“Perhaps they are stupid, but we shouldn’t be over confident,” Gallen considered. “Athena said that, considering how long it took a hunting party to find us, she thinks we were at least a dozen kilometers from their nesting site. Who knows how many of them there are? Or what they’re capable of.”
Lord Felph frowned a bit, an old man’s gesture that seemed out of place on his fresh young clone. “Time, space, nature, self. I wonder what the Qualeewoohs discovered that would make them believe they conquered those?”
“Who knows?” Gallen asked. “Certainly, the Waters don’t give the sfuz such power.”
“Perhaps that is only because the sfuz aren’t wise,” Athena cut in. “Whatever transformation the Waters work upon them, it may not change the way the creatures think, nor affect their basic natures. The sfuz are hunters of the deep tangle. They live down in the shadows, and hunt the upper boughs by night. That is their nature. It may be that they could do more-conquer space, leap through time, but just do not desire it.”
“Perhaps they do things we never imagine,” Arachne put in, and every head turned to her. “Imagine that if a sfuz looked up from the tangle on a clear night, and saw the light of a star, and longed to be there. If it had drunk from the Waters and conquered space, it might find itself there in an instant-and in that instant, it would be consumed in fires it had never imagined. Thus ends the sfuz.” Arachne looked pointedly at Zeus. Don’t get burned, she was telling him. No one else seemed to notice.
“So travel between space may be practiced among the sfuz-” Gallen put in, “to their own detriment.”
“It is always a danger to those who do not recognize their limits,” Arachne said.
At that moment, Orick chose to ask a question, one that had always bothered Zeus. “I don’t understand all of this. If the Qualeewoohs are immortal, and if they’ve conquered space, then why don’t they show themselves?”
Felph leaned both elbows on the table, folded his hands, and stared deeply into them. “I believe that the ancient Qualeewoohs live, but not in physical bodies. They’ve abandoned those.
“Some on this planet understand the folklore better than I, but Qualeewooh belief goes something like this: Qualeewoohs say life is something one `flies through.’ That is all that they do, they fly through life toward some distant destination. Their journey, they say, began long before birth, and will continue long after this life. They move toward ‘the Enlightenment,’ a moment in one’s life where light, where pure intelligence and its attendant powers, become infused into them, in that moment when the image of what we desire to become is engraved into our flesh.
“When that moment comes, an exchange will be made, the new body for the old.” Orick said, “It sounds to me like they’re talking about the resurrection.”
“Perhaps it sounds to you as if their doctrine is the same as yours, Orick,” Felph countered, “but only because we are filtering their doctrine first into human terms, then comparing it to something we understand. However, the Qualeewoohs see a thousand shades of differentiation between your concepts and theirs.
“The Qualeewoohs see this life as a time of preparation, a time during which they must ‘soften their bones,’ so when Enlightenment strikes, they will gain the full effect of it.
“Now, this is the most interesting part of their beliefs, as far as I’m concerned: they say ‘The Waters of Strength’ are ‘The Strong Blow’ toward Enlightenment. The Waters were designed to ‘Shape Bone’ toward Enlightenment.”
Felph drew silent for a moment, then sighed. “I do not know if I can explain this any better, but the Waters of Strength quite literally are meant to transform one into Qualeewooh gods.
“And, Orick, while you may take comfort in the thought of resurrection, the Qualeewoohs have no similar concept. For them, the Enlightenment is not a comfort. The act of attaining godhood is destructive. Just as you must destroy a block of wood to carve it into a work of art, even so, the elders of the Qualeewooh believe our hopes, our desires all will be pared away, until we each become equal with the divine image. But what that divine image is, even the Qualeewoohs don’t know.
“But I do know that the Qualeewooh gods aren’t physical beings in the sense that you and I are familiar with.”
“If they are not physical beings, what else could they be?” Orick asked.
Lord Felph shrugged. “A good question. I don’t believe in beings of pure energy-not in the sense that the Qualeewooh gods are spoken of. Energy beings-if they do evolve or exist at all-are too ephemeral. Born on lightning, they would die on lightning, and none of us would be the wiser.
“But there are types of matter that we cannot detect, or that we can detect only dimly. Some theorists believe that as much as ninety percent of all matter is undetectable to mankind through our instruments. The Qualeewooh seem to have a word for it. They call it ‘dim matter,’ and it is in this invisible matter that they say their ancestors yet live.”
“You’re talking about interdimensional travel again,” Maggie said.
“Precisely,” Felph said.
“Wait a minute,” Gallen said. “I don’t see how this is possible, to transmit a body from this dimension to another. I mean, I’m not a technologist, but …”
“Think of it this way,” Maggie said. “Suppose you take a person’s memories, his personality, and you download that into an AI. Even though that person may die, his or her personality, experiences, and ambitions live on, right?”
“Right,” Gallen said.
“Then imagine that we download those memories into a clone. In our parlance, we say that the person is revivified, right? The person is still alive, still the same in all important ways.”
“Right,” Gallen said, obviously not certain where Maggie was going.
“But imagine for a second that those same memories are downloaded into an android, a machine that thinks and feels in every way as if it were human. Is it still the same person?”
“No,” Gallen said. “An android is still just an ambulatory storage facility.”
“But the android doesn’t know that. Many people have been downloaded into machine bodies, and they seem to like it. They aren’t troubled by disturbing dreams, they don’t have to deal with the emotional side of life. In short, to them life seems better without dealing with emotional issues.”
“Yes, but such people lose their humanity,” Gallen said. “In time they forget how to feel, how to relate to other humans.”
“So they end up going to Bothor,” Orick said, “where they don’t have to deal with regular folks. We’ve been there.”
“Well,” Maggie said, “some theorists say we can’t travel to other dimensions in our physical bodies, but we could create artificial bodies in another dimension, then download our personalities into those new bodies. It wouldn’t be much different from being an android.”
“No,” Felph said. “You’ve got the analogy right, but you’ve just missed it. If I understand the Qualeewoohs, they consider this life to be the experiment. They say they existed as dim matter before this world, and they’ve come here to gain experience in our dimension. Their goal is to take that experience back to the dim worlds. There are lessons they can learn here in mortality they can’t learn elsewhere.”
“Such as?” Orick asked.
Felph shrugged. “I don’t really care. It has to do with self-testing, preparation for greater knowledge. Qualeewooh mumbo jumbo.”
“If the Qualeewoohs are telling the truth,” Maggie said, “have you considered the possibility that they really are creatures who’ve somehow traveled to this dimension? That the ‘Waters of Strength’ might just be the ticket home?”
“Odd as it sounds, I’ve considered that,” Felph said, “but it appears to me that they evolved here. I can’t credit that theory.”
“But you’re convinced the Qualeewoohs have learned to transport their consciousness between dimensions?” Maggie asked.