Moses of Kosbar: New Fiction

Chapter 1: Bondage

Confusion is the Starting Point of Wisdom. Confusion is the starting point of transforming the world into something new. Confusion makes us stop and if we are attentive to our state of confusion, we will nurture it into a full blown dilemma. Only a full blown dilemma provides the material for new vision. Who cares to keep looking out from the same eyes at the same world? Only those who have successfully cultivated personal wealth, health, and influence.

Teachings of the Great Merwegon,  Volume 1, Chapter 4

You might as well call me Moses. That’s what my mother did. She had quite the sense of humor. You see, I was a girl. Well, I was the offspring bearing gender of my race.

Moses isn’t my formal given name. But that’s another story. Mom wanted me to aim high and she thought calling me Moses would remind me of my duty to my people.

Of course, in the old days, we did not call ourselves people. In our language, it’s a different word. But ever since you Homo Saps arrived on our planet, we’ve adopted a fair number of your words, and people is one of them.

Anyway, going back to the story that I was asked to record, the time was four hundred of our wing-flap [1] years wing-flap after a renegade group of homo saps took us away from the rest of the autochthonous people of Kosbar. That’s part of why mom called me Moses. She said it was now time for freedom and being reunited with our Magenta, Cyan, and Yellow family members, and resuming our dietary habits and duties, so we could reclaim our place as the Blue Seers. Same number of years after which Moses appeared to liberate the Israelites from Egypt. Of course the Israelites originally went voluntarily to Egypt, and that was not the case of our removal from the homeland.

After the kidnapping, we Wingers were essentially forced into bondage. This was all for our own good, those who were on the scene were told, when they awakened in what was essentially a prison compound. Wing-flap Now you will no longer be kept in the dark unless ordered by the Yellows to perform some out of doors task. You will be free to see the sunlight all day. You will be liberated to do what you want. Wing-flap.

What you Saps hadn’t understood was that we had never been enslaved against our wills by our own people. Never.

Do you understand now?

Ok. I’m glad it has finally penetrated into your minds that we Blue Seers were not treated badly by our own people.

We Blue Seers were those who successfully went through a rigorous application, training, and apprenticeship program. We Blue Seers came from all three of the other color groups, and did not turn Blue until we changed our diets to accord with the teachings of The Great Merwegon.

Our forebears had tried to explain, but you Saps didn’t listen, even when the offspring turned out to be of all of the other three colors, and even when, decades later,  the original Blues reverted to Yellow, Cyan, and Magenta. They…you…your forebears, refused to take us home, or even tell us in what direction home lay.

We had remained in this captivity for generations, allowed out of the compound only to do the high level forestry work your people were incapable of performing. And when we left the compound, it was under heavy guard. At least at first, we were heavily guarded. Later, we were so demoralized, the weapons became unnecessary. Far from our birthplace and our supporting relatives, we descendants of the spiritual workers of the Wingers, previously members of an egalitarian society, had been transformed into the underclass.

Time passed. My mother was the one who came up with the idea of the return, which has now been accomplished, to some degree. With The Great Merwegon’s blessings, she had the joy and sorrow of experiencing the return.

Now, finally, you are doing the right thing. Now you have asked for a statement of our side of the story for your Sapling Empire Library Files. A small step towards admitting the truth and starting the reconciliation process.

Yes, a small step. Because, as you Saps know, one can never go home again. Because even if you return to the same place, you are different. Especially as the generations are renewed, the outlook and predominant attitude of the group members are changed by the sojourn in exile. While the home group also changes, the groups inevitably drift apart. But we, who had neither experience nor indigenous mythology of exile, thought we would be welcomed back to the bosom of our homeland.

In our innocence, we were unaware of the reality that awaited us. We had no inkling of how the pain of the conflicts within our identities would essentially be eternal. You forced us into modernity. You gave us the curses of modernity, and only some of its blessings. Our innocence was taken from us! We weren’t forced from our Garden of Eden due to the consequences of our own actions. We were kidnapped by aliens.

#

No, thank you. I don’t need anything to drink.

Ok. Ok. I’ll stop with the philosophizing and get back to the history.

When we…ahh, our forebears, awoke in our isolated condition, we found that you Saps, ahh, your Sap forebears, had left our arms free to move, but with our wing feathers clipped, we had no way to escape.

We eventually found out that we had been transported to a different continent, which was an island. The plants were different enough that it wasn’t obvious how to recreate our spirituality supporting diet.

So now, here we were. Four hundred years, or five generations, after the separation from our families, the original captivity had in some ways become enforced only by golden handcuffs. They had stopped bothering to clip our wings when they figured out that we couldn’t fly long distances like your Earth origin migratory birds and insects.

No, they did not need to clip our wings. They found it more lucrative to create what they called a wing-flap synergistic community. wing-flap They let us fly to the arboreal crown of the adjacent forest to collect the scrimey fruits and corlua leaves, among other products, that were subjected to processes worked out by their scientists, and then sold to their people off planet.

#

No, thank you. I still don’t need anything to drink. This is my normal voice when speaking Sappish.

Ms. Botruff had confided that ever since the Sap writers Cordwainer Smith and Frank Herbert had realized that biological substances were going to be the real gold mines of exo-planets, every Homo Sap expedition had a team of biologists and pharmacologists.

Wing-flap Who is Ms. Botruff? wing-flap you ask. Her story comes later, but to answer your question, she was a pharmacologist. Whether you Saps had been using our planet’s bio-product to manufacture ecstasy drugs, or poisons for weapons of mass destruction, we had no idea. We had indeed become an underclass, going through the motions to maintain our own survival, perhaps unwittingly serving to keep others elsewhere enslaved in a similar predicament to ours.

As seers, our specialized service to our people was maintained by a conservative lifestyle, that didn’t really promote creativity in problem solving. We wanted to go home and take up our traditional ways, but the Sap overlords weren’t going to lead us there. Our presence in their midst was too lucrative at this point. It would be a big risk to try to find our way home on our own, and who knew if we would be able to get our powers back, even if we did arrive?

But my mom persisted in her program to turn me into the Winger Moses. My mom said that if we had figured out how to access the Blue Seer state thousands of years ago, we should be able to do it again. I reminded her that the now extinct bagatu fruit had facilitated the awakening of the Great Merwegon.  But my mom wouldn’t listen to reason. She kept telling me it was time to try to go home.

She stopped calling me #^%**`~. And trust me; this is only an approximation of my real name. You Saps couldn’t even dream about pronouncing it as you can’t even hear most of the phonemes! About half of our speech is in your ultrasonic range. So anyway, she stopped calling me #^%**`~, and started calling me Moses. Soon dad joined in. I was only six at the time, and the neighbors always acted as if my parents were joking. But by the time I turned ten, my parents had done what they could to help me break out of my people’s conservative habits.

#

Ok. Please. I will have a drink. That way you will hear that I don’t need one. You have unrealistic expectations about how well an alien life form can reproduce the sounds of Sappish.

#

You still can’t understand how Kosbar social groups function. Your idea of a multi-level hierarchy is probably as much a part of your genetic code as our flat structure is a part of ours. Yes, it’s true that we cultivated plants and fungi, and some life forms called Floaters, that lived in water when young, and air on maturity, but these had no free will and our most stringent wing-flap scientific wing-flap tests showed that they had only a shade more consciousness and sentience than the plants and fungi. We did not eat the Floaters. We did use the larger forms, which we had bred over many generations from smaller stock, for transportation. We did enjoy travel and site seeing, even though we never felt the drive to conquer the planet like your explorers. We also had a short range trade network. The Floaters supported these activities.

Our complete lack of a domestic multi-level hierarchical social structure left us fascinated by the stories of your people. Of course, some of the christians read the bible to us in an attempt to gain greater universal glory for your wing-flap god wing-flap. We were never going to convert, that was for sure. But it finally sank in to some of us that we were in bondage, and needed liberation, and the story of Moses was the most complete blueprint we had.

Wing-flap blueprint wing-flap is not a good word. We now understand that myths never offer realistic plans, only warnings about the obstacles along the way. This is something our relatives who never left home can’t understand the way those of us who experienced the exile do.

Anyway, yes, I’m getting back to the story. We are confident that providing a blueprint for liberation was not the intent of the missionaries. As your christians say though, wing-flap god works in mysterious ways. wing-flap

Yes. God works in mysterious ways. If our agricultural activities were unwitting sources of enslavement for others, the sap missionaries were unwitting sources of liberation for us.

Haha. Haha. First time I really thought about that. I doubt that you’ll ever get any Winger converts to christianity, but maybe I have just had an epiphany experience of the Seekers of Self Evident Truth variety.

Hahahahahahahaha!

Yes. I’ll have more water now. This time I need it.

So, back now to the history, there were a couple of other families that understood what my parents were trying to do by calling me Moses. Slowly, a few started supporting them, and encouraged their kids be my friends. My mom even wing-flap kissed the head Sap’s ass, wing-flap as your people say, in order to get their kids’ educational materials, and they started a school for us future liberators. You see, the Homo Saps who had originally left your Earth were smart enough to know that they’d need to actively teach and practice creativity in order to survive outside their natural place of evolution. Even the most rigid christians, if they chose to live away from Earth, couldn’t make claims that if it wasn’t in the bible, they didn’t need it.

[1] The word wingflap shows when Moses or her ilk are attempting to imitate English speaking homo sapiens using air quotes. Moses’ people have a whole body language.