Book 2; Mother of All Things Extract From “The Book of Pan” So, where do we begin to look for our Hero? Why, amongst our own, of course. One of our number is bound to hold to our values and moral constraints, and he will have suffered along with the rest of us. He will be sympathetic to our needs and he will share our dreams. In short, he will understand. And here, Dear Reader, is the problem; does this “understanding” not colour the Hero’s perceptions of what is required of him? We expect him to apply that understanding in choosing his actions, and we trust that the result will be compatible with our needs. And here, the incompatibility exists. If a Hero is to do just ENOUGH, then will that be sufficient to meet our needs? If he is to restore BALANCE, then will this reach the limits of our dreams? The answer of course, is no. The community from which the Hero has emerged will have set criteria in mind with regard to the Hero’s fulfilment of his task, and as such, the Hero will share those views. He will, undoubtedly, act accordingly. With this in mind, it must be argued that the TRUE Hero should come from OUTSIDE the community. This is the only way that impartiality may be achieved, allowing the Hero to formulate an action for BALANCE. His actions may not be what we DESIRE, but he will have none of our preconceived restraints, and his will be a truer response to the situation. His convictions must be pure, free of prejudice and uncoloured by the opinions of those involved. So, where does our Hero find his motivation? That, Dear Reader, is the question. Chapter 18; Rebirth The throne room was warm; not through any necessity on Mother God’s part, but due to its unique make up. This was her physical link with the world she claimed as her own, a link formed of organic matter, a living, breathing organism in its own right. The walls, ceiling and floor were threaded with fine veins and arteries that pulsed with the low thump- thump of an unseen heart, transporting the lifeblood of countless warped and twisted creatures to and from the throne itself; amid the great washes of desert that covered the planet, fleshy nodules had appeared, their roots running deep into the earth to join the network that fed Mother God’s hellish womb. With the blood came information, and as Mother God reclined in her throne, she could see her entire world, wracked with the pain that had been left by the violence of the past, her creations no more than dust; it was enough to break a god’s heart, all that was beautiful had been ripped away to leave the picked carcass of a dead planet, all that was good, lost… Lost, but not gone. The time had come, and Mother God circulated the command for her creation to live. The message carried swiftly, each nodule reacting to it with a gaseous outpouring of spores that drifted on unseen currents, blanketing the bare earth with a green fog that hung for a while before seeping into the grey and sterile surface. Within hours, there would be the first signs of fresh growth, new life born from the dead bones of the old. Already, the cracked and tortured salt flats were darkening as Mother God released water from its elemental incarceration, and sand choked waterways became slow moving rivers of slurry, as the liquid so long denied them returned. Mother God was still awed by how far she’d come; in seven thousand years, she had gone from scientist to creator to less than nothing, only to be reborn, through sheer willpower and foresight, as the one true ruler of this world; she was part of it, in a fundamental and undeniable way. But the road had been long and the price heavy. She had been born Maria Santos in the small village of Burnock, England in the year 2046, a difficult time in Earth’s history; her young life was spent watching humanity rape their world of its resources, killing it slowly with the casual abandon of a spoilt child, and she had vowed to “make a difference”. Studying hard, she had shown great promise in all areas of scientific research, gaining qualifications and expertise that would prove invaluable as Man retreated beneath the surface of the desolation he had created. By the turn of the century, Maria Santos was heading up the creation of the Ark project, setting the criteria for restarting the Human race on a new world. She had, of course, been one of the first to be allocated a stasis pod, the necessity to retain her skills on the new world was a given, and she had been glad to go; Earth was, by then, all but dead, and her husband was one of many casualties of the failing world. So, the first ship, Salvation, had launched with her aboard, and her son to follow soon after with the Ark Hope. It was here, with a thousand years of sleep ahead of her, that she had come to her true calling. The very computers that she had helped to design had woken her a decade into the flight, leaving her a conscious mind trapped in a motionless body. Fault or Fate, she could not say, but the remote logon, installed as a failsafe should the occupants’ slumber be disturbed, was still functional. She logged on, recalibrated the sleep inducers, and the initial grains of panic when the process failed utterly were quelled by an influx of calming drugs delivered smartly by the status regulator. Her scientific mind took over, occupying itself with monitoring her sleeping companions, reading their dreams, analysing their status, until the problem could be remedied. It never was. Years passed, decades and centuries crept away, and Maria Santos studied the others with increasing detail; with so many subjects, the true nature of the Human race was bound to display itself, and five hundred years in, it did just that. Humanity, she discovered, was indeed like a spoilt child; tell it no and it would ask why, tell it to stop, and it would push to the limits. The new world would stand no more chance than the old. It would be subject to the same degradations that Earth had suffered, leading to an untimely demise. Man could not learn. With this revelation came a burning desire to fix Humanity, to make him take responsibility, and with this desire came the realisation that, without a single overriding consciousness, there would always be conflict. She had to take control; she had to be their guiding light. And she had to be permanent. The nanites used to deliver medications through the onboard monitoring systems had been easy to adapt once Maria had worked the formulae, and by the time Salvation had reached her destiny, the work was complete; Maria and her flight companions were of one mind and physically capable of creating the world of Man anew. They had worked hard, terraforming this dead grey rock into a bountiful paradise in preparation for the arrival of the second and third arks. They had given everything. They had sacrificed much to bring this about. And when the second ark landed, they had been driven away, shunned and branded as an unwanted evil. Man took this world as his own, and rejected those who had made it possible. Man had deserved what came after; the war, the destruction of their civilisation, the pain, all of it was of their own doing. And Mother God had been glad to play her part in order to save this world from the brutality that would surely befall it. Years of planning, hidden away with her people, had culminated in a short and bitter conflict, but with Humanity on the brink of defeat, Mother God had made a grave error. She had tried a step too far, creating two daughters of immense potency, intending to harness that power for her own purposes, but ultimately paying the price for her vanity. Lyssa’s rage, her desperation and fear of failure, had resulted in an almost complete destruction of everything that Mother God had touched. But gods don’t die; she hadn’t died, she had merely slept, awaiting the third ark and her second coming. And while she slept, her world slept too, but now was the time of reckoning. She and her world lived again, and she would break the humans before they had a hold. This time, there would be no mistakes.