And the World Changes, A M Kirk [best feel good books TXT] 📗

are the creatures most humans fear more than any other. Ah – I see our ship’s environment is re-established now, so I can show you my true form.
Mark looked on as Striped Arm removed first his helmet, which was effected by detaching certain tubes and plugs and lifting it off, and then the body suit, which was removed in the same way a human would.
The Soros stood before him.
The head was larger than a human head, the features flatter, the eyes much larger and hooded with scaly skin. Thick bony ridges surrounded eyes and nose. There was no hair. Thick cords of muscle held up the head, for the Soros was a biped. The arms were similar to human arms only much more muscled and stronger, and the body was sheathed in a thick, scaly armour that would take the skin off human knuckles. The groin area was smooth, the genitalia being held inside the body until the season for use. The legs were well muscled and the knees hinged in the opposite direction from that of humans, which made the Soros look like someone had given the top half a savage twist of 180 degrees so he was facing backwards. There were three toes. The hands, however, had three fingers and an opposing thumb, a feature which anthropologists and biologists had correctly deduced was necessary for the development of tool-handling capability in any species. Behind, there was only the vestige of a tail, for like humans that appendage was no longer needed for balance and so had all but disappeared.
The creature continued:
We are the original civilised beings from Planet Earth. Look at our map. And this point here was our first homeland. It has long since vanished under the surface of the planet, by the constant moving of the planet’s tectonic plates. That is an area you would call the Pacific Ocean. And here is my home. Do you recognise this area?
Mark looked. It’s Scotland, he thought, or what Scotland was millions of years ago. That is why they are here, in this place rather than another.
Yes! But now you will find no more trace of the beautiful cities we built or the wonders we created in our time on earth. Believe me, we have looked. Our high culture, ten million years in the making, which resulted in our ability to fly to the stars, is as if it had never existed.
As our land has vanished, so yours has come to the fore – that triangular shape is what you now call India (he pointed to the map) and, a few million years after the making of this map, it collided with Asia and formed the Himalayas. This, as you correctly perceive, is Scotland, and the mountains here were the oldest in the world, higher than the Himalayas are now. Yet, like our culture, and our cities, and the people we left behind, even these mountains will be ground down by time and fade away, and all that will remain of them is what you now call the Scottish Highlands.
That little sea – it was only about five hundred kilometres across at one time – is what you call the Atlantic. That small patch of water, no more than a pond really, will become the Mediterranean Sea.
“Pangea, “said Mark. A name recalled from a programme on the Discovery Channel. The name for the original super-continent. “That was the map I drew from my dream…”
Yes. Pangea is your name for it. This was our world. Now gone. Try to imagine what we feel.. Can you imagine that? No, you cannot possibly. Ah – but then, you know what it is like to lose a home. We made sure of that, Michael. Not quite the same thing, but now we can talk on a very slightly more equal footing. You feel sorrow – and there is another of our little jokes. We feel sorrows – the Soros. But our sorrows are deeper and sharper than you can possibly imagine.
Mark saw the image of a small creature being tended by a mother. They were Soros, yet the affection between them was obvious even to his human perceptions. This domestic scene, some kind of recording perhaps, or a memory given 3-D representation, was in a room high up, very high up in some enormous towering building, for behind, through a narrow open window in a thick stone wall, Mark could see out over a magnificent landscape. Behind the mother and baby was evidence of a mighty civilization capable of magnificent creations: a mountainous landscape filled and crowned with wonders indeed.
Then Mark appeared to be flying through this ancient landscape, so different from the one he knew. He could even feel the moist coolness of white clouds on his goose-fleshed arms as he flew between shining towers, kilometres high, and gleaming citadels, fertile valleys, soaring peaks. He crossed, hundreds of feet up, a vast plateau parkland. Gigantic beasts roamed in herds.
Our cattle, explained the Soros. Your textbooks speak of these lumbering beasts as rulers of the planet, but it was not so. They were our cattle. And the creatures you call tyrannosaurus rex (The Soros’ voice seemed to convey amusement) we kept them for our sport. No, they did not rule – we ruled! We ruled. And the evolutionary branch from which humans developed, the mammals, your ancestors, in our time were no more than little mice, shrews, smaller than your fist. Our children used to keep them as pets and train them to stand on two legs.
“What happened?” Mark wondered.
Ten million years of evolution, replied the Soros, were wiped out in an instant. We had conquered all the ills that plague you now – hunger, disease, old age – and we had mastered our genetic code, something your race has still not been able to do fully. There is much you can learn from us. Our lifetimes extend to many thousands of your years. We on this space ship have been travelling for three hundred years. But because we have spent much of that time at speeds very close to the speed of light, time slowed down for us. Three hundred years for us meant millions of years passed on Earth. We knew that would happen. We were willing for that to happen. Your own scientists have figured out as much. But what we did not imagine was that when we returned our entire civilization would be gone. Gone.
The Soros grief was unmistakeable.
Your textbooks have the reason: it was a comet, hitting the Earth in the equatorial region, in the area of what you call the Gulf of Mexico. But we calculate there were other impacts all over the planet; only these are not evident now. How the collapse of our species happened we do not know. Like you, we had developed powerful weapons and the world was well defended, against just such an eventuality. Perhaps they could not be deployed in time. We just don’t know. We, on this ship, must have left just weeks before the comet struck.
So we, on this ship, represent the crowning achievement of our evolution because we are the last remnant of it. Only one other ship capable of interstellar flight had been built. Only two. We launched at the same time, on the same mission.
Kind of like Noah’s Ark, thought Mark.
But only one ship has returned, continued Striped Arm. We left our planet to take part in a journey of discovery. As I have indicated, our understanding of the physical laws of the universe had led at last to a means of reaching speeds very close to the speed of light. We have indeed travelled right round the galaxy in less than one of our lifetimes, while those we loved, our lovers and our children, became dust blown over a dead land in the wind of centuries. So when we said we came from the other side of the galaxy, we were not lying. In a manner of speaking, my left hand is on one side of the galaxy and my right hand is on the other.
Again Mark clearly detected amusement in the tone: another trick; another play on words.
But – in that journey round the galaxy, we discovered something.
Now Mark felt darkness envelop him. He was on the bridge of the Soros space ship, staring at a view-screen that was dark except for a few pin-pricks of light. He saw what they had seen at the moment of their “discovery”.
What you are seeing now are the stars on the outermost edge of our galaxy, explained the Soros. The furthest fold of the spiral arm. It was here we found…
The Soros could not translate the words.
The monsters? The old ones? The dark gods? The enemy? The Soros could find no real words in human vocabulary to describe exactly what they had found in these furthest reaches. But Mark knew with absolute clarity that what they found made them deeply afraid.
We dropped out of light speed in a dark solar system. Its sun was collapsing and was on the verge of extinction. It had six planets in close orbit around it and as its gravitational pull intensified the planets would be drawn in to their destruction in two to three hundred years.
The Soros, as you will have realised by now, have a telepathic link with each other. This link, which had enabled us to achieve so much, was finally to prove our curse.
We needed supplies of uranium and some other minerals to replenish our power sources, so we spent some time scanning the planets for signs of it. My ship located some on the fourth planet and our second ship explored the third, a dark, desert, lifeless world, forbidding in every aspect.
The second ship had no sooner touched down than the crew was assailed by the most horrible fears and visions. Realizing that some force, or forces in the planet itself, were the cause, they tried to take off, but the ground beneath the ship had somehow “bonded” with the hull, as if the planet’s soil had formed claws and seized the ship’s legs in the tightest of grips. This “bond” had happened even at the sub-atomic level. That was why our anti-gravity propulsion had no effect, and the ship was trapped.
In our minds we had no choice but to witness all the horrors the crew suffered. Creatures came, life-forms unlike anything ever imagined. They were not carbon-based, like Soros or human, they had nothing in common with animals or insects or anything that we would describe as ” life”. They moved through matter like… like we move through air. Solid, liquid, gas, it made no difference to them. They seemed to move into matter at times, and inhabit it, changing it to suit themselves. They moved in the spaces between the atoms, the sub-atomic, scarcely comprehensible dimension. Using the energy that makes our telepathy possible, they could enter an individual’s mind and, with a gentle torturing “caress”, throw the brain’s electrical activity into havoc. They could change molecular densities, atomic weights, and alter cell structures. We became for them like a human child’s plasticine toy.