The iri

In the ninth month of her travels, Admira Tsen landed on a tiny planet somewhere near Proxima Centauri.  The exact position of the planet was impossible to say since each day’s discoveries altered the starcharts completely.  Admira was used to this kind of uncertainty and was equally unfazed by the inhabitants she met there after landing.

            They were a kindly race of humanoids, to be bluntly self-centered about it, with a rich culture and a distant history.  As always – as an exoanthropologist – one of her main concerns was understanding how they saw their own beginnings.  To what did they attribute their existence and how did this affect their way of being?  It was a central part of her thesis about the common ways all sentient beings thought about the cosmos and their place in it.  And so far, she was proving herself right.

            This is the entry she made in the library based on the tale she was told by the inhabitants of PC127349:

            In the beginning, long before we humans ruled the earth with our fear and our fearful technology, there were a Great People who lived and thrived on our world.  These were the first ones, the new ones, the inaugural hopes of mankind.  They were delicate and perfect in their appearance, they knew no disease or deformity, they understood the world and accepted it on its own terms. 

            Their home, the earth, as anyone who lived at that time would have known, was seeded by beings from another cosmos who came here to create a world.  There is no name for these beings but in their tradition we will refer to them as the iri. They were starfarers, these iri, and wanderers and seekers.  They roamed the stars and eventually came to the earth and seeded it with their DNA and from these twisty seeds grew the Great People. 

            This was the way of the iri…to seed worlds and to observe the outcomes.  They were not godlike but more like gardeners.  Planting and watching, watering and studying.  Not immortal or all-knowing, the iri were subject to fate themselves.  Yet they were students of how things unfolded and were never strangers to the worlds they made.   All of the Great People would have seen them and known them as their creators.  In fact, the iri might even become too attached to one of their creations, which is the cause of the turmoil in this tale.

            They iri were not actually separate beings but rather like aspects, like the separate voices we all have in our heads.  For our purpose we can think of them as individuals with names and appearances but this would be just a storytelling convention.  And following this conceit, we can speak of one of the iri named Aia, who was wise and curious, and who fell in love with one of the Great People whose name was Entu and who lived in a place known as the OneCity, a great metropolis at the center of the world. 

             Entu was tall and kind and was a friend to Aia but did not know the depth of her love for him.  It came a time as the eons passed when the iri thought to shake things up to see what might happen.  Thus came the idea to destroy the Great People of the world they had made in order to see what new crop of humans might emerge.  To experiment with a Grand Replanting, you might say.  The iri, powerful as they were, did not have the power to do this directly.  But they could manipulate certain natural forces and so they arrived at a decision to create a flood on the earth and wash the surface clean of the people before starting again.

            But Aia secretly felt sorry for her Entu and could not bear the thought of losing him.  Sworn to silence about the plan and therefore lacking the ability to save him by her own hand, she whispered to his house the idea of building a boat to sail over the rising sea.  When Entu went to sleep that night, the house embraced him and squeezed his dreams so that when he awoke, it was with a sudden and undeniable vision of a great boat on a stormy sea.  He did not have knowledge of the flood and so Entu assumed that his boat would bring in a great bounty for all the people of the OneCity.

            As he made his plans, his neighbors became curious about what he was up to and Entu answered as honestly as he could that in a dream he saw that the Great People would soon be surrounded by abundance, a wealth of fish, and generous rain.  He did not himself know that the abundance would be floodwater and the fish would be within it and that the rain would spell their doom. 

            For many weeks and months Entu worked on his boat – a great grand ship in fact –  the largest ever seen on the earth.  He worked diligently with his family and fed his workmen like there was no tomorrow, which of course there would not be.  But as the skies darkened and the work came to an end, a different vision appeared in Entu’s dreams…not bounty at all but a horrible storm that might wash away the world.  He thought to warn his friends and neighbors but knew in a dark insight that it was too late.  They could not all fit on the boat, great as it was, and would surely sink it to the bottom of the sea.

            Entu understood what he had to do.  He gathered onto his boat all the members of his family, and plants of all kinds, and all manner of animals, and his gold and silver, and a small group of merchants, craftsmen, teachers, and philosophers, and the books of his library.  All the things needed to re-create a civil world when the floods had passed.

            Then the storm began and raged, and winds and rain and hail swirled and whirled.  The iri used their understanding of the laws of nature to whip it up into a frenzy.  It took all their combined powers working in unison to focus these dire energies, the forces of chaos and disorder, the quantum flux, the destructive powers of antimatter and dark energy.  Only Aia refrained from joining in.  And all the while, Entu and his little community – his microcosm of the earth – cowered in the holds of the boat and wondered what would become of them.

            Power feeds power, we all know this to be true.  And once unleashed, the powers of disaster have their own will.  But even the iri misunderstood this for the forces they unleashed were uncontrollable.  Unwittingly they had opened a crack in the cosmic egg.  Chaos reigned not just on earth but throughout the universe and soon it reached their own realm and threatened to destroy the iri themselves.  In an instant they saw that they too were part of creation and had unleashed forces that would destroy them as well.  What have we done? they cried.  How can we save ourselves?  We are killing our children and in that killing, we are killing ourselves.  How can we have been so blind? 

            Powerless to stop what they began, the iri cowered in their realm just as Entu and his family and friends did on their boat, just as the rest of the people were engulfed in the waves that washed everything away.

            After a time, the storm subsided because no storm can last forever or the world would be a storm.  That is a rule of life too.  And the sky cleared and the waters began to recede.  Entu awoke one morning to find his boat perched on a tiny island.  In fact it had come to rest atop a mountain, the only one high enough to poke above the floodwaters.  Had any other land been spared?  Entu released a dove but the bird returned too soon.  Then he released a swallow that could fly for much longer, but it too returned.  Finally, a raven left his hand and after many days it did not return and they decided it must have found land.

            Plank by plank they dismantled Entu’s great boat and they made smaller boats, and divided themselves accordingly, and set off to find larger islands on which to live and thrive again.  But before finally leaving their tiny mountain island, they burned the bodies of those who had died during the journey.

            The iri smelled this pyre and knew instantly that people had survived the flood.  All their effort and planning had gone to waste, the experiment had failed, there would be no new beginning.  They argued and debated this outcome for a long time, but then eventually turned to Aia since they knew her feelings for Entu and suspected that she had warned him. 

            In her defense, Aia made an eloquent plea.  At fault was not her own feelings for Entu, she explained, because that was part of the outcome of their work too.  Instead it was the very notion of the flood.  To destroy all of their creation was wrong since it would tell them nothing about the laws of life.  To begin again would deny what they had begun in the first place.  But to allow some humans to survive…that would continue the work they started.  Only that would weed out the weak and allow the strong to survive.  Is that not a better test of our seeding? she asked.  Is that not the best test of all?

            And she convinced them like that, even though in her heart, it was Entu she believed in, not her own words. 

            And that is why no flood nor plague not war nor unleashing of the forces of chaos will ever overtake the world.  Because nothing would be learned and no truth would pass through.