The Destruction of Faena
by Alexander kazantsev
Peace is the virtue of civilisation.
War is its crime.
From the author
Cosmogony is no less full of riddles than the history of Earth. And where there are riddles, there is room for fantasy. However, if it is divorced from reality and rejects verisimilitude and authenticity, fantasy is empty, it leaves no trace in the heart; the best it can do is to titillate the reader’s senses. But I have always wanted to achieve “authenticity in the incredible”, to write fantasy founded solely on real facts and unsolved mysteries.
One such riddle that excited me was the ring of asteroids (minor planets) between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter instead of the planet, as predicted by Kepler’s law, which had exploded for some unknown reason, scattering fragments all round its orbit. How could that have happened?
If the planet had exploded from within because of certain processes, its fragments would have flown in all directions as from a high-explosive bomb and would have continued moving round the sun in elongated elliptical orbits… But they are moving round in their former almost circular planetary orbit. If the planet had perished because of a collision with another cosmic body, their common fragments would have tended towards a resultant, also acquiring elongated elliptical orbits; but they have virtually stayed where they were.
The planet apparently cracked as the result of a powerful impact received simultaneously from all directions; it then disintegrated under the influence of the gravity of Mars and Jupiter. Its remains kept colliding and breaking up, creating swarms of meteorites and stringing out round the whole former orbit of the planet. But what kind of explosion was it? The explosion of its water envelope, its oceans?
It so happened that I was able to put this question to the great 20th-century physicist. Nils Bohr when he met us Moscow writers.
“Can all a planet’s oceans explode if a super powerful nuclear device is detonated in their depths?” I asked him.
“I don’t deny such a possibility,” he replied, and added, “but even if it weren’t so, nuclear weapons must be banned in any case.”
He understood it all at once! If the planet had perished when its oceans exploded, then there was a civilisation on it that had destroyed itself because of a nuclear war.
This was the stimulus for me as a novelist to write my trilogy The Faetians. Other problems found their way into it. Why has the missing link between man and the Earth’s animal world never been discovered? Why does Mars seem uninhabited, and was it always so? Why did great cataclysms occur on Earth, such as the sinking of Atlantis and the rise of the Andes? According to some theories, the cause was a gigantic asteroid that fell onto Earth, or the appearance of the hitherto non-existent Moon in the sky over Earth. Is this so?
The reader will learn all about it in the novel as he follows the lives of the characters, who witnessed unprecedented catastrophes.
The author will be happy if this book helps the reader to acquire a taste for the great secrets of the Universe and of Earth’s history.
Alexander Kazantsev
PART ONE
Tension
Chapter One
THE WAVE
Translation of an extraterrestrial message inscribed in the language of the Faetians who lived on Faena a million years ago. (Books 2 and 3 of my science-fantasy novel, The Faetians, tell of who wrote and sent this message to Earth and who deciphered it.)
The only daughter of the Dictator of Powermania, an ancient continent of Faena, was named Yasna after her mother. Her father, Yar Jupi, had been hoping for a son, but he loved his daughter beyond measure. He kept dreaming that she would grow up, get married and leave him. When, as was the custom, he needed to give his grown-up daughter a final name, he could think of nothing better than calling her Mada, which meant Falling-in-love. Surnames on Faena were borrowed from the stars and planets. For example. Mar, Jupi, Alt or Sirus.
Mada Jupi took after her mother: she was called beautiful. Her face baffled the artists, being lively, always changing, now merry, now clear, now pensive. How could they paint her? She typified the best of the longfaces, but the oval of her features was moderate and soft, her nose was straight and her lips were firmly compressed.
This blue-eyed Faetess (as they were called on Faena) was met on the Great Shore by Ave Mar, a visitor to Powermania. The girl was coming out of the water, having chosen the moment when a breaker had crashed on the shore and was sliding back in a mass of hissing foam.
Ave wished he had been a sculptor. Everything he had heard about Mada from his hunchbacked secretary Kutsi Merc was pale, inadequate and dull compared with what he could see with his own eyes.
A fat, elderly Faetess, one of the roundheads, ran into the water and wrapped the girl in a soft, fluffy sheet as she emerged.
Mada took no notice whatever of Ave, although from what her companion had told her, she knew quite a lot about him. The nanny deftly put a folding chair down on the sand and Mada sat on it, wrapping the sheet round her as the ancients used to drape themselves in their robes.
Kutsi Merc noticed the impression that Mada had made on Ave, and he hunched his back even more as he bent down to speak.
“Shall we show this to the local natives?”
And with a significant smile on his clever, evil face, he held a small, smooth board out to Ave. Sitting on the sand and admiring Mada, Ave vaguely replied:
“Well, I didn’t realise we’d brought that with us!”
“The proud and beautiful Mada Jupi is here,” said the secretary encouragingly. Ave Mar stood up. Thanks to his impressive height, long, strong neck and piercing eyes, he gave the impression of looking over the heads of everybody else.
In obedience to his own impulse, as it seemed to him, he took the board from Kutsi and walked boldly with it into the water.
Without taking her eyes off Kutsi, Mada’s companion whispered into the girl’s ear:
“Look, Mada! The stranger from Danjab I was telling you about has taken a board with him.”
In spite of the breakwater, built to make swimming easier when the tide was coming in, the waves were crashing violently onto the shore. Outside the barrier, they were truly gigantic, rearing up their foaming crests one after another as on the open sea.
“Where’s he swimming to?” asked Mada’s companion in alarm. “Shouldn’t we call the lifeguards?”
“He’s a better swimmer than you think,” commented Mada vaguely.
“But why’s he taken that board? It’s frightening to watch.”
Even so, she couldn’t take her eyes off him.
Ave swam as far as the breakwater and climbed over it. He had now attracted the attention of many swimmers.
“Why did you decide he’s that particular stranger?” asked Mada.
“Because of his companion. Roundheaded, like me; a hunchback into the bargain, yet he’s as proud as if he was strolling along the beach of Danjab. I feel ashamed for our own people. Isn’t anyone going to teach that show-off how to swim?”