The Winged Lion

If you look to the sky and see a small star

that nobody noticed (because it’s so far),

then look a bit closer and you might even see

how it burns out, explodes, and ceases to be.

Somewhere in the wilderness of the galaxy, in a place the nosy Earthling telescopes have not yet reached, a planet cruises along. It travels politely, trying not to bother anyone, falling repeatedly toward its sun without ever quite reaching its face. Like any self‑respecting satellite.

It is Earth‑sized and orbits a placid yellow star much like Sol. A careful observer will note it is slightly larger, and about sixty percent of its surface is dry land. It’s sun is accompanied by eleven other planets, only the tenth of which is slightly larger than our planet; the rest are much larger, each scattered with five to thirty‑two moons, and six are adorned with beautiful rings.

Among the planet’s inhabitants lives a forlorn, bedraggled tribe of Homo sapiens* — a primate species, peculiarly troubled, that still thinks one plus one equals two.

The tribe’s most conspicuous difference from its Earthly cousins lies in money. Where Earthlings use large, rectangular, colorful pieces of paper, the tribespeople use small, spherical, colorful ingots of glass.

In other respects they resemble Earthlings: their religion resembles Judaism, though anyone who looks carefully will find a few lines hinting at Christianity, a couple of points nodding toward Islam, and two Hindu triangles.

Until recently, the central government was run by wise, if somewhat senile, elders chosen in secret elections whenever someone expressed dissatisfaction with how their affairs were handled. There are few places where elections happen with such frequency.

The tribe speaks some Semitic tongue whose roots go back to ancient times, when the tribe still had enough brains to invent such a thing. Indeed, it is a very old language.

__________

*) Homo Sapiens — “the thinking man.” A relatively late, and not particularly successful, branch of the Earthling Pack-Packoids**. The definition is broad but accurate. Of course, nobody really knows what they think about, least of all themselves. **) Pack-Packoids — “intelligent creatures (if only barely) with two hands, no more than two legs and no tail” (see A.G.). The name derives from the first intelligent race in the universe that managed to wipe itself out (some say doing the rest of the universe a great favor). All Pack-Packoids have a hysterical tendency toward mass suicide, mixed with a generous helping of mutual assistance — “I’ll help you die, then you help me.” Although cosmo‑archaeologists, cosmo‑historians and cosmo‑influencers agree that about sixty‑three percent of the known intelligent races to ever exist were Pack-Packoids, they make up only about one‑tenth of one percent of all intelligent beings now alive. By their nature, that number will only decrease.

Among its words are names: their planet is called “Adama,” which means “Land” in Tribean, and their sun is called “Or,” which means “Light.” It is a very logical language.

From space, Adama looks dull beside its giant siblings — it has no rings and no natural satellite to speak of, save for one exception: an astronaut, who forgot to tether himself to his ship. A rare coincidence placed that astronaut — whose name every member of the tribe knows — into orbit directly above Adama’s equator while his ship fell back and burned in the atmosphere, becoming the only meteor the Adamanians ever saw. In the Or system, as everyone knows, there are no asteroids or comets.

Adama looks boring from space even compared with Earth, but if you examine the planet’s surface you will behold a magnificent spectacle of boredom: a dull, monotonous, flat landscape. The astronaut forgot to tether himself because he was sleepy: before his oxygen ran out he dozed off while staring at the face of his home planet.

Nearly two hundred years have passed since — roughly three hundred Earth years — yet the mishaps regarding that tribe’s first (and so far only) astronaut are still recorded in the book “Safety Principles for Spaceflight” under Chapter Three: “How Not to Go for a Walk Outside the Ship,” Chapter Fourteen: “Where Not to Look When You’re Already in Space,” and Chapter One Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty‑Eight: “Why You Shouldn’t Eat Beans When the Cabin Air Conditioning Is Out.”

The tribe, about five million strong, lives in a single city. The city, called “the City,” is one of the many relics of the tribe’s glorious past, but the tribe does not know this: the tall marble columns, the gigantic ornate towers, the palaces that once gleamed in Or’s light, and the sophisticated tools and construction methods that have been long forgotten are buried or scattered far outside the City’s walls.

In the central public library there is abundant material about the cultural heyday that once flourished on Adama. The end of that golden age lasted no more than two minutes, but more on that later.

In the vast arsenal of the library there are ancient science books describing starships with which Adamanians once journeyed vast distances, and among the history books are many diaries and travel logs, thousands of years old, describing scientific missions to the gas giants of the Or system.

No Adamanian has ever set foot on those gas giants, of course — they would be crushed by the enormous gravity.

The celestial bodies the Adamanians used to land on were the moons, where they would rest and watch planetrises and planetsets. There they would sit down and weep, as they remembered Adama. “Why is ours so boring?” they asked themselves.

The only planet the Adamanians could have landed on was the tenth (called, incidentally, “Ten”), but because it looked through Adamanian telescopes even more boring than Adama itself, almost no one thought it worthwhile.

The Adamanians’ single failed landing on Ten ended in humiliation: the entire expedition – one hundred and twenty people with their equipment (mainly padded chairs) – was eaten by a local cow, which promptly died of stomach poisoning. That cow, after losing its life, was eaten by a Tailless Scavengerian vulture. For two weeks the vulture suffered digestive problems and, once its gut settled, decided to become a vegetarian. It starved to death after sixteen days.

That would have been the end of the matter if not for the vulture’s rotting corpse attracting the Three‑Butted Elephant Worm. When the worm nearly finished the vulture, some bone got stuck in its throat and it too dropped dead.

We will not bore you with the details; suffice it to say events unfolded so that, in the fullness of time, the most advanced creature left alive was a giant tree, whose heart was gladdened by the millions of decaying corpses piled around it and which helped it to grow.

After about five million Adama years a new race of intelligent, assimilative beings appeared on Ten, rooted to the spot and incapable of harming anyone even if they wanted to (and they did not want to). Things looked promising until a tree research team discovered fire before another research team had a chance to invent the firefighting plane. Ten became a barren planet.

But those events happened millions of years in the future, so let us return to the library: the most popular book there is The Story of a Woman, about the life of Orgazmatis Sensualis, the famous nymphomaniac from the Pornographon peninsula. It is beloved by adolescent boys who learn from it what to do, but mostly leaf through it for pleasure. Her second book, The Snake — A Woman’s Best Friend, achieved great success (among men in particular) despite loud protests from members of the “Creeper Rights Association.”

In any case, the most important book on any shelf in the library is Encyclopedia Galactica.” It is an old copy and therefore not made of crystalline memory quarks like any self-respecting modern book (and A.G., by all accounts, respects itself), but written on fire‑, water‑, and bookworm‑resistant armored Petrolikian paper.

A thriving population of migratory worms that found their way into the encyclopedia soon perished from hunger and toothache.

Another drawback of Petrolikian paper is that it is heavy. Very heavy.

The book, colossal by any measure — eighty‑five meters wide, a hundred meters tall, and about forty‑five meters thick by Earth standards — updates itself every thirty‑three and a third Earth seconds.

No citizen of the City ever bothered to read what was written in the book — perhaps because no one remembered that it existed: it was stored in a basement whose entrance was sealed by mistake years ago by a drunken builder who thought he was building a wall — which he indeed did, but in the wrong place.

The book is one more anonymous relic from the days before the disaster.

Several tens of millions of years ago, somewhere on a certain planet, a gang of physicists invented a particle bomb capable of destroying an entire world. Before launching it toward its target — a neighboring planet that blocked their sun and whose inhabitants, rather ugly creatures, treated their envoys quite rudely — they decided, as is customary among orderly scientists, to test a prototype first. They did so in a controlled and measured manner, in the most sophisticated laboratory on their planet. The last word ever spoken on the physicists’ planet was: “Oops.”