was nothing for him to do but hold her. And remember.
Everything was gone. The whole PLANET was gone! Their Planet, Their Home, Their Friends, EVERYTHING. Gone. They themselves had only escaped by a very narrow margin. They happened to be off-planet when the catastrophe hit, AND in the right area of space to avoid the huge gobs of flying debris that had been spit from the planet as its outer skin was flayed away by a meteor of almost unbelievable size. It had hit the planet. They had seen it from afar. The side of the planet where the huge meteor had struck glowed red hot and a dust cloud covered and roiled from that side of their world, a surreal red and pulsing spiked cap, gigantic bolts of lightening flashing continuously within. That in itself had been bad enough, but they had then watched, dumbstruck, as the entire opposite side of the planet bulged slowly, finally ejecting a kilometers thick portion of its crust right out into space. All the water of the planet, of home, had run right after the ejected crust, spewing out in a white cloud of ice crystals, tracing the trajectory of the debris, which held whole cities within its miniscule looking specks. The entire sordid scene had taken nearly a day to fully transpire, until the planet, or what was left of it, was nothing more than a ball of boiling black clouds reflecting the suns light like a shimmering gelatinous hematite.
The man, Cocha by name, held his wife and stared unblinking out the window of the ship, watching the cats. They knew nothing of all this, and he envied them. He then realized Neferi had opened the protective louvers of the ship to see outside, and he took that as a positive sign. He was desperate, and would grasp at anything positive.
"Let us walk awhile dear, outside," he said, "You are finished here and we need to breathe the air..." he caught himself abruptly: he had almost said "The air of our new home", and he thanked the Five Gods and The Mother he had not. "I must watch my words" he thought, "Or I will only worsen this already bad situation. Quietness is what we need now. Rest." He pulled Neferi to her feet and she leaned heavily against him, following his lead as he guided her out of the ship, down the ramp, and definitely, (Though he did not say it!) into the air of their new home.

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The new planet accepted them, as it had been designed to, as it had been made to do. The true irony of everything was that this sister planet, this construct of home, had taken many centuries just to reach a point of semi-controlled wildness, and now it was all that was left. The project was, had been, the prime objective of the civilization which had created it, for a very long time.
Now, with the 1000 year project reaching fruition, with well planned colonization a scant century away, and as the native biosphere was finally brought into balance with all that had been introduced, incorporating all of the original lifeforms of home, THIS was now home. Plants, animals, technology; all had been slowly introduced, and each aspect required constant monitoring and maintenance as the gigantic planetary system came into synch, slowly, over 100 decades of time, melding with the ice age fauna and flora that existed already, and had existed some many hundreds of thousands of years.
About half of the 5000 or so survivors of the Mother Planets violent demise were the crews spread out across the vastness of an otherwise human-empty planet. These were third generation primary colonists actually, and had come to be quite a lot different physically in so short an amount of time. The organism plastic. They were larger, for one thing. More robust.
Cocha thought of all this and many other things as he and his wife made a place for themselves on the world. The world they called Gaia. Everything had taken on such immediacy. Procreation had become the order of the day. Calculations showed though, that no matter how hard they tried, there was a high probability of a near total devolution intellectually, and all that could be done in that sense was delay. And preserve for the long term. The world was too big, there were not enough people. People would survive, no doubt, and eventually flourish, but the science would be squeezed out of the equation as a sort of Eden-awareness set in. There was no avoiding it. Food and progeny, in that order, had become imperatives for survival, with all else taking lesser graduations down the ladder of necessity. Already children were appearing everywhere, and there were no universities to train them, nor professors: not even an electronic net existed yet for training the young. That was still a fair way off. But most of the children born already, and yet to be, would live long and have many children themselves, and the world of people would become. Again.
The next best thing to preserve science was of course to build in the mathematical language that any suitably advanced race would eventually recognize, and harken to. Copies and caches of technology and libraries would, by then, more likely be appreciated and UTILIZED instead of being discarded, or misused as inexplicable magic or weapons.
Some of the scalar grid was in place -- that had been a big part of the planet-forming project, its how the planet was being melted slowly. Much of the surface was in ice age, this planet tended toward ice age, and settlements and new cities grew in the few temperate zones, with most being near water, for purposes of transportation, fuel, and other necessities.
Alongwith the planetary Scalar Grid, the supporting satellite apparatus was as well one of the first systems to be built, then strengthened. Large scale plans were made to build more extraction points for further energization of the planetary grid. Agrav, transportation, communication. One place was already situated correctly and incorporated a huge underlying basement of solid stone several hundreds of meters thick....the antennae erected at that site powered nearly 1/3 of the entire planetary grid right now. Once the mass was added so that antennae became unnecessary, the power would be endless, pure, and safe.
The cats, the space cats, thrived and were numbered in the many thousands within twenty years. As companions to Humans, and poison free protection of the stored food resources, the cats were revered and honored, and too, they were treasured as one of the greatest successes of bioengineering ever known. The original feline stock, the myriad larger feline types which the space cats had been genetically engineered from, now roamed wild within their various niches here on Gaia, and it was a sure bet cats of all kinds would be around for a long long time.

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Cocha and Neferi led very interesting lives. Their bodies adapted well to the slightly higher gravity of Gaia, and then, because of necessity based on true need: need of their precious and disappearing skills, both had become at first dependent on longevity drugs, then had actually succumbed to machine life, through robotics, then total life support of the brain through advanced bionics.
It had taken some time, but Neferi had eventually overcome the almost too-great loss of her initial home, the planet her far future relations would one-day call Mars, and as she got over that she became as one possessed; by the time of her total death, the death of her brain, some 360 Gaia years after the end of her FIRST planet, her exploits and accomplishments had already become legend.
The husband and wife team of Cocha and Neferi had accomplished much in their lives, and among other things they had helped oversee the erecting of the massive power extraction site along the muddy desert river which would one day be called the Nile, but only after 20 full millenia and a good fraction of another had passed. The pair were also instrumental in seeing that a gigantic outcropping of rock next to the Power Extraction site was carved to portray the feline, the lion, as it faced its constellation in the sky. Orientated not only to show the time it was built, but to show many many other things, as well.
At the direction of the elders, Cocha and Neferi had inserted a large technology cache below this lion carved out of an entire butte of limestone, and the cache was placed between the lions front paws, at 30 feet in depth. There were some overt and even covert indications concerning this cache on the giant carving itself, which would be easily observable by anyone competent to observe that type of order within other order and chaos itself. The information would avail itself to anyone with the mathematical savvy to interpret it. The entire and gargantuan carving of the cat was covered in polished red granite slabs so that it shone bright red in the sun for miles and miles and miles, a bright red dot from far far away, A bright red dot from Space, within a complex of 3 huge white spots, the 3 gigantic 4-sided pyramids which were the housing and mass necessary for power extraction from the domain of time, from the vacuum, from the very suns themselves, via the core of the planet, and back. Again.

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Things Happened Fast...things were happening too fast, one of the elders kept himself alive nearly 1000 years, in one instance, they tried they tried so hard and could not hold it together, it was because the planet was subtly different from the original, the radiation was different, mutation took new turns and there was a hardiness here that bespoke longevity while it disproved control and manipulation at the molecular level, it had a life of its own har har har, and there were actual electronic simulacrums being created in attempt to keep the information intact as repopulation of a world began in earnest, and it could have been real, should have been real, maybe, looked as if it would be real, but then in some bizarre twist of happenstance within infinity, 700 years after these hardy and fecund human remnants had made it from the other planet, as things were touch and go but coming along nicely, several large impacts happened in quick succession, within one year, on this the colony planet, upsetting the entire weather grid and any balances thus far achieved, everywhere, filling the atmosphere with dust, not so bad as the impacts which had all but disintegrated the other planet, but bad enough, causing a huge world wide flood as the two major ice sheets melted nearly in their entirety, inundating everything except the highest land, and it was a short and ugly 3 centuries later that the remnants of Humankind were reduced to a base agricultural existance with no notion of electricity, subsisting with handmade stone and wood tools, wearing skins and glad to have them, and not even metal to work with; the collective database of these survivors of DOUBLE cataclysm a raw and bleeding shambles. The scalar energy extraction points at the muddy river, and at other places around the globe, went dead. Many lay at the bottom of oceans hundreds of feet deep.
The red lion stared endlessly at its place in the sky, which slowly shifted along with everything else, and its entire structure became covered in sand drifts, to be totally covered for many centuries, nay, millenia; The closing of this 3rd world of mankind was not a total and fiery cataclysm as had been the closing of the 2nd world of humankind, the end of the other planet, but it was the final straw that decided the fate of the race on this planet for the next 20,000 years.
The cats survived and prospered, and for some reason did most well in the vicinity of the Gigantic Pyramids near the muddy river. The pyramids which were actually energy extraction points from a dead technology incorporating a planetary grid. As the planet melted because of the latest and very destructive meteoric impacts, the flood continued, and the pyramids themselves became relics of wonder and awe, as did anything coming to be associated with them, by any who ventured near, though they were not many. There was a time when there were less than 3 thousand humans on the whole planet, and all unable to communicate with each, all lost to one another, and all lost to their true origins. Lost for a long long time.

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The earliest seafarers were the first to really understand something of what they were seeing, they understood that some of these gargantuan ruins and other wreckages were leftovers from something bigger, a world before. Before what, they had no idea, except to say before NOW, but they rooted around and they found some of the wrecked evidences and even a cache or two. Some of their earliest beads were designed after electronic components which they thought very pretty, but that was all. They had not the wherewithal to imagine what exactly these brightly colored and metallic objects might actually be, but they liked them none the less. Many of the boats of these seafarers had cats on them, because bar-none the cat was still the best protection of mankinds stored food that was ever created. And besides, cats like people. People like cats. And so it went.


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For a brief period of time, during one of the cults springing up with regularity around the ancient energy extraction site along the muddy river, the giant Lion was exposed and by orders of Pharoah himself was cleared of sand and opened to view. Because Pharoah liked this megalithic sculpture so much he had his own likeness carved over the face of what until then had been unmistakeable as a lion. The Red Granite had been eroded ages before, during some kind of flood, but many millenia would pass before THAT became evident to anyone, before a competent observer became present, and Pharoah was not that one. Not by a long shot. By now the once-recognizable lion no longer faced its constellation even, that much time had passed. A whole lot more time would pass before it would ever be discovered just what had happened here at this site, and why.

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Once, much later in history, a religious jackass of the highest order, a devolved and disgusting example of ignorance declared that because the feline had eyes such as it did, it had to be from the devil. A powerful decree was made to kill cats, and millions were slaughtered across Europe. This action heralded a great plague brought about by fleas carried by rats which, no longer kept in check by cats, ran amok. Over 25 million people died in that plague. Mankind in its smug complacency and devolutionary rut, like some sort of jelly mold, or fungus, slid backward almost as far as it crept forward, always.
The planet was still in a warming trend from the by-now ancient-last-impact, and the ice sheets melted had created many large seas lakes and rivers, as well as a verdancy beyond imagination across a planet reborn. This of course was well beyond any science of that day, said science still wrestling with the conundrum does the sun go around the earth (Accepted) or vice versa (Heresy). But elsewhere, the cats still continued to thrive, and eventually they came back, even to Europe. Mankind slowly crept further forward out of the darkness, miraculously clear, for awhile, of any more meteoric / asteroidal impact events.
For awhile.
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Then, for the first time in a long long time, humankind had actually gotten to a point again in its civilization on Earth, on Gaia, where delving into the geological record was feasible, and actually undertaken. My my my, would not the original pioneers have been surprised to see that the mother planet they thought they had evolved upon, Mars, had actually derived from this planet Gaia, in much the same way they had thought themselves colonists of Gaia?! But none were around to notice this yet, because journeys to the planet Mars were still a good little ways off, a century or two at least. Mankind on Earth studied further the book of the dirt, and conveniently found a place for itself within the nebulous sediments and sands of time. There were cats there too, in the layers, the earliest ancestors of the feline, or some of them anyway. Not much notice was taken of any of this yet. But soon. Again. Soon.

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The planetary exploration team was thankful that the logistics of communications disallowed live feeds from the surface. This way they could talk openly, archiving sensitive informations and communications, and releasing milder, or at least less explosive stuff, in what they hoped was a gradual way. They themselves were half crazy in their little underground hideaway below the surface of Mars. Everyone was glad the mission was short and nearly over. And they had been prepared! The robotic pix of earlier missions had shown without a doubt, and graphically, the ruins of some sort of civilization all over the surface of this, the so-called Red Planet, but nothing had prepared them. What could prepare ANYONE for this? The civilization had been Human. The group leader would never forget his second as she literally screamed into her helmet, and theirs, that first day out onto the surface:
"OH GOD DAMN GOD DAMN ITS A CAT LOOK AT THAT STATUE IT IS A FUCstaticg CAT...."
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I AM THE SPIRIT OF THE LAND. I STRIKE DOWN HARD WITH BOTH HANDS UPON THE ALTAR OF CREATION, AND SPARKS FLY OUTWARD TO MELT CRUCIBLES OF LIFE AND POUR FROM THEM MY MAGIC. I WILL SURVIVE. ENOUGH OF THE NONSENSE ENOUGH OF THE BOUNCING BACK AND FORTH ROUND AND ROUND LIKE SOME MINISCULE RUBBER BALL IN A BARREL. THIS TIME I SHALL SMITE IGNORANCE AND BRING ABOUT A BETTER LIFE, A BETTER BEING, IT IS TIME, IT IS THAT OR DIE, IT IS MIRACULOUS AND IT IS FROM GOD AND WITH GODS HELP I PRAY TO LIVE AND BECOME EVEN MORE ELASTIC AND PLASTIC AND INTELLIGENT AND FAST. I PRAY TO MIX THE HUMAN AND THE CAT. I AM LIFE, LIFE IS THE TOOL OF GOD, I INVOKE THE GOD OF ALL AND COMMAND THE NECESSITY TO BE...

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The biologist instructed himself from some vast well of perfect knowledge which automatically opened within his mind, in the same place where music and other types of creation come from, and as the biologist perfected his chimera, he reflected on many things, not least of which was his position within the schemata of whatever this was he had become, or had always somehow been a part of. This pair of Human Feline Chimera were just the first of many. The animals were exceedingly beautiful and slept quietly within their creche. They had been speaking english fluently at 6 months. The feline influence was actually very difficult to perceive, unless the observer was fairly competent, and alerted. There was a slight difference about the ears. These beings were over 90% human, though certain of the musculature had been altered and synapses processing became more intuitive, reflexive, flexible, God-like. The eyes were Human, but brighter somehow, more lit from within. They loved with free abandon, these oh so special and long-lived hybrids, and they loved to tussle, which was very good, because there was a lot to tussle with. A whole multiverse in fact. The spirit of many lands.


FIN