The Diary of Zartoon

ENTRY 13

ENTRY 13

17.03.63.07.23

I spent the night out in the desert. It was soothing. The temperature was around 60 degrees, and the breezes were slow and gentle. The only sounds I could hear were the travelers from the Zartoon city and some kind of transportation from the Human city, but they were a lot fainter.

I slept well, considering what I had seen the night before. It is extremely hard to get images like that out of your mind once you had seen death like that but, for my own sanity, I had to push those images into my subconscious and get back to surviving myself.

I made it back to the part of the city where Pandorica lived around 11:00 AM and, the minute I parked the traveler, Pandorica came running over to me, throwing her arms around me in a hug but she didn't dare kiss me. Not in the open and surely not in where she would be recognized. She took me by the arm, and we went to see the Council. Once there I was asked to give a report of what I had seen.

"There was a settlement," I said. "It isn't there anymore!"

"Was it Human or Zartoon," they asked.

"From what I could see it was a combination of both," I replied. "They seemed to have been family units of both Human and Zartoon, many with young children and some females carrying their young," I told them that everyone was killed and that they all died within seconds. They just sat there silently, just as if they were in shock. Then, one of them started talking.

"In that village were individuals from both our city and the Human city," he said. "Sadly, the Humans in the major Human city near that village keep Zartoon purely for the Humans' pleasure, much as they would animal breeding stock. They are caged and only released to mate and then they are once again locked away. They do the same thing until they cannot mate any longer, and then they are killed. You have seen how we live here Fa Nix, we do not treat Humans that way.

That village was made up of those who were not interested in just mating. The Zartoon and the defiant young Humans they created the village of Elidibsatianouka because they had fallen in love and wanted to be together no matter what. The zealot Humans in their city could not allow this to happen so they must have destroyed the village without any warning."

I could see that the topic was upsetting to the Council, yet even so, they still wanted to know more. So I explained to them that I had looked and could not find a weapon, but I could guess what it was. I looked into the mourning faces of the Council. I told them of the hydrogen bombs of the mid-1940's and how it destroyed entire cities without even hitting the ground.

'Can you make us one of those weapons," one of them asked.

Now, for some reason, I knew the basics of what to do. I do not understand why, but I did, maybe I had seen things on TV or in the movies, or maybe I was in a war, but for some reason, I knew how to make a very primitive bomb. All I knew was that I didn't want to give the Zartoon that knowledge. I recall what it did to Earth when the people were always fighting and deathly afraid of other countries, and through terrorism, there were so many deaths that it finally grew so bad that a full planet nuclear winter was eventually inevitable. Maybe that is just what happened to the Earth I thought, as I replied to his question.

"No, sir, normal people like me were not allowed to know how to make such a terrible device, and we were put to death if we did have that knowledge."

I don't know if he believed me or not, but he looked at me and waved his hand. I was escorted out and led to Pandorica, who was waiting outside.

We spent the rest of the day together as she taught me some of Zartoon history. According to their history, Zartoon was a vast and very successful empire before the Husmans arrived. I asked her how long the Zartoon had been on the planet. She laughed and replied that the Zartoon people had lived on the planet for over 200,000 generations. Then I asked her how long the Humans had been there. "500 generations," she said. Her eyes lowered, and it was easy to see that she was feeling strong emotions toward what had happened earlier.

I didn't ask her any more questions. We sat and talked about happier things. I recited poetry to her, and she sang strange sounding Zartoon opera to me. Her voice it was so lyrical and had such a sweetness about it. Now, usually I don't like opera, but when she sang it was really beautiful!