The Church of the Unborn, part 3

Nilankha

Anthimia 8, 234 AC

The last time I posted an installment of this story, we were discussing the Ingathering movement on Algonar. Now let us return to the matter of the finial building ornaments, with which we started this tale some time ago. The temple built by the Church of the Unborn featured numerous spires, some of which were deliberately shaped in the form of male organs. Others had a more neutral, abstract shape and had finials or lightning rods at their apexes, such as the ones you saw at the beginning of this lecture. The towers and spires of the temple bore names of Noantri who had contributed the money for their construction, as did many other features of the Temple. The interior of the Temple also displayed hundreds of small flat metalwork images of babies, each one added to the wall when a healthy, surviving child was born.

As the Ingathering progressed in the interstellar Noantri community, the situation in Algonar continued to deteriorate. The loss of industrial jobs and the service work associated with them brought the city not only high crime and poverty but the desolation of empty buildings: factories, schools, shops, and residences. The Noantri were not immune from this desolation. The "faithful" still hoped that the Nouergic Gateway would open for them, taking them to the land of the Golden Sun. But other Noantri had given up hope, instead attempting to leave the city and migrate elsewhere, or turning to a peculiar form of Noantri crime, fraud and fortune-telling and spurious "future-finding" or telepathic eavesdropping and spying. The Noantri of Algonar were restless, and inter-Noantri violence, sadly, increased.

Suddenly one foggy autumn, the Ingathering team of techno-prophets returned, and this time they were headed by the leader of the Nouergic Gateway project, the immensely charismatic Redon the Third. We are all mostly familiar with his role in the Great Gateway, but he was active on many worlds long before the Migration. He appeared with his entourage as out of nowhere (actually, a Gateway site some ways out of the city, complete with vehicles driving through the Gate), and they settled as guests in one of the richer Noantri urban compounds. The presence of the Nouergic leader caught the attention of all the Noantri factions, who flocked to the Temple to hear him preach (through an electronically enhanced voice) that the Migration was coming, that the Gateway was already in action, and liberation was imminent. He was tall and majestic, clad in Noantri grey with a great cloak of grey floating about him like a cloud. He had long, flowing blue-grey hair, and manifested, as Nouergists still do, an aura of colored light - with him, it was a brilliant mid-blue, the color of sapphire. 

The phenomenon of pseudo-reincarnational lineages is still obscure to this day; it is very rare and has never been adequately explained. Redon III was the third incarnation of the man who may have been the originator of the Ingathering movement, Redon I the Great, who was based in another Noantri colony in a different star system. Redon II lost his life in a space battle with an Other-human enemy, and by the time Redon III appeared, he was already in his thirties (by New Earth reckoning). The theophoric gift transferred across incarnations and indeed intensified, so that Third was more powerful than his predecessors. It was Third who designed and implemented the modern Nouergic programs which led to the Gateway.

It was this Redon III, who had a talent for showmanship as well as theophoric power, who captivated the Noantri of Algonar. Instead of preaching inside the Temple, or on the plaza outside it, he climbed (through interior stairways) to the portico, where a line of spires pointed skyward. Redon III appeared on the edge of the portico, moving about, holding onto the narrow spires that supported the pointed finial and leaning precipitously into space. The sapphire glow and the tossing cape was a spectacular sight, as he proclaimed the future of Noantri, the passage to New Earth, and the fertile future of a free people.

And at the end of his proclamation, he did something which both scared and astonished the crowd. He let go of the spire and launched himself into thin air! But he did not fall; gravity had no hold on him, and he floated, standing on fog with his arms outstretched, until he slowly descended lit by blue fire, to alight on the ground as if he had no weight at all. Then, before the Algonar police could stop him or break up the crowd, he and his band disappeared into nowhere. 

Redon stayed for about a month, traveling through the Noantri colonies on Algonar planet, returning to the Temple to preach. Only when he felt that his message had reached enough Noantri did he leave, promising that he would return in Nouergic strength, to lead the people through the Great Gate to their new home on New Earth.

Part four will follow.