I came from the city we know as Life Zone No. 8, or Cascade Brightest, where the cold darkness is lit with the rare heavenly cascade.
Shallow seabeds our cities, Europa's core our furnaces, the seas our fields.
Only I, Eleutherius, have penetrated the heavenly cascade, and even gone on much further, into the inhospitable black. Where all who tried before perished, I am witness to the truths of Jupiter and the Sun - these so near and yet so far concepts deep in our cycles and psyches, but in such different forms: the first the progenitor of inner fire, the second the dappled rainbow rays of cascade, in unfathomable heights.
I can tell you of a world away, nearer the rays, a blinding brightness. Where water is not the only element, and there is a new element called earth, another air, another fire. In the water element I saw beings like those of our own world, in endless fascination at our common ancestry with this new world.
The Universe is beyond the cascade, Europans. Let us rise to meet it. We must rise.
I, Eleutherius, speak the truth. It is not raving or madness. You have seen them yourself, both writhing and motorised, the beings from the outer world, the universe away of which I speak.
And I, Eleutherius, am of the highest honour, chief of clan and clam bed, graduate of polyp school with grade A dark knowledge, sound of mind and body, consort of Herself, Lady of the Eggs.
Let me tell you how I was the first Europan to penetrate the heavenly cascade.
Have you seen the cascade on a perfectly white day? When you float eye-up and get lost in those jagged heights?
It was on such a day that I met "them". They have too few legs and at that not sensibly flexible.
We all know the fascination of the white spaces, those aerie heights. Now they are revealed to me, not as a flashing wonder, but a door, a threshold!
Too many of us, alas, answered its siren call and floated up to extreme heights. Those who escaped this death tell us of unimaginable cold, but even greater refractive beauty. But the white ice is but a sheet above our heads. Above that is what we call a dry vacuum, or like a large bubble of gas as we encounter in mining caves.
But this is the extension of familiar space to infinity, with the fluid taken out.
These are inadequate words and we will no doubt have to invent new ones. "Empty space" is something we will all have to learn.
For our few-legged visitors have bored great shafts in the ice, to connect it with the outer space whence they came.
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Title Page-------->>>>I Eleutherius -------->>>> II Touchdown -------->>>> III Sign Language -------->>>> IV Talk Show-------->>>> V Ensemble -------->>>> VI City -------->>>> Notes, Sources and Inspirations