Talking Libra
Talking Libra came from far away. He certainly was a stranger here. His basic chromosomal make-up was more exotic than any of the sentients and non-sentients that had wandered into this parsec of the galaxy.
The reason for this was that Talking Libra did not have any chromosomal make-up. Nor did he have any atomic, sub-atomic, quarkal, mesonal or any of the other divisions that modern physicists divide the structure of matter. For Talking Libra consisted of no matter at all. Not even anti-matter. He wasn't a ghost, a spirit, a spectre, a wraith nor any other of the fantastic creatures dreamed up in folklore.
The best approximation of a description of what Talking Libra was is that he was the embodiment of the only thought a fourteen gram quartz pebble on the mining planet of Shebitz ever had.
It was a freak that this pebble even had a millisecond of life let alone a thought. But for those few short nanoseconds, the pebble had consciousness and it thought of Talking Libra before it faded back into the oblivion of being a quartz pebble on the mining planet of Shebitz.
Unlike the pebble, Talking Libra continued to exist. And over the aeons of his life he developed consciousness, emotions and an intelligence that far exceeded any of the other sapient beings in the galaxy. No problem was an enigma for Talking Libra. He knew everything about everything in all of the fathomable dimensions that layered all the levels of reality, unreality, and all of the tangental leaps in between.
He knew every creature of every world better than the creatures knew themselves. He was able to tell Johnny, Ricky or Sue what they had done wrong, what their hopes were, and to tell them about their future.
When Talking Libra was first contacted by the peoples of Earth, he overwhelmed them with a cascade of information that cleared up all the mysteries of the past. He explained how the great stone heads came to exist on Easter Island, how the Egypitians built their pyramids, and how the Cat Statues came to be on Pluto. He told them of Stonehenge, the mysterious landing strips in the Andes, and what had happened to Jimmy Hoffa and Jack the Ripper.
This information was startling since no one previously had even come close in their idle postulations or in their careful scientific analysis. He told them who Gautama and Jesus Christ actually were. There was no such person as Lao Tzu. The founder of Taoism was in reality no fewer than 73 sages spanning a time of five centuries.
Talking Libra told the humans about every other civilization in the universe that was of comparable intelligence and mental framework to the Earthers.
What was surprising to hear was that there actually was a planet called Vulcan that had pointy-eared indiginants who loved logic. But what was shocking to hear was the number of philosophers and mathematicians from Earth's past that were actually transplanted Vulcans. Euclides, Aristotle and Bertrand Russell were all Vulcans. And, yes, so was Gene Roddenberry.
Talking Libra had said that there was this conniving race of creatures that resembled wooden chairs that were meddling with the young of a great number of planets including the Earth and Vulcan. These creatures were known as Cachters and they were responsible for the many calamities that ensued from their tamperings into the affairs of worlds other than their own.
The Earthers asked Talking Libra what calamities the Cachters had brought to the Earth. They reasoned that being the recipients of the likes of Euclides and Roddenberry could only be considered a boon to the planet and not a calamity.
To this Talking Libra replied with the story of the planet of :chcko and its octopus-like inhabitants that the Earthers had called Danglers. The Danglers had eighteen long tentacles but did not have any central hub to which these tentacles were attached. Instead the eighteen tentacles huddled together in a close group. It was this proximity that brought them the electrical activity responsible for their sapiency. It was said that if you were to take away just one of these tentacles, the Dangler would lose some of its cognition. The amount lost would drop according to a complex nonlinear equation first worked out by :chcko's mega hero :z. :z was also the one that took the pathologically shy Danglers and instilled into them the courage to become a space-faring society. :z was also a genius at most of the natural and social sciences. He was an accomplished actor, a superb athlete, a wily politician, and a stateman emeritus. But Talking Libra disclosed something to the people of Earth. :z was from Earth. He had been stolen away by the fiendish Cachters. That was these chair-like creatures biggest affrontery to the people of Earth.
Almost at once people began to speculate about how great Earth would have been if :z had been allowed to stay. The name Cachter became synonymous with evil and the devil. It was at this point that chairs disappeared as a human artifact. Now people either stood up or they reclined. Sitting was not permitted any more. In the many generations that had passed since Talking Libra had told the Earthers about :z the humans had evolved an ossified, rigid and unpliable spine.
Talking Libra was lionized by every culture and religion of the Earth. He was called God by Muslims, Hindus, Christians and Buddhists. It was only the Jews that did not deify him althought they recognized him as another prophet in the Talmud.
To all this honor Talking Libra was indifferent. He recognized the human need to have an eternal father to look after them and he took on the role just to satisfy them. Unlike other historical gods, he gave no promises. He differed also from these gods in that one did not have to go through presumptious Cartesian proofs to show that he existed. Because he did exist. You could go up to him and take your picture with him. What other god would let you do that?
At one time he did an interview with a magazine called the Agnostic Review. In this session he gave some very candid remarks about being a quote unquote god. He said that humans throughout their history were suckers for the philosophical notion that if one had an idea about something then that something had to exist previously to that idea. It just wasn't so. Talking Libra intended to wean humanity away from this notion slowly so that no catastrophic incidents would occur. Ideas were not out there waiting to be discovered. They had to be created from the mind. He did not exist until the quartz pebble thought of him. The quartz pebble, the Father of God as it was being called at the time, had created Talking Libra. When asked what he would like the humans to categorize him as, Talking Libra said simply, a fellow being with divergent cognitive abilities.
Talking Libra's godhood ended with the publication of that issue of the Agnostic Review. In all of humanity's religious theaters, Talking Libra was villified and condemned. All the quartz in Christian cathedrals were chucked and the old golden crucifixes were hoisted up again. In the mosques, Mohammed became the Prophet again. All heads bowed to Mecca once more. The Buddhists reverted back to their monism and even went so far as to say that Talking Libra was a weak Occidental Maya that confounded the Noble Truths and was simply bad Karma.
It was only the Jews that did not forsake Talking Libra. They still had given him the status of a minor prophet in the line dating back through Ezekial to Abraham.
The most extreme reaction came from a strange union of Parsis, Coptic Christians, Chi Moslems and Southern Methodists. They united under the credo, 'We choose to sit down'. To them Talking Libra was a manifestation of pure evil that had to be eradicated from the galaxy. They arranged to wage a jihad, a holy war, against the heathenistic being. They managed to set aside their religious differences to concentrate upon their goal. Their influence was strong and they managed to capture a majority in the elections of La Monde Politique, The World Body. They called themselves the Party.
They pushed through a myriad of legislation that increased the already exorbitant defense budget thirty fold. All this was arrowheaded to research on how to obliterate a creature that was not made of matter. They enlisted the aid of the Cachters, the chair creatures, in their scheme.
The Cachters were all too eager to help in the jihad. They hated Talking Libra for ratting on them. Throughout the universe, they were looked upon as dirt, as babysnatchers, because of what the god who wouldn't shut up had said about them. They always wanted to get revenge upon Talking Libra but couldn't because of fear of reprisal from every other civilization in the galaxy. For the longest time, they were ally-less while every culture on every world of every galaxy were in league with Talking Libra. But now the planet Earth had suddenly joined their camp.
Earthers didn't pay attention to the fact that the Cachters were athiests. That didn't matter. Every alien culture the people of Earth had ever encountered were athiests. This made Earthers feel special in that they were the promised people. They were truly God's children. The fact that Cachters were godless people made no never mind to them. Earthers were superior and they had dominion over everything in God's universe because they were made in God's image. It was okay to use the athiest Cachters to do their holy work.
Through the collaboration of Earthers and Cachters, a technique was devised to make inanimate objects animate. It involved reversing the polarity of every second electron in the primary field.
At first, this had calamitous results. A fierce chain reaction occured resulting in a blast equivalent to a google of the oldtime atomic bombs. Luckily, the researchers had the foresight to test their new weapon on Alpha Centauri. Sol's close neighbour exploded into non-existence.
Twelve other stars had super-novaed before the researchers got it right.
A three milligram piece of magnesium came to life for a period of one millionth of a nanosecond.
Success!
Four hundred years had passed since the brief life of the magnesium. Earth had cut off all relations with Talking Libra and had not spoken with him for three centuries. The Party was still in power at La Monde Politique. They had abolished all democratic elections until they were finished with their jihad.
By now, the Cachter-Earther research effort had become so refined that they could keep a piece of silver alive for forty minutes and had actually communicated with it. They found that silver was not a very intelligent metal. It had no concept for numbers at all and it could only think along the line of aesthetics. It just wanted to be pretty. It totally lacked the ability to transmute its thoughts into real, definable objects.
A hundred and fifty years later, after bringing life to every element of the chemical charts and discovering that the most intelligent element was chlorine, the researchers were ready for the jihad.
A fleet of starships, both Cachter and Earther, made their way to the mining planet of Shebitz where Talking Libra was created. They took with them the techniques devised by a Cachter scientist who had discovered ways of directing metallic thoughts. Their aim was to bring the Father of God back to life. Once accomplished, they were going to make this piece of quartz rescind its one previous thought. Talking Libra would then be destroyed. He would become nothing but fiction.
Once orbit was achieved around Shebitz, the Earther-Cachter coalition sent down their landing party who were equipped with the Animator-Trainer, the devise that was going to strong arm the Father of God.
The landing party had an unexpected surprise. Talking Libra was there. Their information sources had guaranteed that the creature that had the audacity to call itself a god was on the planet of :chcko conducting a clinic for Danglers who had lost a tentacle and the concomitant amount of cognition.
Yet, there he was in all of his non-mattered glory on the rocky plains of Shebitz.
Talking Libra seemed to be in a trance. He paid the humans and the chair creatures no never mind. At first, the Earthers and the Cachters felt uneasy about his presence but when they saw that he was not going to be a hindrance, they went on with their scheme.
It was easy to find the quartz pebble. Talking Libra, like any child the univese over, placed his forebearers on a pedestal. The Father of God sat in the middle of a crater upon an alloy pillar. The rest of the crater was filled with sulfuric acid. Over the Creator Crater, as it was called formerly back on Earth, was a thick, clear plastic covering made of a material that was virtually impenetrable. Seven hundred years ago this place was a shrine where trillions of tourists had visited to see the rock that gave their god life. Now nobody came. It seemed that only Earthers felt the need to get first-hand verifications of implicit truths.
The landing party pointed the jet nozzle of the Animator-Trainer, the A.T., at the Father of God. After four hours of intense prayer, they turned the A.T. on. An invisible, hissing ray began sending wave after wave of charge-altering mesons onto the quartz pebble. Their calculations said that they should have had the Father of God animated after about four minutes.
A half an hour had slowly and painfully elapsed without any hint of change in the Father of God. Nor was their any sign that Talking Libra was taking exception to their antics. The humans and chair creatures were growing very uneasy. They were all too aware of the powers of Talking Libra. Anything with that much intelligence would have the strongest survival instincts.
Suddenly, the Father of God made a shifting motion.
........
Talking Libra was on Vulcan, a guest of the Tobruk Academy on Extra-Vulcanian Life. There were seventeen pointed-eared humanoids sitting about him. All were totally enthralled and totally fascinated by the lecture Talking Libra was giving.
A Vulcan whose name happened to be Spock decided to ask Talking Libra through a mind meld to summarize what had happened to the peoples of Earth and Cacht. They had totally disappeared.
Before Talking Libra answered him, he told the Vulcan about the genesis of his name, Spock. It was a name that came from an ancient lore of Earth that centered around a mythical Vulcan named Spock. For a period of time Spock had become a common name on Vulcan just like :z was on :chcko and Chang on Earth.
"The people of Earth and Cacht have never existed. They have become merely myths. My father, the pebble, thought them out of existence with just one sentence," said Talking Libra addressing the Vulcan's query.
"And what was that?" Spock asked, lifting one eyebrow.
"You must understand that my father is not a malignant, malicious being at heart. He just enjoys the restive state of being a stone on a desolate planet. When he was disturbed by the Earthers and Cachters, all that he said was, 'Don't bother me.'"
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