“Yes, what is the point?” asked Garekyn.

Amel waited. He was looking at each of us in turn and then his eyes settled on Derek.

“Ooooh, I see,” said Derek. “The Chambers of Suffering! The films, the streams! They are feeding off the suffering of the planet!”

The most brilliant smile spread over Amel’s face.

I was astonished. It seemed obvious, then too obvious, and then undeniably obvious!

“They feed off it!” Derek went on. “They want to watch this…people weeping and screaming in grief and pain! This is why their film feeds are filled with scenes of people dying and those around them in agony as they die, agony worse than that of the dying!”

“Yes,” said Amel. “I believe that is exactly what is happening! And they value this planet all the more for its mammalian ascendant species because no creature in the universe suffers like a hot-blooded self-aware mammal.”

“But this is an unspeakable lie!” I whispered. I shook my head. I didn’t want to believe it, but I couldn’t not believe it.

“When I came back here to this planet,” said Amel, “war was as common as peace, and tribes fought tribes and murdered and raped, and sacrificed their own children and their enemies to their gods, and the planet was covered in blood-soaked altars and blood-soaked groves where men sought to placate the storms and the snows and the fire of the volcano or the rages of the sea with bloodshed and death and pain! And they loved it! The Bravennans loved it, and their transmitting stations which I myself installed all over this planet in places I can no longer find or recognize—these are their means of receiving this suffering, receiving it and devouring it!”

“But how?” I asked. “They enjoy it, yes, I have seen this with my own eyes. They love it, and they lied to us about this, but how do they devour it exactly?”

“I don’t know,” said Amel with obvious frustration, “but I do know that suffering itself, emotion, pain, agony, rebellion, these things give off an energy just as the sun does, and just as the raging sea does….But I have not been able to discover the science of it! I have not been able to discover how the energy given off by emotion can be translated into the physical or biological realm! It’s driving me mad.” He paused, then went on. “This is a biological world. Biology is the reality of this world. Soul is generated by biology, by the chemistry of the brain rooted in biology. All things spiritual emanate from the biological. And they must have some way of translating the energy of anguish into a definable force in the biological realm.”

This struck me as powerfully fascinating.

“I understand this in a crude way,” said Welf. “When we were drinking and dancing during the Wilderness Festival, I felt the energy of the crowds around me—.”

“Exactly!” said Amel.