It is understood among those wise enough to embrace the mysteries lurking there beyond the fetters of perception that the Universe is filled with all sorts of quirky Gods and Goddesses.

 

Every God and Goddess, in accordance with Universal Law, is placed in charge of His or Her own Galaxy. A Galaxy usually has a litany of planets inside of it, of course. But not always. Some Galaxies are empty. The Gods and Goddesses who rule these empty Galaxies are horridly bored in consequence.

 

Other Galaxies meanwhile are filled with interstellar debris and dust and, often as well, hope. The Gods and Goddesses in these Galaxies are like engineers, constantly opening up the hoods of their Galaxies to fine-tune and fiddle around with the machinery–cosmic rotaries and engines and ramps and pulleys. These are infant Galaxies. Infant Galaxies are juvenile, still at the dawn of their own existence–many, as young as one hundred billion years old–and often, too, lacking Life.

 

The truly wonderful Galaxies are those which are bursting with blessed Life. The Gods and Goddesses who have managed to create Galaxies of Life are much heralded by their supremely-gifted and powerful colleagues, as it takes a tremendous amount of skill and perseverance to achieve such a feat. 

 

In one such Life-filled Galaxy there dwells a God who goes by the name Enden-Ra. Enden-Ra is so old that even He cannot recall when or how or why He was born.

 

The first time Enden-Ra created Life in His Galaxy, He smiled with such ferocious and radiant energy that He obliterated the microscopic organisms that floated atop the briny seas of His first and favorite planet, Q’welle.

 

Enden-Ra however had only to wait two hundred million more years to make up for His apparent error. On His second attempt at creating Life, Enden-Ra injected more warmth into the core of Q’welle than he had the first time. He also breathed a new and exciting mixture of gasses into the atmosphere, and reworked the topography of Q’welle to better support the Life He was growing on it. He raised mountains out of dirt to shield nearby lakes and forests and deserts from the howling winds, and added banks to the sides of rivers to help fertilize the grounds around them.

 

Soon, Life took the form of these buggy, brainless half-breeds, which Enden-Ra called Atmz. To other peeping Gods and Goddesses, these Life Forms looked ugly and weak. To Enden-Ra, however, what He saw was nothing short of miraculous. 

 

Knowing He had curated promising conditions, all the God had to do then was sit back and watch as the show, with its infinite dramas and comedies and intricately interwoven characters, developed and spread all across Q’welle over many, many millennia.

 

The Atmz, who began as buggy, brainless half-breeds, evolved into a vast network of highly differentiated critters, plants, and dhuelz (Dhuelz will not be familiar to Earthlings. On the planet Q’welle, dhuelze were super-intelligent air pockets that had a motherly quality about them in the way they pushed and shoved fellow critters and plants towards unspoken, but much desired, outcomes). 

 

Enden-Ra was blind with joy.

 

Eventually though, the Atmz were thrust into a war over identity and culture; for one faction of Atmz who managed certain resources on Q’welle looked different from another faction of Atmz who managed other certain resources on Q’welle. Unable to set their differences aside, the Atmz factions went back and forth threatening one another with increasingly complicated technologies of destruction. Enden-Ra despaired since, in accordance with Universal Law, He could not interfere and stop the conflict from escalating. 

 

Ultimately, out of heroic stupidity, one faction released a deadly Atmz-made pathogen that wiped out the whole Amtz species in less than forty-eight Earth hours. 

 

For a billion and some millions of years afterwards, Enden-Ra mourned the loss of the Atmz. He could not fathom enjoying the company of another Life Form as much as He enjoyed the company of the Atmz. He loved the way they loved, and how they grooved to music, and especially how gratefully they communicated with Nature. As He grieved the loss of His most beloved, Enden-Ra reminisced. He thought about all of the good memories He had had with the Atmz, and He thanked the Universe for instilling in Him the creativity that it takes to nurture such a prolific Life Force in the first place.

 

*

 

Enden-Ra came to realize He was being selfish. In being so caught up with grieving the Amtz, Enden-Ra had neglected the rest of His Galaxy. And so, sheepishly, at first, He swept harmful metallics away from the furthest-reaching, rocky branches of the Asteroid Loop. Then, He wiped down the celestials by spitting into His hand and scrubbing the bodies of stars until they appeared luminous and polished and twinkling again. After that He dipped his blotter into a can of Celestial Paint and went to deepening the blackness of the surrounding void. Soon, His Galaxy once again looked proud and magnificent. 

 

Feeling recharged, Enden-Ra sighed a deep and confident sigh, and then thought: “Well as well. This as another. Perhaps, I shall try again.”

 

Enden-Ra moved on to a different solar system this time. On the planet Gra-Thrund, He generated a unique Life Form, the Tasisis, who taught themselves to move between the seas and lands and skies. 

 

The Tasisis, like the Atmz, annihilated themselves in harrowing fashion. On this occasion it had to do with domestic concerns regarding which of the three Tasisis legions bore the right to command, as it were, whichwhatever planetary matter. Enden-Ra was terribly sad to see the Tasisis go. But having learned that mourning does nothing but dog the crier, He chose to focus instead on refurbishing a wild, fast-expanding solar system hovering on the outskirts of His Galaxy, rather than wallow and sulk, as He had some ideas about how He might triangulate and make use of the energy of the three suns powering it .

 

Over billions and billions and billions of years, Enden-Ra like a gouache painter flicked with gusto and masterful ease Life into the Galaxy, into solar systems big and small, and into species smart and dull, and into matter particulate and non-uniform. Always, these Life Forms died in anguish. Most of the time, they were the perpetrators of their own undoing–suicide, at the special level. It seemed to Enden-Ra that, given enough time, the primary instinct of Life itself involved a budding and a bloodening; a blooming and a bombing. 

 

Time, Enden-Ra suspected, Time itself might be the enemy. 

 

With this theory ruffling the ridges of His almighty mind, Enden-Ra tapped a solar system that He felt offered conditions flexible enough to support the sort of Life Form that could evolve without having to obey the nutty constraints of the perplexing phenomenon that is Time.  

 

Enden-Ra removed all sorts of divine springs and screws and nuts and bolts from the Galactic machinery that was usually so tightly bound to the instruments of Time. Loosening the appearance of order and organization in His Galaxy’s internal celestial clockwork was a novel experiment to Enden-Ra. He had no idea how things might turn out. He was not sure if He could create Life at all in this state. Or if the planets might fall out of orbit and revolt. Or if the sun might shrivel up entirely, or fall into a black hole, or whether the Galaxy altogether might implode in the very second Enden-Ra took his finger off the Time dial. 

 

Thankfully, nothing happened when He did.

 

Enden-Ra scrambled about. He sprung up a Life Form that he felt was durable, and smart, and which had a conscience. In the absence of the curious parameters wrought of Time, Enden-Ra thought it germane this experimental Life Form be resilient, and moral, and good at problem-solving. Timelessness, Enden-Ra knew, if placed in the hands of the wrong Life Form, could trickle out amongst the rest of the Universe in a bad, bad way.

 

And so came the M’intaurs. Lithe, androgynous, symmetrical, and smooth-moving, Enden-Ra was convinced the M’intaurs were the most beautiful of all the Life Forms He had ever created. 

 

At first, the Time-lifting experiment seemed to work. The M’intaurs lived for eons and eons. Death rituals, in which stable-minded and contented elders chose to end their existence, and usually for the sake of preserving resources, became common. Given the endlessness of Life, the M’intaurs built happy societies and diverse cultures and adaptable governing bodies, including foolproof philosophies and fair laws, that could sustain them, seemingly, forever. Unlike all the preceding Life Forms End-Ra had created, M’intaurs were born fully matured. They did not age, mentally or physically. Once beautiful, always beautiful, vanity and envy vanished overnight. Wisdom was not accrued, but rather, endowed. And so every living M’intaur possessed an inherent respect for one another straight away.

 

Two billion years into the reign of the M’intaurs, Enden-Ra found Himself so very moved, pleased with what He saw. He believed, in His heart, that He finally had had a breakthrough. That he had at last created the greatest Life Force of all.

 

Alas, He could not anticipate the inevitable fallout; the fallout which rags any species doomed to try to live without Time. 

 

There arose a problem. The problem of Time-travel. As soon as the M’intaurs invented the Time-traveling machine (which was spawned when one M’intaur wanted to settle a dispute that had occurred during a specific conversation (and therefore effectually rendered bunk the reality of active Timelessness altogether by introducing the idea of there being a “then” and a “not then”)), the planet went haywire. Old versions of M’intaurs traveled “back in time” to converse with “prior” versions of themselves, thereby duplicating their own “personage.” Where one M’intaur, perhaps an Oslo as it were, had existed, now existed two Oslos. 

 

On top of the metastasizing population control dilemma, mass hysteria and confusion had begun to spread like a viral contagion amongst the previously Timeless ranks of the M’intaurs. Endowed with “future” knowledge, which, unto itself, ought not to have existed in such a place as that which does not obey the constraints of Time, duplicate M’intaurs had to consider whether to act upon the transactional information supplied by their “futures”. If they did act on that information, information which had not been supplied by their “originals” to their “past” selves (the “future” and the “past”  and the “present” were now considered standard Universalisms)... ought each of these selves be considered a unique individual? And furthermore, how might the use of “future” information impact every version of every M’intaur living on the planet, thereon? 

 

Concerns about physics and destinies and intelligent design and anarchy drove wedges between the M’intaurs. Prior to the Time-traveling spectacle, these were essentially perfect beings. But in this tense hour, no M’intaur could figure out what to do about the nasty business of Time-traveling, which at one juncture had been commercialized, and at another juncture had been prohibited, and at yet another had been left unregulated completely. 

 

Purges were suggested by the “oldest” M’intaurs–a debate that, once it got rolling, only further reinforced to a Timeless planet the pervasiveness of the existence of Time, including its perverted relationships with aging and numerology, and so on. Some of the keener philosophers on the planet posed the idea of building familial households reserved for “same” duplicates. This, in its wraparound terminology, confused many a M’intaur however; and the proposition eventually witnessed a stalemate after it was presented to the Court of Peace and Prosperity, as the jury consisted of an equal number of “duplicates” and “non-duplicates.”

 

Enden-Ra could not believe His eyes. Without Time, all was chaos. Neutered by Universal Law, and unable to redirect the trajectory of the planet through recourse, He stood by in sterile horror as tens of billions of M’intaurs’ brains exploded out of their skulls from severe mental confusion. Timelessness, Enden-Ra understood then, must somehow introduce many more paradoxes than what any mortal mind can handle. 

 

Enden-Ra had erred in his assessment of the importance of Time.

 

And He would err again.

 

Despite everything, again and again, Enden-Ra insisted upon spreading the gift of Life to Lifeless realms. It was worth it, yes—even if—over and over again—He was forced to witness each of them grow in glory, only to die in vainglory. This pattern, trillions of years into His own Life, Enden-Ra believed to be the lone principle, the very crucible, of Life. Life shows up one day, unannounced, unheralded, and in doing so, is bound thereandafter to perish.

 

Or perhaps, the tinkerer in Him thought, perhaps there may be an exception.

 

Taking only the smallest of logical leaps, Enden-Ra wondered if He too might belong to some greater, more eminent Life cycle. Whether there might be a God or a Goddess who had created all the other Gods and Goddesses out there in the vast Universe, including He. 

 

Unable to resolve Himself to this, the conundrum of all conundrums, He eventually let go of any lingering angst, electing instead to continue to improve upon His craft and thereby honor His vow to forge always through the might of love and tolerance even better and more beautiful realities of existence than which had come before, as He felt He was born to do. 

 

Erring, always.