Pintor’s News

The history of the Earth in stained glass is a very different kind of read. Without labels to title events or places, it forces the brain to categorize things in more visual ways. The overview is telling. So much needless killing and loss along with a good deal of ingenuity and inspiring creative problem solving. In the end, after centuries of being so sure that we would do ourselves in, it’s a war with another planet that brings the destruction of the Earth. The people on that planet are also human, so there must have been a common point in the history of the two worlds. Was Lux a colony world of the Earth or was it the other way around? It’s a question I hope to answer when I study the history of Lux next. 

The war between Earth and Lux is, visually, a black and white war. The humans of Earth at that time are almost all dark pigmented peoples with just a sprinkling minority with white pigments. It appears that the Lux world is almost entirely white and they have a psychological hang-up about darkness. Black represents the evil lurking shadows while white represents safe pure goodness. 

It was difficult to believe that the kind and thoughtful Anches could come from such simplistic, cut and dried, and completely unmerciful people. Was it possible that he could change their minds, give them a new way of looking at things?

If the Library represented a place outside of time, could history change?  Was what I saw set in stone, the way it was, is and will be? Or was what I saw something that could develop differently with new colored glass stories in the place of the ones I just read?

Something in me hoped this was possible.

After days and weeks of eating alone, when I opened the door to the dining room there was someone seated at the table.

“Pintor!” I exclaimed and ran to him, but he did not get up. 

“Pintor! It’s so good to see you! What did you find out?”

There was something wrong. He didn’t look at me and there was a feeling of defeat about him. His clothing was strange and torn. There was blood in scratches on his face and on his hands. Something terrible had happened.

“Sit down, please, Althea,” he said, barely audible, still not looking at me. I sat in the closest chair.

“What happened?”

“I never thought… I just never had any idea…”

He couldn’t speak and there was an anguish in him so heavy that I wondered if he might go into shock.

“Pintor, now is not the time to talk about it,” I said, getting up and going over to the soup cistern to ladle a bowl for him. Good strong, hot, thick soup. That’s what he needed. I plunked a spoon in the middle of it and set it in front of him. Then, I went back and got a bowl for me. I returned to the table and began to scoop the soup into my mouth, which as I’d hoped, prompted my brother to do the same the way one person’s yawn causes another to do the same. His face did not change expression. It was as if he wasn’t tasting the food at all. But I knew it would help eventually and it did. His face started to get a little more color in it. Several times I almost spoke, but forced myself to wait for him to be the first. It was the only way. 

I finished the soup long before he did and waited. To keep myself from speaking, I thought about the colored glass panels I’d seen that day, remembering their details to determine if there was anything new I could learn. There was a panel that showed a ship landing in the flattest most deserted place they could find, probably Australia, I guessed. Was this the first interaction or a response to Earth’s interaction with Lux? 

“They landed on Mars and attacked,” he finally said. “Theo was with me.” He looked at me then. My heart sank. Was Theo alright? “We didn’t see it coming. We did what we could to defend ourselves. There was so much death. So, so much blood…”

“Is Theo dead?” I couldn’t keep myself from asking.

Pintor looked at me. “Theo survived. He’s the one who insisted I come back here, who insisted I tell you…”

He lost the ability to speak again. I waited patiently, considering filling up the soup bowl one more time. I was about to stand when he spoke again.

“We fought side by side, Theo and I. He’s not just my nephew, you know, Althea, he’s my best friend, he’s my brother. We’ve been there for each other through so many things. He built the first stellar map into my ship. And when we were about to lose power and oxygen, he put together some sort of contraption that – well, I don’t even know how it worked – but it did and we made it. And when we met that beast on the dark rock that was just about to extinguish my life, he toppled the beast and rescued me. Endless stories, Althea. Your son is the best of us all.”

Again, he lost his words.

“You could make the stories into colored glass and put them into the Library,” I suggested. “It would honor Theo to create a lasting legacy like that.”

“Althea,” he said dismissively. He was about to tell me what he didn’t want to tell me, by the tone of his voice, something that would make any colored glass story unnecessary or insignificant. “Theo and I were fighting for our lives, side by side. Our attackers wore helmets, so we couldn’t see their faces. Theo said they were from a place called Lux, a planet he’d discovered years ago, a candidate to be the world humans would colonize in case Earth became uninhabitable. Unfortunately, the people of Lux didn’t like that idea very much. It’s like we’d set off a hornet’s nest, they came after us, on Earth, and then on Mars, and…”

He was looking at his hands like he wished he could make them disappear. Was the blood on them his, someone else’s, both?

“I killed one of them, Althea,” he said. “I thought he was about to put the sword to Theo, but now, looking back, I’m not so sure. He may have been trying to stop the fight when I think back over it, but it was happening so fast. I know he was yelling out something and it was something in a language that I understood, which surprised me because I couldn’t figure out anything the people of Lux were saying. Theo must have figured it out because he called out for me to stop, but it was too late.”

I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“I don’t know why I did it, but I knelt down beside him. Maybe I realized he’d been shouting out something I understood. I pulled off his helmet.”

He stopped again as if it was just impossible to say or maybe he hoped I’d simply be able to figure it out so that he didn’t have to, but I really didn’t have any idea aside from a sick feeling inside that something was terribly wrong.

“I pulled off his helmet and saw that it was Anches. I killed Anches.”

Next: Taking Control

This is the nineteenth part in a series of stories. Following are the previous installments starting with the first:
1.   The Library
2.   Listen, Move, Hide, Repeat
3.   A Necessary State of Alarm
4.   Anches
5.   A Question in Colored Glass
6.   How a Lifetime Friendship Began
7.   In the World I Created
8.   To Make Things Right Again
9.   Escape from the Library
10. Pintor’s World
11. Vincente
12. What I Didn’t See Coming
13. First Person Binary
14. Closing the Loop
15. Finding Kali
16. Escape from Smort
17. Lux Earth Wars
18. Tenerife