Chapter 16:The Forbidden Apple and the Golden Apple
(Judgment, Aleph)
PREV HOME NEXT". . . But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."
"Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman: 'Yea, hath God said Ye shall not eat of any tree of the garden?' And the woman said unto the serpent: 'Of the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said: Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.' And the serpent said unto the woman: 'Ye shall not surely die; for the Elohim know that in the day ye eat therof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as the Elohim, knowing good and evil.' And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and she gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig-leaves together, and made themselves girdles.
"And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden toward the cool of the day; and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden. And the Lord God called unto the man and said unto him: 'Where art thou?' And he said: 'I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.' And He said: 'Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldst not eat?' And the man said: 'The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.' And the Lord God said unto the woman: 'What is this thou hast done?' And the woman said: 'The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.' And the Lord God said unto the serpent: 'Because thou hast done this, cursed art thou from among all cattle, and from among all beasts of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life. And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; they shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise their heel.' Unto the woman He said: 'I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy travail; in pain thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to the husband, and he shall rule over thee.' And unto Adam He said: 'Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying: Thou shalt not eat of it; cursed is the ground for thy sake; in toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.' And the Lord God said: 'Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.' Therefore, the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So He drove out the man; and He placed at the east of the garden of Eden the cherubim, and the flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way to the tree of life."
"Alleluia; Salvation, and glory, and honour, and power, unto the Lord our God; for true and righteous are his judgments; for he hath judged the great whore, which did corrupt the earth with her fornication, and hath avenged the blood of his servants at her hand. . . . Praise our God, all ye his servants, and ye that fear him, both small and great."
"And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God, and the books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life, and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them; and they were judged every man according to their works. And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire."
We stood up as Peho and his companions arose. Peho's graceful gesture guided us to a door. Over it was a sign printed in large capital letters:
TOP CLEARANCE ONLY
Under that was an inscription in Latin written with smaller letters:
QVI VOLT QVOD VOLT,
ITA DAT SE RES UT OPERAM DABIT.
A thought flow came from Peho and his companions. "We thought that was an apt expression from your human tradition describing the task we set ourselves: 'For him that wills that which he wills, the event shall be as he shall make it.' You might do well to ponder that."
Noah muttered, "In plain English that means, 'Each person decides what his reality will be."
"Or, 'Where there's a will, there's a way,'" added Rivah hopefully.
The first area we entered contained genetically engineered plants. The high-ceilinged room stretched as far as we could see, perhaps a hundred yards. Before us were row upon row of hydroponic tanks and seedling beds. Other sections had fully grown and fruiting plants and trees. All were illuminated by artificial light from the ceiling that Peho explained was provided by a photo emission process initiated in the rock of the ceiling and walls.
The next room held an assortment of strange animals. In one cage we saw basking lizards with green skins and in another fat green-furred hamsters were waddling about. Peho informed us these were photosynthetic animals. Like other animals they drank water, but they had the option to eat food or not. They could survive for extended periods on light, water, air, and a little dirt in an environment that lacked other forms of nourishment.
"Why make monsters like this?" I asked.
Peho explained: "Complex animate plants represent a completion stage of a normal pattern of evolutionary expression in the life forms of a planet. Earth has Euglena and a few other simple photo-animate organisms, but no complex examples of this type of life form. Generally physical life forms on a planet develop under the energy-information flow of light from a nearby star. Occasionally simple forms may develop on relatively cold and dark watery planets from sub-oceanic geo-thermal energy patterns.
"The first stage of chemical life on a planet usually occurs as crystal forms that grow under interaction with light and planetary geological conditions. The most common living crystals are built around various compounds of Silicon. The advantage of this primitive stage is that it is simple and robust - crystal organisms can survive for long periods under a wide range of extreme environmental conditions. On the other hand, they usually grow slowly, are non-mobile, and mostly just record geological information.
"The next level of evolution occurs when the crystal forms switch over from silicon to carbon as the backbone element. This switch is signaled by information that arrives in the solar light and coincides with certain conditions in the crystal's environment. One critical condition, of course, is abundance of liquid water and an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide gas. Using the energy in the solar light, molecules built from carbon combine with the hydrogen and oxygen of water to form organic structures. Such structures allow more complex and longer molecular chains than silicon can sustain. The organic systems are more delicate, but they can gather and store information more efficiently and grow faster. They make up for their delicacy by replication and redundancy and various error correction techniques. Combining the solar information and the soil, air, and water components, they become chemical data storage systems called plants. The information of their biological experiences is recorded and stored in DNA strands. In this way the collective history of the planet is stored in the rocks and the DNA strands of the plants like a natural library.
"The basic chemical process of the plants is photosynthesis. The silicon rocks and carbon plants are the oldest and wisest of the life forms on any planet. They anchor the biosphere in its basic environment of air, water, and iron. However, the plants sustain their complex structures by means of a chemical metabolism that if unbalanced by a complementary process will ultimately poison them in their own environment. Carbon dioxide is their food, and oxygen is their poison. If they fixed all the available carbon dioxide into organic matter, they would eventually die. The solution they found was to burn off some of their mass to remove the oxygen and release carbon dioxide. That meant a bit of self-sacrifice. They had to combust themselves in a controlled burn. To achieve this was awkward, because at the time this issue arose, they were still single-celled and cluster-celled organisms floating around in the ocean. This watery environment did not promote the ignition of fires. So the plants adapted a portion of themselves into mobile fire engines."
"You mean fire engines like little furnaces that run around burning plant matter, not engines that run around putting out fires?" I asked for clarification.
"Yes. The plants reversed the chemical reaction in a portion of their metabolism so that they combusted organic matter with oxygen to produce carbon dioxide and water. They made the burner cells motile, just like we have motile blood cells moving about in our bodies - and for the same reason - so that the burn will be distributed more or less evenly throughout the population of plant organisms floating in the ocean. This clever strategy created a general biological chemical balance on the planet and allowed a continued evolutionary spiral for their explorations."
Noah commented, "You mean the plants go on about their intelligence gathering process and at the same time entertain themselves with a game to entice the animate forms to burn them just where they want, a singe her and a singe there - to keep things all in balance. It sounds like a very high art form, especially when they climb out onto the dry land."
Peho's thought-flow continued: "Just as the sun controls the plants, the plants have total control over the animals. They entice them with attractive flowers and odors and tasty fruits, and hitch rides on them as well. If the animals consume too much, or devour unintended parts, the plants create toxins to ward them off. A few animate creatures specialize as predators to feed off the numerous swarms and herds of browsing burners. Predators tend to be nomadic and much less numerous than vegetarian browsers. They usually operate as individuals or in small packs. You can imagine how this generates an ecosystem with an entire complex food chain and a tandem evolutionary spiral culminating in a planetary bio-diversity ready for full self-awareness and harvest."
"What do you mean by 'harvest?'" interrupted Ky with a puzzled frown.
"On this planet full awareness is currently taking place in the primates and has resulted in the development of humans. The switch for this transformation is triggered remotely from off-planet by the planetary supervisors when they consider the planet ripe. The creatures chosen for full self-awareness are usually animate, although not always. They are generally chosen from among the creatures that show the most creative versatility. This, of course, is very risky."
"Why is it so risky?" asked Rivah.
"The most versatile creature is obviously the best adapted to indiscriminate burning and avoidance of plant inhibitory mechanisms as well as dealing with predators. Such a creature easily becomes the predator's predator run amuck.
"It is a great challenge to choose as a vehicle for full awareness a versatile creature that will not bring down the whole system. We know this from our own experience in the evolution of our race and our experiments in upliftment. Therefore, some schools advocate the awakening of less versatile creatures. The problem here is that self aware plant forms, for example, tend to just vegetate in their awareness and not get the job done. Predators, on the other hand, often do not give enough attention to the plants. Sea creatures ignore the landmasses and also lack dexterity for the tasks they must perform. In our experience we prefer working with amphibian omnivores. We have had excellent results with salamander-like creatures in previous projects. Your dinoids produced a good crop that our predecessors harvested about 65 million years ago, although only a few of the medium-sized bipedal predator species qualified. In some cases there is direct intervention by genetic engineers to modify the DNA of a target species to render it suitable as a harvest mechanism. Such a procedure was used with humans in your distant past. The same procedure is unfolding now for a future harvest, as you shall see.
"When the self-aware dinoids completely matured, the Watchers - known in one of your traditions as the Anunaki - allowed the ungainly large dinosaurs that lacked full awareness to move on by radically shifting the planet's climatic conditions and introducing viral plagues, all part of general terra-forming procedures. The smaller dinoid species were re-engineered as birds. This made way for the rise of the current mammalian era and the maturing of a primate species for harvesting. This stage is of particular interest to us, since we are distant primate cousins."
"Could you explain for us the purpose of creating self-aware creatures?" asked Noah.
"From our perspective the purpose is two-fold. First, the task of harvesting the planet's mineral resources and genetic resources is a large one involving quite a bit of physical labor for the Over Lords. The agreement is that you, the tenants do the labor for the Over Lords, and they give you self-awareness. The tenant's task is to decode and transcribe the planet's genetic library and then transmit it back to the central data bank in the record halls of the Over Lords. As a bonus incentive, if the client tenant performs well, it gets the second purpose fulfilled - to join the Galactic Community as a full citizen, a Companion Over Lord, adding greater bio-diversity to the realms of higher consciousness. It is simple business.
"Actually the contractual agreements are a little more complex than this, but this simplistic explanation is sufficient for now. You'll understand the rest later.
"The problem we have faced, and that you face increasingly on this planet, is how to achieve the technological and conscious ability to gather and transmit the records without first destroying the recordings themselves. The awakening process is messy, because it attracts a lot of discarnate entities who try to jump on the bandwagon as I think you say in your language. Many are simply joy riders. Others are trouble makers, and a whole lot of the awakening ones are just plain confused out of their minds about what is going on and what they are supposed to be doing. It is like waking from a deep sleep and stumbling around while still half in a dream state.
Unfortunately, many of the life records of Earth in this period are being lost every year as the awakening species flounders around trying to manage the power of deliberate self-aware consciousness that it has unleashed. And the pace is quickening with every passing day. We have the technical ability to do the job, but are too few in numbers and are uncomfortable above ground. It is easier for us to help you speed up your learning curve by transferring technology as fast as you can absorb it. Then you must complete the project. After all, you are the chosen stewards of this planet in this age. You have made the contract to attempt the harvest. Some succeed well, bequeathing to the Galactic Community vibrant planets and enlightened Companions, whereas others self-destruct. We came very close to the latter scenario, but barely survived, partly as an object lesson."
"Oh boy," I said. "And half the light workers in the country are fighting genetic science tooth and nail."
"It does not look good to me," said Ky, with a pained expression. "Your country uses its technology to defoliate the world and create mutations just to assert your ideas about consumer happiness. Even your own people suffer from the effects of Agent Orange after what they did to my people in the name of helping them. And did you get these things from Peho and his friends?"
"The situation is complicated by the Empire syndrome that has infected your world," resumed the flow from Peho. "But you will find the path of simplicity that resolves the situation. A key part of the process is what we call folding back. The photo-animates that you saw are examples of this. These creatures experience both sides of the carbon life form chemical equation at once."
"Peho motioned us through another corridor to the next lab.
"In this room you see photo-animate humans and humans with gills. We also are developing humans that can tolerate extreme heat or cold and extreme pressure conditions. One line of photo-animate humans will be very small in stature, admirably suited to moving at high speeds and in outer space."
"Oh, my God!" said Rivah, as she saw a cluster of little green children playing in a mud puddle. As we watched, one grabbed a fist full of mud and put it in his mouth, and then offered another fistful to his playmate. And for them it was OK. There was no mother to pull them away and say 'No." Only a smiling lab attendant in a lab smock looking on with pride.
A little further on we encountered other children swimming in a tank resembling an exhibit in an aquarium. They were swimming with several dolphins that were acting as their tutors. I moved up close and noticed that the anthropoid dolphin children had extra thick blubbery skin, but retained most of the hand dexterity of humans, at the expense of less speed mobility in the water. They made up for this by using various mechanical devices, fun toys that they played with, zipping around in the tank with their dolphin playmates. I marveled that the dolphins from time to time went to the surface for air, but the children just stayed down under, like fish. Closer inspection revealed that they had gill slits like sharks. And Peho confirmed that they derived specifically from shark genes.
Peho continued his tour flow. We felt ourselves drawn toward a specially cordoned area. "After a thorough survey of the flora and fauna of your planet we have finally located our next candidate for stewardship. We have already completed the preliminary application procedure and received approval from their phylogenic elder brethren, the Mollisians of Saccus, to begin exploring the optimal upliftment pathway."
We stood before a water tank in which a photo-animate green octopus was busy inserting itself into a Super-Mario jungle-gym array of pipes, tubes and bottles. The creature flowed like an ameba, squeezing itself through tiny orifices in the array and oozing around kinks. When it reached the central bottle, it gently chorded on a membrane keyboard with its tentacles. This signal showed up on a nearby computer screen as a string of branching lines that resembled runes and resulted in a shellfish meal dropping into the bottle. Several other shiny green octopi were dragging themselves slowly about the sand in a terrarium. One had climbed aboard a toy rover and was moving it back and forth tentatively with one feeler curled around a joystick.
"We have spliced in some other minor modifications including tear ducts and a gene giving its skin the ability to exude a special lubricant that allows it to stay safely in contact with the dry air. This highly intelligent creature has already explored the Earth's oceans from the surface to the extreme depths. Its flexible body can tolerate a great range of pressures from high G's of super-large planets and rapid acceleration to zero-G free-fall, making it ideally suited for survival in diverse environments. Its relatively small size and body mass makes it efficient for travel on and off planet or long trips in space. Although the Octopeian Mollisians move slowly on land, they are very intelligent and extremely dexterous, able to handle sophisticated equipment in ways that no humanoid could ever do. We believe they are destined to join their galactic brethren as one of the primary embodied species, and serve as distinguished representatives of Earth's civilization. . . . But that is a story for the future."
"They no doubt have very interesting sex lives, too," muttered Noah. He made a puckering noise with his lips and then burst into a peal of laughter. We all stared at him with looks ranging from my amusement to Ky's disgust.
Peho, unperturbed, continued the thought-flow of his tour. "We are also pursuing bionic work. A major part of the folding process is the reintegration of carbon organisms back to the silicon ancestors. This brings silicon to its full potential as it integrates with carbon structures. You have already seen this happening in the computer industry in your society. Many of the solid state electronics and microchip breakthroughs came from technology transfer arrangements made with us to speed up your maturing process. We often just work behind the scenes feeding ideas telepathically to your scientists. The next step is nanotechnology and microchip implants. The complementary development is genetically engineered digital organs that also make use of electrically and magnetically active carbon nanotubules. However these are often not as fast as silicon. The beauty of silicon and rare earth semiconductors is simplicity and speed. So we are experimenting with ways to write into DNA instructions to assemble and maintain in the body sophisticated solid state electronic components (both silicon and carbon based) the same way that mollusks and turtles grow shells. We still have a way to go on this, because we have focussed primarily on the completion of our own genetic hybridization program, which we think is perhaps of more value to your progress and ours. First we will show you some early prototypes that did not fully satisfy us."
Peho guided us into a room where several individuals sat. One was small but humanoid and blind, with eye shields and eyelids interfused and unworkable. Its hair was in patches like a person on chemotherapy. Its sex was undetermined. A female was totally bald and pallid in color. Her mouth was small, but she had large human teeth that didn't fit and jutted out all in snaggles. She had developed breasts, but a tiny waist, and only three fingers on each hand. A male specimen grew very tall but with frail Zeta bone structure. He had to lie in bed all the time, because if he tried to get up his bones would easily fracture. None of them spoke, and they were probably instructed to hold radio silence if they were telepathic.
After viewing these monsters, Rivah was ready to vomit, and I didn't feel much better. This had to be just a tiny sample of survivors. We could not imagine what unspeakable things must have gone on in these labs.
"Oh my God, Oh my God!" sobbed Rivah. And the free world led by America fought Hitler, and we Jews survived his horrible concentration camps and fiendish scientific experiments only to arrive at this! And it's happening right here in the bastion of freedom and democracy! These unfeeling creatures have abducted ordinary men and women out of their homes and subjected them to this kind of treatment with the collusion of our own government! I don't believe it. I just don't believe it. And yet I'm standing here looking these poor beings right in the face, and I can't bear it, Derek." She turned to me and buried her head in my chest.
Ky did not say anything, but she was holding Noah's hand, and I saw her fingers tighten until the knuckles paled.
"You see," said Noah quietly, "When Saddam Hussein calls the U.S. the Mother of all Abominations, he actually knows what he is talking about. After all, he is the current master of Babylon."
Peho and his companions stood silently watching us. I felt their gaze and noticed that they were not transmitting any flow. They were observing only, without any response, interested to see what we would do. Just like scientists watching hamsters?
Peho made a smooth gesture to follow him and broke into our intensity of emotion with a flow: "It is true that at one point there was an insurrection among the human collaborators, resulting in an unfortunate attempt at a fire fight. Several dozen of your people lost their lives in a vain attempt to prevent the inevitable. But do not be too hasty to judge us until you see our final product. You have a belief that the end does not justify the means. We remind you that the people who participate in these experiments all begin as willing volunteers. Such willingness may seem alien to a person who has structured a very narrow view of acceptable reality. But I assure you that the universe is large and contains many realities, even many which you presently can not imagine. And there is motivation for exploring any one of these realities under the right circumstances. The young people you will see in this next room are a sample of the final version that we arrived at after many trials.
"Here is Kara Laban. Her name Kara means 'black' in Turkish. Laban means 'white' in your Hebrew language. It also relates to the heart, for she has more developed emotions than we do."
As we entered the room a young girl with totally white straight hair falling to her shoulders rose and greeted us. Unlike Zetas she had eyebrows, which were also white, like an albino's. Her cranium was large, but her hair attenuated the impression of size. Her eyes were extra large, but human; white with gray irises and large black pupils. She probably could function in bright sunlight with shades or contact lenses.
Peho picked up my speculation and flowed: "We designed a light sensitive cornea that partially occludes in very bright light to protect the retina. That is DNA encoded."
I detected here the closest Peho ever came to pride in his interior voice. The girl had a small but noticeable nose compared to practically just tiny holes for Peho. Her jaw was a little wider than Peho's, and her cheekbones were high. Whereas Peho's face was a circle with a triangular jaw underneath, hers framed by her hair was more like a rounded rectangle with a truncated triangle underneath. Her lips were also thin and almost black, but definitely there and practical for nibbling food and for kissing. She smiled as I thought that, confirming her telepathic abilities, and revealed a set of small but functional teeth. Then she really surprised me by speaking: "Hello, Mr. Derek, Miss Rivah, Mr. Noah, and Miss Ky. I am very glad to meet you. Yes. I can both speak and telepath. That is another example of what we mean by folding."
I felt a chill run up my back. She spoke to me in clear idiomatic English, but her viewpoint identified with that of Peho and his companions.
Kara definitely had a woman's figure. She wore a tight fitting black pullover sweater with no bra, so I could see that under the sweater she had small breasts. As if to answer my curiosity and again confirm her telepathic ability, she pulled off her sweater. Her skin was very pale white and her little black nipples had gray aureoles. She was almost lacking in any color pigments at all, except for faint blushes of pink on her cheeks that showed her blood was red. She must have much less blood than humans do and it probably flowed slower, I thought, with a hunch that Peho was feeding me information.
Peho continued his introduction: "Her digestive system is not as robust as yours, but she can handle solid food or not as she chooses. She is flexible. That's our folding principle again. Our main concern once we had reasonably functioning hybrids was to achieve sexual functionality. Most cross species hybrids are sterile, like mules. We wanted not only functional organs but also the ability to conceive and give birth naturally without resorting to C-sections or other such procedures. Our first breakthrough was to achieve larger hips, birth canals, and of course, usable penises."
Kara now took off her lower garment, which was a pair of white tights. Her waist and thighs were significantly more substantial than those of Peho, although still quite small by average American standards. She had just a few wisps of pure white pubic hair, and resembled a young virgin at puberty. She turned to profile, and I was startled to see her small rump curving pertly out in two pale cheeks. Apparently they spliced in some African genes for her butt.
"The difficult part was to achieve fertility. We finally accomplished that by finding a species flag in the genetic code and fooling the DNA into thinking that it was not a hybrid when we mated our genetic code to the human chromosomes. We also had to weave in the genetic sequences for the sexual apparatus from the human DNA onto our seed before mating. This means that the hybrid really has nearly a hundred percent human reproductive organ capacity scaled down a bit to fit into something closer to our body type and neural structure.
"The third challenge was to enable the female to carry a child and give birth naturally. The relatively larger cranium and smaller hips made this difficult. We solved the problem by shortening the gestation period to less than half and by water birthing. We re-coded the pregnancy clock to shorten its term by half. Most of the latter two trimesters of human gestation are devoted to size, which is what we did not need or want. We adjusted the hormonal sequences to speed gestation. As soon as the fetus is fully formed with all organs and features stabilized, the uterus contracts and the mother goes into her birthing process."
The door in the back of the room opened, and another hybrid came in. He was male, a little taller than Kara, and had skin of a deep green color.
"Hello," he said, speaking with a soft human voice. "My name is "Phyllo. My name means 'leaf' in your Greek tongue. I am a photo-animate version of the hybrid race. When my developers achieved the successful hybrid, they decided to go one step further and create a second hybrid variant that is photo-animate. We will see which model is most successful. My name also suggests that I feel with the same feelings you do. You will notice that Kara and I have a stronger sense of individuality than Peho and his comrades. But we share telepathic and empathic communion with them. Kara and I are both sexually capable and fertile among our own species, but we can not breed between us. In fact, such breeding would defeat the purpose of creating a separate species at this point. As for our descendants, they will decide in their own time."
His hair was dark and tightly curled, with a greenish tint, and he was stark naked in all his greenness. Even his member was like a little pickle lying in the grass. He also had that perky African rump that the Grays apparently figured, and quite rightly so, would add a touch of sexiness to their product. He was a veritable miniature version of the Jolly Green Giant, though not quite so muscular.
Peho added some special features: "Phyllo can suspend breathing and switch fully onto his photo system, and he can even stop his heart beat at will. The only effect this has is that he becomes much less active. He will sit in a meditative state for hours at a time, especially in a sunny location. . . . Kara and Phyllo will be your pilots and accompany you when you visit Sabutai."
"Thank you. This should be very interesting," I said, turning to Peho with an appreciative eye on Kara who was standing at his side.
"I'll bet it will," said Rivah with a hint of sarcasm. "You know, one minute you're revolted by these experiments, and the next you are ready to go off and get cozy with the specimens. I think Peho wanted us to suspend judgments on all of this, - or did he? It's tough. I notice these specimens both have pretty apples - one pair's a pale pink, and the other is green. Eve had no sense of judgment when told by God not to eat the apples on the Tree of Knowledge, and then told by the serpent that it was OK to go ahead and eat the same apples. That's how God made her. So she enjoyed the apples and shared them with Adam, and then they opened their eyes and felt guilty about sex. God noticed their guilt and fear and attempts to hide their nakedness, and He called them on the carpet. What do you know, the first thing Adam did was blame Eve, and then Eve turned around and blamed the serpent. But then God turned around and blamed them all when, after all, he made them as they were. The result was suffering for everyone. Now I don't want that happening to us. . . .
"Then there was another apple, the golden apple of Paris, the handsome Bull man. Three goddesses - Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite - offered Paris a golden apple and a reward for choosing the most beautiful one among them. Hera offered intelligence, Athena offered power, and Aphrodite offered great sex with the prettiest woman in the world. Of course, Paris chose Aphrodite. It's too bad that Helen happened already to be married. And that led to a great world war. Well, there's men for you."
The reactions of the group at Rivah's rambling outburst were diverse. Noah laughed. He understood the gist of Rivah's comments and felt the sparks between us, while appreciating my viewpoint. Ky, from her Asian background had no idea what Rivah was talking about, but she clearly sensed the play of emotions between Rivah and myself, from Rivah's viewpoint, and she identified with that. Kara also felt an energy that touched her personally, but had no pegs to hang it on, and our words meant nothing to her. Phyllo was lost in innocent confusion, and withdrew slightly to let things pass on to more familiar ground.
Peho and his companions were silent, as in blank. They simply did not compute what Rivah was talking about, nor did they have the ability to feel her emotions. Apparently Rivah had unknowingly demonstrated a part of our lives that was not accessible to their telepathic inspection. It was strangely comforting to realize that with our crazy feelings and weird language we could create a private channel of communication amidst these telepathic beings that they could not penetrate for all their vast intelligence.
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