The Mendelssohnian Theory: Action Adventure, Sci-Fi, Apocalyptic ,Y/A (10 page)

“The outburst of spontaneous enthusiasm that had captured his
heart dissipated, but its scent still lingered in his nostrils. For the first
time in his long life, God knew curiosity.”

“God was happy.”

Chapalcharie finished the story and leaned back on the
ground. Adam sat beside him, silent, concentrating on the changing views before
him.

“The story I’ve just told you is part of the oldest chronicle
ever written by man, and the most amazing thing is that this text, found at an
excavation site in a desert next to Jerusalem, is identical to the ancient myth
of a nation that lives on the other end of the Earth, here in Australia.
Researchers say it’s been told for over three thousand years. My mother used to
recite it to me every night before bedtime.” Chapalcharie arrested for a
moment, remembering with pleasure his mother’s voice, then continued: “I’ve
conducted my own research about this text and it turns out it is actually
ascribed to the man the Mendelssohnian theory was named after. Now, you tell
me, how could it be that the exact same story appears in different places at
different times? Curious, isn’t it? And even more curious-why did it spring to
my mind just now?”

Adam shrugged. “You’re the one who told it. You must have had
your reasons.”

Chapalcharie smiled. “I’ve never experienced a dream like
yours,” he said, “and I’m unable to interpret it for you.”

“I can interpret it for myself,” said Adam, “it’s a dream
about responsibility, a dream about destiny. My destiny.” Chapalcharie was
impressed by Adam’s sharpness of thought, his maturity, his wisdom.

“Every dream can be regarded as a binding contract between
itself and its dreamer,” he explained, “as an alliance in which each side gives
something and gets something in return.”

“Not only giving and getting, but sacrificing and being
sacrificed,” said Adam, “I need to choose whether I would like to sacrifice,
and who or what I should sacrifice.”

“The signing of a contract,” said Chapalcharie, “requires
negotiation. The secret is to be willing to go all the way to the end, to the
place from which you won’t be willing to go beyond and know it is your lower
limit. In most cases, this will also be your rival’s lower limit. Once you know
your own weaknesses, you’ll be able to better understand your rival’s
weaknesses.” Adam nodded and closed his eyes. Chapalcharie lingered to regard
him a moment more, then nodded toward a point of light that had been floating
all that time behind Adam. He closed his eyes and woke up, still holding the
leading stick. Adam had already removed his hand from the stick and seemed to
be self-absorbed.

“A man once told me a story,” said Chapalcharie, “perhaps
you’re familiar with it. Have you ever heard the fable about the chick?”

“You mean Joseph’s chick?” asked Adam.

“Do you know another chick?” the Prime Minister answered with
his own question. “So you’re familiar with the story?”

“No,” Adam shook his head. He was surprised to discover
Chapalcharie knew Joseph and felt the ring around him continue to tighten. “I
thought it was just an expression Joseph used when he wanted to point out the
fact that I’m too young.”

“Don’t underestimate Joseph’s intelligence,” Chapalcharie
cautioned him, “he’s one of the smartest people I know.”

“If he’s so smart,” Adam said with a belittling tone, “how
come I managed to get away from him?”

“Are you sure you got away?” asked Chapalcharie, “have you
ever considered he may have allowed you to get away?”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” answered Adam, “considering
the fact he made such an effort to catch me.”

“What about the ones who followed him to get to you?”
Chapalcharie surprised the youth, “in any event,” he immediately changed the
course of the conversation, “the story of the chick goes like this:

One chick was walking last in a long line of chicks, his
brothers and sisters, following his mother, a fat chicken, on their way back to
the coop from the yard. It was late evening and darkness engulfed the small
farm. He must have been busy with lofty thoughts, because he missed a turn, in
the gray area between the farmer’s house and the pigsty, and lost his mother’s
tracks. He had never been lost before. He was by himself and even though he was
mature for his age, fear began to overwhelm him. He retraced his footsteps,
trying to find out where his brothers had turned to and immediately realized he
could not recall where they came from. Filled with panic, the chick began to
run back and forth in the yard, calling his mother in his squeaky voice, but
his mother didn’t answer. The dark skies illuminated by a flash of lightning,
immediately followed by a loud crash that filled up the entire world. Rain
began to fall, a slow drip that gradually intensified to a downpour. The wet chick
searched for shelter and squeezed into a hole in the ground.

“Hey, get out of here,” a voice sounded from within the hole.
Two gleaming eyes regarded him from the darkness and behind them appeared a
gray mouse. “This is my home, there’s no room for another animal here.” The
chick got scared, immediately obeyed and headed out into the rain again. He
rushed under a tall mushroom, which provided him protection from the rain.

“Scram,” a voice was heard from behind the mushroom stem,
“this is my place.” The owner of the voice turned toward the chick. It was a
colorful night-gnome of the nastier type. For lack of any other choice, the
chick continued with his search and pushed his way into the goat pen. But the
goat pen was so crowded, he was afraid he’d be crushed, so he ran away again
into the wet evening. Then he tried the pigsty and was thrown from there as
well. Helpless, frozen and wet to the bone, the little chick stood in the
middle of the yard, flooded by petrifying fear. Suddenly, a jet of warm and
sticky excrement landed on him. A cow that happened to stand above him passed
some loose stool and drowned his body with wet, warm filth. At first, the chick
thought he was done for. The excrement had dirtied his golden plumage and the
smell threatened to stifle him. But he immediately regained his composure, felt
warm and comfortable and his body delighted in the viscid touch. He began to
wade in the brown liquid and was no longer in any hurry. A horse that happened
to pass by, examined him at length and asked, “Why are you staying inside the
poop?”

“Because it’s warm,” answered the chick.

“But it’s shit!” the horse persisted.

“Yes,” said the chick and smiled a beakfull, “but the smell
of this shit, I’m already familiar with.”

Chapalcharie finished his story and added, “The moral of this
tale is obvious: provide a man with the minimal conditions that make him feel
safe and with which he is familiar, and he won’t budge from his place. Joseph
normally finishes the tale with this sentence: never fear, mediocrity is always
here.”

Adam thought about the story and its moral, a serious
expression on his face. “What does he mean?” he asked after a while.

“What do you think he meant by it?” Chapalcharie placed a
mirror at the end of the youth’s question.

“Perhaps he meant that I’m acting like the chick from the
fable instead of looking for a better option?”

“Perhaps…” the Prime Minister retained an air of uncertainty.
“You have undertaken a complicated task,” said Chapalcharie.

“I undertook nothing,” answered Adam, “this task was forced
on me, whatever it is.”

“No one can force anything on you,” said the head of the
dreamers, “you create your own fate. Come,” he said and stood on his feet,
“I’ll take you to Elizabeth.” Adam obeyed and they both left the room.

*

When the time came for Adam and Elizabeth to part on the ramp
leading to the European space shuttle, Adam gave her a warm embrace. “Hartson
will wait for you at the American base in Europa. He will guide and protect
you. Protect yourself as well. And one more thing,” she immediately added, “try
to overcome your desire for vengeance. It distracts you, clouds your judgment
and won’t bring back your loved ones. Remember how much I love you and take
good care of yourself, not because you’re important to the world, but because
you’re important to me.” He smiled into her warm embrace, then detached himself
from her, raised his hand in a waving motion, turned around and swallowed in
the conveyor belt leading toward the gigantic space shuttle. Elizabeth remained
standing by the window facing the docking and landing site long after the
conveyor belt closed and detached from the shuttle. The vast aircraft, standing
at the other end of the soundproof acrylic glass, shook, then took off and rose
to the sky.

The lower level of the Scandinavia space shuttle appeared, at
first glance, like a maze of corridors flowing into a large area that served as
a dining hall and a kind of guest lounge for passengers who couldn’t afford a
ticket for the lower, more luxurious levels of the giant vacuum craft
(Vacuumfly ©) .

In the second half of the first century to the Mendelssohnian
count, when the nuclear fusion traps (LENR ©) became significantly smaller and
their energy production rates grew, the trapping devices (E-CAT ©) became
operable as space motion engines. The vacuum crafts, built to carry man to the
edges of the solar system, were able to move at speeds faster than half the
speed of light and enabled the superpowers to begin space conquest expeditions.
Travelling time to Mars became significantly shorter, so did the time it took
to reach the moons of Jupiter, Europa, Io, Ganymede, Callisto and all other
sixty-two moons of the largest planet surrounding the Sun. The superpowers
erected military and civilian bases in all of them. The corporations built
mining colonies that quarried the surface of the planets and their moons. Some
of them were connected by tunnels to the army bases and to other, secret bases,
detached from one another and able to operate independently.

Upon his entry to the “Scandinavia” shuttle, which was a
giant vacuum craft, Adam was directed by a holographic support robot (Hologram
Support Robot ©) to a small cabin he shared with two other passengers. The tiny
cabin was located on the ninth level, the lowest and most Spartan passenger
level on the shuttle. Elizabeth had purchased a one-way ticket to Jupiter’s
moon Europa for him. She recommended that he mingle with as many people as
possible so as not to be discovered by the space shuttle’s owner and operators.
He marched down corridors, allowing the ticket navigator to direct him to the
cabin in which he was supposed to stay for the course of the journey. The quiet
that surrounded him on his way burdened his shoulders like a pair of tongs. The
other passengers that passed him by seemed to be suffering from the weight of
silence as well.

For some time now, he had stopped doubting the fact that he
was being chased, and probably his seekers would be able to locate him without
much difficulty, even among a million people. They could certainly find him
among the hundreds that inhabited the level he had arrived to through a wide
corridor, just as it appeared on his arm screen.

He stood in front of his cabin door and waited for it to
open. The wall scanner (Uniscanner ©) passed the information beam on his body
and the door slid with a grating screech into the adjacent wall. ‘Someone is
neglecting maintenance around here’, he thought and entered the cabin.

Since his cabin companions had yet to show up, he chose one
of the three beds attached to the walls and programmed it to suit his needs.
Only once it had undergone an identification process by the D.N.A. Recognition
(BDNA encoder ©), did the bed incline to slide into the wall it was attached
to. From that moment till the end of the flight, it obeyed only Adam’s
instructions. No one else but him would be able to draw it from the wall. The
shared cabin could be divided into three personal cabins with the aid of
modular partitions that could be drawn from the floor with a DNA recognized
command, but most of the time the partitions were hidden and the space remained
open. He placed his little belongings in a sealed cabinet and passed the back
of his hand over the cabinet’s infra biological lock (Infra-Biological Lock ©)
for recognition and codification. Then Adam got into the dry-shower unit
(Sterilization Dry Shower ©) to clean himself from within and without. Once
he’d finished the air-shower, drenched with purifying nanoparticles, he wore a
new protective-shield suit and some comfortable clothes, and then headed out to
tour the shuttle.

He slowly lost his way in the narrow corridors of the level,
passing other people, ignoring their presence in the same way they ignored his.
The level map was scanned into the microchip processor (Memo Process ©)
attached to his brain implant so that he could know where he was and how to
reach his own cabin or the central dining area from any given location. In his
aimless wandering in the corridors, he preferred to absorb the atmosphere,
smell the scents, meet fellow wandering passengers, mark tactical possible
escape routes and hideouts, dead-end pathways, and potential traps. The
corridors were typified by an unnatural silence due to the fact that the walls
were built from sound blocking materials (Blocking Sound Wave Walls ©). Those
who walked down the corridors kept silent because they would need to raise
their voices in order to be heard, something that would draw the attention of
all other passersby. When he returned to his cabin, he found both partitions of
the passengers residing with him to be raised. He drew out his bed and lay upon
it, closed the partitions that divided his cabin area and fell asleep.

The next day, when he had woken up, his cabin mates were
still shut in their areas, as they continued to be in the following two days.
He knew they were there as only a person webwired to the shuttle’s central
computer could close the inner-cabin wall partitions.

Every morning Adam showered and dressed before he would go
out to the corridors to continue his roaming in the level area. He dined in one
of the side buffets that operated in the intersections of the main corridors,
and during the evenings, he returned and discovered the two passengers with him
in the cabin had still not opened their wall partitions. That was fine with
him. After being occupied for so long with surviving, running and protecting
himself, he finally had some time to himself. The days that passed since he had
boarded the shuttle were monotonous but allowed him to rest and rejuvenate his
strength.

The space shuttle passed the Earth’s moon, and then continued
on a course that would take it past Mars. Three and a half months after it had
detached itself from the Earth, it orbited Jupiter and finally landed on the
docking base of its moon, Europa.

Upon entering his cabin on the fifth day of his stay at the
lowest level, Adam found both side partitions lowered, revealing his companions
for the first time. He nodded at them politely, and while attempting to
scrutinize them without staring, drew his bed and sat on it. To his left, on
the bed closest to him, sat a bronze-skinned woman bearing a crown of curly
hair on her head. Adam’s eyes passed over her face and the woman smiled at him
warmly. Her eyes bewitched him and Adam felt a blush rushing to his cheeks. He
hurried to divert his eyes toward the second passenger, who was standing next
to the other bed, a tall and strong looking man with pointed, tough features. A
thin scar divided his left cheek, right next to his eye. The man ignored Adam
and acted as if he didn’t exist. It was apparent that he was accustomed to the
crowded conditions of space travel.

“Hi,” the woman jumped to her feet before Adam could etch his
cabin mates onto his eye screens. She approached him and held out her hand.
“I’m Jewel. I guess we’ll have to suffer each other’s company for the next few
weeks,” she said, “unless you’re just here until they fix some malfunction in
your upper-level bedroom cabin.” Adam was embarrassed by Jewel’s directness and
her easygoing manner. He could barely follow the course of her thoughts.
“Anyway, this is Don,” she said and pointed at the third Cabin companion who
maintained his apathy and continued to demonstratively ignore them both. “He
won’t bother us too much; you know how those ex-army types are.” She leaned
toward him and whispered loud enough for Don to hear, “Honestly, I think he’s
convinced he’s still a soldier. Always tense and serious, as if someone is
threatening him. But don’t you worry,” she added loudly, “we’ll make him smile
yet. You wait and see.” She sat on the bed next to Adam, ignoring the code of
politeness that called for maintaining your distance in such a tiny cabin.
“What’s your name?”

Before he answered, Adam quickly scanned his outer memory
database and found the name attached to his binary passport. “John,” he
answered, “John Lennon.”

“John Lennon?” Jewel repeated questioningly. “Are you a
silent type like him?” and she motioned with her hand toward Don.

“No,” said Adam. “I mean, yes,” he was embarrassed; the woman
stunned him with her beauty, her pleasant smell, and her direct attitude.
“Look,” Jewel explained to him, “we’re going to be stuck in each other’s butts
for the foreseeable future, if you’re going to give me one syllable sentences,
we’ll get nowhere, you get me? We’ve been cast together.”

Adam kept nodding his head, thinking of something important
to say, but all he could think of was that he wanted her to stop speaking for a
moment. On the other hand, he felt very comfortable listening to her, as she
intrigued him. Then he noticed he was staring at her, his eyes glued to her
face. She burst out laughing and he embarrassedly diverted his face just in
time to see Don hiding a smile beneath his oversized mustache. A soft ringing
sound emitted from one of the walls and Jewel sprang to her feet. “Dinner,” she
mentioned and pulled Adam after her, “come on, you must be hungry.” Adam wasn’t
really hungry, but he was willing to eat a mammoth to spend some time with her,
even though he didn’t really know how large the animal, whose paintings he’d found
in the memory chip attached to his brain implant, really was. He slammed his
secure bed shut and went out into the corridors with Jewel.