In a place as far from here and now as space and time can be, a lovely world was laid waste by its own chief inhabitants. The same greed and envy of one toward another, responsible for the raising of its prime beings’ civilization to heights of which we humans cannot even begin to imagine, was equally as effective in bringing on its downfall. Not to mention, the near total eradication of the fools themselves. As it happens, the “intelligent” population of this far-away habitat was, as are we, dual-gendered– and not too dissimilar in form. Their “she’s” however, had retained much of their original status, though not, as it proved, enough of the initial control they’d had over the parties of the second part to impede their self-destructive bent and thus stave off annihilation.

The upshot of an unfortunately fatal series of events (blunders, to be honest) was that the guys fouled their own nest, their space-rock retaliated with fast-forward self-immolation exercises… and the “women” wanted off! Being as they were quantum leaps beyond our fondest dreams, technology-wise, it was a simple enough matter for most of these maids from beyond to just bail out in the latest-model cosmic conveyances, leaving their ever-lovin’s behind, to a fate they’d worked hard to earn. They even went so far as to make sure none of their number harbored any potentially– inevitably– deadly male-life within (womb-wise), as all had vowed not to repeat history. Not if they could help it.

Perhaps, they’d hoped to devise some uni-gender scheme for the future they literally leapt into the void to acquire, or maybe they just crossed their fingers, wished on a star and figured there had to be something better out there. Any-hoo, off they went into the wild, black yonder, to seek their fortune elsewhere ‘n elsewise, having picked the prettiest lil’ blue marble of a healthy-sun-orbiting rock in the whole wide, orb-filled universe, as a good place to begin. Given they had an astounding assortment of viable alternatives, there was a valid and very practical reason for their choice.

In the last millennia or so of their own home’s life-curbed existence, what remained of their kind had been forced to retreat beneath the cool purple seas that formed the larger part of it. All land-based living things underwent such hideous changes due to their dominant males’ misuse of every single means of sustenance, that an underwater environment was the only one still sustainable for a few who’d escaped mutation. So, when looking for a new and unfouled nest, naturally, the ladies’ first choice for a habitat was a wet one, having known none other for ages and ages. The particular orb they picked was nothing, if not loaded with water!

The space chariots those goddesses from heavens above came down to earth in, were total– and complete down to the teensiest might-need-it-someday detail– self-contained survival capsules. Capable of expanding in a sort of non-mechanical “growing” fashion, they could splash down in our deepest oceans’ depths– and stay there. Virtually for ever! (Thus spawning timeless legends of “lost” Atlantis and sea monsters, plus all the fanciful fairy tales about mermaids and such). Arriving sans mates, as planned, the planet’s uninvited visitors’ top priority was obvious. Cherchez l’homme! Well… they were immediately disappointed to learn they’d arrived an eon or two too early. Oops! Too late to go back to square one, since home base had checked out soon after they’d said a timely “Sayonara!” So, Plan B was trotted out to save the day and their particular life forms particular way of life… if possible.

Hitch # 2 didn’t exactly wreck Plan B, but sure put an unforeseen kink into its success potential. The fallback scheme involved settling for a less-than-fully-evolved species’ second-gender breeding stock, then waiting out the hybrid results’ development. The primal-gender travelers could easily continue indefinitely with the one-sexed methods they’d been making do with for millennia. That was no problem. A form of cloning, as we know it, it ensured that a wait of only a few hundred thousand years’d be doable. The problem was, the best-available lifeform within their time frame was still so remote from intelligent life, that odds on any resultant hybrids’ ever evolving into something worthwhile were, to tell the truth– slim, to none.

Still, lacking any viable alternative and the topside environment at least a pleasant one, the girls grit their teeth, closed their big, almond eyes, and did their duty with the big, hairy apes. Ugh! What price posterity!? All of which explains why a “missing link” has never been found. There never was one. Higher life-form females from out there + highest-here, lower-life-form males = homo erectus-from-knuckle-walkers in one swell foop. It’s so all-fired simple, it’s no wonder no one’s figured it out. I’ll betcha Burpee or Burbank could’ve! Not that any male anthropologist or male-bound female one is ever going to admit it, even if they tripped over the proof. I mean, what human would want to brag about such an ignominious beginning when he can rely on face-saving nonsense like Adam & Eve or “natural” selection? “Selected”, sure! But rather more unnaturally, the reluctantly willing impregnatees would say.

At first, their current natural environment being a watery one, initial attempts had been made to establish a blended species therein. Tries gone awry is why dolphins and whales are the only mammals at home in our seas. And why they can “talk”! Lovely though they are– and, as expected, quite gentle– it wasn’t quite what the expatriates were aiming for yet, so onto dry land they went, in search of soul- or body-mates, at least. Mate they did. Orang-u-tans, wise-faced, red-haired “people of the forest”; those gentle dark giants the Greeks named “gorilla gorilla”; the chimpanzee, their closest match in size, if not wits, were all cooperative. More or less.

And so, human-kind entered the scene considerably before its cue! Giving birth to earth’s ruling class-to-be was, for those brave volunteers, a sacrifice far beyond any other, for to leave their undersea haven and live on land, they had to leave all life as they knew it, behind forever. Thus, they had to endure exile, as well as the awful necessity of physically mating with such vulgar, lesser creatures! Disappointed, to say the least, at their self-sacrificing sisters’ serious lack of superior mating material, the ones happily relegated to stay below to monitor the situation, did just that– albeit not overly optimistic about the outcome.

And, as offspring slowly evolved, due to successive re-breeding, into somewhat of a semi-approximation of their original selves, those beneath just as slowly but surely separated completely from those above. It had to be. Maintaining contact was too painful for both. Through the luck of the draw, the intrepid few who’d fled a world unjustly condemned by their own males had had nowhere to go but to a picture-perfect world inhabited by some of the universe’s least perfect living beings. They’d been horrified to find there, creatures who not only killed, but ate others! And, they did so in the most hideously horrible, unimaginably cruel ways!

Bad as their species’ males had been, in laying waste to their wonderful habitat, they at least had not harmed their fellow animals directly. The idea was so foreign to these gentle souls, that many of them died of shock upon first seeing sharks’ feeding frenzies and the sight of one fish gobbling another successively, in some evil chain of cannibalism none of them could relate to or understand. Then, as the bravest ones went above, seeking a way to keep their kinder kind in existence, even more shocking scenes of beast-killing-beast had driven them near-mad. It was everywhere on the otherwise lovely planet, it seemed, though it was clear many more species didn’t, than did. An evil force had undoubtedly passed this way, doing its blackest deeds here. To see the new, half-them species emulate those vicious beasts was just too, too much to bear.

Having come billions of miles or light years or whatever mode of distance-telling they used, those deceptively delicate blue-green moms-of-our-kind weren’t about to chicken out, however. They’d not faced worse, but close to just-as-bad had been all they’d suffered from their “better” halves, as their own guy-types had tortured and killed the once-beautiful home place that now was no more. Where once they’d mothered and played and sang sweet songs, now was a steaming, roiling, pressure-cooker of a planet uninhabitable by anything beyond a microbic, ever-mutating, muck-dwelling speck here ‘n there. Killers? Cannibals? Dull-witted aggressive dads for their babes-to-be? These trials, too, the venusian maids could endure. As it is, as it shall be.

The great mother-of-all whom they knew to have caused the lifeforce in them, would make possible what they were meant to do, as she always had. Hadn’t their predecessors tamed those brutal things who’d long ago escaped a dying red globe to invade their serene planet? And then, after finally murdering it just as those original refugees must have done to their own, hadn’t the most purely-bred of the sisters cleverly and courageously made their escape? That it had to be to this death-loving place would simply be accepted by the stalwart ladies of the deep.

What evil beings, things or circumstances could be fought, would be. Accepting, sure. Easy, never! Not again, anyway. Too easily taken in by the red-rock ones, they’d learned from the painful lessons of that experience. Life here was to be on their terms. By their rules. Guided as always, by the good mother source they “knew” to be, though never dared formalize with rituals or any imagined entity. She was, is and will be… and that sufficed. Made like her, able to create new life out of their own, they revered and respected her power and were glad to be moved by it. Honored, in fact. They saw no reason to add frills to the simplest of wonders. What couldn’t be understood could be appreciated. Thanks given from the heart, the mind, the mouth, were all equal. What rigmarole could better those? Attention-payers they were, not worshipers.

Regrets regarded as only useless time-wasters, the gals below just went on paying attention, and waited patiently. Hoping some hiccup in evolution or helping hand from beyond might overcome the combative nature of those creatures they’d made, time eventually proved it wasn’t to be. With the mother-powers they’d kept alive and even developed further, communication with their quasi-human sisters above was possible, tho’ of a much cruder type than used amongst those who’d remained in their ocean hiding place. It was good enough, however, to let a few up on top have some hint of their other-than-humanness. Not that any of them ever dared let on that they felt they might be related to “mermaids”– let alone alien mermaids!

The time would come, those below hoped, when some other world would be made known to them. One where the evil killing-lust was still unknown and where they could go to re-reestablish the peaceful life-ways they knew to be “rightness.” Some day, such a place would be their home, it was believed. All they had to do was wait– and remain right-living beings. But as time passed, it became sadly apparent that the decision to move on might not be an elective one, after all. Mankind, too, was destroying his own environment, committing planet-wide genocide-cum-suicide as the sisters’ former mates had done. Rather than make a voluntary move, they realized they’d one day be forced to evacuate another corpse-soon-to-be. Another celestial body killed off by those it had nurtured. Matricide on the grandest scale of all– cosmic.

Meanwhile, the sisters– that’s how they thought of themselves– readied their ship/home for an emergency take, off the moment such a necessity made itself known. While not too happy with their attempts to avoid extinction, it seemed wrong to not take at least a few of their “children” with them. There were a handful out of the 6+ billion, it seemed, who somehow were spared the taint of evil that ran in the veins of all the other hybrids. These right-living ones the sisters had communicated with, as it seemed the mother force was also doing, so as to bring them together when the time came to escape a punishment the blended race had so well-earned. It was to be meted out, apparently, before the arrogant, destructive beings could get too far into yet another millennium with all under their brutal rule.

Trouble was, the sisters weren’t the only secret inhabitants of earth. Where there is “good,” evil can usually be found lurking nearby. So it was there. Others had looked upon this pretty place with covetous eyes, not just as a safe haven. They too, settled in for a long surveillance, but in preparing to take it for their own, with no intention of cohabiting peacefully. They too, saw the handwriting on the wall spell out a death sentence– theirs, along with all other life on the planet. Indeed, the planet’s itself!

What was soon to come, would ensure that no aspect of the evil so prevalent on it could ever infect another part of the universe. A sorrowful mother would sacrifice her few good children on this one world, along with all of her bad ones, in order to protect the many other good ones elsewhere. What else could a good, loving mother do? To turn the planet called Earth into dust, along with the wrong-minded, would-be rulers of it, was the only way to contain its deadly disease. What else can GOOD do, in a Mexican standoff with pure EVIL? It may not even be the first time such a tragic trade has had to be made. If evil must exist, it will probably not, sad to say, be the last.

— — — — — —

Just a “fairy tale”? Maybe. Maybe not. Why was I “made” to tell it, if not at the behest of those it tells about? I know I did not just “make it up.” It was in my mind pre-written, set itself down on this paper non-stop, without a single conscious thought. Only one question’s still niggling in a corner of my brain. If it’s true… will they take me?

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