Three hours, and no one would have believed the Governor had ever been ill.
###
The Platyrrhine and Solarian medical technicians worked virtually non-stop in producing an inoculation serum for them and a vaccination program for children.
The technicians from both sides became more than friends, “Let’s go get a cup of tea in the canteen Borkum. I don’t know about you but I could do with one. Man that was a marathon session; thirty hours.”
“Pass the sugar, please Nigel.”
“I know why we drive ourselves in the way that we do but you guys don’t have to but yet you do, why?”
“First of all because it’s not our nature to pass up on people in need.”
“No there’s more to it than that, you guys are just – what can I say – Good. Yeah that’s it good, in the sense of being totally devoid of evil. I mean no matter where I look I see Platyrrhines working their hearts out in our cause. I ask myself; had the shoe been on the other foot would we have done the same?””
###
“I appreciate the help these people are giving us but we have to be realistic. We need, no its more than a need, we just have to have a solar system of our own. How soon will it be that producing food for example in the way we do becomes unsustainable without an injection of nature.”
“But we have the ability to make our own suns and planets and arrange them in any suitable order we want to.”
“Of course, we will utilise what we have captain, but it’s like building a house; a foundation is needed. Without that foundation, we could spend thousands of years growing a system for ourselves and by the time we have a world to occupy it will be too late.
We just must have a star system already grown that has the foundations of oxygen, water, plant life and be a rock based planet as opposed to a gaseous planet; that is our minimum requirement. Now others of your ilk with bleeding hearts want us to find a planet with all of that plus have no living species occupying it.
Where in this dimension are we going to find that?”
“God, I think I’m going to be sick. I never thought my people would practise genocide.”
“Well vomit all over the floor for all I care but remember which species heads the survival list, and which species you belong to, but by tomorrow we need an ultimatum to present to the Governor keeping in mind that the ultimatum includes his position and himself.”
###
“I have to agree with them the species does come before the people and instead of sitting here and looking for reasons to resent them we manufacture reasons to draw them closer to us. Have you forgotten that we don’t make war where life is taken but they do?
So if we got to war with them and any of our citizens get killed the onus of guilt is upon our shoulders and we would have failed. Redouble your efforts in building bridges. If we don’t then we are putting the race ahead of the species and compromising our ethics.”
###
“I mean look what they’re doing for us.”
“True, I have to keep telling myself it’s genetics and not racism we must endure, as the more technological advanced people but I don’t feel convinced.”
Doubt and confusions rode the wings of many minds throughout the nine stars. Doubt and confusion also caused uncertainty and violence. Uncertainty and violence spawned new attitudes; few of them good.
###
“Cor guv what’re them things yer got there?” Haronah sounded as if she had been born within the sounds of the Bow Bells.
“Oh! Hi Haronah. From that accent I gather you’ve been visiting London.” The Governor had become good friends with Platyrrhine woman. In so many ways they were similar.
“Yes, I’m just finding out what a wonderful world you have. I mean many of you speak the same language yet you don’t speak the same language. A Washington taxi-driver does not sound the same as a London Taxi Driver and a South African Gold miner is so different to an Australian one or a Martian. You have a marvellous world I love it.”
“So do I, Haronah. It is a wonderful world and I want to preserve it as it is,”
“You said that as if it were going to dry up a blow away.”
“Who knows it may.”
“Don’t be sad I’m sure everything will be right.”
###
Haronah loved nothing better than looking at and handling the Governors artefacts. She was fascinated that they were thousands of years old. The Governor loved nothing better than telling her where the artefacts came from and a history of the civilisation that spawned it.
“You mean that you dig into your soil of your planet and come up with items used by your forefathers thousands of years ago?”
“Of course it but’s not quite as easy as that but I bet you could get the same results if you did the same on your planet.”
She gently picked up a piece of parchment with hieroglyphic writing on it. She was about to tell Haronah something when her eye spotted a figure drawn on the papyrus.
“What’s that,” Haronah asked.
“Oh that’s Anubis one of the Egyptian gods.”
“Anubis? His name is Anubis? One of our tribes is known as the Anubista.”
“Isn’t that a coincidence?”
“I’ll tell you what’s even more of a coincidence; they use almost the same figure you have there as their totem and of the five species here they have an appearance that quite easily could be canine but looked at a second time there is no doubt they are simian but as far back as we can track they’ve always been accepted as Platyrrhines.”
“Well there’s an incentive for you to start looking for likely archaeological sites if ever there was one.”
###
“Haronah,” Master Zill’s voice was deeply sombre, “The world is changing and a time might come when we have to seriously wipe them out and you’re the planner for that. Do you think you can do it?”
“I’ll do whatever it takes to preserve our race.” The Master gave her a squint-eyed look.
“Very well please place your preliminary plans to the final stages on record and have a copy sent to me. I want the Solarians and their star-ship out of here in the next six months. I suspect you’re getting too attached to them.”
“But Master Zill if you engage in combative warfare…” she trailed off.
“Yes, Sister Haronah I know full well what the results will be,” the master said in a soft voice loaded with emotion.
“They’re really very nice people when you get to know them,” Haronah made another pitch to the Master.
I’m partly right she told herself I do rather like their governor, he’s a sweet man and his field of study what’s it called – archaeology – a branch of the human sciences that everyone seems to have missed but he has gleaned a vast amount of information about his ancestors by studying old bones and pottery shards.
She would miss the governor with his patient and gentle ways. She liked, no she loved him well enough but still he was an ape,” Haronah wiped a tear from her eyes, “And they weren’t the best-looking specimens in the universe,” Even as she whispered the words to herself she knew looks were not the only criteria for falling in love.
Nice try Haronah, just who do you think you’re fooling.
“Please Master Zill let’s have one more try. I suggest a series of….”
“Don’t tell me. You will run the Project and whatever you want to do you, do if it goes wrong you can explain it to the Grand Master.
###
The streets of Las Vegas were filled with screaming, panicked hordes running in every direction. Huge dinosaurs, the worst kind, Tyrannosaurus Rex’s, extinct for several million years prowled the streets, damaging buildings and killing people. The streets of Las Vegas ran red with blood and terrified the Solarians. Where had these monsters sprung from?
As suddenly as they appeared they disappeared and Las Vegas was once again the city it had always been. The cards the chips, the dice and the roulette wheels stopped as they were when the dinosaurs appeared. Down in the streets the cars shone their strings of lights while Coca Cola and other bright tube lighting painted the flat canvases of high rise buildings. Nothing had changed but everything had changed. Everyone in Las Vegas knew that but no one could say what it was.
###
The huge, fiery meteor was speeding toward Rome, visible in the finest detail; it was already within Earth’s atmosphere and well on its way to striking the Coliseum. Hordes of terrified people had given up trying to outrun the inevitable they stood heads tilted upward as if welcoming a lover.
When the huge piece of space rock was so close clothing began to smoke and smoulder it just disappeared. Belief was totally suspended but relief was available on the wholesale market. The rush of air against Earth could be felt pushing against the Globe but no one wanted to contemplate what would have happened if it had been a real meteor instead of an hallucination.
There were not enough ambulances to move the suicides and traumatised, the suicides and the mercy killers who threw their children off high rise buildings to avoid them suffering pain but the bodies became nothing when the meteor disappeared.
When the bodies disappeared with the meteor thousands of Romans needed to be treated for shock. The signs of shock were terrible to see. Shocked people froze in unnatural positions, the positions they were in when the meter disappeared, staring with fixed eyes at nothing in particular. Where were the thousands killed by fear, suicide and stampede?
“I Tell you I saw it myself if it hadn’t have disappeared it would have landed right on top of me.”
“So you say it was real?”
“Signor I could even feel the heat coming off it.”
“So how does something like that just disappear?
“Come to the church with me. We pray and maybe God tells us how He performs His miracles. Why you ask me, anyway? Even the best brains have no answer. And me; I’m not a best brain.”
###
Moscow, Tokyo, Beijing, Canberra, no capital city escaped some terrifying apparition or another. The worst of it was that the root of these hallucinations were traced back to the Solarians own minds. So they couldn’t blame the Platyrrhines. Humanoids and humans kept a safe distance between themselves.
Was it possible for thousands of people to have the same hallucination at the same time. For that matter was it possible for the whole population to go mad at the same time?
The Governor asked Haronah.
“We don’t like seeing your people in the state they’re in so we’ve being doing some research of our own. What we have found - although it has yet to be verified is that it is an ancient virus that has resurrected itself on the surface of the planet.”
“It always comes back to a virus, why? Why then are your people not attacked?”
“Have you no viruses on your world? What is it you told me about the small pox virus on your planet? Three or four times your scientists have claimed eradications and three or four times it has returned, as with polio and Ebola. It seems your presence is inviting all these ancient viruses into the open again. I don’t know how or why they don’t attack us, perhaps they do but we have developed an immunity, a relationship to them.
A relationship much like cowpox and small pox on your planet.”
“I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I should think before I speak.”
“Don’t worry; I understand. The theory is that radiation from your ship has stirred them to life again. Well that’s the latest theory anyway,
“They followed the radiation back to its source near Las Vegas and Rome and the Virus read some of their minds and activated their fears. It can do that you know? That it can cause hallucinations is recorded in the records we found but these hallucinations seem to be worse than the originals.”
The danger with this virus is that the constant playing on the hosts fears eventually becomes too much for the host and they succumb.”
“Succumb? You mean die?”
“Yes.”
“What can we do?”
“I don’t know. Our scientists are digging back into ancient records but antiquities don’t interest us like they do you. I regret that now. In the meantime, we’ll continue with our research.”
###
For the first time since the First Generation Solaria experienced demonstrations. The people marched despite warnings that gatherings could foster some other new disease. The fear of staying outweighed the fear of another round of epidemics.
The cry now was to get away from Satan’s Galaxy but the Solarian Executive was caught between a rock and a hard place. If they departed now they could very well just be moving the virus with them. But what form would any evolution take in space or in the new environs of the Star-Ship?
They had no option but to work with the Platyrrhines to find a solution. A virus originally was a natural part of its host, put there to protect the host. It only became virulent when it entered a different species to its host. Ages of infecting strange hosts meant that a virus often no longer remembered its original host and infected any species it entered.
Haronah explained that to the Gov. telling him that they and the virus were at a dangerous intersection. “Your people are being attacked by so many different viruses because they recognize you as a new species and as a threat.
The last memory these viruses would have had was us Platyrrhines as the threat to whoever their original host was but suddenly they’re woken from a suspended animation and faced with a new threat they haven’t even had a chance to gauge.
Their response is to attack as fiercely as they know how. Your surprising presence could also trigger a mutation in them that would pose a threat to all five species in our home systems. Before that happens, we’re going to have to quarantine you in a rather isolated part of the galaxy so that we can work undisturbed on a serum to immunise you, and through approximation to our viruses get your own bodies’ to kick-start their auto immune systems. In which case we can all benefit from the anti-bodies that you’ll build up.”
This made sense to the Gov. whose history lessons had been filled with people like Louis Pasteur, Jonathon Silk and Alexander Fleming. And on the other hand who had not heard of the infamous Typhoid Mary? Who did not still fear the bubonic plague? He had no problem in getting agreement from the council.
Those who could carry a disease directly in the host’s system without being attacked themselves and those who could carry the disease through a parasite which then passes it on to the victim.
###
The Solarians attitude toward staying on and colonising the area was coloured by the illnesses.
“I say we stay. Most of the fever type illnesses seem to have run their course. Given a couple of months and they’ll be a thing of the past. We wait a while and when we’re sure we let Platyrrhines know we’re staying, permanently. Of course, we’ll let them know they’ll always have a privileged position in the new social order, I mean they’ve done a lot for us and we’re not ungrateful.
By their own admission if we survived the fever then we must have immunity and so far, I believe we have had no fatalities. The generals puffed their chests like pouter pigeons as if they were responsible for bringing the population through one of the worst epidemics in the last five hundred years.
Ten days later the largest single out- break of the fever occurred in London and Tokyo on the same day. Two mil
lion people in Tokyo came down with the fever. London had nearly the same amount and for once there was not enough people to nurse the ill.
Nine hundred died in the first week in Tokyo and seven hundred and fifty died in the same period in England. Resources were suddenly stretched very thinly.
###
“I’m damned if I’m going to be chased away from the most desirable place I’ve seen to put down roots by a bunch of blue arsed baboons.”
“General if I ever hear you speak like that again I’ll have you demoted to lieutenant.” The governor had not yet been issued with his ultimatum and the general felt that it should be done soon, or as soon as these bloody illnesses were put to bed.
That sentiment was scarcely out of the general’s mouth than the next fatality was reported. A few cases of individual hallucination also broke out.
###
A superstition grew that it was bad luck to even think of staying on Galactic 3 and the jingoists were silenced under threat of death.
“Haronah are you ready to finish this charade once and for all?”
“Yes Master Zill but I’ll have to foist a lie on them to speed matters up.”
“What kind of a lie?”
“Oh the type known as a white lie but on a grander scale. They believe so strongly in their technology so to make them comfortable with a machine not of their design we will give them something vaguely familiar to them.”
###
A delegation of military personnel approached the governor in his state room. They carried guns and easily disarmed the governors ceremonial guard whose guns were not loaded.
“What’s the meaning of this?” he demanded.
“You are being deposed,” General Ferreira told him.
“Don’t be silly,” the governor spluttered, “There hasn’t been a coup d ‘etat in Solaria since Earth was a series of countries and states.”
“Well it’s about time we had one now wouldn’t you say. We have spoken to your friends the Platarrhines and they are willing to offer you asylum in light of your incompetence in dealing with the recent epidemics. Might I suggest that you begin packing.”
The Final Sunset Page 13
