Monthly Archives: January 2019

I had a brother…..I have a brother!

Michael and I were separated during the great invasion of 2067. World communications had been disrupted, or destroyed altogether. The last I knew, he had been working in the space program. There were missions to Mars that had taken flight before and after the invasion, but I did not know if he was involved with them. Word of mouth had it that some of the missions were lost, and I had feared the worst.

Khostra did indeed return to us at dusk of my second day with them. After “speaking” to Raymond and some of his group, she signaled for me to come and sit. As before, we joined hands. My surroundings greyed out, and I began to feel excited, expectant, and very alert.

I cannot render the name of her people into language, so I will call them Plejarens, a reference to their place of origin.

She began by telling me that she had been in communication with a group of her people who had returned to Mars, after its great calamity, to collect their dead and to search for possible survivors. Unexpectedly, they found a colony of men, women, and children. The two peoples had met, and, through a young girl who was a perfect empath, communication had been established. When the Plejarens found that the colony was in peril because of the events on Earth, they proposed to rescue them by offering safe passage to a new home in the stars. Fully two thirds of the settlers decided to go. The hundred or so remaining believed they had the stuff to make the colony survive, and, in time, prosper.

Before their departure, the Plejarens told the colonists that ancient settlers from the Pleiades still remained on Earth, but were preparing to leave. Realizing that communication with them might be possible, the colony drew up a list of the names of every single person on Mars, in the hopes that some of their kin still surviving back home would know their fate.

My brother’s name was on that list, but my joy was tempered. Michael was one of those who had left for the unknown.

In the here and now, on this sick old Earth, many of the Plejarens were leaving. My group of fellows had decided, almost to a man, to go with them.

But, Khostra and some of her hundreds would remain. They had a plan. One whose success was uncertain. One whose fulfillment might take a lifetime of men. The machinery was already in place.

They were going to terraform Terra. My home. My life. My Earth.

In the morning, I said my goodbyes…..to Raymond and his band of explorers.
I would stay. I would help. I would remember Michael.

“Raymond, before you ask, I know who they are, where they have been, and where they are going.  I know, perhaps, why you are all so happy, but I am puzzled as to why there’s so little dissention amongst you….I’ve been told things that amaze me, excite me and fill me with awe.”

Raymond smiled, put a hand upon my shoulder, and said “Yes, we’re all going, Joshua.  But you knew that.”  I fell silent, and he motioned for us to sit at a small table, the private corner.  

I related to him how Khostra had imbued my dreams.

Her people were of an antiquity that we cannot encompass.  One that even their own scribes fall short of in their stories, ending at a guess.  Their origin was in the star cluster we know as the Pleiades.  Over millions of years, their civilization grew in power and influence, and they began a push to explore their known universe.  Of their ancient homes, our Earth was one, until the great calamity of the Cretaceous period.  Their numbers were decimated, and those that remained fled in search of salvation.  Some had settled on the planet Mars.  The hearts of others desired a return to the lands of their peoples’ birth.

The Martian choice proved well for the new settlers, who prospered for millennia.  In the end, as we know, that planet became desolate after losing almost all of its atmosphere and water, and they had no natural protection against asteroid and meteor strikes.  Over hundreds of years, they prepared their great leaving, most heading across the void to the Pleiades.  Some few chose to return to Earth, found it to be habitable again, and stayed.  They became teachers of men when humanity sprang from the dust.  But their numbers eventually dwindled, and those that lived on became secretive, building underground bases that few had stumbled upon but had somehow forgotten.

And now, in this hour of Earth’s shame and destruction, they were leaving once again.
But not all.
Khostra and some of her hundreds would remain.  They had a plan.  I held a hope after these last lonely years.  I thought I had lost my brother in this time of our world’s chaos. In her magic, Khostra knew that this was not so.  She had more to tell me….

to be continued…..