“Because it’s why I can’t destroy one of you to show you there are no toxins in your bodies,” he said. “Your soul is an expression of the precious quality of life that makes me refuse to destroy it!” He paused and then continued, staring intently at me, though of course he was speaking to all of us. “You are not ‘made things’ without a soul, limited by your very nature to one purpose,” he said. “You are beings of conscience and feeling and the will to respond to what you know to be right. And if I killed one of you to make my point, it would be an immense cruelty to you, and you would never forgive me for it, and you would grieve for your lost brother, for his loss of the gift of life!”

“You’re right, yes, I see,” I said. “But let’s return to what you were saying, about the Parents and what they want, and why they would lie, and why they would seek to control humans as if humans were puppets!”

“Yes, that is the crucial issue here,” said Garekyn. “Why would they make us, grow us, instill knowledge in us, and let these souls develop or emanate from us, and then send us here on a dishonest mission?”

“They want trouble, to make trouble. They want you to foment conflict. They hoped very likely that you’d be captured in the villages and revealed to be non-human, and that you would all be brought here with much fanfare to be executed by me in defiance of them and their machinations. Or they wanted you to attempt to kill me, and maybe even to damage the great dome of Atalantaya! They wanted conflict, trouble. Who knows? Look what happened when they returned me to the planet!”

“But what did happen?” I asked.

“They sent me down here, equipped with immense knowledge and godlike strength, to enslave the tribes, to install transmission stations for them far and wide so that their streaming could take place. And I was told that when this mission was complete, I was then to loose a plague on the planet that would kill huge numbers of the population. ‘This is desirable for the world’s improvement,’ they told me. But they knew, positively knew, I’d never do it. They knew that I’d come to love my fellow human beings, I’d come through working with them and living with them and ruling over them to see their inherent virtues, their values, to let my soul warm to their souls! And they knew I’d refuse to loose the plague, and that I’d start to do things in direct contradiction to their orders, and thereby make conflict, make new things happen!”

“I see what you’re saying,” I said. “And I see the similarity between your mission and our mission, and I can see why they might have known full well that you wouldn’t fulfill your purpose and we wouldn’t fulfill ours. But why? Why do they want to ‘make new things happen,’ as you put it?”