I had this feeling that the Galilean was going to pay me a
visit. C.W. chose it as a favorite shape years ago. He normally uses it times
of stress, particularly when he encounters difficulty in explaining us to the Falloonian
Elders.
It was a nice day in late winter or early spring, depending
upon your outlook. I found him sitting beneath a budding tree watching the
birds, his hands clasped together and resting on his robe. He likes birds.
I sat beside him without speaking. I always try to let the
Galilean speak first. He turned to me and nodded, Then, he turned back to the
singing of the birds for a full moment before he spoke.
“Where the hell do they come from?” he said.
“I think,” I said, slowly while I tried to think. “that they
descend from the same evolutionary line as the dinosaurs. Odd, isn’t it?” Reason
hit me like a stray raindrop. “But you know that already.”
“Don’t be such a dope,” he said, stroking his beard and
refusing to look my way.
“You aren’t talking about the birds?”
“I’m talking about what they call in Falloonia the ‘monsters
from your darkest impulses.’ The actual Falloonian term is broader and refers,
as well, to self-mutilating tendencies.”
I thought I knew where he was going, but caution crept in. “People?
Are you talking about people?”
“These aberrations,” he said, “These malformed examples of
your species that originate such damage on your planet.”
“Oh.”
“Would you call such people as this Donald Trump and Jeff
Sessions members of your same species?”
“Our anthropologists are beginning,” I said, “to strengthen the
hypothesis that our species bred with Neanderthals and that scattered individuals
carry the traces. Would that help explain it?”
“Only if you wished forever to impute a strain of
maliciousness to the noble Neanderthals,” he said.
I knew it was time for me to stay quiet.
“I must explain them to my superiors. I told them that I
had, in a previous assignment, left written instructions.”
“Oh?”
“Surely you recall ‘Do not judge, and you will not be
judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be
forgiven.’ That was pretty damned clear, wasn’t it?”
“You don’t think the ones you mentioned read it?”
“If they have, it will come as hell of a surprise to Andrew
McCabe.”
“That’s true.”
“Not only that, I left word to love your neighbor as yourself.
I made that pretty clear, didn’t I? Did I mince words?”
“No, I recall that you were fairly specific.”
He turned and glared at me. “Fairly specific my ass,’ he said.
“I left clear written instruction in … in … what ever language my Galactic
Universal Translator had me speaking back then.”
“Your GUT was using Aramaic,
I think.”
“Maybe so,” he said. “I forget. At any rate, it translates
into English, right?”
“Greek, Latin, English, all of them,” I said.
“So these characters like Trump, Sessions, and the lemmings
that are following them can read, can’t they?”
“Supposedly.”
“Has anyone informed them about the instructions that I
left?”
“It wouldn’t appear so, although they claim to be aware of
you.”
“Then are they just purposefully trying to piss me off?”
“May I make an observation?”
“Why not? Everybody else does.”
“If I may point it out, you are being a little earthy today.”
“So what?”
“Also, what about your strictures on forgiveness?”
He thought, I imagined that I could hear machinery humming. “You’re
right, I think I did say that if someone sins against you seven times in a day,
and seven times comes back to you and says , ‘I repent,’ forgive him. I think me
and the boys had been practicing my water-into-wine trick a little too much
that day.”
“But you left us with them, your orders I mean.”
 |
| It would explain a lot, right? - C.W. |
He sighed and listened to the birds again. I could sense
relaxing calm in him.
“I will,” he said.
“Will what?”
“Will abide by my own rules.
“So Trump, Sessions, and the others are forgiven for their
meanness?”
“Not so fast,” he said. “Not so fast.” His face hardened.
“You don’t forgive them?”
“Maybe,” he said. “But first I’m going to wait until the sonsabitches
repent.”
See also:
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