In part 1 of The Pinnacle, our hero stands as the last survivor of his dying world. He gets ready to board a self-sufficient ship designed to keep him safe and preserve the Knowledge Tapes, so they can be passed on to next inhabited world.
ALL THE KNOWLEDGE WAS THERE. Knowledge which had brought his world to its peaks and which had led to its destruction. Within those tapes that he had protected and preserved for so long, were the lessons his race had learned in its final hours.
Perhaps other cultures would be able to use them and avoid what his civilization had not been able too. Other cultures could learn from these tapes, the meaning of true civilization and how to maintain a world in a manner that would sustain and uplift its inhabitants.
In these final moments before his departure, he reflected upon those tapes. Their simplicity of presentation, he hoped would ensure their understanding. They had to be understood to be utilized. They offered the key to a lasting culture as compared to a transient one. A few hundred years is hardly a long time to call a culture a civilization. Civility is central, he thought. His culture/civilization had only understood this near the end, when their counsel had begun to plan for the end. The discussions were long and continued into the night and early morning. Why hadn’t they had these talks in the past? Because the present, with its horrible inevitability, was knocking savagely on the door to the future.
He and the members of the counsel had only realized, too late, that the answer and answers lie in an almost intangible idea. An idea taught by teachers of antiquity. Some of those ‘lessons’ or ‘messages’ had been used to decorate temple walls. Words and symbols, inscribed on stone, but only seen as decoration. He thought to himself of the regrets. Why they as leaders had failed to promote – somehow – those words as lessons. They had had an obligation to teach what they believed and passed along to their children. But after almost three millennia of civilization, essential truths had become lost in rhetoric. The true meanings had suffered from old age.
His regrets were magnified when he realized that even he needed to see and absorb the final consequences of their actions, to realize the full horror of the result. The intrusion of the basic self, the debasing element of greed, the few ruling the many, yet lacking the moral or inevitable ‘right’ to do so. Right had been usurped. Yet those whose rights had been taken had given them up without a fight.
The answers, now clearer than they had been in ages past, were hopefully so well defined in the tapes that almost any similarly-evolved civilization would be able to decode them and understand their importance. That importance, he believed, was well laid out and defined. So well so, that he had less anxiety about their eventual discovery and use than he had about the ‘rebirth’ of his planet.
The cold finally became too much for him. He turned and went inside, the doorway sealing with a smooth hiss behind him as he cleared its path. He still wondered about that light he had seen, but dismissed it, as the necessity to leave became more pressing. He gathered up scattered papers and various personal items he had missed and carefully placed them inside a medium- sized backpack.
Minutes later, with a last look around his home, and the sadness of the past gently releasing itself in a sudden sigh, he entered an elevator and descended the 1,000 feet unto the cavern beneath. When the elevator stopped and the door opened, the huge cavern awed him. He had tried to imagine what had created this huge hole but no solution ever came to him because he had not been an excavator, just a scientist looking for a very private place to work. No tunnels shot off into the distance. It was just one hell of a great hole in the ground.
The proportions of his cavern workshop were immense, the dimensions jaw-dropping. Its potential had remained as obvious as it was to him so long ago. He moved from the elevator, passed a pulsating console of controls and proceeded toward the glowing silver object in the center of the workshop. He marveled at its beauty, the silver glow caused by so much scientific ‘stuff’ that even he lost count. It was a silver-white and luminescent culmination of almost 200 years of painstaking planning and exhausting but satisfying work. It was the final glory of this world, its technology, and his remaining years.
He let pride flow through him. It satisfied his esthetic perceptions. Its natural glow from the metallic substances of its manufacture pleased him to the point where he felt embarrassed. But there was no one here to fault him for his pride, so he enjoyed it even more.
He approached the ship with a reverence accorded usually to people in high and respected offices. He stood in front of it feeling the pride of the artist/creator who sees his idea, complete and perfect and a reality.
He pressed a piece of the ornament he wore around his neck. A stairway along the underside of the ship, lowered and he walked fully upright, into his ship. He returned a few minutes later, minus his bundles, and went over to the console, which for so long had monitored this dying world and which now would also keep an additional set of the tapes, in case some future adventurer found his way here.
He began making adjustments on the center console. Second later lights in the cavern began to fade. Darkness, except for the console in front of him, which glowed with a living power of incredible energy forces, was all around him. He made final settings – one to welcome that adventurer who might come later in time. He then moved toward the ship, ascended the stairway and disappeared inside.
He walked along out the corridor that led to the control center.
Suddenly, a certain amount of peace settled over him. It was all over. He and others had done all they could do. He would leave knowing that. If only they had seen. No life could survive her now. He began by buckling himself into the seat in front of the console so that the controls were under his hands, within easy reach.
