Triumph & Defeat (Shaitan Wars Book 4) Read online

  World #6

  2124

  Seer Taste of Magnificence was nervous and anxious, as he settled into his niche in the council chamber. He didn’t know it, but these were emotions that their beings shared with those spawns of Ka, the Ka-Baal. In fact as his beings would find out later, these were emotions that were present in every sentient being in the universe. Seer Magnificence didn’t know this fact at that point of time, and felt like he was the only being suffering from such anxiety.

  The worst part was that the anxiety had not let up, but rather kept growing for the last few thousand cycles ever since the news of the invasion and subsequent annihilation of world #12 started reaching their world. The anxiety wasn’t due to any fear of invasion from the Ka-Baal. He and his beings on this world were well capable of mentally and psychologically coping with an invasion and even the destruction of their entire world if it came to that.

  The anxiety was due to a burden that seer Magnificence, the Council of Seers of his world, and all the beings of his world were carrying. The world of seer Taste of Magnificence was hiding a terrible secret. A secret so sacrilegious that the annihilation of any single world of their beings pales in comparison. A secret, if it were to ever get out of their world, could mean the end of their beings – Taste of Magnificence and the beings of his world had turned heretics!

  Taste of Magnificence did not look at himself as a heretic, quite the opposite. However, he knew how the rest of the worlds of his beings would look at his world – if the secret ever got out, their world would be termed heretic. Magnificence was a student of their being’s history, and he knew that this was not the first time such a thing had happened to a world. In fact it had happened many times during the long and tortured history of their beings.

  Starting from the first chapter in antiquity, during the time of the ‘Great Awakening’, when the beings with the holy message had returned from World #2 with the holy message for the origin world, only to find the beings left on the origin world were incapable of assimilating the holy message, which lead to the ‘Great Cleansing’.

  Since then over the course of the billions of cycles of their beings’ history, many a world had gone wayward in many ways, prominent amongst the causes, was the so called corruption of the ‘holy message’. Magnificence himself knew of about 15 instances in their beings’ history where a world had changed, bent or misinterpreted the ‘holy message’; thus being deemed as having gone wayward by the rest of the worlds of his beings. There had been other reasons for worlds to go wayward as well in their history. Some due to disease, or some other kind of madness that had engulfed a particular world at a certain point in their beings’ history.

  Whatever the reason, it had not ended well for that particular world, which had been deemed as having gone wayward by the other worlds of his beings. In each and every instance, that particular world had been ‘cleansed’, which meant each and every being in that world had been exterminated and every record existing in that world erased, so that the heresy or the madness did not spread any further. All those worlds were then repopulated all over again by beings from the rest of the worlds.

  While the worlds afflicted with disease or madness were exterminated with compassion by the rest of the beings. The same could not be said about the worlds which were deemed to have gone wayward by corrupting the ‘holy message’. Such worlds were deemed heretics, and there was a special treatment reserved for such heretics, for such beings had walked over to the side of Ka.

  Magnificence was not aware how the beings of the other heretic worlds had felt, for all records of their worlds had been erased, but he could guess. They must have felt very similar to what he felt at that moment – a sense of blissful ecstasy at having found the truth in the real interpretation of the holy message, and not the false interpretation propounded by the rest of the world of his beings. Yet he was fearful for his people, his world, but most of all for the truth of the real interpretation of the holy message, which would be lost if his beings in this world were to be exterminated.

  Magnificence knew the story of how the beings of his world had found the ‘Truth’ – the true interpretation. It was a story that was passed on from adult to younglings in their world, only through the traditional way of physical touch and tasting. No records of the story or anything to do with the ‘Truth’ were ever committed to any machine or any formal record. Such a risk could not be taken, for it would risk being discovered by someone outside the world.

  The younglings committed the ‘Truth’ to memory and learnt early never to mention it ever outside their world, or to anyone not from their world. The cult of secrecy had enabled the world of Magnificence to hide their secret for nearly a 100,000 cycles. Magnificence knew that they could have kept the secret for a long time to come. Their world had almost perfected the cult of secrecy about the ‘Truth’. Unfortunately, there was now a very real danger of the secret of their world being exposed due to their contact with the Ka-Baal.

  In a way the ‘Truth’ had foretold the appearance of the Ka-Baal, and how they would eventually be the vehicle of both their destruction, resurrection and then salvation. The contact with the Ka-Baal and the revelation of their capabilities had only validated the ‘Truth’ and reinforced his world’s faith in the ‘Truth’. Yet Magnificence could not feel any joy at the prospects that the beings of his world in particular, and all the worlds in general faced.

  Magnificence knew that whatever be the outcome, the road to that destiny would be awash with the blood of his beings. Being pragmatic, he was aware that there was a high probability that the final outcome could well see the extinguishing of the ‘Truth’, which his beings had discovered on this world. Yet he was hopeful, because the story of the ‘Truth’ was intertwined with the appearance of the Ka-Baal, and that could only be a good sign.

  The story of the ‘Truth’ began 6 generations and nearly a 100,000 cycles ago. It happened during a time of a particular long isolation of their world due to a conjunction of a celestial events coinciding with a rare outbreak of an epidemic in the neighboring world. The orbit of the gas giant of Magnificence’s world was such, that every 140 million cycles their world would reach a point in its orbit around the parent binary star, that it would be deeply isolated from the rest of worlds of his beings.

  The only way to reach the world of Magnificence during those cycles of isolation would be by stopping over at their neighboring world, changing the crew of the void vessel, and then continuing on the journey onward. If any of the other worlds of their beings tried to send a void vessel directly to their world during those cycles of isolation, the travel time would be greater than the lifetime of a single being.

  The seers of their beings have always been aware of the propensity of their DNA to drift given a long enough period of isolation, due to the specifics of their method of reproduction. Hence their being have the custom of exchange of beings from different worlds every few generations. This ensures that their beings as a whole stayed the same with a common gene pool.

  However, due to the outbreak of an epidemic in their neighboring world, which put a moratorium on travel to that world for many generations, Magnificence’s world was isolated from the rest of the worlds of their beings for nearly 20 generations before the next batch of migrants from other worlds could arrive on their world again. During this period of isolation, something wonderful happened – the birth of the Prophet on Magnificence’s world!

  There are many songs sung about the Prophet, all in secret of course, which are not just beautiful but almost ecstatic. At an intellectual level however, Magnificence most admired the Prophet’s ability to reason and question everything, even the religious dogmas and interpretation of the holy message handed down to them since antiquity. If it had been any other being who had questioned the interpretation of the ‘holy message’, he would have been deemed insane or worse heretical and an agent of Ka, and promptly put to the liquefaction chamber.

  However, there was so
mething special about the Prophet. The way he went about his arguments, and subtly introducing the ‘Truth’ and the real interpretation of the holy message, that it slowly found takers. Within a generation there was a thriving secret cult of the Prophet’s followers, who had imbibed his interpretation of the ‘Truth’. In his lifetime the Prophet had followed a quiet, secret and peaceful method of proselytization, winning over converts who believed the ‘Truth’ and spread the word in secret.

  However, after the Prophet’s death, his followers were a lot more sinister and insidious in spreading the word. Quiet and unexplained disappearance of beings, who did not agree or could not understand the Prophet’s words became prevalent. A being exterminating another being of healthy mind did not happen other than in times of ‘Cleansing’, like during the ‘Great Cleansing’. This was a ‘Cleansing’, albeit being done in secret to ensure that the words of the Prophet prevailed.

  Slowly but surely the Council of Seer of Magnificence’s world was dominated and eventually taken over by the believers of the Prophet. From there on, it became an official but secret policy in their world to cleanse any being who did not agree, or was incapable of understanding the Prophet’s words. Thus, by the time beings from other worlds started arriving again to their world, for intermixing of their genes, the world of Magnificence had wholly converted to the ‘Truth’ as preached by the Prophet.

  This interchange of beings from other worlds had presented dual challenge for the Council of Seers of this world. First was, how do you accommodate a large number of beings from other worlds without these new arrivals learning about their secret, and warning the other worlds? Second was how do you send a huge number of your own beings to other worlds, and yet ensure that those beings, over the course of their lifetimes do not betray the secret knowingly or by mistake?

  This had happened a few generations before Magnificence’s time, and the seers of that time had found an ingenious solution. They had invented rites of passage for their secret cult, which encoded the ‘Truth’ as told by the Prophet in multiple rituals to be performed step by step. Each step took you closer to the ‘Truth’, without revealing the nature of the heresy in any particular step.

  A being ready to be indoctrinated as a believer of the ‘Truth’ would slowly learn and pass each step. If a being was unable to pass a step, then he was not ready or capable of being indoctrinated into the way of the ‘Truth’. These secret rituals became the standard method of indoctrination on their world, whereby the beings of their world could practice and spread their faith, without having to reveal the nature of their heresy to the rest of the worlds of their beings.

  Things were going fine, and the world of Magnificence had been able to survive two rounds of migration between the worlds and intermingling without their secret being exposed. Almost none of the beings who migrated into their world was capable of understanding the ‘Truth’, and had to be slowly and quietly ‘cleansed’ in the liquefaction chambers.

  Similarly the beings from the world of Magnificence, who migrated to other worlds tried their best to proselytize the higher ‘Truth’ that they had brought from their world, but almost none of the natives of those worlds were capable of grasping that ‘Truth’. Only a few of their own offspring were capable of understanding the ‘Truth’. Still, a small and secret beachhead of their new religion had been made on every world of their beings.

  It was hoped that in a few hundred generations, their new religion of the ‘Truth’ would have become widespread enough for the beings practicing the faith to reveal themselves without the danger of being overwhelmed and exterminated by the rest of the beings. The appearance of the Ka-Baal had put paid to that long term plan.

  The religion of the heretics stemmed from the fundamental belief in the nature of the ‘Truth’, and the way it had been codified in the rituals meant to hide it from the rest of the beings. The Prophet had asked the very fundamental question – ‘If we are the chosen beings meant to survive, then who is this entity which has chosen us?’ Logically it has to be the creator who would have chosen his beings, since it is He who made the effort to create us.

  It was already fairly well established, that their beings had been created by a process of natural selection, and had survived because they were the fittest. Thus nature and evolution were the creator. Thus, if his beings reviled Ka as the entity that perpetually tried to exterminate them, then they should with equal devotion worship the creator, for creating them and giving them the wherewithal’s to survive despite being thrown challenge after challenge by Ka.

  Thus the Prophet had invented God for his beings, which remarkably had been absent from their beings’ religion. Till that point, their religion only had an anti-god. Magnificence as a scholar wondered whether this was the first time in the history of their beings, that someone had propounded the concept of a God, or was this one of the many iterations in the attempt to revise their religion, which had been crushed violently by the rest of their beings?

  Magnificence hoped that the difference this time was that their world had devised a method, theology and plan to protect the followers of their fledgling religion, till the time that they were numerous enough to be able to survive out in the open.

  One of the corollaries of the ‘Truth’, was the questioning of what it meant to ‘survive’. Since this new religion was was an expansion and reinterpretation of the old religion of their beings, it had obsessed as much with survival, as the old religion had. The old religion had interpreted survival simplistically as winning over enemies and surviving in a way of life, exactly as it existed.

  Since the new religion considered nature and evolution as the creator and the entity which had chosen their beings, the Prophet had reinterpreted ‘survival’ to mean the survival of the genes of their beings as the supreme goal in their struggle with Ka. ‘Anything and everything to ensure the survival of the genes of their beings was acceptable and necessary as duty, even if it meant that one has to make a deal with Ka himself.’ – The Prophet had once said rhetorically.

  This adage of the new religion had been codified in their secret rituals as part of the series of questions asked as the final rite of passage. “If you are given the choice between extermination of our beings while fighting spawns of Ka, or the survival of our species but by making a deal with spawns of Ka, which one would you choose?” The right answer if one was a follower of the ‘Truth’ would be the later. If one was not a follower of the ‘Truth’ of the new religion, then they would always choose the former. The later choice would be a blasphemy in the traditional religion of their people.

  When the Ka-Baal had overrun and started exterminating their beings from World #12, a small population of followers of the new religion, who had migrated from Magnificence’s world along with their spawns who had understood the concept of the ‘Truth’, resided on that world. The rest of the beings of the World #12 had followed the tenets of the old religion, and either died fighting or gone into liquefaction voluntarily to avoid revealing secrets.

  The small number of beings migrated from Magnificence’s world who lived on World #12, realized that this was the very situation that the Prophet had taught about, and was codified as a direct question in their rituals. These few thousand beings realized that it was their holy duty to try to preserve the genes of their species by self-preservation, even if it meant doing a deal with the Ka-Baal.

  These few thousand beings isolated themselves in a sealed chamber and waited for all the rest of the beings to either die in battle, or jump into liquefaction. Once every other non-believer of the ‘Truth’ in World #12 was dead, and the believers hidden in the sealed chamber, certain that their secret could not be learnt by non-believers, they waited for the marauding Ka-Baal to discover their sealed chamber.

  While there was the forlorn hope that the Ka-Baal may miss the hidden beings, realistically it was never going to happen. So these beings had a plan. When the Ka-Baal finally discovered their sealed chamber and started break
ing down the sealing gates, the beings opened up a conversation with the Ka-Baal! It was the first time their beings had opened up a conversation with any spawns of Ka! It was also the first time that the ‘Truth’ had been tested literally to such a degree, as prophesied by the Prophet.

  The beings followed the Prophet’s words and entered into a series of complex negotiations with the Ka-Baal. To the followers of the Prophet, his words had always been the ‘Truth’, but if ever there was a vindication and validation required of his words by any doubter, the endorsement came in the form of the response and subsequent conduct of the Ka-Baal.

  In sharp contrast to all the lies told by the old religion, the Ka-Baal were reasonable, logical and a kind species. The Ka-Baal not only let the few thousand believers of the ‘Truth’ hiding in the sealed chamber survive, but provided them with everything they needed to survive, and even thrive. In exchange the Ka-Baal wanted so little, almost nothing at all, from the beings that it was almost suspicious and unfathomable.

  The beings hidden in the sealed chamber had expected the Ka-Baal to extract a heavy price for letting them survive, but for the first few hundred cycles the Ka-Baal asked for nothing in return, except putting reasonable restrictions that any victorious and conquering enemy would put on the vanquished. The beings were restricted to a certain small sector of the world, but the sector was spacious and did not lack resources, nutrients or water. The beings were forbidden from possessing anything that could be used as a weapon, or from producing weapons. The beings had to subject themselves and their habitat to regular inspections by the Ka-Baal.

  In exchange, the beings were not just allowed to live a comfortable life, but were provided every facility they could salvage from the other sectors of the world, including incubation chambers to be able to multiply and thrive. The quality of life of the beings was not just good, but far better than they had enjoyed previously, due to the abundance of resources for such a small population. The best part for these beings was that they could practice and preach the ‘Truth’ openly, without having to indulge in secretive rituals.