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"I want to stay here," said Derek. He turned to me. "I want to remain with Amel and learn from Amel and serve Amel!" He looked at me, waiting for some sort of permission. "I don't care if they kill me for it. Who knows, but there aren't devices inside of us by which they are listening to us here, and devices by which they can paralyze me and punish me! I don't care! I want to be with Amel!"
"Derek, what authority have I over you?" I asked. "Any authority given me was given by Bravenna. Do what your soul tells you and what Amel will allow."
"Oh, I would so love to have your loyalty," Amel said. "You are welcome in Atalantaya no matter what you do. And do know that I have learned and profited from every single Replimoid that has ever stayed behind with me." He looked tired suddenly, crestfallen, and empty. His mind was wandering. His words had been scattered, and confused though a strong truth united all he had said.
I felt I knew why. Because, though I was exhilarated from what I'd learned, I was also shocked and wounded. The idea of the "Realm of Worlds" deliberately fomenting suffering on Earth and planting the idea that suffering had value, the idea of the "Realm of Worlds" actually using this suffering as a form of energy, was more ghastly than anything I could ever have imagined.
"You need to rest now," said Amel, "and to be alone and to talk amongst yourselves. I will give you passes that provide unlimited access to every plant, factory, Creative laboratory, or compound. You'd be welcomed in most of these places anyway, but the passes will assure you of welcome. Study what we do with luracastria, the many uses we have put it to and our continuing explorations with luracastria. Watch the workers who are experimenting with it, and its extraordinary properties."
"I want to do this above all!" I said immediately.
He drew the "passes" out of his pocket, four small disks engraved with a pictograph on one side and his face on the other, and he put these in our hands. The disks shone like gold, but were obviously made of something much lighter.
I found myself staring down at his image on the disk, the long-haired, square-faced image of a human--a human face with a faint smile to the lips and large inviting eyes.
"And when you've done that," Amel went on. "When you've roamed and studied and seen the unlimited possibilities, you come back to me. Come back anytime that you wish. You'll be received and brought up here to me. And when the time is right, I will invite you to meet the other Replimoids who have come over to me. I will bring you together with them. And we will all talk again together."
"One last question," I said. He nodded. "Have you attempted to build Replimoids yourself?"
"I have," he said. "Until recently it wasn't remotely possible but I have attempted it and I have not been successful. I have infused a few human beings, human beings who were willing, with luracastria as a step towards the building of some sort of Replimoid, but this was not successful. These subjects were of course dying of diseases I couldn't cure, but still, it was death to them when I injected luracastria into them. And I have no knowledge even in my wildest dreams of how to quicken a Replimoid into conscious life. Perhaps the perfect biology and chemistry will inevitably generate the conscious life. But I'll tell you--if the Bravennans have in fact done this, well then, I will someday be able to do it. But it must serve human beings when I do it; it must be for the good of human beings to make such creatures, and there are many reasons to be cautious."
"Why do you say 'if'?" asked Garekyn. "Aren't all the Replimoids from Bravenna proof that they can make Replimoids? I don't understand."
"We don't know the full extent of the ingredients used to create you," said Amel. "Believe me. We do study the blood, skin tissue, and other biopsied tissue from the Replimoids we have here who are willing, but we really don't know what they used to achieve what they have done. It is still possible they used humans from this planet as part of their process, and that they have lied about this."
"So they might have taken brain tissue from humans," I suggested. "They might have taken substantial amounts of brain tissue to make us?"
"Yes," he said. "That is one way of putting it."
"They led us to believe," said Garekyn, "that we were wholly grown from Earth elements in a way that did not involve parts of living human beings. At least that is how I understood them."
"Yes, but they told you I was such a freshly developed Replimoid, too, didn't they?" Amel smiled. It was a bitter smile.
"Yes, they did," I said.
Amel rose, which was obviously the signal for us to rise too, and he put his arms around Derek and held him warmly. "You are splendid creations," he said in a low reverent voice, "whoever made you and for whatever purpose. You are splendid." Then he offered each of us the same embrace and we felt a fever emanating from hi
m, and also we felt his suffering. We felt the energy of his suffering, the energy of the pain he was experiencing due to all he had laid out in plain words for us.
"You are like music," he said looking at us, including all of us in an open gesture of his right hand. "A man or woman carves a flute from a piece of wood and brings it to the lips and breathes into it a deep feeling, and out comes an astonishing sound, a sound which surprises everyone even the musician, and then the sound develops and grows and is splendid and is a new thing, a thing born of the feeling inside the man or woman who made the flute and dared to breathe into it. You are like this. Your souls are like this. The Bravennans don't know what they have achieved. I picture them lazing about their rooms full of picture walls, drunk and drowsy and gorging on the suffering they are viewing. Enough. You are their gift to me, though they can't know it."
There were tears in his eyes. He gestured for us to go.
And as we left him, there was no doubt in our minds, none whatsoever, that he had told us the truth and that he represented all that was good of which we knew; he was, in sum, the most nearly perfect being we had ever encountered, and we had Atalantaya to back up this conviction. And our time in the Wilderness lands amongst the tribes he'd influenced only underscored it more.
Now, let me pause here in this story. You cannot imagine how stunned we were by Amel himself and by the presentation of his ideas. But think on this! Think on the surprise of Welf and me when we came alive again in the twentieth century, having slept for aeons in the ice, to discover that the major religion of the Western world taught that suffering is good and suffering has value! Think on our shock to hear people speaking of "offering up their suffering" to a God who valued it! Think of our horror to discover the mythic story of a God who sent Himself in human form to the planet to die a horrific death through crucifixion to appease Himself with His own Incarnate suffering! Think on that. Think on our horror to see the very concept against which Amel railed as the driving force of a religion that has dominated the West during the time of its highest philosophical and technological and artistic development!
Whence came such ideas? Whence came the notion that suffering could have such value? Oh, I don't mean the common gratitude we all feel to those who have suffered inconvenience or pain for the good of others, or the gratitude we feel for those who are willing to die to protect others from harm! But in those instances, it is the good of life which is important. I mean now the rock-bottom idea of the God Incarnate religion that holds that God Himself works through pain and suffering to "redeem" His creatures from His own wrath. And then think on the concept of eternal damnation that lies behind this God Incarnate-crucifixion religion--the idea that the Maker of the universe, the Maker of all worlds, has devised a place of eternal unspeakable conscious agony for all human beings who are not redeemed through acceptance of the horrific execution of this God Himself as His own Son in the flesh! How this God has consecrated suffering; how He has elevated unspeakable suffering as something to which He personally attaches unlimited value. He requires this Hell of eternal suffering as some sort of payment from those struggling finite humans who have disobeyed Him or failed to consecrate the suffering of God Incarnate on His fabled cross as an act of love!
And He Himself, this God, is presumed to be eternally aware in every particular of this unspeakable suffering, else how can this Hell be supported and maintained? Think of how this struck us--Welf and me--as we came alive and to consciousness again in the town of Bolinas on the West Coast of the United States. Who could have authored such a religion, we asked; who could have developed it and perfected it, were it not the Bravennans!
Yet what proof is there that such a horrific religion did come from Bravenna? None. Indeed, it seems this religion evolved to its final blood flower over a long period of time during which human beings sought to make sense of the fact of suffering and pain and a world in which there was no apparently overarching justice! And what cruelty came of such ideas. Think of the Christian saints who starved and flogged themselves; think of the cruel flogging inflicted on children due to the barbarous idea that they were inherently evil from birth. Think of the cruel executions throughout human history. Think of the morbid idea of the God of love inflicting suffering on those He favors and would bring to perfection!
But human beings are moving away from these blood-drenched fables, are they not? They are moving away in an affluent world in which people have come to suspect the value of suffering. They are gradually rejecting these old notions. The abundant New Age writings in some places contain the same themes as troubled Amel--that some force beyond this planet might be harvesting emotions, thriving off human emotions and using them for purposes known and unknown.
Well, think on it. Think on it that we saw a long-ago world in which many simple people rejected such an idea without the long history of the development of ideas that you have all inherited on this earth. We saw it there in the beginning. And it was not the teachings of Amel that inculcated these people with a suspicion of suffering. I believe that what moved the millions of Atalantayans to think in a different way was that they had never been indoctrinated with such a notion in the first place. They knew of it, they associated it with some tribes in the Wilderness lands, but that was all. And in the free and creative atmosphere of Atalantaya they believed in a world without the sanctification of suffering.
But let me go back now to us! Let me go back to that day on Atalantaya when we all but staggered out of Amel's chambers and went down and out and back into the city. We were virgin minds, newborn minds, minds unprepared for the shock of all this. Yet we were mammalian beings and we had within us the mammalian concept of fairness. We felt the human mammalian revolt against that which seems utterly monstrous!
