69. (Seeds of Eden.)

THIS POST IS A DRAFT; a more recent version of this story can be found at reido.deviantart.com; this one will not be updated again.

I
A steel flower floats through the darkness of empty space, spinning slowly, it's metal petals pointing in all directions. It is empty, lifeless. It has floated thus for decades, but now its time has come. There is an inaudible vibration as processes start working internally--the petals fan out more evenly, and the flower discharges its seeds: synthetic metal pods, wrapped in heat-and-impact shielding. Carriers. Lifeboats. Hundreds of them, thrown in all directions. Barren now, the flower begins once more to spin, a monument to a scientific venture on a scale only partially comprehended by its creators.

II
An artificial seed flies through space, propelled by momentum. Its sleek shielding protects it from the cold of space, and the errant radiation of the stars in the distant void. It is one of many. On its random path, it reaches a belt of frozen asteroids. At first, the seed is lucky, and slips through without harm. But this luck does not last, and the seed impacts a solid mass of roughly equal size to itself, crumpling on impact and splitting in two. The halves float, broken, and spill their electronic and bio-organic contents into the emptiness.

III
An artificial seed flies through space, propelled by momentum. It passes just close enough to a small planetoid to be pulled in by its weak gravity, but its velocity is too much and it slingshots around, speed increased exponentially. At this speed it reaches a planet--a lush paradise of water and plants, or air and life, a place perfect for for the seed to grow--and slips thunderously through the atmosphere. But the speed is too much: parachutes deploy in preperation for a landing that will end disasterously, but the high-tension cording that attaches it to the seed snaps. The seed strikes solid ground and is flattened, bits of synthetic steel flying in all directions as it shatters and crumbles into itself. The parachute descends into the crater like a token of mourning, covering the wreckage in its white cloth.

III
An artificial seed flies through space, propelled by momentum. It vanishes into a massive, burning star, and it, along with its contents, are vaporized instantly.

IV
An artificial seed flies through space, propelled by momentum. It never stops doing so.

V
An artificial seed flies through space, propelled by momentum. It reaches a lush planet of plants and water, air and life. It slips through the atmosphere with a boom as the air of the world parts before it. The parachute opens, slowing the flight, and the seed drifts slowly to the ground amidst a dense forest. There it rests for several hours, testing the air, tasting the soil, drinking the water. It finds the air toxic, the soil poisonous, and the water deadly. It incinerates its contents and shuts down, little more now than a piece of rubble on a forest floor.

VI
An artificial seed rests in the vastness of a desert. It tests the soil and the air, but finds no water--and it, too, destroys its contents.

VII
An artificial seed breaks atmosphere, deploys its parachute, and sinks into a planet-wide ocean. It is eventually crushed by millions of tons of pressure far exceeding anything its builders had expected it to face.

VIII
An artificial seed lands gently on a sloping plain. It tests the soil, air, and water nearby and finds them all satisfactory. With a click and a hum, it begins its next task. A pair of tiny, bio-organic cells are rapidly thawed and charged with electricity. Each, now living, resides in its own capsule within the metal seed, floating in a reddish fluid. The shielding on the cell protects the cells as it protected the seed before, shielding them from the alternating harsh heat and cold, from the shocks of seismic tremors, from the curiosity of the native fauna. Both tiny lifeforms within the seed's inner workings begin to grow and form. The seed conducts very specific electrical charges through them as they mature, shaping and molding them into its creators' form.

IX
Years pass after the seed lands. Eventually, the capsules hatch like eggs and two pink, fleshy creatures, a man and a woman, emerge from the seed, naked but fully formed. They are devoured by local animals before they know how to defend themselves.

X
Years pass after a different seed lands on a different planet. The man and woman of this seed awake and hatch to find themselves buried alive. They die without ever seeing the blue sun of their new home.

XI
Years pass after yet another seed lands on yet another planet. The man and the woman of this seed emerge on a small, isolated island in the middle of a vast lake of fresh water. A violet sun shines down on them, warming their bare skin. They stare at each other. The electrical charges of the seed that guided the forming of their bodies to these human forms also guided the forming of their brains, and they have a basic understanding of who they are. They are the forbearers of culture on a new world. There is a crack and a hiss from the remains of the seed, and it begins to fold in on itself, compressing and overlapping, until it is no longer the seed, but a small cube of leftover parts. It speaks a language whose name is lost across the vastness of the empty sky: "If you are hearing this than your creation and birth has been a success. This is the voice of your creator. There are great plans for you and it is I who will teach you how to survive that you may continue our great cul--" The man smashes the cube with a rock, on impulse. A hundred generations of knowledge is lost in an instant, and a society's dream of being born anew on a fresh world, undespoiled by their vast industry, vanishes. He smashes it again and again, until it has shattered into dozens of metal pieces. A man and a woman stand alone on a lush, habitable island in the middle of a huge, fresh lake.

XII
Years pass for the man and the woman, and eventually their number increases. By the time Orillan, the male, and Merrith, the female, are physically incapable of reproducing, there are twelve humans living on the island in the middle of the freshwater lake. Their skin is tanned a light shade of lilac. Their hair has been dyed by the radiation of the violet sun to a dark, watery blue. Each generation--the original, their four children, and their six living grandchildren--is lithe and fit, having lived on a diet of fish-like creatures, clam-like creatures, and small lizard-like creatures, as well as the local flora: leafy "greens" (they are actually more of a teal-blue color), small melons, and berries. Each of the children was born the same pinkish-white shade Orillan and Merrith bore upon exiting their seed, the color of their creators, but after time in the violet sun each in turn became the same lilac shade. They are strong swimmers, but still, after decades of time spent on the island, the far shore is still too distant to reach. But today is a monumentous day for the family: their simple raft is completed. Today, Gerif will paddle across to the far shore in search of new foods, new living habitats. In truth, he wants to escape the island. He is of the third generation, one of the six still living. There have been many more--but, as genes were mixed and brother mated with sister, these many others were born disfigured, monstrous, imperfect. They were drowned, as an act of mercy, and to keep the bloodline strong. Gerif is the only member of his generation aware of this fact. He steps onto the raft and pushes away from the bank. Old Orillan watches, slightly hunched over, grey-blue hair blowing in the breeze. Soon Gerif is but a speck nearing the horizon, but still the elderly grandfather watches. He watches, as a large ripple appears in the dark water near his grandchild's raft. He watches as this ripple moves, moving alongside the young man. He watches its maker nudge the raft, curiously. He hears Gerif shouting--and he watches the raft overturn, a horror of tentacles and teeth and claws gripping it and tearing it apart, tearing Gerif apart. He sighs, and turns away. The far shore remains too distant to reach.

XIII
Years pass. A fifth generation is born, and Old Orillan and Merrith pass away, replaced at the head of the family by Gerif's parents, Morath and Tew. Today is the day they buried their elders. Orillan and Merrith had arranged previously with their brood where, exactly, their bodies would be covered. It wasn't until the digging was finished that Morath realized why they had wished thus. He holds in his hand something hard and cold, something alien to him. He stares at it--a chunk of the seed of his parents' birth, which they'd buried after pulling it apart. He slides an edge across his palm--and draws blood. And Morath laughs, a deep, masculine bellow, as he realizes the gift he has inherited.

XIV
A year passes. By now, there are thirty men, women, boys and girls living on the island. And still, the bloodline has been kept pure, the malformed drowned on the beaches of their isolated home. Morath stands on one such beach, holding a tiny babe in his hands, beneath the water. The child was born with too few fingers, and a face pinched closed, with eyes that would never have opened, and legs too small to function properly. He can hear the child's mother, Geya, wailing in the distance; she is not as far as he believes her to be, however. When the tiny kicking stops, he lets the body drift away with the tide--and wraps his hands around the only other object on the beach: a weapon. A long stick, taken from one of the island's many trees, with a chunk of the seed attached to the end--a long, slashing blade tipped with a stabbing point. A primitive spear, a primitive poleaxe. Morath has made a dozen of these, and distributed them among the stronger males of his tribe-family. They have built a larger raft, a stronger raft. Today is the day they reach for the far shore, or die trying. Morath will lead them across, but in truth it was Tew, his mate, that made the need known to him: they were rapidly running out of space, and food. Today, they would sail across, all thirty of them, and claim the mainland that has been little more than a horizon their whole lives. Their choice is simple: die slowly of starvation and overpopulation, or die quickly to the monsters of the deep lakewater. The decision was unanimous. They pile onto the wide raft and the younger females begin paddling towards the far shore.

XV
A beast comes from the deep, gripping the side of the wide raft with its tentacles. A young woman is tugged over board and lost, devoured. Morath's only brother is crushed beneath a wide claw. But they fight--male and female both--stabbing and slashing and hacking at the beast as it kills them. And eventually, it sinks away. Twenty-five men and women, boys and girls reach the far shore, their new home. Their leader drops his weapon on the sand and falls to his knees. Morath grins, spreads his arms wide--and spits a gob of blood compulsively as the tip of his own spear bursts, bloody but shimmering, from his left lung. Geya, panting, screams in his ear, rips the spear out, and impales him again, this time hitting his heart and pinning him to the hot, unspoiled sand. Silence descends on the ragged band of lilac-colored survivors. Geya stands over the body of her father, and catches her breath. She turns to the others, and delivers her ultimatum.

XVI
The family splits. Years pass. Then decades. Then a century. Then two and three. Life on the island was lush--life on the mainland even more so. Theirs is a world with few land-based predators, and those that do exist learned quickly to fear the soft, lilac beings. The Geya tribe, having travelled far from the freshwater lake, lives in dugouts in the soft earth. They no longer kill their imperfect young. They have become a people so radically different than Orillan and Merrith that it is difficult to see any family resemblance. They have weathered the storm of their inbreeding and come out a stronger people, larger and broader, less human. They climb the great trees with ease, dig with their broad hands with little effort, and take advantage of everything the land gives them. They have become something close to native, embracing the planet and changing to live upon it. They are no longer what the seed's creators envisioned. Their distant cousins, however, cling unknowingly to the creators' dreams. The Morath tribe, remaining near the lake, have spread out along the beaches. They keep their bloodline pure, as their forebearers did. They are a thin, lithe people, but not physically strong. They do not live long; unknowingly, they have suppressed their own natural adaptations to their environments. They travel far to the distant mountains once a year to mine a material not unlike the metal of the origin seed. These alien metals they forge into new weapons, blades and cudgels of varying sizes and utilities. They are a people of tools, of weapons.

XVII
Genri lies, tied and gagged by vine-turned-rope, in the center of the largest Geya village. Strange men stand over him--huge-armed, small-eyed, small-legged. He is young, and has no idea that these people are his distant relatives. The largest of them--a female, with leaves and something-like-feathers in her hair, exits a deep dugout in the earth and stands over him. She asks him--in his own language!--who he is. Wide eyed, the thin man is unable to answer out of fear. One of the males kneels before the female and presents Genri's weapon--a long blade on a short handle, roughly as long as his forearm. A sword, of sorts. The female takes it by the handle and hefts it, and the blade whistles in the air; she runs it along her palm--it bleeds profusely, but she does not fear it. She says something in a bastardization of Genri's language, and he only understands two words: kill, steal. She kills him with his own weapon, cutting his throat; he feels no pain. That night, she returns to her dugout and uncovers that which makes her queen of the Geya: a spear, still caked with blood. It has been passed down from the tribe's namesake to each leader in turn. It is the spear that split them from the Morath, still marked with the blood of the man who bore that name originally. Every leader of the Geya has been told the tale of the split, though most of their people have forgotten it, forgotten the Morath even exist. The queen, Shicha, knows. And she smiles.

XVIII
The Geya descend on the unsuspecting Morath mining expedition like a fury of flesh and death. Despite their superior weapons, the Morath do not stand a chance. They die to the last man, woman, and child. The cries of the dying, and then of the celebration, can be heard from the Morath villages that line the shores of the lake. Children weep; women fear; men rage. War is coming.

XIX
The Morath strike first. An expedition, armed with the best of their weapons, strikes out into the jungle to find the Geya homelands; hundreds of thin, lithe men work their way through the jungle, and eventually come across a village of dugouts, of misshapen people, of Geya. They slaughter them in their sleep.

XX
The Morath retreat into the mountain from which their weapons come. The flee into the caves, the smell of their burning homes still fresh in their nostrils. The Geya come soon after, screaming for revenge in a language half-shared between brothers and sisters of such distant relation. The Morath reach a dead-end and are forced to turn and fight. Their numbers are equal, and in that cave, the remains of both tribes are snuffed out, blade and rock and fist smashing bone and skull and life. The progeny of Orrilan and Merrith bring about mutual genocide.

XXI
There is a crack and a hiss from the remains of the seed, and it begins to fold in on itself, compressing and overlapping, until it is no longer the seed, but a small cube of leftover parts. It speaks a language whose name is lost across the vastness of the empty sky: "If you are hearing this than your creation and birth has been a success. This is the voice of your creator. There are great plans for you and it is I who will teach you how to survive that you may continue our great culture." The man and the woman listen, laying on their backs on smooth green grass, under the light of a green-yellow sun.