Adrien continued. “What I see in the hearts of people is usually good. It’s in the heart of people everywhere, to want sustenance and survival, happiness, to have children, to want to avoid pain.
“The need to control,” Adrien said, “was born in earlier times when it helped someone survive, or when a leader needed to help his group survive.
“The need to dominate was an aberration and was born of that need to control.
“Suspiciousness of difference was born of survival when indiscrimination resulted in someone getting ill or dying, as in from a food or a different group who wanted to dominate.
“But things have evoled. No longer existing are the circumstances that spawned those qualities—where once they helped humanity to survive, now, with the development of greater weapons and complex forms of social organization, they could result in humanity’s destruction. And not just for a few, but for all.
“Now, we on Earth are blessed if we are kind.
“Now we are blessed if we can look into another person’s mind and see who they are.
“Now we are blessed if we can be gentle with each other, for we hope to live together for a long time, don’t we?
“Now we are blessed if we strive to grow.
“Now we are blessed if we can show mercy to others—”
A ripple began in the crowd below and grew like a wave.
“Oh Good God Almighty,” General Beck said in the Oval office, dropping his pizza on the carpet.
The in the meat section of the market behind Estella gasped.
“He’s Jesus effing Christ!”
Putin sat in his office, threw his coffee across the room, and slapped his forehead.
“Jesus!?” people shouted from below, but their manner was—
“No,” Adrien said. “You say that I am, but no. I’m not. Please.”
When the crowd settled down to a dull roar, Adrien spoke again. Gene raised the volume a little, subtly. “I am just a person, flesh and blood, human being, as are you. I’ve lived a long time because we’ve used transmuters to regenerate. It is not religion, and I am not divine. I’m just a man. This is another example of old stories amplified. Things that happened were, fundamentally, no different than here today.
“I’m hoping this time, with us being recorded here, today, with the internet, cell phones, that this story will be shared as-is.
“We are only people, here today, and we were only people then.
“Look at us, together,” Adrien asked, “at what could merit this violence?
Adrien looked at everyone on the ground and into movie cameras.
“Gene, can you bring the two shuttle craft here, please?”
Gene’s surreal voice sounded throughout the area, “Sure.”
Alexander and Bessie flew under the mother ship to float nearby Adrien. “These two craft are shuttles. We use them to travel in, sometimes, like an airplane, I guess. Yes, they’re ‘flying saucers,’ but they’re just a conveyance with a few crowd control abilities such as we’ve demonstrated in a few places here today. Alexander and Bessie, those within, would you please, now that you’ve been seen here together with us on world-wide television, travel around the world to violent hot-spots and do as we have done here today. Calm people. Don’t be violent but stop violence. Remind them of the greater world we live in, the greater universe.”
The two shuttles departed, one to the east, one to the west.
Adrien regarded one last time the people around him. He spread his hands a little in a welcoming gesture.
“Do not fear, everyone. Be at peace. Love each other, is the lesson I’ve gained in these last 200,000 years. Ends which favor the few cannot thrive, because of the needs of the many. Ideologies which require a strict adherence cannot thrive, because everyone is an individual. Systems which favor the rich and take advantage of the poor cannot thrive, because all people are valued.”
Adrien paused once more.
He motioned to Gene above, and the entire floor of the observation deck descended to an area just behind him. It held everyone else aboard the ship.
“I sent Gadin down here first,” Adrien smiled, “because I thought his manner would help to unpressure the situation.” He smiled at the crowd. “Because I think he’s funny. Because on top of my first message of learning to love each other, is my second of three, and that is, don’t take things so seriously. Don’t hurt other people. A person can ‘believe’ anything, he can know it deep in his soul as certainly as we’re floating here. But nothing in that is a reason to hurt other people.
“All people are different from all others, yet we’re all human. Each person’s life is as valuable as the next, and with that, I my third message I ask you accept each other regardless of difference.
“The world has over seven billion people in it, and it simply is not possible for everyone to be the same, have the same ideology or religion. The fight to corral all people under one ideology is what causes friction. Diversity does not cause it. People seeking inclusion do not create discord, but the effort to prevent them does.
“Without this very concept—accepting people regardless of difference—nothing we do here will survive. This is the basis of love and human respect, without which there can be no future.”
Adrien’s gaze to the world was kind yet stern—a loving intimation that nonetheless carried the weight of warning.
Everyone behind him slowly moved forward on the platform to stand with him.
CHAPTER
31
At the 16 multiplex, people flooded into the bathroom of their choice. “Yea!”
The bathroom monitor tossed his whistle over his shoulder and walked off the job.
* * *
The shuttle craft floated over a small town in the Syrian Civil War. A battle was evident below.
“There’s a good pocket?” Oliver said on the bridge. His 180 degree HUD’s view was brilliant, the war vivid.
“What kinds of things can you do, Alexander?”
“You mean as a ship from up here?”
“No! As my new boyfriend!”
Alexander’s happy eyes flashed on the HUD, quickly replaced by a tactical view. “I— We—”
The shuttle floated slowly over the conflict, casting a shadow that moved like an omen over people of both sides. People stopped fighting long enough to look up.
“This is one thing,” Alexander said.
A holoscreen perhaps a mile wide coalesced in the air beside the shuttle, blocking out the sun’s rays through it, and began to play Gene’s video of Adrian’s speech.
* * *
Bessie raced at high speed southwest to Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger, and Chad to the Boko Hiram insurgency, flying over hot spots at low altitude at a transonic Mach 1.1. People fell to the ground as the sonic boom hit them.
“This all you can do, Bessie?” Cory asked.
“Fast enough for a boom; slow enough for them to see this space ship flying overhead.”
“Aw, yeah, but you can do better?” Cory asked.
The shuttle flew to another hotspot faster, though a little higher off the ground “This is Mach 3,” Bessie said. “The SR-71s cruising speed.”
Bessie’s HUD indicated a missile launch, targeted.
Bessie sped up. The monitor showed the shuttle racing over Cameroon, other hot spots, at Mach 3.5. “This is the speed of the SR-71 when it outran missiles.” The missile behind them lagged behind until it ran out of fuel and fell to the earth, exploding on an empty hillside.
“How fast can you go, Bessie?” Cory asked.
“Um, you mean in an atmosphere?”
Cory nodded.
“That depends on my altitude. So fast we’d look like a horizontal meteor, at most altitudes, and in space— I’ve never clocked it, but I’m registered to fly, in your units, at about 510,013 miles per hour in space, where there is no resistance of note.”
“Wow! That means it’d take you 30 minutes to reach the moon!”
br />
“Because I’m a shuttle. Gene is faster, as you might guess. She’s for interstellar flight. I ride her; she goes fast.”
Bessie arced into the sky, turning sharply toward Sudan for the South Sudanese Civil War. There, she flew over hotspots each at a slow 14 miles per hour, at near building top heights.
People on the ground stared. Some were very irate, shooting at the shuttle. Bullets stopped their flight toward the shuttle about fifty feet from it, fell to the ground.
“I can calm them a little,” Bessie said.
People on the ground softened, looked tired.
“How do you do that?” Cory asked.
“We’re an exploratory team,” Bessie explained. “Going places, we never know when we start what we’ll find. We need to be able to come and go in peace.”
“But—?”
“It’s an energy transmitted that slows movement on a cellular level without decreasing temperature.”
“What?”
“You’re a biologist, Cory. The quantum physics of it are not your field.”
* * *
Alexander flew at about 150,000 feet east to the War in North-West Pakistan, descending at the last minute in a fighter’s dive to hover over a village.
“People! Stop fighting!” Alexander sounded out the bottom of the ship in two languages! Have you not heard?”
The sound’s fidelity out the bottom of the ship was impressive. People stopped to listen to his story.
* * *
High over New York City, covering half of it, sitting aboard Gene’s mother ship bridge, Jane Hamilton of W.K.T.G.-T.V. in New York ran the list on the Ahleth, or would have if she could speak. “Uh— Uh!”
Adrien looked at Ella.
Lori laughed.
Wood and Hanah smiled, but tried to keep their composure.
Marie told the reporter, “Speak!” She elbowed Gadin.
Jane looked around the mother ship’s bridge and started to vocalize without words. “Aaaaaaaah!”
Adrien reached out and touched her hand. “It’s okay, Jane.”
* * *
“JESUS IS GAY,” the press ran.
* * *
Bessie and Cory flew west over the Atlantic at a couple hundred thousand feet—enough so the blue Earth below was very close, yet the sky above was pitch black.
Cory was dancing to himself on the bridge and yelled, “Yeah! We’ll stop the killing!”
Bessie’s face appeared on her HUD in a humorous, mock disapproval. “You might dance better with some music?”
“Yeah!” Cory said. “’Choo Choo Ch’Boogie’! Manhattan Transfer! Rip it loose!”
There was a 2.873 second pause before the song began to play.
Cory’s dancing markedly improved.
* * *
Jane held her hand over her heart and laughed.
The cameraman caught it all.
“Oh!” she said. “I’m on the mother ship!”
“It’s just Gene,” came the surrealistic voice of the ship’s artificial intelligence.
“Gene! Of course! I’m ‘on Gene’?”
“Good enough. It’s nice to have you.”
Jane leaned forward in her seat toward the ship’s massive HUD and asked almost conspiratorially: “How do you hold this huge ship up?”
“Magic,” Gene said with a HUD grin.
* * *
Bessie buzzed a hotspot in the Mexican Drug war at 2000 feet. The sonic boom knocked some people to the ground.
Cory watched it on her HUD, dancing with himself expertly.
Bessie slowed them a little, looked ominous, and chilled the air slightly. She played Alexander’s voice out the bottom of the ship accompanied by sound effects worthy of a Hollywood studio.
Ascending back into the air, Cory looked like he had an idea. “Bessie, can I pick a destination?”
* * *
“You know,” Alexander said. “I have an idea. What do you think?”
The Vice President of the United States walked, laughing, down the exit ramp from Alexander’s shuttle craft and onto the South Lawn of the White House.
Alexander secured and rose quickly into the sky, nearly straight up, though a little east.
“What’s so funny?” Cadence asked from the door of the Oval Office.
The shuttle descended low over Moscow.
“I’ve got him,” Alexander said to himself.
“How can you do it?” Alexader asked himself, imitating Oliver’s voice.
Alexander said in his own, sarcastic version of Sean Connery’s voice, “The same way I’d retrieve someone if they were disabled on excursion.”
Alexander approached a tall building and hovered with the edge of his disk two feet from the glass walls of the building.
People inside became drowsy, all except one.
Alexander’s hatch opened, and a sonic vibration shattered the glass of the building’s wall.
“Putin!” Alexander boomed ominously as the voice of God to the impotent man. “I appear to be malfunctioning! COME HERE!”
Screaming for sleeping people to help him, Putin floated three inches off the office floor, out of the building, and into the saucer.
Alexander flew rapidly to the southeast at about 100,000 feet, related his intentions to the angry Putin.
“How can you do that?” Putin demanded from the center of the small bridge of the shuttle.
“The same way I’d repair someone hurt on excursion.”
Putin suddenly rotated in the air, a bed forming under him. He went limp, then unconscious. He morphed into the body of a 12-year-od black girl.
She woke up screaming. “What the hell have you done!”
The bed disappeared, Putin was returned vertical.
“Not much,” Alexander explained. “Considering what I have to work with.”
“What am I?” Putin demanded, her voice the weak girl’s compared to the strong man’s.
“You’re still old and feeble!” Alexander said. “I don’t have the ability to rejuvenate. But you’re a girl, now.”
“Poshjol ty!”
“Little girls don’t talk that way! You need to be taught a lesson,” Alexander said. “It’s called empathy, something you lack.”
Alexander’s HUD displayed navigation screens, and at the bottom left of the screen there was a square set aside with one red dot on it, blinking.
Ukraine was still a hot zone. People were shooting at each other in a square.
As alexander approached, people around them calmed, relaxed to the point of sleep.
Then Alexander settled onto a courtyard and opened his hatch. The young girl Putin floated out of the hatch onto lawn, apparently telling Alexander what she thought of everything with circuits throughout the solar system. “What am I supposed to do!” she screamed.
“Lash the boats together and wait until the fleet arrives!”
* * *
“Okay,” Jane said to Adrien, getting into the swing of things. “You were Adam, and you,” she said, pointing to Ella, “were Eve? Adam and Eve?”
“Uh, well,” Ella began to answer, “Yes, as you think of it like that, but those were legends—”
Jane thought. “Genesis 5:2: ‘Male and Female He created them.’ Ahleth are both sexes, intersex.” She leaned forward in her seat again. “You were Athden and Efeth, and your names got changed in the ’20 People’ hand-me-down stories thing?”
“Yes,” Adrien said. “But we’re Adrien and Ella, now.”
“So that’s my question,” Jane said. “If you were Adam and Eve then, are you still?”
“Adrien and Ella are our salient personalities, now.”
“Why?” Jane asked.
“Because we’re ‘now,’” Ella said. “There is evolution in all things.”
* * *
Alexander raided the office of a Dr. Karen Zucker in Arkansas, changed her into a 10-year-old boy and sat him down in a foster holme in southern Mississippi.
> “Eff you, Alexander!” he screamed.
“Maybe you want reparative therapy to correct your gender to a boy’s! You are a little boy! Anyone can see that! ACT LIKE ONE!”
* * *
“Richard BAYLEY!” Alexander’s voice boomed.”
He sat the blond woman down in a small town in Texas.
* * *
Estella walked out of the store with her groceries, her phone still playing Ahleth feed.
The ladies were all laughing at the feed on her phone.
Vivian squealed, “Ah! Someone kidnapped Putin again!”
The video showed, in overhead P.O.V., a 76-year-old Russian trans woman, red-faced, spitting, pounding on the ground with her fists, screaming something not quite audible to whatever mike was in the area. She had a sign on her back, of which she was obviously unaware, “I can’t marry in Russia.”
“Putin is such an as—”
“Don’t say that!”
“Okay, then he’s a di—”
“Ladies!” Estella said sardonically, remembering her crowd control. “Decorum!”
Estella put her phone to sleep. The ladies hung around, chatting about things they’d seen on her phone. She began putting her groceries in the back of her new VW Golf clean diesel when the saucer settled over the parking lot to her left.
Everyone gawked and gasped, instinctively formed a circle.
“What a car!”
“Space ship, Marge!” Vivian said. “Look up!”
Vivian hung on Estella’s arm like a groupie at a Lady Gaga concert.
The hatch opened in the shuttle, and Cory emerged.
“Oh my God!”
“God no!”
“Not God!”
Estella put her free hand on her hip and smiled at him.
“Hello everyone!” Cory said with one of his T.V. show smiles. “Human being, here. Trans person a star.”
“Cory Peck!” someone called.
“That’s right!” Cory said. “Hello, ladies!”