Blentyn Drwg turned from the window and noticed a heavily bound book on Plato’s laboratory table.
“Do you mind if I have a look at this?” he asked the good dragon as everyone assessed the vortex.
“Sure.” said Plato as he briefly looked away from the oval shaped castle window.
The title on the thick grimoire Blentyn had noticed merely displayed the word “ALIENS”. Blentyn flicked through the pages until he reached a chapter that read “ALIEN PHYSIOLOGY.” It seemed to Blentyn that he had time to read some of it. The following was one of the segments that he had time to assimilate.
“Aliens are green because they photosynthesise. They are a combination of plant and animal. They take in carbon dioxide and give out oxygen in the day and take in oxygen and give out carbon dioxide at night. They have the night vision of a shark. They also have the electrical perception of a hammerhead shark. Through this they can tell exactly where they are on any planet in the same way that the hammer-head uses their electrical receivers to navigate the oceans.”
Blentyn then flicked through to a chapter called “ALIENS AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO TWENTIETH CENTURY EARTH.” What he read was this....
“As we know aliens all have the ability to travel in time and to and from a myriad number of other dimensions and have not been expelled from Eden. Alien representatives on Eden are a common sight.
As with most pre-enlightenment centuries and dimensions Aliens in the twentieth century inhabit extra-dimensional pockets that humans rarely have access to. You could be walking past the same electrical box in the street every day for years and not know that inside it there was a gigantic city with a surrounding vegetation of plants that have evolved from plants humans are familiar with. If the electrical box were to be opened it would look like a regular set of components inside. If you made the right hand signals and had green, slightly bulbous fingers with the power to sense the direction of electrical currents in the same way that human eyes read a map then you would be sucked through a gap between transistors and between the molecules of physical reality as we know it. Once sucked in you would find yourself in a forest that had paths leading to a jewelled city with elegant spires. Space ships would be periodically landing and taking off from landing pads set up on the sides of certain buildings. These ships had cloaking devices which had a largely 99.999999999 per cent chance of working without a human getting a glimpse of them. Of course the human population explosion had made sightings a bit more unavoidable by the twentieth century but on the whole alien traffic was a daily occurrence in every country on Earth. The ships left their cities by being sucked from the alien’s hidden world and then spat out through the apertures in every-day things. If the ships and the aliens were not cloaked from human senses a space ship or an alien leaving an electrical box was an awesome sight for a homo sapien. The spatial statistics of the crafts were fucked with in such an extreme way that they resembled forms of liquid metal as they oozed out from between the terrestrial molecules that humans knew about. Once out a ship quickly popped into its normal static shape and BINGO it flew quickly up and out of the Earth’s atmosphere. If you were a passenger in such a craft then you would merely experience the same sensation you experienced when you singularly entered or left an alien environment. An alien would ooze in the same way with their green bodies becoming firm the second they were through a gateway. A human could only do this if they had been invited to join in by an alien.
Aliens had a more evolved perception of physics than humans. They actually had physiological abilities that enabled their analysis of matter to involve perceptual experiences that humans just couldn’t have. I suppose this is a difference between all species no matter where in the Tree of Life they were.
Humans could survive an entry or exit into or out of an alien environment if they were invited to do so. Other species on Earth were not only independently able to traverse alien gateways but regularly did. The alien cloaking devices only worked on humans. They were only designed to work on humans. Other species did not react with any noticeable surprise when they saw aliens or their vehicles because aliens did not cause noise pollution or toxic fumes.
Aliens communicated with other species telepathically and were careful to inform all living things, within a radius of any of their more extreme experiments, of any activities that may startle or shock. These were not life threatening experiments but could sometimes involve size and shape changing and burn ups in their smaller craft. Cats were particularly interested in aliens and didn’t give a shit whether or not humans thought they were acting strangely when they were playing with them. Aliens were nowhere near as prolific as humans because they were aware of the problems that over-population could cause. Humans were also aware of what problems over-population could cause but didn’t seem to be getting the hang of sensible levels of contraception. All Aliens were both male and female but the female genes were dominant and alien sexuality was therefore physically female in the eyes of humans who had seen them. All aliens could become pregnant and give birth. This was certainly one of the factors that helped them control any rise in population levels. Aliens only had one child each and every alien took a collective responsibility for every alien child. Alien children grew to adulthood within 2 years and the average alien life span was 400 years old. Population size in the twentieth century varied on Earth as they were constantly leaving and arriving. Aliens knew at all times how many of them were on Earth. This was the same for the hammerhead shark because, as mentioned in the chapter on Alien physiology, they had similar abilities to sense electrical activity and especially the electrical activity in their own species. Aliens did not harm the balance of nature and they did not farm or fell trees. Each could find the nutrition that they needed from every plant in existence. Their physiological appreciation of taste was thousands of times broader than the human equivalent. They never killed whole plants because they needed to only eat small amounts of vegetation. Most of their energy was derived from photosynthesis.
The hardest job that terrestrially based aliens had was their continual attempts to stop humanity from destroying themselves and other life on the planet around them. This was especially true of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries.
Aliens held meetings through instant all-inclusive telepathic contact every 23 days in order to assess whether to make their existence known on a mass level. By the beginning of the twenty first century aliens were still pretty sure that they would have to destroy large numbers of humans in order to protect themselves from government led reactionary attacks if aliens suddenly became visible to humans. They feared as much for the safety of other species caught in the crossfire as they did for human beings and themselves.
Of course aliens only had access to a certain number of the infinite variety of time-lines that affected the Earth. They were not a hundred per cent sure of what would happen in certain futures owing to difficulties in knowing which present led to which future. Experiments into solving this problem took up most of their research time in the twentieth century. This activity was mainly inspired by their needing to know which human activities may lead to genocide and which would lead to enlightenment. Aliens believed that humans may have to wait until they were allowed back into Eden as a whole species before full communication between all aliens and all humans could be safely achieved. There were rumours that along some of Earth’s time-lines this happens before humans and snakes are allowed back into the garden but most aliens could not go far enough into the future to get a good look at examples of this. Those that did only got glimpses of these scenes. This caused great excitement when they were broadcast at telepathic meetings. Aliens never killed any living thing on Earth or anywhere they travelled in the galaxy. In fact they had actually saved humanity on various occasions when other beings had regarded humanity as a parasite on the face of Earth. The thing to remember was that with all the visits aliens received from galactic and inter-dimensional beings they were often advised about ways in which to “cure” Earth of this mammalian pest. Aliens were forever reminding concerned Andromedans and upset Alpha Centaurians that aliens were, themselves, evolved from humans and that, furthermore, while there was a chance that humanity may improve itself then aliens were committed to a course of non-violent direct action.”
Blentyn put down the book and looked up at the group of beings that were gathered at the castle window. He grinned. In Big Brother’s narrow little world none of this was known. How comforting that the dictatorship that believed it had an almost omniscient status knew practically fuck all about the true nature of the universe.
Blentyn Drwg picked up another book that sat on the table next to the one about aliens. This one was entitled “THE DIARY OF BOBBY REWIND”. He opened it at random and read the following....
“WHEN DID YOU DISCOVER YOU WERE A BOY?
Bobby Rewind....
Big cats should not be kept in cages. They were either pacing about because of the confinement or they were disconcerted by the crowds of stupid humans all cooing and laughing in some sick, backward glee at witnessing a prisoner. I did not like the spectacle and moved on. The gorillas in the next cage looked bored and angry. One clumped another around the head. It was obvious to me that the clumped gorilla had not done anything wrong. It was just the frustration of confinement that provoked the act of aggression. I knew this even at the age I was at the time. I had seen it in school. Some of the big herbivores had a little bit more room to move around in but watching a giraffe sprint for three seconds and then have to stop because it had reached the confines of its cage made me depressed. Even the vultures seemed discontent with a daily routine of idling and eating. It seemed to me that routine had sucked their vim and vigour away. It seemed that inevitability had crushed their spontaneity.
All the creatures I saw seemed to eye their human onlookers with a mixture of contempt and pity. It seemed to me that it was humankind that had somehow missed the point. It seemed that the animals were all too aware of our problems but that we were painfully unaware of theirs. I almost rushed from one cage to another which seemed to infuriate the company I was in. I understood the need for protecting species from extinction but I was dang diddly sure this was not the way to do it.
The company I was in seemed to enjoy deriding the myriad number of species that flashed in front of our eyes. I found that as equally disgusting as the nature of each beast’s confinement.
I knew that it was no good airing my disgust in front of my peers because I would only get the usual set of responses. They would have included things like “What are you? Queer or something?”, “You’re a right poof!” and “They’re only animals!”
I was at Chessington Zoo with one of my cousins and one of his hard mates. We headed for the adjacent fun-fare which seemed to provoke an even more witless sense of glee than the animals had inspired.
We were walking towards the big wheel when my bollocks dropped. I didn’t know at the time that this was the reason why I suddenly felt an exquisite and irresistible ache down below. I dropped to a crouch and time seemed to stand still as goose bumps ran up and down my body. As well as the dull ache there was an electric muscular ripple that coursed around my crutch. The sensation was so exciting that I felt like I wanted to scream with laughter. It was all over far too quickly for that however.
The minute I bent double I had expected some horrific medical revelation but there seemed to be none.
My cousin and his pal had carried on walking and I picked myself up and ran after them. I kept the experience to myself which was weird for me because, as a child, I delighted in telling everybody everything I could about the things I had experienced. I was loud and hysterical through a lot of my child-hood but the experience on the way to the big wheel seemed to demand a certain level of secrecy. It may have been that my ignorance of things testicular was not a social failing I was prepared to admit. It is interesting to note that the fear of being thought uninformed in matters surrounding one’s groinal area was a more powerful force than my usually high level of hypochondria. Normally I would have been scared shitless that this experience would lead to something worse. Normally I would have spent nights worrying about the risk of amputation or cancer from such an incident. At the time of the event wherein my nuts revealed their fleshy hammock to the world I couldn’t even tap my head off of a wall without pestering all and sundry about whether or not I was going to suffer some form of brain haemorrhage. Just as one pain can replace another so one anxiety had replaced another leaving me free to relegate any fear of injury arising from this experience to the growing number of personal files in my subconsciousness. Seeing as I knew I could not ask my cousin and Co. whether or not my experience was familiar to them I actually forgot it had happened a few minutes later. I didn’t fully remember the incident again until some years down the line.
What did stick in my mind for weeks afterwards was a revelation about what it was to be a boy. I ended up on the big wheel with my cousin’s mate. In a classic scene that would have made Graham Greene jump up and down with excitement my cousin’s mate and me were stranded for about ten minutes while the big wheel had been brought to a halt by some technical problem. We were at the highest point and this seemed to fill my companion with a set of emotions ranging from the tyrannical to the homicidal. He started throwing halfpennies down at the dots that now stood for the people on the ground.
“NO!” I shouted as I feared for the safety of folk.
“ARE YOU A BOY OR A GIRL!?” he screamed as he continued to throw halfpennies in an excited state of psychosis. I had to think about his question. Was I a boy or a girl? Was my sensitivity and concern for fellow humans a feminine trait? Was his destructive thrill the factor that delineated the genders? I couldn’t accept this and decided that there was more than one way in which to be a boy. By the time we got off the big wheel his path in life was almost certain to lead off in a completely different direction from mine.
Hitherto I had always suspected that I was not as much of a boy as those that used to hurt animals, play aggressive sports with a relish and bully smaller kids. Now this suspicion had been exorcised from my mind. For some reason that I could not define at the time I suddenly considered myself as much of a boy as my cousin’s hard mate. I was not prepared to accept his worldview as any more masculine than mine. My feeling of rebellion against what I saw as the status quo had helped to stabilised my perception of myself.
WHEN DID YOU DISCOVER YOU WERE A BOY?
Billy Fish-Head....
Now that is what I call a good question. I suppose it was on the eve of my 10th birthday which would be December 9th 1972. It was about 3pm. I was sitting on my windowsill staring vacantly at the old Walkers crisp boxes which I had filled with all my old toys. It was wet as I remember and the repetitive sound of the rain hitting the windowpane was the perfect backdrop to my mood.
Outside in the back garden I could hear my father digging the pit. Even though it was cold he had stripped down to his blue nylon vest as he methodically attacked the ground with only the occasional grunt giving away the effort it was taking.
It seems strange looking back now but in those days all fathers always dressed the same no matter what task they undertook. If they fixed the car they would wear the same clothes as they always wore. Usually this would be a pair of dark brown crimpalene Marks & Spencers trousers, a light brown striped shirt with a vest you could always see underneath and a pair of plain black shoes. This uniform never changed, cleaning the windows, cutting the lawn or messing about in the shed. The only thing that might change was how many buttons on the shirt were opened or if it was removed entirely and this marked out clearly the exertion required for the task at hand.
The pit was not that big, probably about one and half feet wide and about three feet deep, but to a child a pit sounds far more dramatic than a hole. It did not really have to be that deep as it was only meant to hold the ashes and the remains after the bonfire. I watched my father dispassionately. It never entered my head for one moment to go down and offer him some help. Digging as we all know is boring.
However the bonfire was a different matter altogether. There is nothing more exciting to a child than a bonfire. Just the thought of piling up those bits of wood and watching them go up in flames was enough to make the hairs on my neck tingle with anticipation. But as with everything that is exciting when you are a child making bonfires is definitely not allowed. Sometimes that’s why I think smoking is so popular. Not because of the tobacco or even the nicotine but because it means you can set fire to something almost whenever you want and that is forbidden when you are a child. We all know how exciting it is to do something that we shouldn’t don’t we?
My eyes had lit up when my father came out of the garage with an axe in one hand and a load of old wood in the other. I rushed over to see what was happening but I was stopped in my tracks by his deep booming voice. “Go back into the house you might get a splinter in your eye”. You see what I mean? Even the preparation for making a fire was fraught with danger. I could see it all in my mind’s eye. Being rushed to casualty with a piece of wood sticking out of one eye, bravely holding back the tears as I was carried into the hospital. Then all the attention at school that happened after a lengthy recuperation period. I imagined finally going back and sitting at my desk proudly sporting a black eyepatch.
My father looked up “Well what are you waiting for? Go on back into the house”. I turned and ran deciding it was better to watch the proceedings from afar. A bit like I’ve done all my life in one way or another.
It’s funny but I never questioned the fact that my father did not stop working because it was raining. That was because he never stopped for anything. Once he had begun to do something he would just carry on regardless of whatever else happened. Everything he did was an act of will. He never gave up and he would never admit defeat. He had about him a brooding intensity which at times you could feel you could reach out and touch.
After a while I got bored of watching him and turned my attention to the boxes in front of me. They were crammed with all my old toys. I remember the argument I had with my mother about which ones had to go. You notice I said I argued with my mother. This was because I never argued with my father. In fact up until the time I took the boxes downstairs and he began to throw them on the fire, I don’t think I ever had really spoken to him at all.
It’s strange really when you think about it. You can spend nine years and three hundred and sixty four days with someone and never ever really say a word to them. But then again some people never ever say a word to each other for their entire lives. I suppose it’s all a matter of perspective really.
Anyway, after about half an hour my mother called me from the bottom of the stairs. “Your father’s ready, start bringing down the boxes.” That’s another funny thing looking back now. I am sure that up to this point it always seemed to me that my father only ever communicated to me through my mother. It was almost like a medium passing messages to an expectant customer via the spirit world. The distance was that great and we seemed that far apart.
I picked up the first box and ran out of my bedroom door. It would be nice to say I looked at my toys and felt regret or sadness that they were going to be destroyed and this was a poignant moment where I realised the inherent cruelty of growing up or something deep like that.
But that would not be true. In reality I could not care less. All I wanted to do was watch something burn and the sooner it started the better as far as I was concerned.
It only took a couple of minutes and all the boxes were in the garden. I watched mesmerised as my father tried to light the fire. The wood, however, was too wet and he became more and more frustrated. Eventually he looked back furtively towards the house. He turned to me quickly and said in hushed tones, “Son, quick. While your mother is not about go and get the petrol can from the garage and be careful carrying it back”. I could not believe it. I was being told by my father to go and fetch one of the most dangerous and forbidden items in the whole world. I ran to the garage as though my life depended on it. I grabbed the can and cautiously carried it back thinking that at any moment it would explode in my hands and turn me into a human torch.
My father took it out of my trembling hands and moved me away from the bonfire. The smell of petrol filled the air as he poured some onto the wood. He lit a match, threw it on the fire and jumped back. The fire leapt into life. At first it was a light hazy blue then it slowly turned a fierce bright orange. The flames began to crackle and spit and the heat started to burn my face.
My father took the first box and placed it on the fire. Burnt cardboard flaked and flew haphazardly into the grey sky. A green action man scorpion tank whose wheels had fallen off began to melt and give off pungent black smoke. I took out an action man doll, one of the really old ones without realistic hair and gripping hands, from one of the remaining boxes and gleefully tossed it onto the fire for added effect.
My father watched the tank and the action man merge together and suddenly put his arm around me. Without thinking I flinched thinking I had done something wrong. I looked up and I saw him staring at the fire with the saddest expression I had ever seen and that even now I cannot fully describe. It was as though he had changed physically. He looked weary and very very tired and for the first time in my life he looked old.
I held his huge hand and gripped it tightly. He continued to stare at the fire and not knowing what else to do I did the same. “Son, you should always do the best you can for people while they are still alive, because when they are dead it’s too late.” I carried on staring at the fire too embarrassed to look up and nodded. “People think that life is the most important thing in the world, it isn’t. Time is.”
There we stood together staring into the fire. It was then that I realised that I was a boy. My father had taken me into his confidence by telling me an unpalatable truth about the world and now things would never be the same again.”
Blentyn Drwg looked up and stared at Bobby. He then flicked the pages and stopped at another chapter. He continued reading....
“Consummation.
The spangley towers rose up like crystalline dodecahedrons. The hanging gardens of beauty that focused an image of Bobby’s idea of heaven grinned and invited the climax of a lifetime. Then the long sentence was complete. As Bobby lay beneath Shiva’s thighs he understood the age of Aquarius. He had drunk from the grail. She had given him communion. He had experienced a visitation from the divine. Shiva had summoned an aspect of the Goddess.
Bobby had to pay respects to the Underdog rehearsal that he had had tonight. This is what Lord Snooty Deceased had become. Same line-up but different tunes. Less jumpy and more melodic. If “Lord Snooty” were “Crass” then “Underdog” were “Hawkwind”. Not that either band were wholly derivative of either band but the influences were there.
Bobby had to pay respects to the skunk weed that Rasputeeeen had sold him. Shiva and Bobby had also had a quantity of scrumpy cider by the time they had hit the sack.
Bobby also had to pay respects to his grandmother Rosina Florence Freda Mary Cooper aged 88 and John Woods (one of the Crow Man’s grandsons) aged 8 for such a variegated day. John had gone with the band to their rehearsal and his comments on this auditory palace of delights had greatly amused Bobby.
Earlier in the day the south circular road had fired Bobby’s blood. He had spent a few hours on it going to and from Rosina’s as he did every week. It was a hot day and tempers were flaring in the London traffic.
Bobby had had a ghetto blaster in the car. He had listened to an Underdog C.D.
When he got home he and Shiva were full of anticipation. The forth-coming Saturday was the date for the “Legalise Cannabis Campaign” march and free festival ending in Brockwell Park near Brixton. Sunday would see the multicultural festival on Plumstead Common.
Shiva and Bobby had consummated their love on this blistering day of physio-telepathic illumination. It was now four in the morning of the 15/6/2001 and Lundun was bubbling with the kind of explosive cultural hysteria Bobby remembered from the late nineteen seventies. At least it seemed to be that way in his neck of the woods.
There had been a fire alert at the Elevator rehearsal studios in New Cross in Saaaarf Eeeeeast Lundun earlier tonight. Underdog and loads of other underground musicians had milled about chuckling. Bobby had taped the fire alarm siren. It was groooovy. Thankfully there was no fire.
Bobby considered that he had entered these thoughts on the laptop whilst sitting naked in the early hours of the next morning. He was using recent technology in the most primitive state in which he could sit. He felt that this was cool.”
“Blentyn come and look at this man!”
The call had come from Eglwys Fach. Blentyn Drwg closed the book and put it back on the table. He then joined the others at the window.
An Alien oozed, unseen, out of the slot in the electric toaster that sat on the table near the books. She solidified her form and immediately picked up “THE DIARY OF BOBBY REWIND” and opened it. She telepathically read to all those in Plato’s laboratory and they all turned in shock to face her. This is what she read to them....
“21/6/2001.
Whilst constructing collages for two tapes of Amorphous Drum and Bass records from D.J. Smutley’s collection Bobby considered using a photograph of a solar eclipse. He then thought that this was not relevant because the sun on this solstice day in Gorman Road was not hidden by the shadow of the moon. Bobby then considered finding out when the next eclipse was due on a summer solstice day.
Interestingly he found out later in the afternoon that there had been a solar eclipse across South Africa on this very day. Synchronicity! Daniel Love Peacock advised that Bobby should keep a diary of his now daily experiences of synchronicity. The eclipse revelation was, therefore, the first entry Bobby made in this personal history of coincidence.
The second instance of synchronicity happened as soon as the first was recorded. Shiva and Bobby were listening to “Quark, Strangeness and Charm” by Hawkwind. Bobby then noticed that the word “Hawkwind” was amongst those making up the piece of writing that was displayed on the laptop screen. It was part of a written assessment of Lord Snooty Deceased and Underdog’s musical influences. Bobby had not foreseen this second coincidence and felt that this added more to the growing body of evidence that suggested there were cosmic patterns at work here.”
Shiva and Bobby then immediately vanished. They were no longer in Plato’s laboratory.
“I’ve sent them back.” said the alien without moving her lips.
“How?” asked Blentyn Drwg using his lips.
“By reading a piece from Bobby’s diaries that had, as yet, not happened to him or Shiva. It’s a particularly efficient way in which to expel humans from Eden. It works on a principle of time displacement where a temporal vacuum is created by an anomaly in human linear movement. The vacuum has to be filled in an automatic return to the normal time-line involved. In this instant the vacuum momentarily happened between the 30th of April 2001 and the 21st June 2001 in Shiva and Bobby’s dimension of Earth. It has to be read aloud with mouth or mind so those concerned can hear it. It also has to involve a certain level of shock. If they anticipated it they could end up anywhere.
“Why did you do that? asked Eglwys Fach.
“Yeah Shiva was just about to offer a scientific hypothesis as to the origins of the vortex.” added Blentyn Drwg.
“They could not stay any longer. The collective alien consciousness has had a message from the Goddess. A talking clock from one of the more abstract dimensions reminded us of the human banishment from Eden and spread a map out to indicate where corrections had to be made. I was sent here to immediately implement this course of action. My apologies for the lack of consultation but, as I said, I had to employ the element of shock.”
Mont Mont Vinsita was grinning.
“But we’re human too!” exclaimed Fach.
“Yeah.... we were supposed to have gotten explanations as to why we are here from your species!” added Drwg.
“Maybe you already have.” said the alien. She then read some more of the book....
“It was a cold morning in Noughtember and the clocks were striking zero. "FFFFZZZZZTSSSSRREEETTZZZZFFFFZZZSSSSTWHEEEEEEESSSSZZZTTTThis is Airstrip One Radio welcoming you to the last day of the Twentieth Century. In less than 14 hours we enter the new millennium. All glory to Big Brother and the New Nought! FFFFZZZEEEET WHOOOOOEEEEEEndependent Airstrip One Radio will be live in Greenwich Park next to the observatory. Amongst our celebrity stars we have Lord Riff Clichard"
A hand twisted the knob on a big square wooden radio.”
Blentyn Drwg and Eglwys Fach both disappeared.
“Won’t they be returned to the clutches of the police in Airstrip one?” asked Sydny Smith.
“No. They will return to find the duty staff still unconscious and will make good their escape. All of their experiences with our species and Eden will exist largely inside their subconsciousnesses. Now and again they will get glimpses of their “extra” knowledge as you know. The same applies to Shiva and Bobby. We must be careful Sydny. We cannot allow humans to stay in Eden for too long while the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is not yet full-grown.”
“Do you think that all four humans were sufficiently shocked enough for them to re-enter their appropriate space/time co-ordinates?” asked Old Tongue as he levelled his gaze at the alien.
“I hope so.” said the alien. “Either way it had to be done there and then according to our message from the Goddess.
Mont Mont Vinsita grinned again.
Sure enough Shiva and Bobby were returned to their flat. Shiva came in from her job at the primary school and found Bobby tapping away at the laptop on the 30th April 2001. Later that night they would exchange tales of similar dreams they had had just before they woke up that morning. They would wonder in awe at the synchronicity of it all. To them glimpses of Eden would, for the time being, involve split second snap shots of an extremely colourful place that flashed across their minds in that twilight world between sleeping and waking. This was how it was for most humans who had been temporarily whisked away into the forbidden realm. Repressed memory as well as almost total banishment was the punishment for felling the Tree of the Knowledge Between Good and Evil.
Humans were either a distant memory or even regarded as a myth to many of the inhabitants of Eden. Some had realised the reality of the human situation when the forces of Cain were expelled from the Forest of Able. Since Eden defied normal space/time co-ordinates there were many inhabitants who were not aware of each other’s existence let alone that of humans. It was a continual voyage of discovery.
As an example of the bio-diversity concerned in Eden’s complex evolutionary structure the circumstances surrounding alien physiology may provide an element of clarity here. In some dimensions aliens were not evolved from humans. In some dimensions they were evolved from reptiles. In others amphibians had continued as the most prolific species and therefore made it up onto two legs. Regardless of the fact that all these aliens looked similar they had all evolved from different branches of the evolutionary tree. It’s a bit like different branches of a particular species of tree all blooming with flowers of a similar colour. To many studying the biology of this process it served as proof that we were all one being subjectively experiencing itself through the senses across time and space. The permutations were infinite.
Inhabitants of Eden were representatives of every permutation of the Egg that could exist. The geography of the place defied three-dimensional space and its vast network of temporal anomalies meant that all of the Egg’s atmospheric permutations throughout its myriad histories were somewhere accounted for in the Garden of Paradise.
For many of Eden’s inhabitants Earth, itself, was regarded as a myth. Dimensions of Earth where humans had not evolved were seen as a reality but they were not called Earth. Earth, after all, was the human word for the Egg.
When aliens telepathically communicated with household cats on Earth the cats would invariably comment on the irony that they were aware of Eden and the Earth’s collective subconsciousness and yet their so-called “owners” were not. In fact the irony bit deeper. If it wasn’t for sub-etheric links between the alien consciousness and Eden (where all creatures understood the language of all creatures) they would not have been able to understand what terrestrial cats were saying in the first place.
So Shiva and Bobby continued in the world they thought they had never physically left. Eglwys Fach and Blentyn Drwg were not that lucky.