AFTER MUCH CONSIDERATION, The special council on Oig had concluded, as Aum and Oig had, that the killing of like fauna by the priest and the sacrifice of the fauna's vital liquid to the ivory and gold god image had not resulted in any discernable benefit to the Minoan people; but since it was part of the Minoan tradition, it must have yielded some satisfactory results in the past, and, therefore, the procedure would be recorded for future reference. However, since Aum and Onz had not been able to approach the priest and ask for intervention on the part of Oig--in the Diroid 1,540,872, which was the Christian Earth year 1270 BC--they were sent back to the blue planet to continue their investigations.
Excerpt:
On Oig
ON EARTH, IT WAS the Christian year 15,000 BC. On the planet Oig, in the star system Cuomz, it was Diroid 1,275,879. It had been 1,275,879 Oig years, Diroids, since the God of Oig, Ziratremor, had died.
Having decided that Ziratremor must not have been the real God of the Universe, since he only lived the typical life length of an Oigion, 386,207 Diroids—about 20,000 Christian Earth years—the elders of the highly advanced civilization of Oig formed a special council, the purpose of which was to try to establish a connection between the Oigions and the real God of the Universe, whatever that was, and to ask It for help saving Oig. It was imperative that they do so, as Oig, had reached a stage of serious bio-decline and it was becoming obvious to the astrotechs that all of their technological efforts thus far to save the planet had come to not.
It was also clear to the elders, that Ziratremor, even though he had put on a good show over a period of thousands of Diroids, with much pomp and ceremony, had not been a deity nor had he actually received any divine guidance, and that such guidance was sorely needed to either make catastrophic changes on Oig to restore its growth and water supply, or to plan to leave it altogether, and go colonize a planet somewhere else.
Two of those chosen for a planetary mission were a pair of young male clones. The nearest twenty-first century earthly pronunciation of their names would have been Aum and Onz.
Oig astrotechs had plotted all known blue planets, on their electronic star charts, and had selected one planet in a far distant star system for Aum and Onz to jointly seek the needed connection with the God of the Universe.
In the beginning of Diroid 1,275,883, all preparations had been completed, so amidst much ado and fanfare, a vast crowd of Oigions watched as Aum and Onz solemnly went aboard their saucer-shaped spacecraft.
As a crowd-pleaser, Aum set the craft for a slow liftoff. It ascended into the heavens above the crowd, above the crystalline red land-scape of mountains and purple lakes, up through the deep-blue shield of air, into the light of the three distant suns that kept Oig at a perfect tem-perature during the entire Diroid.
In about one-tenth of a Diroid, they would reach the planet Earth.
