CHAPTER FOUR
Eve woke up to the light of all three suns shining through the tops of the trees. She had slept for nearly eight hours, and all her muscles were sore from having ran for the entire day yesterday.
She was not accustomed to the silence in her head. Before the days of the humans, constant whisperings were a background to any solitary life and were a permanent part of everyone's existence.
But when those chips had first entered their brains, communication had broken down to little more than a few sentences to each other at a time--stronger, of course, if the bond between the two was stronger. Love magnified all communication between two Novacadians, made the voices louder, more coherent.
The less she heard from her father, the more concerned she became. The love between them was so strong that it had endured multiple operations, and though the whisperings of others had died long before, she still heard his voice in times of urgency.
The experiments that the humans performed on them were gruesome, considering that the Novacadians' primary source of strength and sustenance were their bonds between each other. They ate little, required little water, and if it were not for the intervention of the humans, they would live for hundreds of years. Love surrounded them, empowered them, sustained them. They fought no wars. They had no disagreements. There were little threats to their peaceful existence. But humans carried with them the threat so violent and so powerful that it could wipe out the entirety of the Novacadian race: hatred.
That was something that the humans did not understand: it was not the crude implants they inserted that stripped them of their power: it was the hatred that they communicated to them through these implants that left them blind, vulnerable and naked. For the first time ever among their race, a new, fearsome emotion was poisoning and killing them, one by one. And the accidents were only symptoms of the illness that was beginning to become the plague that would be destined to kill them all in due time.
The accidents were merely outpourings of passionate emotions. Several Novacadians already had fallen victim to its spell. Inspired by the evil intentions of the humans and in reaction to the tortures they were imposing on them and their family members, three humans were killed.
But it was hatred, not love, that had enabled them to do this. In all reality, Novacadians could have wiped out these planetary intruders with the strength of their collective intellects, but they had chosen not to do so because to have done so would have weakened and hurt them. However in time, the actions of the humans would prove to do just that anyway.
She began to panic. On her knees, she called for her father again and again, but there was no answer. She began to suspect, with growing certainty, that she had to go back. She may have been the one they were trying, above all, to protect, but the fear and concern she felt for her father and brothers and sisters was intolerably weighing on her heart. She couldn't see them fall victim to the evils of the astronauts' mind-control schemes, hear their writhings of agony as they fell to hatred.
It wasn't a new world that the humans wanted. They wanted power. Novacadians possessed great power within their minds, and the humans wanted to harness it. Under a guise of trying to establish communication with the first intelligent alien life form ever discovered, they were trying to unlock the mysteries of their race. But they would not find it, so long as they were stained with the blood of their evils, which were infinite.
Eve slowly got to her feet and stood on shaky legs. She was perhaps the most powerful being on the entire planet and yet she still felt the burn of overexertion.
"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned." The chaplain was a nervous and eager man, with pale hands and a sallow face. Anthony gave confession not because he believed in it, but because it was a routine that had been drilled into him when he was a little boy. It provided some relief, which he did not really understand since he did not believe in the existence of God, but mostly he did it out of respect for his departed parents, who, he imagined, would have wanted it that way.