words: Thalib Razi
Dhul Hijjah — Third Hijri Millennium
The astronomer looked to the stars for one last time before beginning his ship’s descent into the cloudy atmosphere of Neo-Canaan below. The great warships of the Nimr-Ud Empire were hot on his tail, their firepower enough to destroy entire planets. He wasn’t sure what exactly he was hoping to achieve by diving into the clouds… But he had to try.
“I love not that which will have a heat death,” he muttered into the light-strewn black, echoing the words of Abraham in the Qur’an which always flickered on one of his dashboard’s many screens – verses which he called the Abraham Directive. “And I know You didn’t make this universe in vain, all these suns just for them to set without an afterlife, God… So don’t let them sunset Your worship in this system.”
And that was what would happen, if they killed him. No human had yet lived on this planet which he named; the entire star system was only recently folded into the empire of the twin planets, Nimr and Ud. The Empire’s state religion was militant atheist scientism, meaning that the astronomer’s very existence – as an iconoclastic, once-celebrated Nimrian scientist who broke with his forefathers’ reverence towards the material by theorizing on the immaterial –– was an affront to its honor. They really might blow up this whole planet just to kill him for trying to revive an ancient Blue Planet religion.
Sure enough, as soon as he landed, he saw the clouds turn orange with the warships’ world-destroying energy pulses, and he winced. “La ilaha illa Allah, Muhammadun Rasul Allah, salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam,” he repeated in a language which was dead in his galaxy. He only regretted the waste of this unique, non-spinning planet, with its desert sunwards hemisphere and its icy spacewards hemisphere and the beautiful, wild meridian of temperate jungle separating them where he had landed. A barzakh, an isthmus just like the one between this world and the next – the world of the grave which he was about to enter.
But then an earth-shaking blast of cold wind knocked him to his feet, and when he looked up again, the warships’ fires had…cooled. The orange blasts of light turned a dull red in the distance from where they hit the planet, but when they ricocheted back to the warships, they returned to their orange glow, blowing them all up. Bodies and wreckage scattered into a ring which orbited the spinless planet. The astronomer, shell-shocked, raised his hands to thank God for the coming decades it would take for another squadron from Nimr-Ud to return through the light-years between their star systems to try to annihilate him again. But after praying, he lowered his hands to the planet’s still-shaking soil curiously. Something was strange about this planet.
Soon, he found out what.
The planet’s prey-rich jungle meridian was inhabited by ferocious, massive predators – arboreal, riverine, and aerial, and some were all three – and he had to flee to its spacewards tundra to escape them. But in that snowy wasteland, he discovered that there were in fact humans already living on the planet… They had just gone unnoticed, as Nimr-Ud’s explorers had only mapped the meridian, assuming that Neo-Canaan’s hemispheres were incapable of supporting human life. He married a fair-skinned noblewoman from the tundra people; then, at her insistence to produce an heir due to her infertility, he also freed and married her slave-girl, a dark-skinned woman of equal beauty from the tundra people’s enemy: the desert people of the sunwards hemisphere. To their surprise, he soon had sons from them both, and as he preached, the ancient Blue Planet religion began to gain followers amongst the tundra people.
But his oldest son Prodigy, from the desert woman, would be the only one who could spread the faith amongst the desert people on the other side of the planet, once he grew up. For they were far more hostile to off-world men than the tundra people were – so to continue his mission of reviving the ancient faith, he would have to leave Prodigy and his desert wife alone amongst the sands and pray for the best. Thankfully, it happened that an earthquake struck again, just like when he first landed, and a spring burst forth near the place he had left them, ingratiating them with the locals and securing the faith in the desert hemisphere. Again, the astronomer raised his hands to thank God when he heard the news – and again he wondered whether He was using the natural means of the planet’s tectonics or whether He was just working another direct miracle of His. All was well in his life for a time, and he traveled between desert and tundra, spreading the faith and enjoying family life with his two wives and two sons from each.
Until one day, Prodigy got sick.
The predators of the jungle were not all massive – one was a parasitic worm which burrowed into its victims, turning them aggressive with an urge to kill everything in sight, so that it could feed on the resulting carnage. The astronomer and Prodigy were exploring near the border of the desert and the jungle meridian when one such worm infected Prodigy and caused him to kill the rest of their company. The astronomer had already been working on a cure against the worms…now he had to choose: hold out for a cure out of preference for his son and risk the lives of more innocent desert people he might kill, or prefer his faith which called for killing killers if necessary to stop them. It would only be a matter of time before Prodigy’s prowls took him back to the desert people.
Grief-stricken, the astronomer told his son this, just as a few dregs of sanity briefly returned to his worm-possessed mind before starting to fade again. “Do as you are commanded, father,” he said, and the astronomer shot him and wailed.
But the shot hit the worm, which just happened to be under Prodigy’s skin at exactly that spot.
Writhing in agony, the worm fell out of the bullet wound in the boy’s unharmed chest. Starving as they were in the desert, with their rations destroyed in Prodigy’s rampage earlier and with the jungle too dangerous to enter to forage, they roasted the worm and ate it, which gave them the strength to return to the desert people’s oasis.
Now the boy was a man. Prodigy married into his mother’s tribe and converted them all, just as his younger brother Prodigal did with his on the other side of the planet, and the two tribes mixed, and when Nimr-Ud returned to destroy the “superstition of Neo-Canaan,” it only succeeded in dispersing Prodigal and the Neo-Canaanites who were with him amongst the stars, while those with Prodigy intractably persisted, eventually populating the globe and establishing a sovereign home world for the Blue Planet faith. Only time will tell what will happen when Prodigal’s people return, eons later… and how they will treat their brothers’ welcome.
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