Writing and Mythology

With the food crisis solved, the God-Given City finally settled into true stability, and once more began to flourish and grow.

A population of a few thousand was not their limit. Redlichia meant to build a city-state of tens of thousands, even a hundred thousand.

Beyond that, Redlichia could not even imagine what a city-state of such size would look like.

He stood atop the high wall of his palace, looking out over the buildings of the God-Given City, one after another.

Besides the houses where people lived, there were fields for drying salt, workshops for curing food, storehouses to keep it in, great wells sunk down to connect with the sea, and buildings of every other sort.

Far off, marshes walled in with stone lay like farmland, and trilobite women leapt into the water to drive and catch the shoals of fish.

He had created so many things, and brought this place to teeming life.

"I once made a promise to God, that I would build a great civilization that would never fade."

"That everyone here would stand guard over God, and make offerings to God."

"Ten thousand years. A hundred thousand years. A million years."

"All the way to... eternity."

He turned to look at his queen. "Do you think I can do it?"

The queen looked at Redlichia with open worship, her eyes brimming with tenderness and longing.

"You are the King of Wisdom, the firstborn son of God, the wellspring of every intelligent spirit."

"You will surely be able to do it."

Redlichia smiled and took the queen's hand, and looked out at the sea and the setting sun.

"Yes!"

"I will be able to do it. And I will do it."

"Because this is the promise I made to God, the oath I swore to Yinsai, supreme above all."

Under the light of the sinking sun, the whole city bustled with activity.

His eldest daughter was back from fishing, and she and the other trilobite women with her lifted their catch high amid a crowd that pressed in around them, winning a burst of cheers. Redlichia and the queen shared a look, approval showing in both their eyes.

It was then that Redlichia's eldest and second sons came running up.

Having lived through their last crisis, Redlichia's sons had grown uneasy, and they resolved to set down in record the myth of God's power to create life, and the legend of the King of Wisdom, so as to show the greatness of God, and the might of the King of Wisdom, Redlichia.

Through this, they meant to tell everyone the nobility of their own bloodline, that they were people chosen by God.

They carved the story of God and the King of Wisdom into the face of a great stone slab, and on its reverse, the story of how the King of Wisdom had led the trilobite men to build a civilization. They meant to raise this stone marker at the entrance to the God-Given City.

Redlichia looked at that great standing slab of white stone and at the images carved scene after scene across it, God descending upon land and sea, God guiding them to find this land of shelter. Every one of those scenes was something he had lived through himself.

And yet, he could not shake the feeling that something was missing.

As though... it lacked the very air of civilization that an intelligent race ought to have built.

It was less a mythic epic than it was a band of savages, dwelling in the wilderness, carving onto a cave wall some chapter of a miracle they could not begin to understand.

"Ah, that is it. We have no writing yet."

Redlichia remembered something Yin Shen had once told him, back when God had created the trilobite race. "A true civilization ought to have a written language of its own. It ought to have an art and a philosophy of its own. It ought to have the power to remake the world, and to understand it."

Redlichia went again to ask Yin Shen what God's own writing ought to look like.

God gazed at the fusion monster's shell embedded in the temple wall, as though looking into some vast, transparent tank. He watched the creatures within swim to and fro, and all the while he walked slowly along beside the stone wall.

"You still haven't created a writing system of your own?"

Redlichia followed behind Yin Shen. "God, You never taught Redlichia God's own writing!"

Redlichia had only ever learned how to speak by following Yin Shen. He had never once learned from him how to write.

Yin Shen shook his head. "My writing belongs to me. It is my memories, and everything good in them."

"It does not belong to you, nor does it belong to the trilobite men."

He looked at Redlichia. "Redlichia. Writing is the most important thing a civilization carries within it. You mean to build a civilization that belongs to the trilobite men, so create a writing that belongs to you and to you alone."

Yin Shen did not teach him his own writing directly. To his mind, that belonged to humankind, not to the trilobite men.

Redlichia felt a little lost. He had no idea where to begin.

Until today, he had not even had a clear sense of whether they ought to have writing at all.

Yin Shen tapped the fusion monster's shell, and in an instant its transparent surface turned opaque, lines running crosswise and lengthwise across it, flowing with light.

With a fingertip he drew a circle upon it, and light bloomed out along the line as it formed.

"This is the sun!"

Redlichia looked on, half understanding.

Below it he drew a simple crescent, and told Redlichia, "This is the moon!"

Redlichia understood now. To him, writing was nothing more than a picture pared down.

He drew a single wavy line upon the shell.

"This is water," he said.

Then he drew three wavy lines, and cried out in wild excitement, "This is the sea!"

Under God's guidance and teaching, one simple character after another came into being.

Redlichia looked at the shell, covered now in strange, unfamiliar symbols, and his eyes shone bright, his hands clenched tight.

Writing.

A thing born of pictures, and yet more powerful than any picture could be.

He could feel that these symbols held some wondrous power within them, one that could express every mystery and hidden truth in this world, and carry it down through the ages, recorded and remembered.

With writing, a life and a whole race seemed to become something else entirely, something set apart, something transcendent.

A life or a race without writing, and one that possessed it, were two utterly different kinds of being.

And they had just taken that very step.

The writing of the trilobite men had no need to name every beast and blade of grass.

They needed only know the sun, the moon, and the stars.

They had no need for machines or technology. They needed only know wind, fire, thunder, and lightning.

The scope through which they understood the world was not a wide one, and there was not so very much they needed to know or grasp. Building a writing system of their own proved, in the end, not so difficult.

Redlichia had a gift for carving, and within his own palace he cut slab after slab of stone, setting down every character he had made.

Then he called together his sons and his subjects, and announced that they had, at last, a writing system of their own.

His sons and his subjects were baffled. None of them quite grasped what writing even meant.

And so, for the first time, Redlichia showed this world what writing could do. The very first thing they set down with it was myth.

On the stone marker raised before the God-Given City, there were no longer only images. Now, writing was carved into it as well.

God created every living spirit. He created his firstborn son, the King of Wisdom, Redlichia. And next he created his servant, the Mother of Life, Shelly.

Everyone lifted their eyes to the images and the symbols, and a few of the cleverer trilobite men, working from the relief carvings, managed to guess at the meaning of the writing, piecing it together half by luck.

"So this is what God is."

For the first time, they felt with absolute certainty the presence of God, and came to understand the wonders God had wrought.

With writing now theirs, the civilization of the trilobite men pressed further forward. They began to shed the wildness and ignorance of their earliest days, and could, at last, truly deserve the name of civilization.