Alexander Kazantsev - The Destruction of Faena

“Who knows what’s happened to our friend after all these years?” sighed Ave Mar.

“Perhaps they need another leader and they came for a Faetian,” said Mada.

“I’ll find Serpent and we’ll look for the new lair of the Faetoids together. Perhaps we’ll meet Gor Terr or even find Avik still alive. Anyway, we’ll catch one of the talking beasts and question him.”

Ave did not manage to carry out his plan, however. Serpent and Ma had gone somewhere a long way away. They weren’t to be found in the nearby caves. He could only hope that they hadn’t fallen victim to the Faetoids.

Perhaps in another forest they had founded a new station for the descendants of the Faetians on Terr. The offended hunter hadn’t forgiven his mother for her reproach, although he had deserved it to some extent.

Nothing was known of Avik either.

Life continued for Ave and Mada with their family. As if to take over from the lost Avik and the runaway children, Mada gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl, and their mother was fully occupied in caring for them. As if she hadn’t enough cares already.

She cooked for the whole family, treated hides with her younger daughters so as to sew, with the aid of tendons, primitive clothing and footwear for the growing children, herself and Ave. They had to gather medicinal herbs, about which Mada knew a great deal, and not just because she had once been a Sister of Health. She had been attending to all the members of her big family. She hadn’t time to help Ave with the hunting.

After the working day, when darkness had fallen, keeping the fire going in the hearth and grinding the day’s harvest of com in a stone mortar with a stone pestle, Mada would tell her children fairy tales.

She didn’t invent anything, she simply recalled her life on Faena. But for the little Terrans, living in the dense forest, stories about houses as high as the clouds, or about rooms that moved about and even went up into the air like birds, and even of the piloted star on which her parents landed on Terr, all sounded like an amazing, unattainable and incredible fairy tale.

Ave Mar also used to listen to these stories about the irrevocable past as he dozed on his couch after an exhausting day.

He would listen and could never understand whether he was having fantastic dreams or whether he was remembering long-forgotten pictures from the words of the now white-haired but still beautiful Mada.

And, to the rhythmic murmur of her infinitely beloved voice, the first Faetian on Terr wondered what lay in store for his children and grandchildren.

Would the Faetoids return? Surely the talking beast that Serpent had let go would feel duly grateful and would not only save Avik, but would lead the Faetoids away, as Gor Terr had done in his time? Or were neither Gor Terr nor Avik still alive, and was the war with the Faetoids about to begin again? And who would survive in that conflict? Who would settle the planet with a race of rational beings: the descendants of the Faetians or those of the Faetoids? In the process of development, they would begin to resemble the present-day Faetians. Otherwise the law of development of all living creatures would have to be seen in a wider perspective than had been thought of on Faena. It must be extended from one planet to all inhabited worlds! Rational beings could appear everywhere and could migrate to those planets where rational beings had not yet appeared. They would enter into conflict with the less developed. Was this not the meaning of the all-embracing law of the struggle for existence in which Reason must come out on top.

Ave decided to carve the history of his family on a cliff in the mountains where he went hunting.

One day, his rational descendants would read the inscription.

But what would they be like?