Homer held his hand in front of Sasha’s eyes.
Leonid was breathing heavily and turned away.
“What happened?” He asked one of the men who were guarding the paramedics.
“Something hit our guards at the big distributor. All dead, to the last man. No survivors. And nobody knows who did it.” The paramedic cleaned his hands on his coat. “You got a smoke? My hands are shaking.”
The big distributor, so Hanza’s shuttle, it was the spider web like system of tracks, that departed from the radial station at the Pavelezkaya and connected four lines with each other: The ring, the grey, the orange and the green line.
Homer had guessed that Hunter would take that way. It was the shortest. But it was always guarded by Hanza.
Why all this bloodshed? Had they opened fire first? Or hadn’t they seen him coming out of the darkness? Where was he now? Oh god, there was another head… Why had he done this?
Homer thought about the broken mirror and Sasha’s words. Should she have been right? Maybe the brigadier was fighting against himself, maybe he had wanted to avoid unnecessary deaths, maybe he wasn’t in control of himself… And that was the reason he had broken the mirror, to destroy the ugly man into which he had transformed?
No. Hunter hadn’t seen a man in his reflection but a monster. He had tried to eliminate it but only broken the glass and one reflection had become a dozen.
But what if… Homer looked after the paramedics who had just loaded the last of the eight bodies from the railcar onto the platform… What if he had seen a desperate man starring back out of the mirror? The old hunter?
What if the other one, the monstrous one had already arrived and taken the lead?
What made a human to a human? More than a million years he journeys though the world. The magical transformation, which let this intelligent animal become something totally new, had only happened in the last ten thousand years. You just had to think: 99 percent of his history he spent cowering in caves and chewing on raw meat, unable to warmth himself, develop tools or even weapons and he couldn’t even really talk. Even his feelings weren’t that far from apes or wolves: Hunger, fear, companionship, pleasure…
How had humanity learned to build in just a few centuries? To change its surrounding matter and to create new?
Why had they started to paint all of a sudden and how had they discovered music all of a sudden? How could they bent the earth to their will and change it according to their needs? What was it that had made this animal to something special in the last ten thousand years? Fire? It gave humans the ability to tame light and warmth and carry it into uninhabitable cold regions. But what changed that? Good, it made it possible for humans to extend their reach. But rats had colonized the entire planet without fire. No it wasn’t fire, well not just fire, there the musician had been right. There had to be something else… But what?
Language? That was a difference to any other animals without a doubt. When rough thoughts were polished to brilliants of words they had finally turned into the common, currency. At the same time it wasn’t just so much about expressing yourself, not really about what was happening in your head but more about the ability to order the instable, like molten iron flowing pictures into a solid form. To retain a clear and sober mind and to pass on orders and knowledge accurately. So also about the ability to organize, to conquer, to raise armies and form states.
But ants didn’t need any words. On a for a human unnoticeable level they lived in complex hierarchies, shared information and orders with high accuracy, agitated thousands of fearless legions with iron discipline to merciless wars.
Or was it letters? Without them would we have been able to safe our knowledge? Those bricks that made up the to the sky rushing tower of Babylon of human civilization?
Without them all wisdom that Humanity had gathered, would flow apart like unbaked clay and the tower would fall down under its own weight. Turning into dust.
Without letters every generation had to build the tower again, would work all their life in the ruins of their clay huts and finally die, without even having constructed a single floor. First letters and then writing made it possible for humanity to transport the gathered knowledge out of their small heads and store it just like it was for their decedents. So it was no longer their fate to discover the discovered over and over again and they were able to built something of their own on the stable fundament that had been built by their ancestors.
Was that all?
If wolves could write, would their civilization be similar to the one of humanity? Would they even have a civilization? A full wolf that was no longer hungry got tired, snuggled with its kind until it’s growling stomach drove it further. A full human gets a strange feeling on the other hand: He gets melancholic. The unbelievable, unexplained tend that gets him to look at the stars for hours, paint on the wall of his cave with ochre, to decorate the front of his warship with a carved statue, building stone colossuses over centuries of hard labor instead of strengthening the wall of his fortress and work his whole life on the perfection of his poetic masterpiece instead of learning how to wield a sword.
It was the tendency which brought a former train operator helper to devote the few years he still had to lecture and search and to try and write something down…
Something special…. To free him of the longing the common and poor people listen to the skilled violist, kings had kept own troubadours and painters and an underground born girl looked at the package of a painted teabag. It is an obscure and powerful calling, that is even able to overshadow the voice of hunger. And only humans can hear.
It is not just the calling that goes past the spectrum of animals and gives a human the ability to dream and hope for courage. Love and mercy, two emotion which humans think to be such a special ability. They weren’t the first to find it. Even a dog is able to love and feel mercy: Is its master sick, it doesn’t stray from his side and whimpers. Even it can long for the day and is able to see the reason of life of another creature: Some dogs have been ready to die as well after the death of their master. Only so that they could stay with them.
But a dog can’t dream.
Then isn’t there the longing for something beautiful and the ability to value it? This surprising ability to enjoy a composition of colors, arrays of sound, broken lines and elegant constructed sentences?
To get the sweet and at the same time hurting sound of their soul, which grips your heart, even if it is sick and scarred and make it pure again?
Maybe. But not just that.
To sound over shots and the desperate screams of imprisoned naked humans, some humans have played wonderful operas from Wagner on full volume. And that wasn’t a contradiction: One underlined the other.
What else?
Even when humanity survives this hell as a biological kind, is it going to keep that fragile and almost unnoticeable but without a doubt real part of its nature? Is it going to protect that special spark that had brought the hungry animal over ten thousands of years to a creature of order? To a creature who was tortured more by the hunger of the soul then the hunger of the body?. A stumbling creature, always torn from one side to the other, between spiritual greatness and lowness. Between for a predator forbidden mercy and unforgivable cruelty which seemed to have come out of the soulless world of insects?
A creature that built wonderful castles and made unimaginable paintings. Whose ability to create beautiful things could measure up with the creator itself and at the same time create gas chambers and
