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Sometime during this information orientation or instruction, we were taught how to eat and enjoy food, and this was a great discovery. We were told that we could survive quite well without food as we absorbed nutrients through our skin, but we could also utilize food and drink, and our bodies would dissolve every particle of it. We had no need to eliminate. Now this was important to understand, they said, because everything that happened on Earth had to do with eating and drinking, and the species of Earth not only craved food and drink, but could die quickly without it, and all creatures of Earth which we saw in the films excreted waste as the result of eating and drinking and this too had immense significance on Earth.

"All the violence you see amongst these mammals," said the Parents. "All of it stems from the drive to live, to survive, and to have offspring to survive and to obtain all the food and drink necessary to survive and procreate. That is the basis of life on Earth. And self-aware human mammals--intelligent mammals--are the most savage and cruel and vicious of all the beings on the planet, or any planet in the 'Realm of Worlds.' "

The Parents gave us to know that planets ruled by the intelligent descendants of reptiles or birds or insects were far more reasonable, peaceful, loving, and harmonious. Indeed, for the most part these species were seekers of harmony by nature, and had a very different attitude towards time than human mammals did, a very different attitude towards love, and towards the Maker.

"Self-consciousness should never have developed in mammals," said the Parents. But at the same time as they told us these things, they also told us that our longing for love, our seeking of knowledge, our response to various patterns, our noticing of traits and similar structures, our excitement at realizing certain things--all of this had to do with our minds being made to resemble human mammalian minds.

Derek in particular wanted to know why this was inherently "bad" and I think he surprised the Parents with some of his questions. They never reproved him or criticized him or any of us, though they did seem stunned at times, and at a loss for an answer.

But they did give answers. "The mammalian mind is entirely shaped by emotional needs," they said, "by wild and intense feelings. And because of this it invents invisible personalities that do not exist and longs to communicate with such personalities. It attaches absurd and destructive attitudes towards feelings. Its idea of the 'Maker' has to do with emotions. Ideas of the Maker on planets on which reptiles, insects, and birds had developed into the ascendant species did not reflect anger or love or vengeance as did the human mammals' vision of the Maker.

"It is almost impossible for these creatures to know peace or genuine love," said the Parents. "They are always too deeply enmeshed in pain or pleasure, loneliness or a suffocating sense of paralysis, a need for love, or a raging jealousy resulting from love, or a desire for vengeance due to personal defeat or injury. And when they are physically wounded or experience disease, their suffering is unendurable for them. They are driven by it to terrible extremes. Peace, harmony, joy elude these creatures."

Finally came the day when we were tired of the film streams, of their repetitiveness, and we had become even a little callous to the endless suffering.

The Parents brought us together, and told us we were to pray to the Maker. They invited us to bow our heads, clear our minds, and think only of the great creative force that had made all worlds, including those in the "Realm of Worlds," and to thank the Maker for the gift of life and the gift of witness to life.

They made beautiful sense to us and we were glad to do it.

They told us to thank the Maker for our having been grown for a special purpose, and to promise to the Maker that we would do our utmost to fulfill this purpose. The wretched mammalian human life-forms on Earth had to be destroyed and we were the ones chosen to do it.

At this point, Welf spoke up and in a rather jocular manner asked if this Maker was real, and if he or she heard what we were saying, and whether all this thanks mattered.

I was shocked, as it seemed inconsiderate or unkind to ask this of the Parents. But as usual the Parents were completely calm.

"We do not know if the Maker exists," said the Parents. "But we believe that he has to exist and he is not really male or female. There are many worlds in the 'Realm of Worlds' where the ascendant beings are not male or female. We use the male referent for the Maker for you because you are male or female, and the male on the planet Earth dominates the female. We believe it is wise and right to give thanks to this Maker. We can see no harm in doing it."

It was obvious to me that Welf thought this was hilariously funny, and Garekyn did not like it, and that Derek was coldly suspicious of it. For me, it was a matter of being courteous to the Parents. I wanted to know my purpose. I was eager to get on with it. I am by nature the most impatient of the People of the Purpose.

We went back to the prayers. We bowed our heads, closed our eyes as instructed, cleared our minds, and thought of the Maker. And for the first time since our awakening we heard music again, singing, and it seemed all of Home was filled with this singing; and singing came from outside the dwelling, from the forest realm with all its other dwellings. I opened my eyes and saw a great gathering of Parents around us, Parents who had spread their multicolored feathered wings though they were standing still, and all were singing, and outside I saw ascending and descending Parents, gliding as it were with open wings, and they too were singing. The words these beings sang said something like "We sing of the Maker; we sing of life; we sing of the gift of life; we sing of the glory and the mystery of life; we sing of our gratitude for life; we sing of our gratitude that we have experienced and witnessed life in all its grandeur."

Finally this came to an end. The huge room was indeed filled with more Parents than I had ever seen gathered in one place before, and the Parents who had been speaking to us resumed.

"As we have told you," said the Parents, "Earth suffered a calamity. Millions of years ago its atmosphere was poisoned by a large asteroid that struck the planet, resulting in darkness and coldness that killed its abundant life in unthinkable numbers. As the result of that, the mammals of the planet arose and made the life you have come to know, a life of endless struggle, violence, and misery.

"It is your purpose to go to Earth and to achieve an explosion there that will impact the atmosphere as greatly as the earlier catastrophe. And when you create this explosion, out of your shattered and dissolving bodies will come a toxin strong enough to reduce life on the planet down to single-cell structures once more.

"But it is imperative that you be in the city of Atalantaya when you detonate this explosion. You must be within the dome and you must be in the presence of the Replimoid who built and rules Atalantaya. It is imperative that this being know who you are, whence you came, and what you are about to do. And then with utter resolution you must do it. Indeed, you will need all your intellect and skill to make the journey from where we plant you on Earth to the city of Atalantaya to confront the Great One of Atalantaya. If at any time before that final confrontation he suspects that you are Replimoids, if he suspects that you have come from Bravenna, he will seek to imprison you or destroy you. And he no doubt possesses the means to dissolve your bodies back to their basic chemical components, while removing the explosives and toxins in your bodies, and indeed he will use all the components to continue his unlawful rulership on the planet. You must take him by surprise. You must announce your purpose and explain it right before you fulfill it."

I was pondering this. So were Welf and Garekyn, but Derek was plainly horrified. And how could anyone expect otherwise, because we knew full well what death was. We had been watching humans and animals die for days or weeks, or months, for all we knew.

Derek cried out at once, "I don't want to die! Die? All of us will die? You mean Welf will die? You mean Kapetria will die? Garekyn will die? Why must that happen to us? What good will we be to you when we are dead? And where will we be when we are dead, the we inside of us, our minds, our...who we are!"

The Parents were obviously completely stopped by Derek's words. If they'd heard such an outpouring from a Replimoid before, they gave no sign of it.

Then the Parents began to answer.

"You will not be anywhere, Derek, when you die," said the Parents. "You will be finished, and gone. There will be no Derek. There will be no more of any of you. That is what death is, Derek. We die too, we who developed you and created you. All creatures die. And that will be the end of you."

Derek was in helpless tears. Welf and Garekyn couldn't comfort him. And I could see that they were none too happy with this revelation themselves. It had caused in me a sinking fe

eling I'd never known before.

"Perhaps you can explain to us," I suggested, "how this will feel." They answered, "You will not feel anything. When you detonate the explosion, you will cease to be. That's all. There is no life beyond biological life. There is no life beyond visible life."

It was clear the word "visible" had more meaning to them than their word for biological. And of course they were contradicting themselves. They'd told us of planets that had invisible life, or at least that is what I had inferred from what they'd told us.

"Can you tell us," I asked, "why you made us such complex and intelligent beings if we are to die so soon?"