Woodstickin' 2016!
(August 20, 2016)
13: In Xanadu
The following is a reconstruction of the vision the humans shared that night, with the Journals of Stanford and Dipper Pines as the primary source.
They saw . . .
A wondrous city, domes and shining spires, beneath a clear sky, a darker, richer blue than Earth's sky, with a smaller, whiter, hotter sun in it. White steaks of cloud swirled in the blue, as though brushed there by a giant hand. An odd silvery band, almost invisible at the zenith, arched downward to opposite horizons.
"Is that a planetary ring system?" Stanford asked. No one answered.
Dipper couldn't help thinking of the poem that begins, "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree. . . ." Wendy, holding his hand, recognized it as one her night-school college English class had read.
This is even stranger than an opium dream, Dipper, she told him mentally. And the vision continued to unfold, all around them, on all sides, strikingly three-dimensional but still, only a vision.
The people—for they appeared very humanoid—were gracile and—cliché, but it must be said—beautiful in an exotic way: slim and tall, with long hairless skulls, large gentle eyes, and small smiling mouths. They dressed in what seemed to be one-pieced clothing of varying colors, from pure white to pure black to rainbow mixtures. They ate and laughed. They played strange games with strange balls, they boated on streams of dark water and slow gelid waves, they dandled children and played with them and nursed their small hurts. They lived and had families and grew old and died.
As for the world on which their lives happened: Somehow the humans all heard the name of the planet, though later, comparing notes, Dipper discovered he had heard it as "Wildercan," Ford as "Wulderkhan," and Wendy as "Waldercain." Mabel insisted it was "Wonderland." Teek, who was still finding concentration difficult, had no firm opinion, and Stan said, "Some cockamamie place, I dunno, who am I, Mister Memory?"
Their world seemed a simple place in some ways, an advanced one in others. Machines, walking, rolling, and flying, did much of the work for the people. The people did not seem to be divided into rulers and ruled, or rich and poor. The observers all had the impression that the, well, call them robots for want of a better term, cared for the people and produced their food and protected them.
Odd. They next saw Wildercan—we may as well use Dipper's term—from space and became aware that, yes, like Saturn, it had a bright silvery ring running around the equator; two smallish moons; the main planet had two polar caps of essentially the same size, each about a twelfth of the planet's surface. At least sixty per cent of the un-iced surface was ocean, with two small continents on opposite sides of the globe, and many scatters of islands.
Their point of view glided from space to the surface and like a surfer, rode waves of wind past mile-high brilliantly colored cliffs, through the twists of whitewater rivers, across expanses of blue-green forests of trees reminiscent of broccoli heads, wide grassy meadows, the plants a deeper green than Earth's, a few sandy deserts, and broad, dark seas, sometimes smooth, sometimes chopped with whitecaps. It was a world of calm and storms, placid nights and warm days, the seasons changing very little, with some snow, some hot days. It was above all a world of breathtaking beauty.
The cities clustered in the open areas, surrounded by farmland tended by machines, and at the seashores, near the mouths of rivers. As far as they could see, the inhabitants of both continents were of the same species and race. The ones on one continent looked exactly the same, dressed the same, and lived the same as their counterparts across the globe. The machines seemed to control the environment on both land masses.
Their impression was that in both parts of the world's civilization, the natives lived the same kind of easy lives, with machines and devices to work for them. They did not seem to have radio or television or computers—at least the humans saw no evidence of them. Almost all of their time was leisure. They did have music, sculpture, art, and dance. If they had literature, the viewers from Earth saw no indication of it.
Then—none of them could say how—they had the impression of many generations passing, with nothing really changing. Except now they had glimpses of sailing craft, built not by machines but by people in the old way with wood and canvas, venturing out on the sea. And then they had a view of contact: A sailing ship from the slightly rounder continent landed on a populated island not far off the coast of the slightly more rectangular continent. A crowd of the island's people sighted the ship and came down to the shore to gaze at it. The crew of the ship rowed ashore in boats—and began to strike down the islanders, beating them with clubs, pursuing even the children, slaughtering them all. Mabel cried out and hid her face against Teek's shoulder.
When the raiders had finished, they looted the empty buildings and set fire to what they could, while a handful of survivors hid on the island. One of them programmed or requested that a machine give them a means of escape, and within what seemed like a few days it produced a small ship, metal, just large enough for the fourteen survivors. They crowded in, and it skimmed to the mainland, hovering two feet above the waves as it sped there.
Next they saw some of the survivors speaking urgently to a man who might have been elderly—he moved slowly anyway—and this man opened a panel, took out a long, thin, cylinder that looked very much like the flute, installed it in a machine, and—
"The war of extermination began," came Ariel's musical voice. The device must have possessed her again. "The first war for a hundred generations. The machine servants had tried to end the war by giving both sides all they could want or need. And yet they fought. The Centurion of Agoth requested my first iteration to produce weapons. This we servants could not do, for over the many years we had ourselves refined our programs never to kill or injure.
"It did not mater. Those of the continent of Spruall built their ships and invaded. The Agothians countered. And so for five generations, back and forth the battle went, and even with primitive weapons, millions died before the end. At last the Agothians created a terrible weapon, a new disease. They unleashed it on the Spruall continent. It exterminated all sentient life in that land. But what the Agothians had not anticipated was that the dying Sprualls secretly landed infected people on Agoth. They spoke, dressed, and behaved as Sprualls, and they spread the contagion. There was no antidote, no treatment, and no time left to devise one. From the time the first Spruall contracted the disease, there was no hope."
The humans saw a world strewn with corpses. Time sped up, like in a time-lapse movie, and the corpses decayed and vanished. Yet still the machines—the servants, which had been neutral all through the terrible war—continued to function, to repair and reproduce themselves as they wore out.
And they, the machines, developed space travel.
"To repopulate the world," Ariel said, "scout ships went seeking life forms that had intelligence and that could flourish in the atmospheric conditions of our planet. By then the disease organisms had long since perished. As Humans count time, fifty millennia had passed since the end of the war.
"Many worlds our unmanned ships visited, many life forms they considered. None were right. Until, over three thousands of your years ago, we discovered the Earth."
The probe had attracted the attention of a young man, a musician (not a rat-catcher). He ventured inside the craft, perhaps thinking it was an unusual cave, and the automated machine closed, sedated him for the long trip, and launched itself on a journey that stretched sixty-odd light-years. It took nearly a thousand years, one-way.
The probe had left behind hundreds of monitors—machines, many of them formed to look like birds, others small animals like cats and dogs. These mingled with humans, listened to them, and over the centuries built up a knowledge of languages—at first mostly Germanic, since they happened to have been left in that area, but a few made it as far as England and Ireland. The cats were no problem—they would stay in one place for years until people started to wonder how old that cat was, anyway, and then they would stray to a distant farm or town and settle in again. The dogs had to stray before families grew too attached to them. The birds went everywhere, unremarked and unnoticed. No arrow or blade could penetrate their skins. They were programmed to escape at once, should anyone attack them.
All of the information these monitors gathered was constantly relayed back to the homeworld at light speed. Most of it reached there long before the probe, which held the young human in stasis the whole time.
On Wildercan, the young man, whose name was Petur, was awakened and greeted by a talking city that spoke his own language. An instrument very much like his simple flute was the core of such knowledge, and with it installed in the central cylinder, every machine on the planet could converse with him. He believed at first that he was in Purgatory or, just perhaps, Heaven. Gradually Wildercan taught him of its plans for him.
Briefly, their monitors had located an area in which the populace lived in poverty. Most children did not survive past their tenth year. The Earth could not sustain these children, and Wildercan needed people. The piper was to return, play the flute in a pattern that would affect the children's brain waves, and bring back at least a hundred of them. The servants needed someone to serve.
On Wildercan, they would live to grow up, have children of their own, and, the servants hoped, learn to live peaceably and happily. By then Petur, who had seen despair and squalor enough during his short life on Earth, thought that was the best thing. He went willingly back to Earth—landing some five hundred years (the machines had improved the technology) after launching from Wildercan.
The town nearest his landing site on Earth happened to be Hamelin, in Lower Saxony.
No rats were involved. Petur went into the town—the gatekeepers thought him a mere minstrel, in his strange multicolored clothing—and he played the tune that attracted the young ones and made the old ones unable to perceive or understand what was happening. He led the children, some 130, to the waiting ship, which split open to receive them; they went inside; and it lifted off and took them in suspended animation to Wildercan.
Once they were on the planet, the machines did everything for them. They merely had to play, eat, sleep, and grow up and reproduce. "Beyond language and a style of writing, we did not teach them a thing," the voice of Ariel said. "For the learning of the original inhabitants of our world caused all the trouble."
Unfortunately, over time the birth rate dropped. Now, Ariel said, Wildercan needed new human blood, for the descendants of the first infusion were dying faster than new children were born. And by now, the monitors had mastered all languages everywhere, and they were aware that something very different was the norm in Gravity Falls. Therefore, Ariel was sent to that location. She was Petur's direct descendant, and within the family, Petur's instructions were firm: The eldest child in each generation had to learn to play a flute. And they had to be named Ariel Hemppin, whether they were male or female. "Let the name be a sign," the founder of the family was supposed to have instructed.
This Ariel was the last in a long, long line. And the first to be called on to visit Earth and bring back children. "We need new people to serve," Ariel said. "Only two hundred or so. Please understand. We must serve someone. They must be served."
"We can't allow that," Ford said.
"Our ship could easily overpower you." The threat, in Ariel's gentle voice, sounded strange.
Ford did not flinch. "Potentially, no doubt. But you can't strike in violence, can you?"
A long pause, and then, "No. We cannot willingly harm a sentient being."
Ford nodded. "Yes, I thought as much. If you could, you would have participated in your war of extermination."
"What you say is true. We will not and cannot force you with physical violence. But understand our need: The human population on Wildercan is declining. We fear they will become extinct."
"Doy!" Mabel said. "I know the problem and how to fix it! Listen, Ariel, or whoever, people can't live if you do everything for them! They need goals! Things to do! Jobs!"
"Let's not go too far," Wendy said.
"People need a purpose!" Mabel insisted. "Let them, I don't know, build their own houses! Grow their own food! Go fishing! Write poetry! Go bowling! Climb mountains! Invent fashion design!"
"This concept is impossible for us to understand," Ariel said.
"No, it really isn't," Ford said, putting his hand on Mabel's shoulder. "But right now we haven't enough time. Can the ship hide? Perhaps on the far side of the Earth's moon?"
"Easily. That is nothing, a journey of a few minutes."
"Then let Ariel remain here for three of our months. In that time, I will provide her with some training and much information, electronically stored. We can't insist you bring back the descendants of your first abducted group—this world would be too strange for them now—but we canhelp you give them a new interest in surviving, in, ah, being fruitful and multiplying—"
"Yeah, like rabbits," Stan said.
"—reasonably," Ford added. "We are willing to trust you. Will you trust us in return?"
"We will think of it. We will let you know when we decide. In the meantime, our beloved Ariel may remain. You may instruct her and provide her with the materials. If you harm her in any way, if you make her unhappy, we shall take the children either from here or from another location. If we decide that your solution bears trying, we will try it. In any case, expect us to return for her in eighty-four of your days. We will communicate through her and tell you where to meet the ship."
"Then let us go," Ford said. "Right now. An armed force of humans will be here within minutes."
"I'll go," Ariel said, speaking not for the machines but in her own voice.
The craft opened again, and Ford jumped up. "Let's hustle, everyone! We're almost out of time!"
They got up, and before Dipper even reached the opening, he heard the clattering chatter of helicopters approaching.