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ENIA
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Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: self
Type: Fiction
Pages: 300
Copyright: 2020
ISBN-13: 9781716643903
Price: $6.00 (eBook)
My name is Viktor Lekov. I'm from Bulgaria. My career so far has nothing to do with writing. Lifeguard, scuba diver, soldier, dental technician, design & prepress in advertising agency, graduated in economics, store manager and traveler.
I have a brand new English translation of my first novel to offer.
A fast-paced adventure across four continents (and two universes), aiming to answer a lot of questions.
What would an ordinary man do if he suddenly gains the ultimate knowledge? Will he use it for his own benefit or the common good?
Are we alone in the universe? And is the universe alone? Who made it?
Is there a grain of truth in conspiracy theories? Who hushed up a number of inventions and why?
Does the power of thought know any limits?
Questions. Always more than the answers.
Excerpt
The limpid air provided such visibility that if the planet hadn't been a sphere
and it was,
one could have probably seen the opposite continent. The water in the turquoise bay tried to outmatch the air, but it was still a denser medium. Its purity was equal, its transparency, naturally smaller.
The water and the air both teemed with life. As did the land beginning at the broad beach. Monkeys called to each other from the tops of the palms, ants scurried along the trunks, carrying bits of leaves like so many flags. Flocks of birds cried from above. Crabs tried to look purposeful but merely left funny tracks on the white sand with their sideways gaits. The sand itself was so white, it might have well been downloaded from the website of a five-star hotel in the Caribbean.
Despite the density of the water, one could see single fishes or whole schools as deep as a hundred yards. As if obeying an order, they parted in opposite directions. Almost immediately, some of the water they'd just vacated started rising. It formed a more distinct bulge by the second. And it moved towards the shore. It looked nothing like an opportunistic wave and everything like a walking creature.
Water that walks out of the water?!
The bulge could now be described as a head. It was followed by a neck, a pair of shoulders, a chest. When the whole thing
creature?
stepped on the beach, it became obvious it had come here on purpose. And was made of water.
So there's going to be a witness to this perfect beauty, after all.
The undeniably humanlike creature threw diamond reflections in the lavish tropical sun. It resembled a more complete version of the ancient crystal skulls discovered in Latin America. Those were made of mountain crystal, transparent or milky-white, while the creature was made of water, but the similarity was unmistakable. The creature had flesh over its skull. And a body. And limbs. Even hair. Whose hairs could not have been thicker than a few water molecules but distinctly fluttered in the breeze.
This mass of water, some six feet tall and shaped like a human body, did look human. It moved like a human too. It probably also had a heart, a brain, irises, nerve endings, papillary lines, and everything else, but there was no way to tell. Staring yielded nothing. It was like trying to find the outline of a crystal brain inside a crystal skull. You'd never know if it was there or not.
The hushed monkeys and the other inhabitants of the beach watched mesmerized the cocktail of equal parts reflections and transparency caused by the slightest movement of Pete l'Eau's body.
Pete sat down on the white sand, as carefree as a vacationer, and looked up at the sun.
He was an Observer. The last scion of an ancient line of Observers. So ancient that the substance that made up his body, along with the bodies of all Aquatics, was included in his surname. One legend went as far as to claim that the Eau line had been among the First Ones, those the Creator had made Himself. Some of Pete's ancestors were still alive but made no comments about that particular legend. Probably out of modesty.
Aquatics did not age or die. The water on a planet can't age. A predator can't hurt a body made of water. Still, a lot of Pete's ancestors—if he consulted the Records, he'd find out just how many—had undertaken the Dissolution. They had decided they'd taught the Knowledge, the Norms, and the Purpose to the others, and so dissolved of their own will, providing material for creating Descendants.
Indeed, their bodies were made entirely of water, but had it been that simple, all the ocean, the rivers, the rain would be alive. In order to create an Aquatic, one needed water and the unconditional love of an Aquatic man and an Aquatic woman. Plus the most important component: the Spark.
Pete was a little over 43,000 cycles old, a paltry age for Aquatics, but he'd grasped, or at least thought he had, the reasoning of those who had chosen to Dissolve. Seeing the joy of Love and the Mingling of two Aquatics, feeling the pure, harmonic vibrations they sent out when they were together—it would tempt anyone to give them her or his Spark. So they could activate it afresh and create a new Aquatic. That was particularly true for those who had lived on Anomaly and gazed at the stars in the Water Way for millions of cycles. And had meanwhile observed or occasionally steered the Terrestrials and the Aerials' evolution. Then there were some who simply grew bored with being immortal.
There was another way to provide a Spark. It required two Aquatics to have gained a higher understanding of their own Spark. It took cycles of self-reflection. Only then could they join their efforts and wade across an array of failures to finally create the new Spark. But such occurrences were rare indeed. And when a new Spark arose, it was always accompanied by a cataclysm of various scales and significances. This causal relation had generated long and heated debates in the Aquatic society. The Knowledge did not account for the mechanism generating a Spark. The Norms did not prohibit creating a Spark, but some Aquatics claimed that any new Spark, or rather the subsequent cataclysm, contradicted the Purpose. Or at least made its attainment harder.
Sometimes, Peter wondered why the Terrestrials and the Aerials were called like that. Unlike the Aquatics, they weren't made of the medium they inhabited. Their constituent elements were different—with some water, too, of course—but you could say they consisted mostly of ... meat. Aquatics could thicken to a degree that allowed them to stay on land for a long time. They could even make small parts of their bodies evaporate, condense, fall down as rain. The rain would wash the rocks, soak into the soil, and enter the plants. Or slake the thirst of an animal. Evaporation served as a way to communicate over long distances outside the water, to accumulate knowledge, and more rarely, to change the habits or development of an organism.
Pete's first name was a variation of the Creator's. When a new Aquatic appeared, his family dove to Marian-Atla-Mirror, or the Mirror for short. The new Aquatics entered the Spiral and stayed there until they received a Vision. Then they told their parents about the Vision, allowing them to pick a name for them. The Visions about the Creator's world were sometimes similar. Therefore some Aquatic names were more common: Pete, Pette, Piot, Bart, Arton, Sea Mour, Knog, Ing, Ann, Anna, Mally, Strong, Storm, Stro, Astro, Mart, Marat, Shiel, Shinder. There were also Mer, Mar, and Chaaz. Rather seldom, new Aquatics received the name of Cher, Mil, Xander, or Ander. Most Aquatics felt an inexplicable antipathy to those last names.
Naturally, the Visions did not always show the Creator's world. In fact, they seldom did. Consequently, the majority of names derived from objects, states or events from Anomaly itself.
Pete's Vision had been extremely rare. Perhaps unique. It had mostly comprised fragments of the Creator's life. Some had been so detailed that the Cult servants would gladly include them in their Records. If they had known about them.
Pete himself didn't understand all he had seen. It was impossible: in those fragments, the Creator acted inside a non-water medium among such exotic objects that their names meant nothing to Pete. The dialogues Pete had heard during his Vision testified to a certain Knowledge that differed to some extent, certain Norms that were unacceptable to a large extent, and a Purpose that not even the Creator (?!) had grasped. Therefore Pete did not share the entire Vision with his parents Chaaz and Flo.
He shared even less with the Cult servants. Although newly created, Pete, like any Aquatic, knew a lot about the world he had come into. Some ascribed this to hereditary memory, others to the infinite capacity of water to convey and store information. Be that as it might, Pete decided he'd hurt the Cult servants' sensibilities if he told them that the Creator had been born in a world with different Norms and wasn't exactly clear about the Purpose. Tell them he'd seen the Creator among similar beings, perhaps even His equals? That He was not the only One? Or that the Aquatics' Creator was a ... Terrestrial? Pete carried the memory of the Cult's vehement reaction to the rumors that the Creator had spent a month on Anomaly. Along with a woman whom He'd treated as His equal, to boot.
No, Pete had known the Norms since the instant his Spark arranged the surrounding water into a body resembling the Creator's. The Norms enjoined you to do your best and refrain from offending anyone's sensibilities.
Actually, nobody knew much about the mythical maker of Anomaly, although a handful of the First Aquatics were still alive. The Creator was said to have made, not only Anomaly and all living beings there, but also the Water Way galaxy. The extremists claimed that even the Universum had been His doing, and keenly tried to persuade everybody else.
They're right, by the by.
Pete didn't wish to argue on matters within the Cult's competence. He was an Observer. The Cult focused on the Creator's personality and work. That was their path to the Purpose. Observers kept and expanded the Knowledge, obeyed the Norms
I mean, are there any Aquatics who do not?
and through self-perfection, logic, analysis, and discrete interventions, tried to attain the Purpose.
Part of the Purpose consisted of providing the Terrestrials, the Aerials and the Aquatics with increasingly better conditions and larger habitats. The Aquatics' habitat had reached its limit: the whole of Anomaly. Although barely noticeable by the other inhabitants of the planet, the Aquatics were everywhere. If they'd had any sense of ownership, one could say they owned Anomaly.
The Aerials and Terrestrials had it harder. There were indeed those who, as they sought food or migrated with the seasons, briefly entered untypical environments, but they were few and far between. The Aquatics' greatest success had been modifying and then persuading a group of Terrestrials to live underwater. They made dolphs out of dogs. Dolphs fed on fish and thrived in the water. Yet they still stuck to the surface, because they breathed air.
Aquatics also moved to the surface once every few days, though briefly. They even walked out on the land. Always in daylight. Like plants, they needed the energy amply provided by the nearest star. That was the only resource they needed. Now, the Aerials and the Terrestrials were something else. The fishes too. They all needed food. Whether plants or animals, but they had to eat something. The predators went as far as murder. For anyone but the Aquatics, the Norms did not apply. Because the Aquatics were the only ones aware of them.
In the Beginning, they said, Anomaly had only a few dogs. All of them were slender, affable, and long-snouted, like dolphs. Their gorgeous fur invariably came in the same three colors: ginger, white, and black. Like something from a conveyor-belt.
Only, Anomaly had no conveyor-belts. Or industries. And it never would: an integral part of the Norms enjoined you to prevent the emergence of a resource-based civilization. Fortunately, in their entire history, the Aquatics had to take the decision to break the "Do not harm" Norm only once: when they sent a small, controlled Deluge to a region inhabited by Terrestrials. It was an ape species, who were laying down the foundations of an economy.
Now, after countless cycles and twice as many generations, dogs were much more diverse.
Aquatics had picked dogs as the basis of dolphs, because dogs were the only Terrestrials who could sense an Aquatic even if they did not see her or him. (Of the Aerials, none could at all.) They also didn't avoid Aquatics but approached them rather affectionately. Aquatics returned the affection; nowadays, it was common for a pod of dolphs to swirl around an Aquatic and try to involve her or him in an impromptu game.
As for ants, Aquatics had nothing to do with their odd, astonishing behavior. Few other beings on Anomaly had built such a complex society, with such a degree of specialization. And no other being built its house like ants did: underground parallelepipeds with orthogonal shafts and tunnels. Their sizes invariably had a ratio of 1 to 1.618.
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