Keepers of the Western Forest

by Chris Kennedy

  Chapter 29

   

  Stella found her brother at last, walking in the forest near his grove. He was wearing his customary long cloak and wide-brimmed hat.

  He beamed at her. “Sister! Well met.”

  Stella sensed the change instantly. It was not only the unexpectedly enthusiastic greeting, but also the force radiating from his entire being. This was the Oberon she remembered and loved, the young officer who had captained the pod that first brought them from the mother ship to land on this planet.

  “Brother, you’re back at last.”

  “Yes. I’ve been travelling.”

  Stella laughed. “I meant—you are back! You’ve only been half there for years. What’s been going on?”

   Oberon looked at her seriously for a moment. “You’re right, I have changed. I no longer see those things you’re always talking about as just phases we pass through on our way to a higher reality.” He smiled. “Love, above all. I now believe it teaches us we cannot fulfil ourselves alone. We shouldn’t aspire to some sort of blissful transcendence without first using whatever wisdom we may have picked up along the way to help the rest of our fellow beings.”

  “Ah, Oberon! You don’t know how good it is to hear you say that! But what brought this on?”

  “Two things. I had a breakthrough in my meditations—and I’ve have seen Titania!”

  “Titania?” That was impossible, surely. “But how? Is she here?”

  “No.” Oberon’s eyes were shining under the brim of his hat. “Well—yes and no, that is.”

   “I don’t understand.”

  Brother and sister had been walking slowly side by side during this conversation. Now they stood by the oak grove. They sat down on the stone bench.

  “First I must explain to you the nature of my breakthrough,” Oberon said. “You will remember I was meditating on the workings of the mind and their relationship to the structure of the universe. I hoped to transcend the forms that thought has imposed upon reality to a plane of blissful, empty being.”

  Stella nodded, intent. Her brother smiled and went on.

  “Well, I got behind the structure of the universe all right, but not to a realm of silent bliss. One day, I was sitting right here, formulating a complex equation in my mind. At a certain point, I realized I could have expressed the same thing in a different way, so I adopted this new formula and was about to continue my train of thought, when I suddenly felt with absolute clarity that everything had changed. At first, I didn’t understand—all around me looked the same, the same sun shining on the same trees. But I knew somehow that I was in an entirely different world.”

  Stella looked at him blankly.

  Oberon spread his hands. “Don’t you see? Every time we choose between two alternatives, a new universe comes into being—one in which we make the other choice. It’s hard to imagine. Such a world is not in another place or time. It’s not even another world, really—just this one as a different mode of possibility.”

  “But we can only live in one universe, surely?”

  “Normally—yes. But having solved my equation, I find that I can enter any other universe I wish, if I know what decision brought it into being and go to the point in space where that decision was made! For example, the first thing I tried was to go to a fork in the path I had been walking the day before. I imagined myself back in the moment when I decided to take the right-hand track. Then I chose the left. I immediately noticed a patch of mushrooms growing a little further down the path to the right. They were still there, even though I had picked them the day before.”

  Oberon waited a moment for Stella to appreciate the full significance of what he had just told her. “And now we come to the most interesting part,” he continued, taking his sister’s hand. “A month ago, I took my boat, Ariel, and sailed down to Avalon.”

  Avalon was the rocky island where the scout pod had touched down the day of their arrival, thousands of years before. They had named it after an island in the Old World. Then Stella understood.

  “You went to the place where you made the decision our group would stay here and Titania’s pod would return to the mother ship,” she exclaimed. “You wanted to cross into the universe in which she and the others stayed here and we were the ones who went on to some other galaxy.” She was silent a moment. “You did it because you wanted to see her again. I knew it—you love her!”

  “Maybe!” Oberon laughed. “I know I miss the arguments we were always having.”

  Stella clapped her hands. “Believe me—you two were like the two halves of one of your equations. So you put that boat of yours to good use.”

  The Ariel was a beautiful sailing boat, modelled on the yacht her father and brother had delighted in back in the Old World. It had taken Oberon nearly a hundred years to build it. With its sharp prow, slender hull and triangular sails, it could race through the water and tack in and out of the wind in a way that left the square-rigged ships the mortals used far behind, dependent as they were on favourable breezes.

  “Oh, sister! You are right to liken our minds to some sort of equation. Incredible as it may seem, at the same time as I was sailing to Avalon, Titania, in her world, was on her way there too. When I stood on that rocky plateau at the southern end of the island and stepped into another universe, there she was, sitting on the cliff’s edge, gazing out to sea. She had been drawn there, she told me, by a sudden desire to revisit the place where her life on this planet began.”

  “But you came back. Didn’t you want to stay there with her?”

  Oberon shrugged. “I should have liked nothing better—but you remember how we were. Before long, we were arguing again. Titania finally issued a challenge—I could come and live with her as king, but only if I brought something from my world that she and her people thought might add something of value to theirs.”

  “Her people? King?”

  “Titania’s team had a lot more members than ours did, remember—more than I thought necessary to colonize such a small planet as this, in fact. Well, most of them are still together.” Oberon grinned. “Titania, of course, lords it over them. A veritable Faerie Queen!”

  Stella laughed. “Of course she does! So what will you take her, do you think?”

  “I’m not sure,” answered Oberon. “Something that will help the mortals in her world, I suppose. Titania takes a great interest in them—she has followed their history very closely. Her world looks very much like this one, but from what she told me I gather the mortals have developed rather differently—as you would expect, given the millions of decisions we have all made since landing on Avalon. This realm of Logres, for example, is called England in her world.”

  “England? And there’s no King Arthur or Camelot, I suppose?”

  “No. I get the impression Titania regards the whole western part of her world as being a little barbaric. That highly developed sense of honour and chivalry that Arthur has fostered here and that you admire so much is somewhat lacking there, I’m afraid.”

  “Well then, brother, that’s what you could offer her—stories of Arthur and his knights to inspire the mortals in her world. I can think of a few.”

  Oberon looked thoughtful. “A good idea. But, alas, I’m not much of a storyteller. Could I persuade you to come with me, perhaps?”

  “Can you do that? Take someone with you?”

  “I think so—if we have physical contact, holding hands for instance, and you open your mind to me. Shall I show you?”

  “Sorry. Another time, maybe. Right now, I’m needed here. It’s vital I find Bertilak’s axe, and soon. Did you hear anything yet?”

  Oberon looked at the ground and pursed his lips. “You still want that thing? I asked Gondrifel, one of Bertilak’s servants, but he claimed to know nothing about where it might be. But I must warn you—the axe is dangerous.”

  “In what way?”

  “It seems Bertilak somehow gave it the power to see into a man’s heart and mind. Anyon
e who attempts to pick it up does so at his peril. Unless his conscience is absolutely clear, the axe will turn on him.”

  Stella got up and began pacing back and forth. “Morgan says it’s not important any more. But I don’t believe her. I’m sure she fears the thing.”

  “Very likely. As I told you before, she was Bertilak’s pupil, but he didn’t like what she was turning into. Perhaps the axe was a warning to her, a threat. He was always devising moral tests and whatnot. Like that beheading thing he subjected that poor knight to.”

  “Sir Gawain.”

  “Yes. But Stella, I’m not sure Gondrifel was speaking the truth. I have a nasty feeling Morgan got to him first.”

  “Then we are in trouble. I must go to Camelot at once. Farewell, Oberon.”

  “Farewell, sister.”