The Message

 

    It came in the mid- year season when the tropical parts of their planet were battered upon by heavy acid rains and the violet plants were in a fight for water and the two suns were hidden behind clouds of yellow and green. The thing crashed from the sky leaving a tail of fiery smoke. When the chieftain led a recon party of fifteen warriors, all they saw was a devastated forest for miles around. In the middle of a great burning circle, covered in ashes, cinder and rocks, there lay the thing, hotter than the boiling lakes of the North, shining like the seven Major stars of the winter sky. Many men died trying to protect the celestial treasure from the acid raindrops. First they built a shelter over it, and when the season finally let them, they dragged it towards the village. But after a while they found that anyone who came round the thing eventually died from an unknown disease that made their blue skin fall off and their grey teeth turn white and break.

    And so, they built a secluded temple deep in the violet jungle and put the relic there without guard, but with scribal warnings on stones, bearing the message of the unknown curse.

    Years passed and pulled the carts of decades and centuries. The rainforest tribes were overrun by a heretic military nation of the East that had no belief for ancient religions. When their scouts died telling the tale of a cursed temple, the sages and learned men tried to study the shiny thing that was sealed behind stone walls. Many scholars gave their lives until one day radiation was discovered and they found ways of protecting themselves. The relic was loaded onto a new steam ship that carried it to the Imperial capital, where it was put in a museum. After a hundred years a young lab apprentice found a way to decipher the writings upon the metallic corpse and he managed to understand that the radioactive meteorite was no more than a highly sophisticated machine that bore the message of an alien race. Time came to pass and the young assistant became a renowned scientist with the rightful authority to turn that machine on.

    It was a song. A woman's cry, thatched into melody. An angel's voice that came out of matter. It brought tears to the eyes of a race that had never known music before. It was sensational. People came from all parts of the Empire to listen to the beautiful tunes and were left captivated by the powerful depth of the message. Soon recorders came out and the whole planet was captured by that squire of peace and tranquility.

    So the people made their leaders swear that there would be no more wars and their civilization endeavored to perfect the simple writing of music, poetry and novels, the painting of beautiful landscapes and creating marvelous statues.

    And so it came to pass that their culture grew so strong and influential that it overcame the other planets in their bisolar system and soon enough a multibiological, metroethnic race appeared that found the only sense of its own existence in locating the lone star that had sent out that message of humanity and understanding millennia ago. And they worked, tirelessly, to calculate the coordinates and build a solar ship capable of reaching that destination. And when they were finally ready, they sent their best pilots and diplomats to reach that small star in a secluded part of the Galaxy.

    But when the ship finally reached the planet, it was a desert, scorched by the scars of an ancient nuclear war. This gave great grief to their black, five- chambered hearts.

    But they would not give up. They carried their civilization's resources to the outer limit, until, after a century of poverty, hunger and hope, they discovered time travel. When the day came, they sent out a crew of fifteen, commemorating those first fifteen warriors that died in the jungle, aboard the time machine and set the computer to carry them back to the day the old planet had sent out the shiny metal messenger.

    It was a blue planet, covered by a grid of white clouds, with several continents of various climates. When the crew tried to make contact, though, there was no one to listen. People there were too busy watching over their own lives, trying to defend their land from each other instead of working together. They fought small, hypocritical wars, lied to support personal gain and found progress in the development of weapons and the discovery of new, faster and more effective ways to kill.

    The crew of the time machine watched the temples and monuments get leveled to the ground to make way for hypermarkets and highways, the rainforests cut down and the whales go extinct. They saw the crystal waters and the pure air get poisoned with fumes, waste and aerosols.

    And then they left Earth rather disappointed at what they saw.