...billibilli..

By Bill Gallagher

4530 Words

     The boy was 13 when he summoned the demon, and it scared him so badly he wet his pants.  His feet immediately began a natural retreating motion which he was not really aware of, or able to control.  It was an involuntary reaction, that retreating motion, born where all such reactions are born, in the medulla oblongata, the reptilian part of our brain, top o' the spinal cord, the first brain.  As the boy moved away from the demon one of his shoes dragged across the perimeter of the sand circle, breaking the line, stopping whatever had begun.  The candle inside the circle extinguished itself with a sizzling pop.

     He tripped over his own feet then, falling backward, hitting his head hard on the concrete floor of the garage.  A high pitched squeal had escaped him because of what he had seen, sounded just like a little bitch, he thought with disgust.  He felt even more self loathing when his crotch began getting cold from being wet.  Not just a squirt either, this was a full release, some kind of spasm.  He felt his face and ears get hot as he unsteadily raised himself from the floor.  Rubbing the new lump rising under his curly brown hair made him wince and cringe.  He got moving and made his way to the bathroom for a shower and change of clothes.  He would clean up the mess in the garage after.  He was thankful he only lost his water, and hadn't loaded his drawers from the backside.

  

      The boys name was Billy Keenan, and he'd found the old book in an abandoned house out by Dania Beach, very near where Al Capone used to hang out.  He and some friends went on regular treasure hunting trips in the south Fort Lauderdale area, riding bicycles, spending days and days. The wrecked and abandoned house near Dania Beach was not the first ever explored, not by a long shot.

     Billy read the book avidly, thinking it was really good stuff, rare, not something you would find in a public library.  Then, one night while his parents were at a church social event, he decided to try one of the incantations.  That was a perq of being an only child: more and more often as you grew older you found yourself Home Alone, which could be a very fun place to be.  The preparation instructions for the summoning were explicit, and it was just dumb luck or a supernatural knack that allowed him to get everything right the first time, even the word pronunciations, so that a connection was opened to...somewhere else.

     "DEFINITELY somewhere else," Billy thought.

     Later that night while he lay in bed trying to sleep he considered the few seconds he'd remained in the circle, measured against all that had seemed to happen, and a shiver ran down his spine.  He remembered saying the last word of the incantation, and then, right in front of him, in the center of the circle, over the candle flame, an opening had formed, elongated from top to bottom but quickly forming a near circle, like a round blue window.  Something seemed to swim within the window and all these crazy mental impressions assailed his mind: he was breathing water and not drowning, how strange; his fingers had some kind of webbing between them and it felt vare weird mon; the lights were different there, bright, like little pieces of really powerful fire.  Looking further into the round blue window he saw another thing take shape, and that thing was what put his legs in reverse all on their own, with no help from him.  It had something like a mans body, but with a distinctly fishy looking head, even the eyes were off to the sides a little, nowhere near full-forward looking.  The demon stretched a very long and also webbed hand out to him, and right before he fell backward and broke the circle he heard it say "...billibilli...".

     That night, after he finally fell asleep, his brain replayed the days events, and the connection was re-opened in his mind, but at the next level, above this, where conscious memory does not exist, only interaction.   A communication began that would last the lifetime of Billy Keenan, and that would be a very long lifetime indeed.  During other times, in a few years or so, the connection would be opened at the conscious level again, but in the beginning it was best to proceed slowly.  One thing was sure.  The boy would never be the same again.

                                     

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     The huge coral reefs were magnificent.  They covered nearly all of the ocean floor of the water planet, at many varying depths. These corals were specially engineered to grow into the materials necessary for huge machines and space vehicles.  Some even grew metals, and some others grew corundum, or carbon crystal, which were useful for many things.  The race of beings who planted and tended and modified and harvested these corals had developed their system over many millions of years, and their sentience was unequaled in all of their experience.  None of the other lifeforms they had ever encountered, and that was a very large number, even came near a million years of self aware responsibility.  The vast majority could only record a few millenia before devolving back to nothing, to their beginnings.  It was an embarrassing, banal, and overall bothersome aspect of these cosmos.

  

     They called themselves EnCoi in their own language, Coral People.  They were amphibians who lived as long as they chose to live, except in rare catastrophic instances where accidents caused violent obliteration, death without reproduction.  EnCoi chose how long they lived and when they reproduced, because those two things were actually one thing, Death was also Reproduction for the EnCoi.  Reproduction was as important to them as it is to any race, with one outstanding exception: the EnCoi are nonsexual, there is no opposite sex.  They reproduce by choosing to die: when an individual decides it is time to reproduce they "Wear The Chain" and let it drag them to depths specially maintained for that purpose.  At a certain depth the density/pressure of the water causes a metamorphosis, and the cellular makeup of the individual becomes lost in an all encompassing segmented discorporation.  The individual dies, and is no more, but thousands of new EnCoi are born.  The few of these that survive the journey back to the coral reefs become new individuals and with help will find their way to positions which serve themselves and the EnCoi best.

     There was no known incidence of an EnCoi remembering the body from whence it was born, there were no memories of past lives; things like that were as alien to them as most of the reproductive practices of other races.  During an earlier time in their history they had encountered a life form with high intelligence which had somehow evolved so that at least three and preferably more individuals were required for a single birth.   This was the one chaotic element in their existence, and it eventually undid them.  The never ending combats and battle resulting from that type of reproduction finally led to the extinction of sentience on that planet.  War had decimated the environment so badly it would be a million years or more before anything near intelligent life could develop there again.

     Unfortunately this was the rule and not the exception almost everywhere they looked.  Over time the EnCoi had taken it upon themselves to correct some of the hardships other races suffered because of these reproductive blind spots.  That of course could not be done without direct intervention, so thats what occurred.  Many races owed any seemingly advanced times they had experienced to the EnCoi, although most of those races had long ago forgotten more than they thought they knew in present times.   

     There is an element of the ridiculous at work in the cosmos, transcending even chaos.  This was one thing The EnCoi seemed able to understand much better than other sentient races, and for that reason they were a very light hearted though resigned group whose overall numbers were counted in trillions, across a million planets or more.  Because they were amphibious ocean dwellers they were able to inhabit many planets invisibly, undetected by local sentient beings, if that was necessary.  And it was often necessary to stay hidden on a foreign planet, at least until good reconnaissance and other intelligence could be gathered.   Due to their seemingly unique nonsexuality EnCoi perspective was much more objective and therefore more useful than other races, so it was all worth the effort, they could in fact make great change happen regularly.  They perceived themselves to be a Direct Force of Evolution in the cosmos.  This was not their opinion, this was something they had learned in very hard ways over long periods of time.

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     Five years passed for Billy Keenan before he met the demon again, and it was not by his choosing that it happened.  He had all but forgotten his encounter that night in the garage, mostly because he was enjoying his time as a teenager in North Hollywood Florida where he lived.   He had lost his sexual virginity even before he learned to drive, and he would remember her forever.  She had dumped him quickly and unceremoniously, and once recovered from that first traumatic heartbreak he began again, and now knew many girls his age in that way.   The Fort Lauderdale area can be a wonderful place for a teenager to come of age, though Billy would not understand this except in retrospect, after he traveled a bit, to personally witness some of the awful dreadfulness this world has to offer. Things like the psychic stink of proud ignorance, or the truly filthy bestiality behind Might Makes Right.  One thing he learned early is that Truth is not always pretty, but it does not have to be pretty, because it is Truth.

     Billy had signed up to join the United States Navy upon graduation from High School, and that would be soon.  He found himself walking the local beaches at night, introspective, wondering where the path he had chosen would lead him.  He vowed to give it his best effort, and see what the years ahead brought to him.  In this he would be ultimately surprised, but uncertainty of Everything covers human perceptions like a gauzy cloth, and that above all is the human condition.  The religions of Billys world preyed primarily on the sexual differences of people to create shame and other idiot ideas among the flock, with control the only agenda; these religions were the ones who wove the cloth covering peoples perceptions, and the mass at large seemed oblivious and uncaring for the most part.  One song Billy liked from a few years back, Redemption by The Redlight King, put it like this: "...They sell us torches, and they're the ones who make it dark..."

     Confusion strife and conflict are the real gods of religious people, and they forever lead the race down the garden path to devolution, performed to a cavemans drumbeat, over and over and over.  Billy thought religions were an inescapable trap, a downward spiral, and the more he learned the more he was convinced he was on the right track to get as far away from churches as he could.  That was anti-survival activity, and he wanted no part of it.  Some of his friends had begun talking about it, how religions were all lies to control people, and evil.  He was starting to see this very well now, and when he looked at people he saw something else, he saw it in their eyes, all of them, and even in his own when he looked in the mirror, it was a haunted look, a hunted look, a result of being beat down over and over again.  It was the look of an animal in a trap, and it was everywhere.

     One of his friends insisted that people had CREATED cats and dogs in a time past, from tiger and bear DNA.  Another said there were ruins on the moon and Mars.  Whenever he really looked at what they said, it pretty much became self evident, these espousals, this blasphemy; this freedom from shackles.  Billy Keenan had quit going to church as soon as he got his drivers license, taking rides to the Everglades instead of early services.  It was the year 2018 and everything was changing very fast.      

      On that fateful night when he met the demon again he was walking close to the water just north of Johnson Street Beach under a full moon which shined down very brightly.  He was barefoot and it was 1 AM.  Looking out over the water he thought he saw something familiar, a long ago memory now, but no, it was just the full moons reflection on the calm water.

     Then, within the reflection of the moon something seemed to move, he thought maybe it was a shark or tarpon being illuminated by the bright moonlight, but the reflection itself rose up out of the water, becoming once again The Blue Window to that other place.  He did not feel as frightened this time, and wouldn't know for awhile yet that this was because of a five year dialogue and instruction course he had been host to since the initial happening.  There would be time enough for those explanations later.  The demon was the same as before, or at least appeared so, a fish head on a mans body.  Again it reached out a webbed hand, and again it said "...billibilli...".

     "Who are you?" Billy asked, with just a little tremor in his voice.

     The demon did not hesitate, and spoke in English, or what seemed to be English.  In later conversations it would come out that the real communication taking place was mind to mind, not vocal at all, it just seemed like speech.

     "My name is Fithmar.  And yours is billibilli."

     Billy nodded, said "Allright. What do you want?"

     The demon made a gesture with one of its hands as it dipped its head.  This was an expression of laughing joy, although Billy could not and did not know it.  He felt it a little bit, along with that very strange sensation of breathing water, and the webbing between his fingers and now his toes too.

     Fithmar said "I very much wish to be your friend.  We have great work to do together..."

     "What work?"

     "We will change your world billibilli.  We will make it better."

     "And how do you propose to do that?" the young man asked sternly, doing a pretty good imitation of William Jackson Keenan The First, his father.

     "...billibilli....we will do it like we do everything, we will grow it a little at a time."

     Suddenly Billy's consciousness was washed with something, a great dawning took place, uncertainty left the premises, the gauzy cloth covering his perceptions was thrown away, at least for the moment.  This was not a Demon, Fithmar was a being from another planet!  A WATER planet!

     "YES! " said the voice in his mind "We have been there before, we brought you the water fire..."

     "Water Fire?"

     A picture of those weird lights from his memories of 5 years before erupted in his mind, it was a fire made from water that was almost magical in its ability to cut through matter.  Dawning realization made him look away from the window for a moment, seeing the world in a very different way, enthralled.   When he looked back the window was gone, it had closed and the moons reflection was once again flat on the surface of the Atlantic ocean.   He waited for nearly three hours, staring at the reflection of the moon on the water, but it did not re-open that night, and it would not open again for almost three years.  This was to allow Billy Keenan the time he needed to assimilate what he had consciously been bombarded with.  All the while the dialogue in his unconscious mind continued when he slept, and even during his waking hours; he really had no idea of this portal in his brain, and the uses to which it was being put.  He did begin dreaming of Fithmar, and the water planet called RaCoi, the Planet of Coral.  He usually woke from these dreams feeling refreshed, and knowing much more than he ought to about that far away water planet, the industrial center and home world of a very extensive star faring race, the EnCoi. 

     And time progressed.

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     There was great rejoicing on RaCoi, because a new portal to Earth had been created, however tenuous. There were parties in the vast coral caverns which stretched for miles and miles, and much heated discussion.  Each light within the gigantic walls represented an apartment for a single EnCoi, and there were millions of lights.  All sorts of celebrations took place while future plans were made, and scenarios considered.  This was their life, the cooperation, the sharing, the reaching toward oneness among the people, and they loved it, every one.  This new and never before heard-of portal was the biggest thing that had happened in almost forever, it promised to radically change the entire outlook on things over a very short period of time.  This they loved too.  It was time to Wear The Chain when life became boring.  That did not seem as if it would be an issue anytime soon.

      The EnCoi had at one time spent nearly unspeakable sums to visit the home world of Billy Keenan, in the very dawn of mans latest civilizations; there are pictures of them carved into the stone walls of the earliest middle eastern/oriental temples, and in other places.  A physical matter transmitter portal had been planted at the underwater EnCoi base off the West Coast of what is now Northern South America, and it allowed free travel between RaCoi and Earth for supplies and living beings.   The amphibians had left Earth fairly early, with plans to return at regular intervals via the portal which was a piece of matter specially entangled with the water fire of their home world.

     It was not understood why the portal that had been left behind stopped working -- it was the first and only time EnCoi engineering had failed in a very long time; underwater tectonic activity was thought to be the probable culprit, and that in fact was the case, though it would not be truly known for a while yet.  After this debacle it became standard procedure to leave multiple portals in far distant places on any planet visited, and the cost ignored.

     No matter, another visit to earth via space craft could not be justified for at least a thousand more years.  There were many planets to visit and colonize, and Earth would not come up again for a good while yet.  It was hoped that the portal would somehow start working as time went on.   That had not transpired up to the time Billy Keenan opened the new ethereal portal for communication, the one to which he had summoned Fithmar, who had been as surprised as anybody.

     The EnCoi were well versed in the nuances of interdimensional physics though, and the overall variety of physics available for exploitation, which are mainly dependent on ones proximity to either a white hole (a living star) or a black hole (a dead star), or to artificial conditions created by machines and electronic fields which partially mimic those two things.  Physics change as one gets closer to density anomalies, so in effect there is no such thing as "Normal" physics, just things you can make work under many different conditions and circumstances.  This was well beyond humanity in its present incarnation,  because humanity had devolved steadily at least 4 times since they had peaked then fallen for the first time over one hundred thousand years ago.  The truest mark of this devolution was the stark fact that they were not even aware that it had happened, in spite of the evidence lying all around them, in plain sight. They preferred to take guidance from "Spiritual" types who used anything they could to create slaves.  Real brutes.  The EnCoi understood everything very well, they were masters of reality.  They did not depend a lot on explanations.  They believed what they observed.

  

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     The Navy had been good to Billy Keenan, though at times he wondered what had ever possessed him to enlist in such a huge undertaking, where the best one could hope for was to get through it alive and with ones sanity intact.  He had been in the service for over two years, with less than two years to go.  Time went very fast because he was very busy all the time.  Shipboard life was hustle and bustle, with some fun too.  He did his time as a cook in the vast ships kitchens, and he was well liked for his creative cookery and overall good humor.  He had not seen anything remotely resembling warfare, and he did not expect to, the world was uncharacteristically calm, as if it was holding its breath, waiting.  His Dad once described something like that taking place before Billy himself was born, in the 1990s, right before a giant comet called Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter, as if everyone somehow knew on some level that big things were going down.  During his off hours he took chefs courses online and chatted with his friends in Fort Lauderdale; he figured he would be able to get a pretty good cooking job back in Florida once he put into Port Everglades for the last time, a fair assumption.

     The thing that kept him sane was the ocean.  He loved to walk the decks of the aircraft carriers and other boats he served on, especially at night during full moon.   He knew why this was so, and didn't care.  He was sure he would see Fithmar again, and was patient to wait.  He had no idea what was really happening, but he liked the idea of communicating with aliens, he didn't know of anybody else who even read about these things, say nothing about experienced them.  He often wondered what the other incantations in that book might lead too, but really, he considered himself lucky not to have called a Real Demon, if there is such a thing, and he was quite willing to leave well enough alone.

     On a full moon night in July, while walking a railing of the aircraft carrier Jefferson V which was slowly moving toward a rendezvous with some other nearby ships, he found himself very alone, in spite of the humidity and heat below decks.  He did not really think about it, but later he would consider it an oddity.

     It was then that the moons reflection again became The Blue Window to that other place, and Fithmar appeared almost immediately.

     "...billibilli..."

     "Hi," he heard himself say.  He had rehearsed this moment over and over again for more than two years, and all the elaborate locution he had planned came forth as nothing more than "Hi".  He was nervous, it made him fret.  Fithmar did not seem to notice.

     "We must hurry now" said the alien, "We do not have much time.  You are very nearly over the perfect spot in this ocean to leave another portal/door/opening.  We do not know if this will work, if we can pass anything to you through this channel you have opened."

     Billy must have gotten a questioning look on his face or the equivalent thought in his mind because Fithmar gave an explanation:

     "...billibilli, you are the first person ever who has been able to open a channel between our worlds with the power of your mind.  This is extremely valuable to you and us.  Otherwise it would take the entire output of 10 planets for 5 years to finance one colonial spacecraft crossing to your planet from here.   Bear all this in mind if you decide to try this experiment, it must happen fast, just moments from now."

     Billy was speechless, and could only nod quickly.  Fithmar held out his long webbed hand to Billy one more time through the blue window, and Billy saw a light in it, one of the fire lights he'd noticed the first time he had met the "Demon".

     "billibilli take the light into your hand," said Fithmar, and Billy did.  He held it for a few seconds, and it began to burn.

     "Now throw the light into the ocean billibilli, throw it now!"

     Billy Keenan was only too glad to oblige, and he knew he would have to see a medic about the burn on his hand, and come up with a good explanation for it too.  Cooks could do that.  He watched as the light hit the water and sank deep and deeper, until it was gone.  Then:  a blast of light from below that was instantaneous and bright enough to light the ocean for miles around.  Apparently others had not seen it, and that was one more odd thing for him to consider later on.  He looked down into the dark depths of the ocean, all of the light below had dissipated, and he thought it was his eyes recovering from the flash when he saw movement alongside the slow moving ship.  It took a few seconds for him to realize what he was seeing.

     They were very large creatures, larger even than porpoises, almost as big as killer whales.  Billy figured thats what they would look like to any of the ships sensing instruments, a pod of small whales.  There were easily a hundred of them, and maybe more.  They did have bodies shaped like men, two arms, two legs, and the heads of fishes.  Their bodies appeared to be scaled like a fishes too, but in fact that was the segmenting inherent in the organism EnCoi.   One of them swam easily over to the spot directly below Billy, using its legs like a big tail.  It looked up, keeping pace with no trouble at all, and said:

     "...billibilli...that was very well done."

     It was Fithmar!

     Fithmar continued speaking to Billy as he glided easily along:

     "You are the only living bridge across space that our race has ever encountered, and that is saying a lot.  It has made the immediacy of this mission even more pressing.  This ability of yours must be developed, it is of multigalactic importance.  Now, to the moment...your oceans are cesspools and everything is dying.  We arrived just in time.  Continue to watch the moons reflection, we can talk that way very easily now, or just light another candle.  This spot is near our new base, and your help will be enlisted very soon as our primary contact here.  There is much to do." 

     And with that all the beings dived below the surface and were gone.

FINI