Chapter 77
MY FIRST STOP back home was an unbelievable zoo I know inside a hidden park beneath the universe’s biggest shatterproof solarium.
I went to a vantage point overlooking a grasslands field filled with herd upon herd of elephants. The friend I was seeking saw me first. She approached my viewing platform very gracefully—especially for an elephant that weighs forty, maybe fifty thousand pounds. She extended her telephone pole–sized trunk to me and I gently stroked it.
Welcome back, Daniel, she said in my mind.
This was Chordata. I had known her as an infant and met up with her again when I set out on my first alien-hunting adventure.
Why do you look so anxious, my young friend?
I need your help.
Then my help you shall have.
Remember how you told me an elephant never forgets?
Well, if I couldn’t remember saying it, how could it possibly be true?
I grinned. Have you ever heard of another two-legged Alpar Nokian who calls himself Abbadon? He’s been on Earth for centuries, maybe since the dawn of human history.
Ah, yes. The Fallen Soul.
You knew him?
No. He is far older than I. But I have heard the stories. It is a cautionary tale we still tell our children. A story of one who was given tremendous talents and powers, who, instead of using those gifts for a greater good, chose instead to selfishly enrich and prolong his own life. You see, Daniel, the one known as the Fallen Soul was granted not immortality but a vastly extended life by an evil god known as The Prayer. So long as the Fallen Soul did that god’s bidding and provided him with constant amusements, he would be granted life.
I had wondered how Abbadon could’ve hung around Earth for so many years if he was truly an Alpar Nokian, like me. Yes, we live a very long time. But thousands of years?
Well, I communicated to Chordata, he’s been keeping up his end of the deal, putting on quite a horror show for The Prayer’s amusement. But now he’s upping his game. He aims to wipe out the entire planet. And he’s doing a pretty good job of it. Now he’s eager to destroy me, too.
You say he destroyed the planet?
Yes. The civilized parts. I saw buildings topple. Whole cities were leveled. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rode across the rubble.
Are you sure of this, Daniel?
I saw it with my own eyes.
Ah. Then perhaps it did not happen.
I shook my head to clear out the bafflement. Huh?
Always remember, Daniel—the fallen one has the same powers you do. He can conjure up a reality and make you see it through the sheer force of his destructive imagination—especially if certain fears already lurk in your subconscious.
My father had said something very similar about Abbadon: Trust none of what you hear, and less of what you see.
So the cities of Earth aren’t really leveled?
They might be, Daniel—so long as the one you call Abbadon imagines that they have been.
I was beginning to understand.
The things I create with my imagination only stay that way as long as I focus my creative energies on them. If I release an object or person from the grip of my transformative powers, they go back to being what they always were. I could not alter their essence, only their substance. Trust me, it’ll make sense one day, after you’ve read Aristotle’s Metaphysics or spent a little time in Plato’s Cave.
I leaned down and gave Chordata a quick kiss on her wet snout.
What was that for, Daniel?
Hope. You’ve given me hope!
Talking to Chordata, I finally realized that if I could defeat Number 2, then all the destruction he had conjured up with his twisted imagination would be erased the instant I erased him!
There was only one problem: How could I do that?
How could I defeat him?
There was only one place I hadn’t looked for the answer: the future.
Yes, it was a pretty sketchy, highly questionable idea, but I figured it might be my last chance to find some flaw in my nemesis. Maybe I could go just far enough into the future to watch our fight and see how he’d come at me, and then flip back to the present knowing how to foil his attack. Maybe I could see him kill me and then zip backward in time to stop it from actually happening on the do-over.
Yes, it was complicated, but then again, saving a whole planet from imminent annihilation usually is.
I concentrated every fiber of my being, every molecule in my body, every ounce of my creative powers on recalling exactly how it felt when Abbadon had sucker-punched me into the future. It was time to re-create that moment.
Using cellular-level sensory recall, I blasted forward….
Into the future.