The Askandar

Book excerpt: The Askandar is a continuation of the story ETMA PNIKRE. The Askandar, the great starship has escaped with its six thousand survivors from the cremation of the planet Earth and now rushes onward in its journey through the blackest darkness of the infinite ocean of the universe. In the starship, within its occupants, live all of the natural instincts and emotions, which had fluxed and flowed within the cultures, the survivors had left behind. No one had given much consideration to the great broad spectrum of the human condition, which would demand its satisfaction, even though it had been stripped from its natural home. The individual's instinctive creature found itself resident within a closed capsule, where it still needed to satisfy its ancient secret yearnings, and to find contentment for the beast, which secretly underlies civilized humanity, that it might be peaceably consoled. And so, though Earth and its societies had all become just a distant cinder, the mysterious ways of Mother Earth had been so patiently distilled into every cell and every fiber of the people on the starship, that her ways, her embedded instincts, her emotions of love, hatred, and savagery, rode within the ship in the safe luxury of each individual survivor.