Questions . . . Answered

How does Sharanrala know so much about the Earth?

As I talk to readers of Letter from Tomorrow I have noticed that there are a couple of questions that seem to come up over and over that I wanted to address here. Although the book is really about what, where, and who we are now, the realities of the larger universe figure prominently into the story and because they are not exhaustively explored in the book (as they could, of course, not possibly be) there are some questions left unanswered. The first one is probably the one that I've heard the most often, and that is the question above: "How does Sharanrala know so much about the Earth?" As an Eowelmnian, she seems inordinately preoccupied with us; not just the Earth in general, but the Earth in the first part of the twenty-first century. People have wondered about this, and I have to agree that it is worth an explanation. The narrator of Letter recently let me read some words that he had written in his journal, which I think may help answer some things:



January 25, 2007

When I first met Sharanrala she said very little about Eowelmn, the Eowelmnians, or perhaps more interestingly, the Elions themselves. As time went on, though, I did learn some key ideas: The Elions are the most advanced species in the Milky Way, and they brought a small group of people from an Earth-Goddess culture that lived on what is now south-eastern Europe, to a nearby planet that orbits the star 18 Scorpii. Sharanrala's people left Earth in order to preserve a population of our species on the habitable planet of Eowelmn. Sharanrala is a representative of her planet, chosen by her planet's council, as an emissary to our world.

Before she came back with me to Earth, she taught at a prestigious university, specializing in Earth Studies. She was told about my mission to her planet about 20 years before we arrived, when she was just ten years old. Since that time she has studied Earth languages, cultures, religions, and history through the lens of the Elion historical record--the scientific data of a culture that has been photographing, recording, and storing information about the planet Earth for more than eight hundred thousand years. Sharanrala doesn't talk about it much, but she studied at an Eowelmnian University for eight years. Her telepathic abilities have made her an incredible student, and she has always taken an extra load of classes, even in an education system that is incomprehensibly specialized.

In the library of the University she attended she had instantaneous access to any text written on any planet in the Milky Way for ages beyond ages. Of course, she could read less than .001% of them--she can read only nine languages. Unfortunately, I had to write Letter from Tomorrow for her, since she can read our language perfectly, but does not write well in English. Unfortunately, there are limitations to what I--a twenty-first century Earthling--can be capable of understanding. I am trying to learn Eowelmnian, so that I can read her book. It's impossible to translate into English, so I'm struggling to learn their laborious language. I shouldn't complain, though, it's beautiful and deep--evolved in an effort to much more fully explain the depth and breadth of what a person is thinking. Sharanrala told me that there are Eowelmnian books written by two people together, in a full dialog of telepathic thought.

It's a beautiful universe. I think that really Sharanrala would like to move even farther back in time, but the Elions don't like to bring people from time to time on the same planet--it creates paradoxes of thought and time for too many people and requires an unimaginable quantity of energy. Yesterday Sharanrala joked that the Elions don't seem to want to see us trying to compete with Jules Verne on the best-seller lists any time soon.