Johann was exhausted when he finally reached a sandy beach dimly lit by the distant overhead light. He pulled Beatrice up on the sand, surprised to discover that there was some small gravity working against him as he lifted her. He immediately began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. For five minutes he tried to force air into her lungs and pump the water out.
When she wouldn’t wake up, Johann became frantic again. He started talking wildly to himself, and then addressed his raving to his unseen and unknown hosts.
“I really don’t give a shit,” he shouted at one point. pausing for a moment in his efforts to revive her, “if you are aliens or angels… But I damn sure do care about this woman, and she doesn’t deserve to die. She is the best human being I have ever met… If one of us must die, then take me instead, and let her live.”
He returned to the resuscitation with renewed vigor, increasing both his tempo and the amount of pressure he was applying to Beatrice’s chest. “You will not die… You will not die,” he kept saying over and over.
After one forceful push, a heavy stream of water burst out of her mouth and her body shook slightly, as if it were trying to cough. Encouraged, Johann pushed hard again and more water streamed out of Beatrice’s mouth. This time she did indeed cough. She was alive! The exultant Johann continued to press rhythmically on her chest until her violent coughing finished the task of emptying the water from her lungs.
He sat beside her on the sand and held her up while her coughing slowly abated. When Beatrice was finally able to draw a clear breath, she smiled wearily at Johann and then lost consciousness again.
Johann stayed awake until he convinced himself that Beatrice was all right. He carefully monitored both her breathing and her pulse. At length he permitted himself to lie down beside her on the sand. Johann fell asleep instantly.
In his last dream he was swimming alone in the middle of a vast ocean. Johann called Beatrice’s name repeatedly, but she never appeared. He saw something in the distance that he thought might be her body, but when he reached it in the dream, it was only a piece of driftwood.
Johann awakened with a start and sat up. The darkness had been replaced by artificial daylight. Beside him Beatrice was still sleeping. He checked her pulse, stood up, and stretched. Then he took a few cautious steps on the sand before jumping into the air. Based on the time it took him to return to the sand, Johann estimated that the gravity level was roughly a tenth of that on Earth.
But how are they creating gravity at all? he wondered briefly as he began to look around. And why?
To Johann’s left the placid lake stretched into the distance as far as he could see. To his right, beyond the white sand beach that was about forty meters wide, lush tropical plants grew up the side of a gentle slope. The unruly, thick vegetation bordered the beach everywhere except in an area about a hundred meters to the right of him, where there was a tidy grove of unusual trees. With his sharp eyes. Johann could see bunches of large, brown spheres hanging from the lower branches of these trees. He decided to investigate the grove.
He walked barefoot across the sand, stopping every ten meters or so to look back at the sleeping Beatrice. When he reached the trees in the grove, which had thick, white trunks, Johann pulled down the bunch of brown objects nearest his head and plucked one of them out of the tree.
The object was the size of a basketball, with a hard brown covering. Looking around on the floor of the grove, he found a wide, flat rock. He sat down, still in view of Beatrice, and hit the top of the brown object against the rock progressively harder until major cracks developed in its surface.
With his powerful hands Johann pulled away parts of the outer shell. A thick, red gelatin oozed out. He pinched off a piece with his fingers and held it under his nose. There was no smell. He was about to taste the red material when he felt the brown sphere move in his hand.
Startled, Johann sat very still for a few seconds until the movement recurred. Then he set the object carefully down on the flat rock so that he could watch it. It jiggled back and forth ever so slightly several times during the next minute. Before anything else happened, however, he heard Sister Beatrice calling his name. In a flash, Johann bounded out of the grove and across the sandy beach.
She was sitting up on the sand with her robe wrapped across her torso. Beatrice smiled as he approached. “I figured that tall man over in the grove of trees must be you,” she said. “Either that or I was dreaming again.”
He dropped down beside her. “How are you?” Johann asked.
“As well as can be expected,” she said. “For a moment, when I first opened my eyes and saw the sand, the water, and all the vegetation, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.” She laughed. “I assume you must have rescued me… My last memory is of being hopelessly entangled in my robe and trying to swim, without knowing which way was the surface.”
“It was fortunate that I found you,” Johann said. “And even more fortunate that you had not already drowned.”
“God must not have been ready for me to die yet, Brother Johann,” she said teasingly. “Or maybe He wanted to make it absolutely clear to you how dependent we all are on one another, in case you had missed the earlier, more subtle messages.”
She laughed again. A moment later she was more serious. “I thank you for my life, Brother Johann,” she said with her characteristic intensity. “I have no idea how I will ever repay you.”
Johann did not know what to say. He suddenly felt awkward and embarrassed. Inside his head, however, he heard the words that he might have spoken if he had not been so confused by his own emotions. You have repaid me already. Your smile and your laughter are all the payment I could ever want.
Before they started to explore their new domain together, Sister Beatrice convinced Johann that it was all right to drink from the lake. It was not an easy task. Despite his thirst, Johann was reluctant to accept that it could possibly be safe to drink from a large pool of standing water. Sister Beatrice stated matter-of-factly that the lake water must be all right, otherwise -their hosts would have provided drinking vessels for them, as they always had in the past. In the face of her certitude, Johann eventually waded out into the lake about twenty meters and took a long drink.
Beatrice wrapped her wet robe around her shoulders, wearing it like a shawl over her long underwear. They walked along the beach, and Sister Beatrice started to feel better. Johann wanted to show her the unusual grove and the brown spheres that he had found.
Instead they first inspected the vines, leafy plants, and shrubs that were in their immediate vicinity. The flora was unlike anything they had ever seen. One of the vines, for example, enmeshed in a bush covered with black berries, had peculiar cylindrical rods growing perpendicular to its stem and extending almost half a meter out from the main body of the vine. Another shrub had many prominent offshoots that reentered the ground, forming a protective circle around what appeared to be, based on its size, the central growth of the plant.
During the time they were examining the vegetation, Johann and Sister Beatrice only saw one species of animal, a brightly colored flying creature, about the size of a butterfly, with two pairs of long, harrow wings and eight tiny legs. They saw three of these creatures, each of them sitting on a horseshoe-shaped red fruit growing in the center of a large leaf.
Together they found many shrubs with berries, and what looked like fruit on half a dozen different kinds of plants. Johann and Beatrice decided not to eat any just yet, mostly because of Johann’s earlier experience with the brown spheres.
Despite her growing fatigue, Sister Beatrice eventually accompanied Johann to his special grove. His brown object was still resting on the flat rock. Where Johann had pulled away the covering, a hole had been burrowed through the red material. He picked up the object and handed it to Beatrice. She stood still for over a minute.
“I don’t feel any movement, Brother Johann,” she said.
He held it for a while and then shrugged. “I know I felt
it move,” he said. “I even saw it wiggle while it was sitting on the rock.”
Beatrice smiled. “I’m sure you did, Brother Johann… But it’s not moving now. And among the set of events that we have experienced in the last few days, the movement of this nut or seed or whatever it is does not rank as one of the greater mysteries.”
He stared at her for a few seconds. “You’re patronizing me,” he said.
“A little,” she replied apologetically, putting her arm through his and heading back toward the lake. “These last few days I have grown to understand your need to analyze and explain every phenomenon you encounter,” she said while they were walking. “But as I have mentioned to you before, that kind of compulsive need inevitably leads to frustration. Only if there is faith and acceptance in the presence of that which is beyond our understanding can we ever achieve any inner peace.”
“Sister Beatrice,” Johann said a little later, “I’m not comfortable with your notion of blind acceptance. It seems to be antithetical to the whole thinking process. Without thought, and the understanding that comes from an analytical approach to what we see and experience, we are no different from all the billions of other molecules trapped in insentient rocks, plants, and lesser animals. Thinking is what has allowed the human species to be aware of who and what we are in the overall scheme of things.”
They had reached the lake. Beatrice turned to face Johann. “St. Michael taught that the ability to think and reason is our single greatest attribute. He encouraged research and learning of all kinds. But he also reminded us repeatedly that thought was only one of God’s gifts to mankind… Love and faith are two others. Neither can exist, Michael said in one of his sermons, in a person who believes that the only path to truth is a rigorous combination of logic and analysis.”
Johann stared at Beatrice’s intense blue eyes and was flooded by a myriad of simultaneous emotions. How can I argue with her, he said to himself, when just hearing her voice, or seeing her smile, brings me such pure happiness? Is this not the very point she is making, that we are not simply thinking creatures, and that we must learn to accept concepts and feelings that we cannot logically explain?
He had a sudden and powerful desire to kiss her. Beatrice must have sensed what he was feeling, for she took a step backward and looked away.
“And now, Brother Johann,” she said lightly, “if you have had enough philosophy for the time being, I would like to take a nap. When I wake up, if we still have light, let’s look for something to eat. Without food in our stomachs, we are not likely to resolve many of the fundamental issues of the universe.”
Johann smiled. I love you, he thought.
8
Sister Beatrice was surprisingly full of energy after her nap. When Johann and she walked half a kilometer down the beach and noticed a small mountain rising behind and beyond the thick vegetation, Beatrice insisted that they should climb the peak.
Johann tried to dissuade her, reminding her that she had nearly drowned less than twenty hours earlier. She dismissed his concerns and plunged into the vegetation, heading in the direction of the small mountain. Sister Beatrice quickly discovered that her robe was a cumbersome nuisance in the thick growth. “Would it be too immodest,” she asked Johann, “for me to leave my robe on the beach?”
Johann agreed that given their circumstances, it did not make much sense for Beatrice to continue to wear her Michaelite robe. She returned to the beach, neatly folded the robe, and placed it on the sand in front of a group of shrubs with bright blue berries. As she skipped barefoot across the sand in his direction, wearing only her standard long underwear, Johann realized, for the first time, that Beatrice’s body as beautiful as her face. With that realization came a surge of lust that he instantly suppressed.
They found a stream several hundred meters inland and decided to follow its course up toward the peak. The vegetation was not as thick on the banks of the stream as it was elsewhere, and climbing was not difficult in the low gravity, so their progress was quite rapid. The air temperature was mild, but they both began to sweat eventually from the constant activity.
Beatrice sat down beside the stream when they were slightly more than halfway to the top. She splashed some water against her face and then bent over to take a drink.
“How do you know that this water also is safe?” Johann asked.
Beatrice glanced up at Johann, shook her bead, and then broke into a smile. “Look around you, Brother Johann,” she said. “Isn’t this place absolutely marvelous? Is it even conceivable that a paradise like this wouldn’t have perfectly pure water? Besides, you didn’t die or become sick after drinking from the lake; why would you suspect that the water in this stream would be different?”
Johann didn’t answer immediately. He turned slowly around, surveying the plants on both banks of the stream. “What are we doing here, Sister Beatrice?” he said eventually. “Why was this place created, and by whom? Why were we taken to Hiroshima and Nazi Germany? What was the purpose of that endless, painful train?” He threw up his arms in despair. “None of this makes any sense to me.”
“Brother Johann,” Beatrice said with a bemused look on her face, “sometimes I think that you are indeed hopeless… Here we are, surrounded by beauty on all sides, and you can’t enjoy it because you can’t explain everything that has happened to us. Haven’t you heard a word I have been saying to you? We do not need to understand the universe to be happy. There will always be things that we can’t comprehend. That’s why faith is so important… Brother Johann, I’m afraid you’re going to continue to have a hard time unless you can somehow learn to experience life without analyzing it to death.”
Johann looked away from Sister Beatrice. From the set of his body, she guessed correctly that she had hurt his feelings. “I’m sorry, Brother Johann,” she said sincerely. “What I said was unduly harsh, and presumptuous as well. Please forgive me.”
He walked over, bent down beside the stream, and took a long drink. When he was finished, Johann wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stared at Sister Beatrice.
“Not knowing what’s going on doesn’t bother you even one little bit?” he asked.
She came over beside him and touched his shoulder. “I wonder about it, Brother Johann, and I might even try, now that you have raised the issue so often, to see if I can come up with a reasonable explanation for this island. But not understanding doesn’t bother me, and I would never, ever let it interfere with my appreciation of all this beauty.”
They discovered that they were on an island when they reached the top of the small mountain. The island was long and comparatively narrow, roughly ten kilometers by two kilometers. The mountain peak, rising four hundred meters above the level of the lake, was almost exactly in the island’s center. The sandy beach on which Johann had resuscitated Beatrice stretched down one long side of the island. On the opposite side there was no beach at all. There, the calm blue waters of the lake that surrounded the island lapped against the bottom of steep cliffs.
Where the beach and cliffs came together, at either end of the island, there were fascinating rock formations that were dotted with caves. Johann and Beatrice decided to explore these rock formations next. After taking one final look at the spectacular view, Beatrice headed down a path that led through the vegetation toward the caves closest to their initial landing spot on the beach.
They reached the rocks when the artificial daylight was almost gone. The first two caves they explored were right opposite the lake. Both were large, empty single rooms with surprisingly flat floors. Their structure suggested that the caves had been at least partially created by intelligent beings.
As they rounded one corner during their exploration among the rocks, Johann and Beatrice saw a flickering light reflecting off a very large boulder about twenty meters in front of them. They stopped and watched for several seconds. Ahead of them, a pathway through the rocks turned sharply to the left. The light was coming from somewhere beyond tha
t turn.
Johann edged forward slowly, touching the rock wall with his left hand and listening for any sounds he might be able to identify. He heard nothing. His pulse rate increased as images of white ribbons and snowmen came into his mind. He eventually reached the corner. Beatrice was only a couple of meters behind him.
“Here I go,” he whispered, thrusting his head around the edge of the rocks and looking to his left.
In front of him, above a hole in the center of a circular plaza virtually surrounded by rock walls five to six- meters in height, a large fire was burning. Johann motioned to Beatrice to join him. They walked slowly into the plaza together. They stood there, mesmerized, staring at the dancing yellow flames that seemed to be rising out of the ground.
“He has given us also the gift of fire, Brother Johann,” she said reverently. “To provide us with heat and light.”
Johann walked over as close as he dared to the fire and looked down into the hole. He could not see anything but yellow flame. “So you think this fire was meant specifically for us?” he asked.
“Yes, Brother Johann,” Beatrice said. She had a faraway look in her eyes. “I now believe that this entire island, including everything on it, was carefully crafted by an omniscient and omnipotent designer, the one I call God and you barely acknowledge, for our exclusive use… We are meant to live here, in these caves, to drink the water from the lake and streams, to eat the fruits and berries that are so plentiful… God has given us a paradise to share.”
Her face was radiant in the reflected firelight. Despite her burns, which had already started to heal, Johann had never seen her look so beautiful. He knew that he was falling hopelessly in love with her.
“I don’t mean any disrespect, Sister Beatrice,” he said after a long silence. “But would you mind telling me how you know all these things already? Have you seen something that I haven’t?”
Rama: The Omnibus Page 209
