Charger the Soldier (4 page)

Though Visha hoped to follow in his father's
footsteps and become a scientist himself, he couldn't help being
excited because his father was taking him today to see the Nine
great ones. The boy could not believe his luck, for almost no one
ever visited the Nine of Nines, and with good reason. These old
ones were the greatest minds in existence and had little interest
in the affairs of ordinary mortals. Even at twelve, Visha had
learned all about the great ones from school. What he didn't know
was that he had been summoned by the Nines and his father was quite
concerned, though he did not let on to Visha.

Father and son stepped onto their transport
and sat down. Visha's father removed the restraints from the
anti-gravity attachments on the corners and waved his hands over
the front of their vehicle until a small rope-like thread of
fibrous materials arose. He tipped his head forward, moved his long
gray hair aside and, with his left hand, raised the end of the
fiber so as to join its connector with a surgically installed link
in the back of his neck. Within moments, his own electrical
circuits, enhanced by the vehicle's mechanisms, created a glowing
field of golden light around the two occupants, and the transport
began to rise from the ground.

Visha liked travel. Though there was no
indication of motion inside the vehicle, he loved to jump up or
stand as the transport dipped and swerved dramatically.

Within moments the great city disappeared
behind them and the ring of mountains appeared on the horizon. Soon
they approached the temple of the Nines. The transport slowed,
hovered for a moment, and gently touched down at the base of the
great temple's steps. Visha and his father stepped out and Visha's
father rolled up the flat transport, much as one might roll up a
carpet, and placed it under his arm.

"Si Eed, it is good to see you, my old
friend," a grizzled gray-haired man said, "and this must be your
boy Visha? Where is your lovely wife? Why do you always come
alone?"

Visha's father said, "Because I trust you so
little around women, my old friend." They both laughed. "Excuse me,
my friend, we have business in the temple," Si Eed said, and guided
his son up the great steps and through a broad, open archway into
the temple.

The interior was astonishing in its purity,
with white stone walls and clear glass-like floors polished to
reflect the sunlight. The hallways were wide and long and the
ceiling high, making Visha feel insignificant. Rooms opened off the
halls on both sides but Visha knew better than to glance inside
them. The main precepts everyone learned, right from birth, were
peace, privacy, and respect for one another. Doorways existed, but
not doors.

Visha followed his father along the halls for
quite a distance before entering a narrow pathway that led to a
lower level. This pathway was rough and simple in comparison to the
halls they had walked through. At the bottom, the pathway ended
before a wide opening where both Visha and his father stopped and
gazed politely at the ground. From deep within the room, a voice
spoke.

"Si Eed, let the boy enter, then leave us.
Come forward, Visha, we command this." The tone was clear and
commanding, though seemed to have a slight tremor. Young Visha
turned to his father, concerned. Si Eed gave him a reassuring touch
on the shoulder and urged him onward.

When Visha looked up and stepped inside, he
could see no end to the room, no matter where he looked. It was a
vast space with a dirt floor and a low ceiling made of rough cut
stone.

The Nines were a shock to most who first saw
them, for they were in fact, nine human bodies, both male and
female, joined by the tops of their heads. They lay upon a special
star-shaped platform so that their heads, which had been surgically
attached to one another from youth, were all in the center of the
star. They never made eye contact with anyone, for they lay on
their backs always looking upward. But Visha was sure that they
knew where he stood and how he looked.

Their brains had intertwined, and it was said
that this brain mass gave them incredible powers of intelligence,
perhaps nine times nine more than the normal person. Altogether,
there were nine groups of humans conjoined, in nine different parts
of the land, one at each point of the compass, north, south, east,
and west, and at the midpoints, northeast, southwest, southeast,
and northwest. And one special group in the center of all, the Nine
of Nines, where Visha now stood. The Nines decided everything for
the people of Mahoud, also known as Atlantis, for Mahoud was the
body and the Nines its mind.

"Approach us, young one, and do not be
afraid, for we have need of you," said the clear voice. "Time is
becoming short. Not only have brutal primitives thrust themselves
upon us and made the world too impure to bear, the earth is also
destined for a vast coldness. We are too old for the journey that
Mahoud must take, and nine children have been called to sacrifice
themselves for the greater good. You have been chosen to guide the
city from this place to a new place of peace. You are to be one of
the Nine which will navigate the black skies."

"I am sorry, great ones," Visha said, as he
bowed down and hid his face in shame. "I do not understand what you
are asking of me."

"It matters not; all will be revealed when
you are joined. Celebrate this day with your family, for a great
honor is bestowed upon you," the speaker for the Nine said.

The people of Mahoud were far advanced in
technology and intelligence compared to the primitive humans
massing on the rest of Earth and camping in their hundreds on the
strip of land connecting the city-state to the continent. Many
thousands of years before, the First Ones had met the Dinosauroids,
and not only respected them as superior beings, but used and
improved on their inventions. When the Dinosauroids suddenly
disappeared, as if swept from Earth in a single instant, this
branch of the First Ones secluded itself from the inferior and
warlike primitive humans by retiring to this near-island. They also
developed robotic guards, installing in each one a primitive
controlling device perhaps the size of a shoebox and powering them
with radioactive particles.

The humans who lived in the villages lying
before the city gates had always been dirty, vile, and primitive.
They attacked other tribes merely for the pleasure of capturing
very young girls and scarring them for sexual gratification. The
Mahoud elders, from high atop their towers, were appalled as they
watched the aggression toward the young, the weak, and the
elderly.

Lately, Mahoud patrols had discovered a new
type of human far to the north. They were notably different from
the local brutes, shorter, more robust, more massive in muscle, and
larger in brain capacity. At first, the learned ones thought these
new humans might be of some use to the cities, both as cheap labor
and guards. But, alas, when the Mahoud patrols managed to capture a
few specimens, it was discovered that they were extremely
passive.

These new humans were clearly more
intelligent than the dirty ones, for they had a primitive language,
a combination of grunts and clicks. Nevertheless, their passive
nature made them unsuitable as laborers and so they were left
alone. Unfortunately, the dirty ones took every opportunity to hunt
and rape these passive peoples wherever they were found. Eventually
the elders learned that the dirty ones had managed to wipe out all
the passive new humans for at least as far north as the Mahoud
patrols flew.

The time had come to remove Mahoud completely
from the twisted creatures, for the safety of all its citizens.

>>>

Dart speaks to Reader:

No, the Mahouds did not simply pack their
suitcases and move, leaving their beautiful buildings and wonderful
country for the brutal primitives to ravage. They took the country
with them.

You say that's not possible, Reader?

But it happened, and they used antigravity to
do it. For millions of years a portion of Earth's core had been
working its way to the surface and, when it neared four hundred
miles from the upper mantle, the immense pressures of over-lying
rock shifted rapidly, allowing a large fragment to surge toward the
surface. However, the shift also broke this core piece into smaller
shards which were not powerful enough by themselves to entirely
penetrate Earth's shell. Thus they lay undiscovered until the Toba
eruption.

It was this Toba volcanic eruption of 70,000
BCE which ejected the small fragments of Earth's core to the
surface. It must have been stupendous, though I'm glad I wasn't
around to experience it. Humans had never faced such a large and
extraordinary eruption, considered by later standards as a deep
earthquake and the nearest to level 10 on the Richter scale ever
experienced.

Well, as the ejected fragments of the core
cooled, they took on the properties of antigravity, much like
placing two magnets of opposite charges in proximity to one
another. The immense pressures in Earth's core determined the
polarity of the planet's magnetic field but, as the core fragment
was no longer subjected to pressure and heat, the cooling fragments
flipped their magnetic field to become antigravity.

No, the shards weren't discovered right away.
It would have been impossible to approach the area for a long time.
But eventually things cooled down enough for human exploration.

At first only small pieces of these magic
rocks were dug out of the ground. Those who found them held them to
be sacred for they had the power of lifting heavy objects into the
air. Releasing such a shard would cause it to rise and disappear
forever, so great care was taken to secure shards to the ground by
placing them between manganite stones, canceling their effect.
Eventually technology was developed that could retrieve the whole
core fragment and it was soon learned that the fragment could be
controlled by placing dense materials near it to repel or attract
the stone so that it moved in a desired direction.

Yes, Reader, a steering system. Anyway, that
was how the first human antigravity-powered drive was built for the
tiny continent of Mahoud.

>>>

The antigravity drive took hundreds of years
to perfect and many lives were lost in the process, but the small
island continent of Mahoud finally transformed itself into the
first sky city. As the island ripped itself from Earth's surface,
debris fell everywhere. The ground shook and a great crackling
filled the air, sending the primitive humans scurrying to their
shamans for protection. The city rose ever upward, while the seas
surged forth in boiling chaos, filling the void which Mahoud had
occupied. The whole world seemed to tremble, as if awed by man's
victory over the elements.

From the eight points of the compass, the
towers that stood atop the mountains ringing Mahoud began to glow.
Joining their powers, the Nine of Nines created a dome of radiant
golden light, powered by radioactive particles, emerging from the
towers to encase the continent and people of Mahoud. Now safe in
their domed flying city, the land of Mahoud began gliding above the
surface of the planet, seeking a better place to live.

For a hundred years, surrounded by clouds and
invisible to the ground dwellers, Mahoud drifted above Earth in
search of a more congenial location, but wherever it wandered, the
humans appeared to be as vile and primitive as those they had left
behind. The people began to despair of finding a new home.

Visha and his eight compatriots had long
since grown to manhood. Bound to one another by their skulls in the
center of the flying state of Mahoud, they were now more than a
hundred years of age, and wise beyond all their ancestors. Great
were the powers of these Nine, for their minds, in concert, were
strong enough to control the direction Mahoud could fly. They
searched, and went on searching for many years, never finding the
place of peace they were tasked to achieve.

The Nines then turned their gaze to the
blackness of space to seek a different world that they might own
and control, a world where they could finally be at peace. They
knew it might take many, many generations to find a new Earth, and
preparations were made to live in the black sky for thousands of
years.

The Nine of Nines guided the antigravity
engine, first of all to leave Earth, then to have Mahoud pulled
toward the moon, then to repel the moon as they passed, and be
attracted to another planet, like a gravitational slingshot. On and
on, for years, Mahoud would fly to a planet, then push away from
that planet and fly toward another.

The time arrived when the flying city-state
reached the last planet in our solar system, a small, cold, barren
orb. They passed it by and the vastness of empty black space
stretched out before them like an endless road might appear to an
ant. At first the Nine of Nines were confused, for their gravity
engine had nothing to grab on to, and for a while the space farer
simply drifted.

"I wonder," Visha finally said to his eight
compatriots, "if we should set a course for Alpha Centauri. It is
the nearest solar system to that of Earth." It had been agreed by
these eight sages that Visha would act as leader when decisions
were to be made. Though their brains were joined and used as one
single powerful instrument to control the country, their minds
could still function independently, thus affording each a small but
precious measure of privacy.

"Why not?" asked Sarama. "Earth's system is
pair-bonded with Alpha Centauri; we are binary, for we orbit the
center of the Milky Way side by side."

"There would be many more planets to choose
from," Kumar offered.

Visha mused, "We have traded planets in the
past, though not in recent eons. It would take us a very long time
to get there, probably thousands of years. We travel so very
slowly."