Page 21 - Effable Encounters

Aesop’s Stables

“Not a dream? Gods are dead? What trickery is this?” he muttered,
to no one in particular.
The stork folded up one leg, settling in.
“It’s no trickery, old Aesop. It’s the end of an era. You will have to
serve as the link to the new one.”
“Me? I already serve one master. You want me to serve another, a
whole era? I hope this really is a dream.”
“Now, calm down a bit and listen.” The stork turned his head
sideways and fixed the twitching hominid in the gaze of one black
beady eye. “Because you are the only one of your race who can listen.
Events have occurred more swiftly than we dreamed, and many of us
did not believe in the theory of epochs.”
Aesop squinted and frowned. He could understand the words the
stork was saying, but somehow their meaning eluded his grasp.
Mouth agape, he could do nothing but let the flow of language spray
his synapses with phonemes and drain unimpeded past his cracked
and eroded filters of memory.
“In the beginning,” intoned the avian authority, “the gods did not
speak, each of them knowing already all there was to know, and none
of them needing to tell any of the others anything at all. We may
assume this was a period of great beauty and harmony, enduring
many, many centuries. But end it had to, and end it did. Perhaps
those deities, like many of us, did not see it coming; but that would
require a deficiency in their omniscience, and that in turn would open
the door to unpleasant speculation. No, we prefer to consider power
more limited than knowledge, and awareness of one’s impending
doom may or may not impel one to extend one’s knowledge into the
future by transmitting it to one’s presumed intellectual heirs. The
gods must have realized the inexorability of the cosmic cycle
governing their rise and fall. Perhaps they decided that the
consequences of revealing the secrets of nature to us, their survivors,
were too dangerous. At any rate, we also prefer to believe that
explanation rather than any other impugning their character or
motives.”
“Of course,” replied Aesop, agreeable by profession if not by
nature.
“And thus it came it pass, that when the time came for the gods to
lose their minds—which were all they had—and to vanish from the

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