REVELATION

I pinched the title from a book that might be good if it didn't offer so much bad advice...

The war had almost been the end of everything.

For a start, the good old-fashioned range of ordinary, decent weapons filled with traditional high-powered explosives had been absurdly destructive, and then when the nuclear stuff had been launched by a side scared of losing too much face, things had almost drawn to a fiery ending.

They would, wouldn't they?

Suddenly the air was toxic, the water radioactive, the mountains crumbling, the forests dead, even the fish struggling for existence before giving up the watery ghost. That's quite close to being the end of everything, don't you think?

It's not that the ordinary folks living their ordinary-folk lives had wanted it. They'd wanted peace, harmony and a quiet life, but the politicians had told them that wasn't enough. What good, they had pontificated, is there in peace when you're in thrall to a foreign power? What good was harmony if your own Government had no say in the world any more? Best die in writhing agony and leave the future to a bleak lifeless quiet life, that's what they'd said, sort of cynically.

One nuclear explosion is a mighty terrifying affair, and the damage it leaves in its wake is horrendous, winds and fires and death, endless death, but just imagine a dozen. And more! It was like the threatened Armageddon promised during the cold war, but worse. Much worse, because it was real.

And when the anger had died along with the angry, the planet had nursed its wounds, and barely a heart beat anywhere any more.

Yet a very few did. A tiny number, but a number none-the-less.

What would you call the time that passed? Aeons? Epochs? Or just a very long time indeed? But time passed. The sun blazed in the sky, it slowly aged, though not by very much in terms of the life of a star. The air slowly cleared. The dust from fire-storms drifted down and settled on the land. A few green shoots appeared, here and there, fresh and tender. The seas started hosting life. It was simple stuff, really, wonderful yet simple.

But simplicity wasn't good enough. Not at all! There was land to be conquered. And it was mostly brand new land, land without a history, land made of the outpourings of volcanic monsters because the fire-storms from the war had created repercussions way down in the planet's heart. Had there been a poet there he might have suggested that the planet wept, but there wasn't so no such fanciful thought ever manifested itself. And anyway, the tears dried up.

There was new land everywhere.

And skies turned from grey to blue, and oceans from tumbling chaos to serene calm.

Continents continued on their diurnal drift, millimetre by millimetre, like they always had. Winds and rains, radioactive at first, sand-blasted mountains out of existence. But that was all right because new mountains rose to take their place. Ice-capped monsters, ravaged by storms, held their sway high in an atmosphere growing clearer by the millennium.

And a worm crawled onto the land from the seas.

Then another.

The land was being reconquered by life!

And some power somewhere, some big hearted power, the one that suffuses the Universe, the one that was there before the beginning of all things and will be there after the end of everything, sighed, and a wind from everywhere blew towards the world that had seen the end of almost everything.

A whisper from nowhere and everywhere swept across everything.

The worm and his mate were were blown back into the sea.

And the wind formed itself into the very noblest of sounds and a voice whispered out from its depth, across galaxies and along the back-alleys of black holes.

“Not again,” it breathed.

And the world was caught by the great breathy voice, and slowly, like a tiny dancer on a gigantic stage, it drifted into the sun, and for a moment, sparkled.