Last Dance of the Phoenix

by James R. Lane

“That uncertainty is now over,” the voice stated. “And while the hostile entity that was hosted by the now-dead Ar’kaa Councilor has been eliminated, the Ar’kaa people themselves remain very much complicit with the goals that entity promised them---the total elimination of Yularians, Eelon, Dralorians and Humans. What the Ar’kaa are not aware of is, had the entity succeeded in its goals, it would have turned against them, the Ar’kaa---and annihilated them as well.” There were squeals of outrage and denial from the other Ar’kaa scattered around the room, as well as from the other species represented.

  “At this time,” the bodiless voice continued, “there is a fleet of human warships---using a drive technology unlike yours that doesn’t require passengers and crew to endure cold-sleep---on their way to the Ar’kaa home world. These ships are heavily armed, and will establish a permanent blockade of all interstellar traffic to and from the planet.”

  “You can’t do that!” another Ar’kaa Councilor yelled. “We demand---!”

  “YOU ARE IN NO POSITION TO DEMAND ANYTHING!” the voice thundered. “Had your now-dead Councilor not revealed himself as the host to the hostile entity responsible for this matter, the human war fleet had instructions not only to blockade your world, but to reduce it to a radioactive cinder at the first sign of resistance. We had determined your people were harboring this hostile entity; we just didn’t know exactly where it was hiding. That matter has now been resolved with the death of Councilor Ee’rah and his...passenger...so your people will be spared...extermination. You will not, however, be allowed to rejoin the Alliance until you prove that you have reformed your genocidal ways.” There was a brief pause. “There is also the matter of punishment for your crimes, and while it will be fair, it will also be...harsh.”

  “Genocidal?” and “Punishment?” were the new buzz-words winging their way around the dais, along with an incredulous “Ar’kaa?” The three other species, all meat-eaters, couldn’t seem to wrap their minds around the thought of the soft-appearing, plant-eating Ar’kaa harboring genocidal intentions.

  “Yes---genocidal,” the voice intoned. “They were enthralled with the idea of eliminating all the carnivorous species of your Alliance, including the newly-discovered Humans, then expanding onto your vacant worlds in a free-breeding utopian bliss. They didn’t realize that the hostile entity they were harboring had plans to eliminate all intelligent biological life, not just the carnivores.” The scattered Ar’kaa Councilors seemed frozen in place, terrified, now that their obscene plans had been revealed. “Before any of you attack them, understand this: These Ar’kaa are not to be harmed. Instead, they are to be gathered up and placed on a human transport ship that will soon land nearby, and returned to their home world. There, they will explain to their people the reasons the Ar’kaa people are being isolated, and just what their punishment will entail. Anybody who harms an Ar’kaa at this time will be forced to accompany them to their planet---without weapons. You carnivores may have impressive teeth and claws, but a large group of determined herbivores can easily overwhelm a predator.”

  The warning came just in time, since several of the younger, more-energetic Councilors had begun moving toward the lapins, and the carnivores had blood on their minds.

  Chapter 30

  Last Dance of the Phoenix

  A light at the end of a tunnel; a bright sky full of puffy clouds; a vast, endless plain of wind-swept grass; a table of poker-playing historic figures; a doorway leading into a blinding, bright-lit expanse---all familiar clichés of near-death experiences. These and seemingly endless others flashed through my mind in a constant stream like frames of a slide show---but yet... How was this happening? I had no eyes, I wasn’t breathing, I felt...nothing. Was this eternal damnation, what many fear being dead must be like?

  Was I, indeed, dead?

  “Hello, Tom,” a familiar-sounding voice replied, apparently responding to my...thought? “Yes, my friend, you could safely say you were dead, and the man you once were is quite dead, and will remain so.” Oh, this wasn’t going well at all! “Yet here you are---here we are---and to answer one question prominent in your mind, no, this isn’t heaven, nor is it hell. You could say this is a genuine ‘life after life’, a new beginning for Thomas D. Barnes---although, as you will soon discover, you are no longer the Thomas D. Barnes of old. Sadly, that person’s death was permanent, but in dying he helped bring an end to a most...unfortunate...episode of history in at least one otherwise pleasant little corner of your galaxy.”

  “I...I don’t understand.”

  “No doubt,” the formless voice replied evenly, “but if you’ll give me a few moments, and if you try not to interrupt too much, I’ll fill in the holes before we move you to your next level.”

  “Next level?”

  “First things first,” it said, “and to begin with, you need to know what happened in your last moments of life. Tell me---what do you remember?”

  Surprisingly, there didn’t seem to be a problem recalling the scene in the Grand Chamber, and the memory playback went smoothly up to the point the raging Ar’kaa Councilor leveled his staff of office at me--- Strange! The memory simply...ended...right there. “What---?”

  “That’s the point your memory crystal---for lack of a better term---‘took a snapshot’ of your entire brain; memory, consciousness, ‘soul’---everything. A moment later the Councilor blasted the lower part of your body with a plasma beam, which obliterated that half of you and literally fried the remainder.”

  Huh? “What’s a ‘memory crystal’? Humans don’t have---”

  “Humans don’t normally have things like that,” the voice explained, “but you’d been ‘tampered with’ by more than just your friend Art’s people, as well as the Yularian medical team that rebuilt your aged human body. A ‘memory crystal’ is a peanut-sized automated monitoring/recording device that, upon detecting a potentially-lethal threat, makes an instant recording of the subject’s entire mental processes. If the threat passes benignly, it resets to watch for the next threat. You may have noticed a faint click the instant before a potentially lethal event took place. In this case it recorded the essence of one Thomas D. Barnes, human, an instant before he suffered fatal injury. I used that recording to reanimate you, Tom. Your original self died and was beyond resurrection, but through technology far beyond current human or Yularian science, you live again.”

  “So,” I finally ventured, “I’m...really just a...a recording, an analog copy of a dead man...with a brain so small it’ll fit in a peanut?” Ouch! Am I live, or am I “Memorex”?

  “You’re what you believe yourself to be, Tom,” came the reply. “You were a science fiction writer, and I know you’ve both written about and read numerous other stories of characters who experienced ‘rebirths’ of various kinds, often from recordings of their prior---often dead but not always so---selves. Now you get to experience what you and your kind have only dreamed of thus far; a genuine ‘rebirth’ from a salvaged recording of you a moment before your untimely death. This should be a science fiction writer’s dream scenario, not his most feared nightmare!”

  “How---?” How, indeed. “How did this happen? Who are you to be able to do such a thing?” I paused a non-existent heartbeat before continuing. “And if I’m once again alive---and apparently asleep or in limbo---what am I going to wake up as?”

  “First off, to answer your unspoken suspicions about me,” the voice said, “yes, I’m the...entity...you knew as Bertha. What I am is a bit tougher to explain.”

  “Are you--- God?”

  “God? No, Tom, I’m neither your God, nor anybody else’s deity---at least not at this time. I’m what you might call the ‘essence’ of a star.”

  Huh? “Do you mean...stars are alive?”

  “We’re a different type of life than you biologicals, but yes, most of us, at least, are in a sense ‘alive’, but once we’re ‘born’, our conscious minds normally unite into what’s best called an ‘overmind’ or ‘group mind’. Each
galaxy, like your Milky Way or my Andromeda, is made of millions, sometimes billions of stars, and each star’s essence becomes a part of the galaxy’s group mind. Some stars birth planets that, in turn, give birth to life of one sort or another, while other stars either have no planets, or have planets barren of life forms altogether.

  “In this case, one ‘cell’ of our overmind became terribly unstable and horribly xenophobic; its planets had no life forms, and it developed a pathological hatred of ALL forms of life. It destroyed hundreds of civilizations as it worked its way through our galaxy, staying one step ahead of those of us who had been tasked to contain it. Then, much to our surprise, it made the totally unexpected leap to your galaxy, and I alone was given the task of stopping it.”

  “What---why didn’t any of our own...star minds...stop it?” I nearly screamed, outraged. Well, I tried to scream, but without a real voice it didn’t work all that well.

  “You must understand that most of our kind have at best but fleeting interest in what transpires on our worlds; we have other, far larger matters to concern us---matters beyond even your deepest thinkers’ comprehension. Your own star’s essence, for example, along with most others in your galaxy and mine, are fully occupied with an...issue...with what you call the M87 galaxy.”

  “So...why are you here? Why concern yourself with life forms not of your making?”

  “Look at it as you might with a person dealing with his own psychosis,” the voice said. “One cell of our overmind became more than indifferent; it became malignant, so we dispatched other cells to deal with it. Eventually, since ‘we’ had infected another galaxy, ‘we’ felt it necessary to take additional steps to curb the infection. That’s where I came into the picture. I was the ‘white blood cell’ tasked with finding and destroying the ‘infection’.”

  “Have...have the two of you been responsible for the ‘angels’ and ‘demons’ that have filled human culture?” I was genuinely terrified of what I might hear.

  “No, but I don’t doubt that other so-called ‘wanderers’---either alien life forms or even individual cells of your own or other galaxy overminds---may have tampered with your culture throughout your history, since your own star’s attention has been otherwise occupied for millennia. And while some of us actually do care about the life forms that our planets spawn, I’m sorry to say that a great deal of us...really don’t.”

  “You?” Its answer, if it gave one, would possibly give me insight into things beyond my comprehension---but I had to at least try...to know.

  “Sadly, my own planets are as yet barren of life, but my solar system is also relatively young, so in time, and with a bit of work, they may in fact ‘bear fruit’. Not anytime soon, as your kind measures its passage, but I have ample time to nurture the projects I’ve begun, and unlike some, I will take an active hand in their development.”

  So...in effect, I really was dealing with a god; just not humanity’s God---nor the god of any of the Alliance’s species. Somehow that knowledge didn’t relax me---not at all.

  “Unfortunately,” the entity continued, “you weren’t the only casualty that day in the Great Hall. B’naah’s mate, D’oono, sank his fangs into the throat of Ee’rah, the Ar’kaa Councilor who happened to be hosting my hostile...sibling...and a moment later one of them triggered the plasma canon in the Ar’kaa’s staff of office, obliterating both their heads, along with the threat. We are born in and of stars, but everything has a physical limit. Like your human self, D’oono had a memory crystal in his brain, and no doubt it had dutifully made a record of ‘him’ when the altercation began, but even my advanced technology couldn’t withstand what that plasma weapon did, and the crystal---along with the malignant entity---was destroyed. Still, his quick action saved many lives that day, and possibly saved an entire species---and more---since, as you knew before entering that room, there were human-crewed ships heading for the Ar’kaa home world, with instructions to destroy it---and the Ar’kaa people---if necessary.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, “the death of an entire species---genocide---wasn’t something I was looking forward to, but damn it!---those rabbits were acting like the German Nazis in World War II who aimed to destroy the Jews! Only these fur-covered ‘Nazis’ wanted to kill four entire species of sentients---literally trillions of people! We just couldn’t let that happen!”

  “Agreed, Tom, and with my hostile...sibling...obliterated in the plasma blast, and the heinous Ar’kaa plot exposed, the threat to everybody was removed. All that remained was meting out suitable punishment for the Ar’kaa, and implementing a rehabilitation program that will hopefully bring them back into the Alliance fold in a generation or two.”

  Part of what it said gave me an imaginary chill. Punishment? How do you dole out “suitable punishment” for such an outrageous crime as the bunnies were planning?

  “What...did you decide was...suitable...considering their crime?” I finally asked.

  “Like your Nuremburg War Crimes Trials after World War II,” it began, “all those who were actively involved in the plans to commit genocide against the Alliance member species, as well as against humanity, were rounded up, arrested, tried in Alliance courts...and sentenced to death. What was different from your Nuremburg Trials was, the guilty Ar’kaa were sentenced to be hunted down like animals in special game parks on the Ar’kaa home world, killed by Yularian, Eelon, Dralorian and human participants---and eaten, all on live video broadcast world-wide.” It paused a moment to let the gravity of that statement sink in. “Being hunted and eaten is the Ar’kaa’s number one species nightmare, and nothing short of that would burn into their psyches the enormity of their crime. Simple executions are often quickly forgotten, but knowing that the punishment for plotting multi-species genocide is a period of abject terror, followed by fatal pain, followed by the horror of being eaten---that, Tom, will stick with them for countless generations to come.

  Also, their entire population will be forced to live for at least a number of years at the same primitive level of technology they were at when the Yularians discovered them. No modern medicine, no comfortable amenities, no convenient communications or rapid transportation. After they’ve endured this for a period of time (yet to be determined), they will be evaluated by the Alliance, and if it feels they’re ready, they’ll be allowed modern technology and readmitted into the Alliance on a probationary status. If they turn out to be good Alliance citizens, they’ll again be granted permanent membership. It’s brutally harsh punishment, but one thing dealing with countless unruly species has taught us---half-measures, compassion, gentleness and ‘reason’ don’t get the message across to headstrong civilizations. However, they all understand the iron fist, and if a stellar entity deems it necessary to become directly involved in such matters, the measures it metes out must make a lasting impression.”

  “Where do I fit into this?” I ventured. “Obviously a lot of effort went into resurrecting me, but to what end?” I held an imaginary breath as I awaited its answer. Dealing with an entity that has god-like powers requires balls; hell, I didn’t even have a body!

  “After I convinced the Council of the enormity of the Ar’kaa plot,” it explained, “and made them understand just what was behind it, the members were sworn to secrecy. Then I laid out a series of demands, one of them being that they were to rescind their rule of not rejuvenating key Yularians. B’naah, with her advanced medical knowledge, could not be allowed to die of old age, so she would be first to receive the treatment. Several of us knew that Councilor D’oono was unrecoverably dead, but he had filled an important, progressive role in the Alliance government, and I didn’t want that influence to be lost. The Council members saw both your human remains, as well as those of D’oono, placed under stasis fields, and they were told that, given time, D’oono’s body and mind could possibly be regenerated---a most painful lie. Once B’naah’s rejuvenation process was completed, she salvaged enough undamaged DNA from his preserved corpse to clone him a new body---�
�

  “But---!” I interrupted. “You said his memory crystal-thingie was destroyed in the fight! How could you restore his---?”

  “Exactly,” the formless voice finished. “Nobody could restore the person D’oono was; he was truly dead. The cloned body would simply be an empty vessel.” It paused, and somehow I detected a bit of amusement. “We hope you like your new form, Tom.

  “And your new name.”

  ***

  “Wake up, Tom,” came the Yularian-accented voice---speaking English. I could feel the chains of a soul-deep sleep rapidly falling away, but something told me to keep my eyes closed, at least for the moment. Then I took a deep breath and I thought my nose---which felt really strange---would literally explode from all the olfactory information it was trying to feed my fuzzy brain. Snatches of scenes from the stories I’d written rapidly flashed across my mind; scenes of once-human characters waking up in non-human forms---and trying mightily not to lose their ever-lovin’ minds!

  But---I quickly realized that this really wasn’t all that bad. It was as if my subconscious mind had been preparing for this the whole time my disembodied self was... “talking” with...with--- Dear sweet Jesus! I’d been holding a conversation with a...a star! Despite its denial, the thing was in every sense a superior, supernatural being---a god! And...that god had...had rescued me. How humbling an experience can one poor soul be expected to endure, I wondered, my chest suddenly tight with emotion. I squeezed my eyes tightly shut and forced my breathing---which had gotten terribly erratic---to settle down. The Yularian that had spoken to me must have been monitoring biomedical instruments, and had begun making concerned noises; that wasn’t something I wanted to worry it---her---with. My nose and brain had quickly identified one of the major new scents as female Yularian, and as another bit of suppressed knowledge clicked into place I took a gamble.

  “B’naah?” I managed to croak in terrible-sounding English, my mouth not feeling at all like it should.