despite all their efforts to rouse him and get through to him, he was ignoring them, continuing the same upsetting routine.
At some point Katerina and the others realised the change from consciousness to unconsciousness occurred at regular intervals; the duration of each condition lasting the best part of two minutes.
Katerina’s gaze held the eyes of Vasilis, Lara and Aristo in turn. ‘We need to time it properly and be quick. Time is running out.’
Lara gently touched Katerina’s arm. ‘Maybe he does not seem to understand our language, but I cannot think of any other way to get through to him.’
The child had until now been busy playing, engrossed by an ant crossing the barren soil at his feet. Suddenly he looked up, his face locked into a smile that was expanding, until it was about to consume his whole face. Then his face began to expand, struggling to fit in the smile.
Katerina took it as an invitation, as acceptance of them. She began to feel hopeful. She was at long last beginning to get through.
They all stared at the child who seemed to be going through a transformation. The child’s body started to grow as if a seed had received a huge boost from a magic concoction, the most amazing unpatented fertiliser.
At the end of the show, what stood in front of them was a curious creature not before seen in this world, in fiction, in myths, in the whole literature that had been falling like copious rain on Earth. Part energy, part flesh, it kept changing forms, with the mouth and the eyes the only features remaining constant.
He had in his arsenal a multitude of expressions, from most horrific to gentlest and most reassuring. Every facial expression speared through Katerina and the others’ emotional chords making them pulsate to the different emotions the child triggered.
The child spoke only to Katerina in a language that for some reason only she understood. The other three stared at her confused, waiting for the translation.
‘I was in disguise until I could sense that I could trust you. I do not know about the others, yet.’
The old man finally stirred, his face animated.
‘We know who you are. We know why you are here. We are honoured to have you here. Please accept our hospitality.’ The two minutes were up. The old man went back to his by now familiar stasis.
The four visitors wondered. Hospitality? With what tools? With what goods? With what energy that seemed to be lacking in their self-appointed hosts when they seemed not to be capable of remaining conscious for more than two minutes? Perhaps that was an act for the benefit of intruders that had to be scared away from this strange and creepy place.
The man seemed to be speaking to the four visitors in stops and starts, in two-minute intervals, perfectly capable in picking up the thread of his story after every two-minute gap, every single time without fail. But Katerina and the others had to try hard to remember every time where he left off, what came before.
At the same time that the old man was speaking, unbeknownst to them, he was probing their minds, reading their thoughts. Katerina could wait no longer. She wanted answers.
‘What happened here?’ To herself: Why are we here?
‘We are peaceful people. We had good relations with our neighbours and co-operated with them and exchanged ideas and technology. But then we had an unexpected visitor from another time, a rogue who caused havoc and division and almost brought us both to the brim of extinction.
‘This was a lovable rogue. We did not know of his true self and character until it was too late. We took him into our hearts and our minds and our homes and made him wholeheartedly, with no objections and no exceptions, an honourable member of our society. He then, probably, got bored and orchestrated the incident that became the trigger of our destruction, the small sound that upset the avalanche of pain and dislodged it from its age-old position, perched up high, watching us indifferently, loath to interfere and shower our world with its inimitable dark blessings.
‘It was this rogue but smooth operator who tricked this avalanche to come down crashing on us. He lit the match under our feet, set in motion a series of events that led to the breakdown of our society.
‘We watched our world crumbling around our ears, powerless to stop it. In the meantime, once his “good” deed was done, he left and went to the neigh-bouring realm where he caused considerable excitement with news of our realm’s disarray.
‘But he did not stop there. He had to feed this monster inside him, this manic obsessive sadistic streak for destruction and infliction of pain on innocent unsuspecting and carefree souls.
‘He played those poor souls like a professional, saw them as one instrument to be mastered and, like an expert puppeteer, he pulled their strings to the tune he had used in the past against us and probably others as well. He played us all so well until we could take no more stress and in the end snapped.
‘He preyed on our neighbours’ ambitions and cultivated their savage streak, suppressed till then, with horrific consequences for all of us. He gave our erst-while friends and neighbours new technology to use against us. Our neighbours were complacent, until they too realised, a little too late, what had happened to them was not what they desired at all.
‘They paid the ultimate price for a few precious seconds of celebration of their superiority over us. For many centuries we have been at war with the neighbouring realm and with ourselves.’
Katerina sensed the flow of words was ebbing away and decided to interrupt the excruciating monologue to ask the question that had been bugging them for a while.
‘What was the incident that the rogue caused to bring all this to a head, to cause the opening of those rifts in your society?’
‘It was innocent things at first, things like small thefts of grain, innocuous objects and other items, gradually increasing in frequency and significance. The result was petty jealousies becoming monsters, skirmishes, minor duels and catfights.
‘We ignored it. We thought it might be children, bent on mischief, but there were no leads and we unearthed nothing to back it up. He…’ The old man’s emotions began to rise to the surface. ‘First he charmed us and then he turned us against each other. We were desperate, you see, and when he had done his evil deed, he disappeared. When we could not catch him, it became worse and the civil war started.
‘We went to our neighbours who refused to help. They were going through a similar evil and devastation. We were inventing more and more terrible weapons, including biological ones, till we got an idea through an opportunity that opened up a door to us, a new world, a means of escape.
‘In a horrible twist of fate, which we now regret, we took the ruinous decision, by design for profit by some and by accident through immigration, to begin exporting our biological weapons and our people, to the other side, to other worlds, through the portal and portals that randomly opened up.
‘We were only trying to save our people, you see, and we started sending them to Athens through the portal. Some we sent to Sparta and Corinth. I cannot understand why the portal opened up at the time of the Peloponnesian War, which lasted between 431 B.C. and 404 B.C.
‘Perhaps by design of a higher force or for its amusement, that war that had similar overtones to ours was meant by that higher force to act as reminder of the consequences, like a weird parallel universe, nature’s way of trying to tell us something, a strong message that not only did we not heed, but we ended up making things worse there.
‘We may have caused a deterioration in Athens’ ability to cope. The Athenian plague during the war ended up becoming much worse than it would otherwise have been. They didn’t stand a chance. We changed events by, maybe inadvertently in some way, boosting Sparta.
‘The Spartans seemed to have been immune to our plague. I don’t know whether it was their diet, that disgusting black soup, the “melas zomos”, or something else, something in their genes, but, whatever it was, it worked for them, and the plague had no effect on them at all.
‘Do you think it had to do with Spartan appreciation of nature at a more rudimentary and honest level, and thus being closer to its secrets, compared to the delicate elegant Athenian love affair and its use of nature as inspiration for art?
‘Even though they had no way of analysing the bug to establish whether it was the same strain affecting both cities, the Athenians found out about the Spartans’ mysterious immunity to it and tried to contact the Spartans to get some help, a cure maybe.
‘Representatives from both sides had a secret meeting and found similarities in the intruders and their
