Eos Rising: The Third Book of Regenesis Read online

  For these isolated species, evolution was shaped by genes which were exclusive or reclusive.

  Both were possessed by the males and females of each species, but it was the females alone whose hormonal messaging determined the sex of the offspring. And those instructions held the numbers of males to females in stasis and rigorously segregated gender traits so males were kept unlike females in every important way.

  Gregor Mendel would have been none the wiser from tending peas in these gardens where diversity did not exist!

  It is this genetic legacy of sameness that made Mei-o-Peia and her six sisters appear to be like every other female.

  They were not.

  They were different in ways the eye could not see. They were, in fact, “freaks” of their race.

  While they were the mirror-image of the other females of the village, they were unlike the others in their constant questioning of tradition and their refractory views of the world.

  Even their mother, the village shaman, had been alarmed by their constant questioning and irreverent skepticism. And she had strongly cautioned them to silence lest they suffer the fate of the Chosen.

  The Chosen were selected from among the adolescent males of the village to satisfy a ritual the shaman was required to perform each time the red-violet-yellow Mother of All Being hid one of her daughters. Leaving only a single watchful sun remaining in the sky.

  It was at these times, and these times alone, that the earthbound daughter sought to break free and ascend once more into the heavens.

  If that were allowed, the legend clearly warned, then all life on the island would perish. For it was the third daughter’s presence under the earth, and her presence alone, that made life possible on the sandy surface above.

  To prevent her escape and to demonstrate fidelity to the legend, the shaman selected two young males. Festooning them with garlands, the village elders—all female—marched them up the two tallest cone-mountains and hurled them into the bubbling lava within the open craters.

  Only thus, the legend held, could the third daughter be distracted long enough for the hidden second daughter to return to her rightful place in the visible sky.

  For their part, Mei-o-Peia and her sisters disbelieved the legend and the grim bargain the village made each time only one sun rose overhead. While all seven sisters were strong of muscle and keen of mind, they took no satisfaction in marching children to a violent and needless death.

  The absence of the second sun also occasioned another ritual. A painful, impersonal conjugation dreaded by every village female.

  The rutting.

  While this rite was not as cruel as the sacrifice of village boys, it was as abhorrent to the village girls as it was essential to the survival of their race.

  It was the coupling of the adolescent females with the males.

  The females saw no beauty in the stark, barren, unlovely features of their hairless counterparts, and the males were too stolid and obtuse to appreciate beauty in the females.

  A purely physical act. Without lust.

  An act of obligation. Without sentiment.

  And where passion is absent, modesty takes a holiday. Thus accounting for the unabashed nakedness of both sexes.

  These are the painful memories that crowd out the sisters’ initial sense of loss and nostalgia as the day wears on.

  By the time the solitary sun dips down to the horizon, they are glad they chose this day to depart. They are relieved to be quit of the rite of rutting, the ritual of sacrifice, and the tyranny of superstition that demanded them.

  That is why they now find themselves alone on the broad ocean. Drifting away from the only home they have ever known. And that is why they have escaped the destruction unleashed by forces beyond their experience or understanding.

  Mei-o-Peia smiles sardonically at the irony as the setting of the solitary sun shakes her out of her reverie. She is confident there is a natural explanation for the periodic absence of the second sun. She also is convinced there is not now, nor ever has been, a third sun. And she muses over the folly of a legend that condemned a non-existent body to the darkness of an unknown fate.

  While blackness bleeds over the wide ocean.

  The seven sisters are restless this night. Filled with uncertainty for what lies ahead and a gnawing lament for those they left behind.

  Next morning, waking to an empty sea, their grief surrenders to the hollow despair of separation.

  Long leagues of ocean divide them from the ancestral island of the cone-mountains. From the horrific spectacle of its utter destruction.

  Forever separating them from the only home they ever have known.

  Extinguishing their race.

  The prior day’s image of the great white wall of cloud anchored to the ocean surface is seared in their thoughts. The last vestige of their lost world.

  Mei-o-Peia is first to break the spell, shrugging off feelings of loss as she turns to practical matters.

  Clapping loudly, she addresses her sisters:

  “We need food and drink, and we will not find them in our thoughts. It is time to act!

  “As second daughter, Lin-o, you will lead us in securing food.

  “As third, Em-o, water will be your responsibility.

  “And your job, An-o, as next, will be to organize and manage it all.”

  Pairing the remaining sisters, including herself, with the three leaders, Mei-o-Peia grabs four lances for Lin-o-Peia to distribute. While Em-o-Peia takes water gourds and strips of thin vine for herself and the two who will assist her. And An-o-Peia begins allocating spaces for occupants and provisions alike.

  Lin-o-Peia’s team station themselves along the gunwales and begin spearing the small silver fish that travel in schools alongside the craft. Soon, they have enough and turn to filleting and sorting. Apportioning the flesh among seven broad, leathery leaves. Discarding scales, bones and ribbons of stringy entrails into the sea.

  When the hunters store their lances and grasp the keen-edged stone shards used for filleting, Em-o-Peia’s team emerge through the hatches, fore and aft, and string the water gourds along the outside of the craft’s mesh bulwarks. No sooner do they secure the gourds than it rains. Filling every gourd with fresh sweet water.

  At An-o-Peia’s direction, the fish are cleaned and wrapped and placed in storage alongside the sealed gourds of water.

  Grateful for the bounty of sea and sky, the seven sisters feast this second day on the wide, vacant ocean.

  But neither food nor drink, nor the companionship they share, can fill the hollow emptiness and the tragic loss they feel.

  It is a despondent, disconsolate sisterhood that crews the craft this day.

  Each is lost in her own thoughts as they gaze through the fabric of their wicker craft upon the counterpane of restless sea. Whose constant surface motion weaves a fabric of its own.

  Chapter 3. The Seven Deadly Perils

  Soon, the soporific cadence of the sea-swells rocks the sisters to sleep. Each drifting in her own dreams of an uncharted future.

  It is midnight when a ghostly presence invades their thoughts.

  It is a silver maiden, dressed in the starlight of which she is made.

  Flowing into the tiny craft in streams that pour through its wicker skin, the silver image materializes into a glowing figure whose features are not unlike those of the sisters she visits this night.

  I am the Earth Spirit, she announces, keeper of this planet-world whose wonders you cannot guess. I will be your keeper through perils you cannot know.

  For you are the Brave Ones.

  You are the future of this new world. And you are precious to me.

  Hear me now, and heed me well!

  With this introduction, the silver maiden serenades the seven sisters with lyrics pregnant with meaning for them and import for the wide world beyond:

  Fear not, Brave Ones,

  For I, too, sail with thee,

  Swaddled in a textured craft


  Upon a textured sea.

  Swept by currents fore and aft

  Across an endless ocean,

  Through storms and blows and winds that waft

  The craft in endless motion.

  An ocean rife with many threats

  To bar the course you bear

  With jaw and fin to grip you in

  With paralyzing fear.

  Creatures deep will upward creep

  To take you in your sleep,

  While waterspouts will push you out

  To deeper places still

  Where monsters dwell and hunt as well

  To crush and maim and kill:

  Stealthy skates and squids and rays,

  Leviathans that stalk the waves

  That bear you through their realm.

  And worse things yet the sea will bring

  To drown you in its swell:

  Tidal waves and hurricanes

  and maelstroms reaching hell

  To Hecate beneath the sea,

  Her demon horde as well.

  When all is lost or seems just so,

  The sea will glow and you will know

  You travel not alone.

  For then shall I be by your side

  To comfort and preserve

  The Brave Ones who shall serve

  A purpose so sublime

  The world will be remade again,

  A new race reach its time.

  Fear not, Brave Ones

  For I, too, sail with thee,

  Swaddled in a textured craft

  Upon a textured sea.

  And I will guide you fore and aft

  To meet your destiny.

  The specter pauses.

  But she is not done yet.

  Her message is not complete.

  There is more the sisters must know.

  Raising both arms, the Earth Spirit sweeps her palms in a wide arc encompassing the sleeping sisters on both sides of the wicker craft.

  While their bodies remain at rest, the sisters’ eyelids flutter with every syllable of the silver maiden’s canorous, lilting lyrics.

  Seven are chosen

  From this wide world

  To cross the ocean

  And then fulfill

  A destiny foretold.

  But first things first,

  For you must know

  The truth about the way you go.

  For you, whose future is

  To inherit this earth,

  Must first face risks

  To prove your worth.

  Seven perils you will meet,

  Each more deadly than the last.

  Seven foes you must beat

  Just to make it past

  The trials of the sea.

  Think well, o’ eldest one,

  In choosing who shall be

  The sister that confronts

  Each peril as may be.

  For all to prove their worth,

  Each must valor show,

  As each choice is spent,

  You cannot relent.

  Think well whose turns shall go.

  As you choose and the die is cast,

  Know that the direst peril is last,

  That the first is least and after that

  The challenges grow the farther you go.

  Know this, too:

  When danger stalks and strikes at you,

  Do not shrink and do not flee.

  Strike boldly back and you shall be

  Thus assured of victory.

  But if you quail, then shall you fail!

  Each of the seven has her strength,

  But all must act across the length

  Of ocean deep—its monsters’ keep,

  From abyssal depths to surface swells,

  Where they kill to repel invaders as well.

  Creatures above and creatures below

  Will stalk and hunt you as you go.

  Five of the perils will they pose

  Five of you will face-off those.

  The sea itself will pose the rest

  That rage and roar and crash and crest,

  Primal forces both, set free

  To scour the sea of all that be

  Caught in their angry maw,

  Trapped in their lethal craw,

  To be swallowed whole

  And be no more.

  These are the trials ordained for you,

  To test your worth to inherit this earth,

  For only those whose valor shows

  The courage to bring them through,

  Only those, and those alone,

  Can make the world anew.

  At the last vibration of the final syllable of her prophecy, the specter dissolves into tendrils of silver starlight that flow back through the wicker mesh into the obsidian sky. Leaving every sleeping sister to ponder the meaning of her words.

  Even as the Earth Spirit abandons them to their somnolent thoughts, a silent killer is making its way inexorably toward them beneath the waves.

  Chapter 4. Shadow-Runner

  Dark shadow flows away from the imploding cauldron of stone, ash and superheated steam.

  It is a shadow cast by no cloud.

  It is a shadow deeper than the night overhead.

  It is a shadow just beneath the surface of the roiled sea.

  Still stunned by the stinging waves of shock radiating through her pelagic realm, the giant skate has risen to the surface, trolling for food.

  She is desperate.

  No longer does she ride the great streams and currents that bind the vast ocean in a symphonic convection of endless motion.

  Streams that race north and south along the littoral shoals of the supercontinent. Currents that sweep east and west, alternately joining with and departing from the streams. Great serpentine jets pumping energy into the restless sea. Giving it vitality as surely as the living creatures it hosts.

  Reefs are her favored feeding-grounds and, like pearls in a necklace, they are strung methodically along her migratory path to appear each time she requires food.

  Except the latest reef in the circuit did not appear.

  In its place was a cauldron of boiling water she could not approach, and her radar reflected floes of solids racing from the surface downward into the bubbling sea.

  Turning sharply away from the superheated water, she swam outside the coastal stream. Beyond the guard-rails of her migratory track.

  Now she is lost!

  Only the irregular, scarred features of the ocean floor answer her frantic pings.

  The minute organisms she feeds upon are gone.

  The vast blankets of life she harvests are gone.

  The lesser creatures that feed on them are gone.

  She is alone . . .

  In the twilight of a world that is no more.

  The ocean she crosses is as lifeless as the giant exoplanet hovering in the night sky overhead. That is because she is no longer in the hospitable current she has followed since birth. She has been driven away by the pyroclastic blast of the island of cone-mountains.

  She crosses a dead sea.

  The endlessly circulating streams and currents are the lifeblood of this ocean, the plasma that supports all aquatic species. Life occurs nowhere else in its vast, watery expanse.

  All the planet’s ocean species have evolved and spend their life cycle solely within its constantly flowing veins and arteries. And all are joined, link-by-link, to complex food chains that sustain them in their unending migration across the planet.

  Unlike their terrestrial cousins, the predators of the deep are opportunistic hunters and omnifarious feeders. Because, unlike the dry, elevated surface of a supercontinent scoured in flame, the ocean and its life-forms were spared the Great Extinction.

  They did not suffer the collapse of populations, the shrinking food chains, the scarcity that forced land-dwellers to focus their predation on species whose numbers were most robust. Forsaking all others in the exclusive p
redator-prey calculus that followed the GE event.

  Their numbers did not decline, but thrived beneath the surface of the sea, maintaining the great diversity and complex food chains that had evolved over eons in their protected, liquid element. Defying the climatic cataclysm that so decimated life on the solid earth above.

  But vast areas of the sea are not host to living things. They are toxic, carbon-rich dead zones. Still waters where no life exists. Where even the simple micro-organisms at the base of the food chain have been unable to gain a foothold. At the margins of the great ocean’s lively streams and currents, home to all marine life across the planet.

  Mimicking the singular chemistry that binds the fiery tendrils of magma beneath the earth, the ocean currents flow in seamless ribbons whose invisible, integumentary margins hold life in like the Judas molecules binding the subterranean magma.

  Only an event as cataclysmic as volcanic eruption could force life out into the dead, empty ocean beyond.

  That is where the titan is now.

  She swims on through a still, sterile sea. Searching for her familiar way. Seeking a meal.

  In the darkness.

  Her hidden shadow is vast. Cast by wide, undulating pectoral fins whose parabolic rhythms flow in perfect synchrony. The fins delineate her large girth on either side.

  Atop the forward axis of her great length, twin spiracles accentuate a median row of spinules, the only rimples on an otherwise smooth skin.

  There are no eyes, nor need of them. For this eyeless creature is not blind.

  She sends out acoustic pings in all directions. Both beneath and along the black surface of the still, silent sea.

  They are her eyes.

  Penetrating the darkness.

  Showing there is nothing to see.

  The great beast is solitary and migratory.

  She swims alone.

  Fatigue heightens her hunger as the sea beyond her familiar ocean current saps her flagging strength.

  Never has she ventured outside the ocean streams that have carried her across the vast sea. On wings propelled by the energy of endless forces flowing north and south, east and west.

  Never has she so had to tax her pelvic fins, stubby appendages evolved only to help the creature with steerage through a following sea.