Feeling much relieved and not a bit self-conscious at not having washed my hands, I began to explore the ship and I realized, before long, that something was very wrong. There was simply nobody anywhere!
There was the slight hum of vibrating bulkheads, common when starships were in close proximity to a planetary atmosphere.
But this was no ordinary planet.
This was Sparthios.
In the old writings of Sephis' religious past, after Empion rose from the dead after his execution on the Ganymede Truss, he spent a little time among his disciples before fading away. The Church of Empion that rose to prominence after he had vanished had named Sparthios, that point of light in the sky which was later found out to be a planet, as the home of Empion.
In those old writings, associations with Sparthios were generally positive. Until an old Caprician book was found that also spoke of Sparthios. Needless to say, it caused quite a ruckuss with the more conservative elements of religion. Here they were, dumbasses all, worshipping this guy, Empion, who made Sparthios his home, only to find that Sparthios was also a figure in ancient Caprician literature who was not only associated with the interests of Capricians but also answered to something obviously larger, Omnae. Whatever or whoever that was!
It pushed our religious fervor down a few notches and then came the play. A play that posited that Empion and Sparthios were two homosexual lovers and then all hell broke loose.
Bombings here and there.
Drum beating.
Breast beating.
Claims and counter claims.
Sephis survived. A lot of people did not.
Eventually, my world became more and more secular though there were those that still believed in the more conservative elements of the old Empion religion. The story of that girl peddling religion was one example. Still, today's incarnation of what passes as conservative religion would probably have shocked their earlier counterparts.
There was always the old staple where men could not fuck men but, did the current incarnation of the conservative religious ever think about that other old staple of men being unable to fuck women they were not married too?
Of course not!
Nowadays people pretty much fuck whoever they want. Kids are no longer taught not to do something their elders obviously couldn't do but, rather, it became a forgone conclusion that if their elders couldn't keep their pants zipped up, who could they expect the kids to do so and so their elders tried to ensure the least amount of accountability.
Shit, I doubt fucking outside of marriage is even considered a sin anymore.
So, if that is the case, why are the conservatives of today dicking around pretending to have an aversion to homosexuality?
Apparently, rather than taking the few seconds to realize that such a position could never last (look at what happened to sex outside of marriage!), they water down their faith with compromise. If current social trends accept sex outside of marriage, well fuck! God must too!
Just you wait, homosexuality! Social acceptance (and thus God's acceptance!) is coming!
Anyway, with all this 'progressive' shit going on, secular Sephis did not know what to make of Sparthios.
The home of Empion seemed to be a tangible world and since atheists and secularists piss themselves with giddy excitement whenever the chance to take a shit all over the beliefs of the religious arises, we, in grand fashion, sent ships to Sparthios.
Then. THEN! We would have
proof that Sparthios was just another world.
If it was the home of Empion, they would undoubtedly drag him back to our little fucked up world strung up by his nails if need be!
The religious were aghast at the effrontery and there was much fanatical violence at the time.
Imagine everyone's surprise when Sparthios shat into everyone's lap when we lost contact with those ships.
To this date, no ship traveling to Sparthios ever came back. No transmission was ever received from the ships that made their way there and no bit of scanning ever revealed their fate.
So, I'll tell you want happened to them.
All the fucking people disappeared from their damned ship!
I am growing more annoyed than anything as I make my way around this Caprician ship....nevermind it is an Imperial design.
A person might try to make shit over the fact that here was a democratic government making use of an Imperial design as if doing so made the democratic government the bedmate of old Emperor Palpatine. I mean, shit! If the Imperials designed the condom, did that mean every child who practiced safe sex was a fucking Imperial sympathizer?
According to some shit I see that comes over the bandwaves, probably so!
It seems that the progressive agenda is to wipe away as much accountability as possible. Oh no, Mr. rapist murderer. It's not your fault. It's the fault of your parents for beating the shit out of you when you were little.
I mean what the fuck?
Some of those little snots need the shit beaten out of them!
*
"Cosmic thoughts?" intruded a voice.
"Fuck off!" I barked, clearly annoyed by the things that were rattling around in my head. The last thing I needed was some other fucking annoying thing intruding. Of course, that might explain why I was not married but I was not in the mood for a "Why I am not married" introspective.
"Looking for something?"
The voice sounded really close and as I turned from a view port staring at the mass clouds of nothing surrounding the ship, I noticed a man standing in the middle of the corridor.
He was tall, thin, long blond hair... you know, the good looking kind of fucker that all regular people hate. I know I hated him. Probably make a girl wet herself with one of his devil-may-care shady grins.
"Silvest," he opened his mouth to talk but I was having none of it.
"What the fuck do you want?"
I may not have his good looks but I definitely was not going to go female on him and lose my wits!
"Why did you stab yourself with a stylus?" he asked and I was instantly afraid.
Anyone who casually intrudes upon your most secret of secrets without so much as a forewarning so you could prepare a plethora of denials demanded a goodly amount of fear.
While stabbing myself with a stylus may not have been my most secret of secrets, the public embarrassment of the situation would have been such that I chose to hide that memory in the same room along with all of my most secrets of secrets.
The fact that he could get into that room was cause for much concern indeed!
"Maybe I wanted to know what it felt like!" I snapped back. I was impressed with my off-the-cuff comeback that seemed to flow out of my mouth as natural as smoke to a smoker.
"You are a very disagreeable man," the other said and I sneered, "What do you know?"
"You are a modest reporter of what passes for news on your world. You hate your world, your society, yourself, and most of all, your parents who disappeared on a ship sent to visit me."
Each word seemed like a baster shot piercing my body burning through my soul. Well, maybe not quite that bad but it still seemed like a feeling of walking around naked in public without realizing you are naked until someone points and giggles.
But what the man said was true about my parents. I wanted to haul off and hit him until his words replayed in my mind once more and I realized just what he said.
"Sent to visit
you? You're Sparthios." I did not frame that last part as a question.
Spartios bowed as if he were a character from antiquity. "Guilty as charged," he grinned.
I did not wet myself but my heart did flutter.
Stang, this guy was good looking!
"So, you going to kill us like you killed everyone else that tried to visit you?" Now that was a question! As much as this guy stirred up strange emotions from both past and present, it was not enough to overwhelm my good sense of self-preservation.
"My dear man, what a dreadful thought! Of course not!" Then he paused, "At least I don't think I will."
That last part was not, I must say, very faith strengthening about my chances for the future.
Speaking of faith, my eyes began to narrow.
"You know, Empion died for our sins and only had our best interests at heart," I interjected into the uncomfortable silence that followed.
Sparthios grinned again and it was infectious. I felt a grin tugging at the corners of my mouth.
"What makes you think your perception of me is correct?"
And there was the bitter seed to this fruit.
What indeed?
The residents of my secular society looked at their collective religious beliefs of the past and seemed to, with each passing generation, revise them to their liking. Take the whole sex outside of marriage thing. It was prohibited back before the first computer was a gigabyte in it's creator's eye and, for the longest time, the words of the Book of Empion was law. And, you know what? People seemed to be able to follow it! Granted there were all sorts of punishment if one did not as added incentive but, by and large, it
was followed!
The current residents of my secular society, for whatever reason, felt they could not follow that prohibition. We all knew that the real reason was they just did not
want to follow it. And they maintained their piety over generations of loosened strictures utilizing the idea that if God, or Empion (if you will), loved them then he would forgive them their trespasses even as they ran to commit the next trespass. They effectively removed the guilt and thereby the accountability.
It was a cute solution to the 'religious problem vs. carnal desires' but we are a resourceful, clever and slick bunch.
But, whereever did we get the idea that such justifications that ran through our minds to assuage our guilt would hold weight with God himself? With Empion or .. Sparthios as he seems to be named?
So, in lying to ourselves, we ended up believing the lie. With God around to call foul, then, what the fuck? Why wouldn't we believe the lie?
There!
You see what I did?
I even blamed why we believe the lie on God! I got this whole avoidance of accountability down pat!
I wasn't going down without a fight!
"The fact that you did not correct us!" I shot back, grinning just to spite him.
Sparthios was not without his own defenses.
"Since I do not need to validate my existence with your perception, what you end up perceiving is of no consequence to me. Only to you. For you see, I do exist and you are affected. So, while you may blame me for all your little world-views that come crashing down around you, it does not change the fact that they will be coming down.
Your world is going to die."
The fact that the world is going to end was always in the back of my mind. Even our own society came to that conclusion if one simply read the fiction (shit! even the non-fiction) of our world. We are all shitheads waiting to be flushed out of this cosmic toilet.
But hearing it from the lips of this grinning fucker made me mad. I don't know why but it just did.
"We all die," I snorted out as if I had balls the size of giant melons. "It's not like you gave a shit before, why should you now?"
Sparthios just shook his head, not in disappointment really but... pity. "You
are a disagreeable man."
I wanted to shout in triumph when the man, Sparthios, simply shrugged his shoulders. "Ok then. Die."
He started to turn around as if to walk back to whereever he had come from when panic overtook me. A real fear that this grinning fool really did know what he was talking about.
It is funny. Our cultural holovids will play out stories of God's angels coming down from wherever it is they come from intent on saving some pregnant teenager from god's wrath because her little bun-in-the-oven is supposed to somehow save everyone. They never really explain how.
The last savior was nailed to the Ganymede Truss by the people so what these story-tellers expect a second one to accomplish is beyond me. But some people lap this drivel up like it was laced with spice.
Anyway, these story teller never quite indicate how this one rebel angel can take on all of God's forces in protection of some stupid knocked-up wench's unborn baby. For all we know, it could be retarded.
What this illustrates to me is that we give God absolutely no respect.
Why the fuck do I care?
Did I mention that he said, 'Ok, fine. Die'??
Could the man be bluffing? Possibly.
But consider this: The facts are, anyone and everyone who has tried to come to this world has never been seen or heard from again. We presumed them dead and had a healthy, if waining, fear of this place (and now person).
It's like forgetting what fire did to your hand when you put it in. We stupidly stick it back in.
"Don't you care?" I pleaded.
He looked back, sardonically, "Don't you?"
I had nothing to come back with, damn the man!
He folded his arms and leaned against the bulkhead, "Why should I give effort to save you when you are unwilling to save yourselves? You are like the man that prays for his clothes to remain clean and then goes rolling around in the mud."
"But it is said that you love us." I countered weakly.
"So do men to their wives. And yet they still cheat on them or divorce them. Oh, I'll be sad for a little while that you're gone but my affection is not going to save you if you do not give a damn about being saved."
"But you are better than us."
"Yes, I am. But that does not mean I am going to be a sucker of poor manipulation by a people that couldn't give a damn about the consequences of their actions. You may have avoided immediate accountability but accountability does not go away. It's just been stacking up, like debt, and now... now you will feel the effects."
I got mad, "Then why don't you just kill me like you did my parents!"
"First, your parents are alive and well. Second, when I said your world would die, I did not mean by me."
This was turning out to be a very emotional visit. I am pretty glad that he made the crew vanish because I don't think I could have held my head up high among them after this had he not.
"My parents are alive?"
"Of course."
"Then where are they?" I demand.
"On my world." Sparthios simply states.
"Prisoners?"
"You might say they are in protective custody."
"Perhaps I should break them out?"
"If they wanted to leave, perhaps you might."
I tired of the game and simply sat down on the starship floor. The floor was cold and hard. Just like life, I suppose.
I only had one question left in my arsenal and it was not barbed. It was actually quite desperate.
"Why?"
Sparthios sighed and sat down next to me. "On your world, what would you do if you saw a woman being mugged and she was screaming for help? Say she saw you walking by and shouted for help?"
"I might continue to walk by.." I said truthfully.
"Why?"
"Because you stick your nose in other people's business, that business has a way of showing up on your doorstep the next day." It was true.
"Well, every time some yahoo comes to my world, I am faced with a dilema. My construction involves a level of understanding beyond the current galactic techological plane. Suffice to say, that I can tap those understandings to observe the results of their interactions."
"What?"
"I can see the future."
Before I could reply, the good looking man continued, "It is not something I dwell on personally but I have found that with those who visit me, it becomes something of an annoyance. It seems the future is something of a worry with everyone else in the galaxy. And with that knowledge, I've seen from the most earliest of visits that you people tend not to take any satisfaction but, rather, work to change the future."
"Was the future dire?"
"Of course, it's dire. Your cultures are relatively young, bouncing around from here to there never their minds on where they are! What they are doing!"
It was obvious that Sparthios was channeling someone but I did not recognize who.
"What is wrong with trying to change the future?" I asked. "Especially if it is dire?"
Sparthios shrugged. "Nothing at all. Just like nothing would be wrong with you interfering with a woman being mugged. However, the moment you do interfere, you become a focal point of interaction. Despite your good intentions, you become a part in a situation you were only, moments before, observing.
So, your parents came, I appeared, I showed them the direness of their situation and what would happen if they made choices to alter that dire future. I also showed them what would happen to them after their choices were made. Or, rather, what would happen to you after they acted and returned."
"So, you're saying that as fucked up as my life has been this whole time, it could have been worse? And it would have been worse had my parents come back to me? So they went where?"
"Unfortunately, if your parents went to other worlds the accountability of their actions would have followed them. The universe does not let go easily when you start tampering with those aspects of mother nature she does not like you tampering with.
However, it just so happens that the world you named, Spartios, my world, lies outside the universe's reach. They are living here and they are happy."
"Well they couldn't have done much if the future of my world is still dire," I hated to take a dump on my parents memory but hey, my life was hanging in the balance here.
"You think it is a matter of the scale of action taken to remove the dire threat? My good man, there are multiple threats from multiple actions that effect a multitude of other situations. The actions of your parents alleviated one threat only to ensure that you are here now, to deal with another. They did not know it would be you but you will appreciate that this situation does give one a sense of awe. The universe works in mysterious ways."
"So, what is this dire situation?"
"I told you. Your world is going to die."
"When?"
"Oh, quite soon. Within the decade, give or take."
"So, what do I have to decide? How do I alter this dire future?"
Sparthios stood up and, with a hand, helped me up. "Well... You need to figure out if you want the Capricians dead or not."
Whatever I was thinking, it was not that!
"WHAT?"
"Do you know what would happen if these Capricians returned to your world? They would be the first to ever visit Sparthios and return to tell the tale. It would be a sign and it would make quite an impression on your world. Quite an impression."
One did not need to be a magic man to realize that though my thoughts had to be pointed in the right direction.
"Shit. They would join this Commonwealth for sure."
"That they would. Obviously, I would have to become a more extroverted entity where these Capricians were concerned but that is besides the point."
"Does joining these Capricians bring a dire future to my world?"
"Of course! Their problems will become your problems. Your world will die."
"So, how do I avoid this dire future?"
"Quite simply, you tell me to kill these Capricians."
"Kill them? Aren't you a part of their history or something? Did they make you?"
Sparthios grinned, "I would like them to produce the bill of sale?"
"What about me?" Let's face it. This was foremost on my mind.
"Well, if the Capricians are dead, they cannot take you back to your world. So, you get to stay here, meet your parents and live happily ever after."
I paused. My parents! They'd been dead in my mind for so long, would I recognize them? Hell, would
they recognize me?
Kill all the Capricians and my world would not die!
I rubbed my hands together and I turned a sly eye towards Sparthios.
