Working title: Father

The father woke, and sniffed the air. The windows of his room were open, as they almost always were, and the cool air of early morning flowed gently over him. The white light of Primus outshone the yellow light of distant Seconde, and fell on him, warming him. When his son had built this room for him, he had designed it such that most days of the year, the light of one or the other sun would shine directly on him at his waking hour.

As his mind cleared of sleep, he was happy, feeling the warm light on him. But as he smelled the morning air, a deep sorrow gripped him, and he remembered.

Today was the day he would go to meet his Creator.

And today was the day he would blaspheme in the most aggregious manner he could. If indeed he met his Creator, if indeed he left this world for the next, he would question the Creator's purpose, His plan. And he would express his anger and disgust with the life the Creator had given him. Today was the day he would reclassify all he had ever believed holy as evil. For him, today was the day his life ended, and he discovered wether it was all myth or not.

Because the cool morning air was without scent. His family was gone. Not one of them remained. He was alone, and everything he loved was dead, every member of his family was decaying under ten feet of soil they had labored a lifetime to make fertile. And it was all, every bit of it, the Creator's plan.

He rose, and dressed, and walked to the north-facing window, looking out over his home.

His first memories were there, underneath the massive waterfall that marked the northernmost point of the city. It was next to that waterfall that he had built his mate her first lasting home, of stone and wood and mud bricks. The city that would one day be there had been nothing but a large. flat meadow of greens, yellows and purples, flowers, moss-like bushes that thrived in the mist blown from the waterfall, and huge ferns, 50 feet high, whose stalks, when dried, made wonderful building material. And there they lived, under the two suns, for many seasons, raising children.

But what came before then? The Creator must have left them on that field, but he had no memory of it. He simply awoke, lying on his back under the two suns, and said to himself, "this is home". And then, looking at his mate, he said to himself "and she is why I live and breathe" and that very day he built her a shelter, of fern leaves and stalks. It was several days later that her first litter was born, and he had fourteen mouths to feed.

His children had all been born, all the native animals of the planet were born, lived and died, but the same rules did not seem to apply to him. He just WAS, and that had always been proof to him of the creator and his plans.

From his window he could see the spot where he had awoken. He had insisted that it be left bare, and that the second, permanant house he had built be maintained and left standing as a remembrance. The first enclosure hadn't lasted a week, but he still remembered it perfectly, and with a clarity that surprised him.

But they were all dead now, he thought. As his eyes tracked back from the waterfall to the base of the palace in which he stood, he saw the houses, the textile factories, the plastics plants, the parks and sculpted recreation areas, the roads, steel mills, fusion plants, and more houses, neighborhoods, roads. Dead, every one of them.

Dead.

More than anything else, he wanted to join them, lie down in the palace his children had built him, and pass gently from conciousness into oblivion. But the Creator waited, and he had buisness to discuss, and he wanted to discuss it on the Memorial, and nowhere else.

He descended the large stairs, opened the doors of his marvelous palace, and looked down the western road to the enormous flat white stone sheet that was the memorial to his wife.

He walked, resolutely, through a city built of his memories.

Why had he ever believed in a creator at all? He had no memory of ever seeing him, no evidence, except for Father's own existance...

And the dreams, he reminded himself. It had been long since he had had one, but walking through the city streets, he remembered.

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The first dream had been the metal. There were several hundred of them, 20 daughters and more than 200 sons, and his Mate had begun having fewer litters, and his own sons and daughters were beginning to take much longer to mature. The vegetation they had been eating was growing scarce, and they had begun to hunt the large, thick skinned, slow moving herbivores that shared their forage. They ate well, but his sons were dying, because the herbivores fought back. He had already lost seven to the hunts. Better weapons than fern-wood clubs with stone heads were needed. Better tools to hack the local foliage to carve out living space were needed, also.
The dream was vivid, more vivid than any other sort of thought or remembrance he had ever had. He had never dreamed before, and it startled him.
He dreamed of watching himself direct his sons to sun-cure the skins of several of the beasts, and form large wood paddles, and secure the skins to the paddles in such a way that when the paddles were seperated, it sucked in air from one direction, and when forced back together, would blow air in the other. He instructed them to make a crude leather-flap valve which would direct the air flow. He had them make two of them, so that they could be operated in tandem. He showed them how to make a mud-brick oven, and how to make charcoal, and which stones to find and crush and put in the oven, and how to make a rough mold, and how to pour the metal from stone pestles.
He had told them, and they had done the rest. It seemed to him that the youngest of his children, and his children's children, had understood the best. He had seen a fire in their eyes, an understanding that was not present in the older ones. It took them an amazingly short time, less than a hundred days, before they had rough, soft metal tools. In another hundred, with no further help from him, they had alloys, dramatically improved ovens, and things even he did not understand.

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Where had the dream come from, if not some higher power? As hard as he tried to explain it, this day, as he walked to his ending, he could not. Before the dream, he had not even understood that fire needed air to burn. He had not known what metal was, much less where to find it.

With an ever increasing supply of questions for his creator, he walked on.

There were no roads in the inner city he walked through, just wide, suspended footpaths made of polished deep purple fernwood of the giant variety. On each side were enormous, many-roomed houses made of polished stone and the dark green wood of the giant moss-trees, and the soft orange-brown curliqued tendrils of the thread-plants growing up all the exposed stone in beautiful patterns. One of his sons had discovered how to treat the stone so the thread-plants would grow only in certain patterns, and the owners of the houses had all designed their own thread-plant walls. Some spelled out words, the names of the children of the houses...

One son took longer than all the others before him to mature. He was odd, but very lovable, and they all coddled him. His littermates had grandchildren before he was mature.

He invented writing.

They had always had a spoken language, since Father had awoke. All the sons learned it from him. Mother never spoke, and until the 100th generation, none of the daughters did, they simply cared for all the inhabitants, loving them, healing them when they were sick. They gave purpose to the colony, and in their way, they communicated well. BUt when the Writer had invented written language, they learned it first, and taught it to the children.

The Writer took a wife, and she was only his, and mated with no other. This had never happened before, but because the Writer was so odd, and so clearly useful, and because Father judged they no longer needed, as a matter of survival, to breed as fast as possible, he allowed it.

Also, father felt he owed the writer a debt, and it was a feeling he had never felt before, for his wife, the mother of his children, could read and write. And she loved him deeply, as he did her, and now, she could tell him. She never wrote in the clear, literal words that he used when writing complex directions for his sons to follow, but in words of allegory and metaphor, comparing him to the strong wind that blows the huge ferns to make the pleasant sounds they fell asleep to at night. It took him a long time to understand her writing, but eventually he did, and she made him see everything differently.

All the writer's daughters spoke. Father's children seperated into two parts, and the older children spread through the countryside, and breeding more of the worker class, and the younger children desired to live in closer quarters and became intensely social.

THey began to reproduce very quickly.

The air was tasteless, dead. He did not remember a time when he could not smell the scent of his own family. As he crested the small hill, he passed into the next