Tales From the Old New Land - Century 2 - Generation 7 - Real Beginning

So this letter is meant for God and Abel, though I don't know how to send it or if anybody else does. If anybody ever finds this letter, if you can find a way to send this to God I'll be very grateful. 

It's been a little more over 30 years since The Flood. From the way people talk about it you'd think everybody died, but it couldn't have even been one in a hundred who got themselves killed. Maybe if you were closer to the Mediterranean you had more chance of dying, but people here just hiked themselves to the Zagros mountains, and a lot of people whose houses were made of mudbrick just camped out on the roof and fished. 

The Flood wasn't that big an event. ...Oh it was big, but mostly because it made us shelter in place for two years. It was just a pre-echo of the real event that came for us within the flood's cause. 

We thought The Flood focused everything, solved everything, clarified everything, and obliterated from our minds all the trivial drek. The generation before the flood was a generation of partisanship and violence. We were the generation of unity and love. We all experienced the same loss, the same fears, the same meshiggas, the same boredom, the same rage. 

Everybody knew who was at fault. Everybody knew what they had to do. It was right around the flood that everyone had the sense that to make a flood this big, there must be a god so powerful that no other god can be much of a god, and it could only be Ea, the water god. There was even a movement to rename him Y'Ea because he was so willing to use his power. But just about everybody agreed: if one god can really be that powerful, we needed to wage a war on him before he killed the rest of us. 

Sure, not everybody believed this, Ea had a bunch of loud partisans on Earth who were violent and dangerously powerful, but the partisans of the other six gods had an unbeatable coalition. Any system in which the partisans of Ea win is a broken system, and if the system was really this broken, so the only option left was to go up to heaven and fix the system. It was one of those few moments in every lifetime when everybody seems to speak the same language. 

Nobody actually wanted the responsibility of a god, at least not if they thought about it. But they did want the right to be free of him. They fulfilled every commandment of Ea's in good faith, they obeyed every obligation to sacrifice, they prayed to him whenever they were afraid, they talked to him when they were lonely, and only crazy people ever thought he answered. 

As for me? I knew that Ea was just an old wives' tale. I just had a thought that maybe the Holy One BBH didn't think of, that all that kvetching he does about heavenly schpritz was because there's a leak in heaven, so I wanted to go up there to point it out to him. 

I was there as a scribe in Uruk as the leaders of every major city convened: Eridu, Ur, Nippur, Ubaid, Lagash, Elam, Banesh, Kish, Babel, Erech, Accad, Calneh, Farsa, Ansha, Susa, Irsin, Larsa, Keddesh, Megido, Kass, Hurrain, Malatya, Armenia, Kizzuwatna, Luwia, Melid, Carshemesh, Mitanni, Washukani, Qatna, Armenia, Aramea, Cyprus, Hatti, Hattusas, Mycarae, and Ugarit.

Every one of these cities experienced the flood, and it was just large enough that every one of them believed another flood from Ea was imminent. All of these cities, all of these representatives, all of them speaking barely comprehensible dialects to each other, and it took only ten minutes for everyone to agree what needed to be done: 

A tower to heaven. An elite force of soldiers climbs to the top, does battle with Ea and his rain, defeats the water god, redistributes the rain to its proper season, and if possible, allots the rain more justly throughout the seasons so there is no drought. The tower doesn't need to last forever, it just needs to last for as long as it takes to be climbed up and down once with a 20 minute battle in between. 

They even agreed on a place: a flattest part on the Valley of Shinar. Personally, nobody asked me, but I thought that was unnecessarily cautious to build in a valley rather than a mountain. That's ten thousand cubits more of material everybody needs to buy and build.