“I felt it, it was palpable and I felt myself grow more excited and more…more delirious…on account of the delirium around me. And at the Meditation Center when someone told a tragic story—.”

“Yes, exactly!” said Amel.

“—I felt the energy from that story; I felt it enter me and make me cry,” said Welf.

“Exactly!” said Amel. “And when you see heroism, great heroism as in a battle, this too gives off energy, and you are energized to fight beyond your normal endurance. And when you gather and sing around a great tower being planted and grown in the earth, you feel the energy and your own body warms and quickens and gives off more energy to join the communal energy.” He looked to each of us for a nod, for confirmation, and we gave it willingly.

“Well, somehow,” he said, “the Parents thrive on the suffering and other less dramatic emotions of the human beings of this planet—anger, resentment, sorrow, grief—and they are, I suspect, transmitting their film streams of hot-blooded life on Earth all over the ‘Realm of Worlds’ to those cooler species, cold species like them who also thrive off this suffering, off the pain that human mammals feel! And for all I know this not only gives them delight, intoxicating delight, but this fuels Bravenna itself and fuels its lights and its warm air, and the laboratories in which you were developed and grown! It is their fuel—our human suffering!”

“This is appalling!” said Derek. “This is cruel.”

“Yes, it is very cruel,” said Amel, “and the Parents are very cruel. Did you not see that?” He paused, then went on. “Someday I will discover how this energy is being translated into something biological or measurably physical. I will discover it.”

At this point, Derek began to cry. Just as he’s crying now. Because of course we had all seen it, the unspeakable cruelty of the Parents developing us and growing us and offering us beautiful music in our cradles and then telling us that we were meant to destroy ourselves, to lose our lives as we destroyed everything on this planet.

In a hushed voice Derek began to talk about it, talk about the cruelty of the Parents, and talk about how the deathbed scenes in the film streaming had torn at his “soul,” and how he loathed and detested the Parents and would fight them forever, and fight everything that was cruel.

“Ah, but be wise,” said Amel. “They want you to fight. They have bred you to fight. They would like nothing better than for you to go forth and start to try to root out every transmission base and station and to quarrel and fight with any human who sought to stop you. They want people to come to blows. They want people to shed blood. They would love to see you taken prisoner by the tribes for seeking to destroy their Chambers of Suffering!”