The Paths Between Worlds

by Paul Antony Jones

  Jacquetta said, “And I am fluent in Spanish, French, and German. I can also hold a decent convo in Latin and Ancient Greek. Oh, and I have a passing familiarity with several Arabic dialects.” Unlike Freuchen, there was a distinct sense of pride in Jacquetta’s voice.

  “Jorge, Benito, and Evita don’t speak much English,” Edward said, looking across at the two men and the woman I had seen first walk back into camp. “Without Freuchen and Jacquetta’s help, we would have had a devil of a time understanding each other.” Again, I was reminded that whatever alterations had been made to me, or Albert, or Chou the previous night that allowed us to communicate so fluently, had not happened to anyone in this group of strangers.

  “How is your friend?” Freuchen asked, looking over my shoulder to where Chou lay beneath the shelter.

  “She’s holding her own,” I said.

  “Edvard has told me that both you and your friend—”

  “Chou,” I said, “her name is Weston Chou. Just call her Chou; she seems to like it.”

  Freuchen nodded. “Sure. Sure. Edvard told me that both you and Chou are from the future. I very much look forvard to talking vith you both, at some point.”

  He was like a little child; eager to learn as much as he could. The idea that I was, to all of these people other than Chou, some version of a futuristic time traveler had never crossed my mind. All the questions I wanted to ask Chou about what the future was like must be burning just as strongly in these people too.

  “Come with me,” Edward said, taking me by the elbow. “Let’s go introduce you to everyone else. You too, Albert.” We walked back toward the fire where the rest of the group had settled, sitting on the logs placed around the fire to act as benches, drinking water from the pots we had seen filled earlier while chatting amongst themselves. Everyone looked exhausted, but apart from their clothing, they all looked so, well… unremarkably normal. Certainly not what I would've expected of a group I suspected had been hand-selected for some higher purpose by the Voice.

  “Alright, everyone, please gather around,” Edward said again. Heads turned in our direction, and people moved in closer. “We’re going to be seeing a lot of new faces joining us over the coming weeks, I’m sure, and the first of those are here with us this evening. This is Meredith, and the little chap next to her is Albert.”

  Freuchen began to repeat Edward’s words but stopped a half-sentence in, a puzzled expression on his face; an expression echoed on the faces of the three non-English speakers Jorge, Benito, and Evita as they looked first at Edward then Freuchen, then to the rest of the group.

  “Is something wrong?” Edward asked Freuchen.

  Freuchen seemed confused. “I… you understand vat I’m saying to you?” he said to Edward.

  “Yes, of course. Why?” Edward replied, and I felt a sense of déjà vu wash over me.

  “He’s not speaking English,” Albert said, beating me to the answer.

  Edward looked puzzled, glanced at me, then across to Freuchen, raising his eyebrows questioningly.

  “The boy is correct,” said Freuchen. “I am speaking Spanish. At least, I think I am.”

  “This is what you were talking about earlier, isn’t it?” Edward said to me. “You said you thought the aurora made some kind of a change to you so that you could understand Chou and she you.”

  “Yes, but I guess this means it was either me or Albert that the changes were made to. Peter, can you say something in another language?”

  “And now I am speaking in French,” Freuchen said in perfect English.

  Jorge, Benito, and Evita regarded us intently, everyone else seemed mildly confused as to what was going on. I smiled at Evita and stepped forward, extending my hand. “Hello,” I said, “I’m Meredith, can you understand me?”

  Both Jorge and Benito looked at each other as though I was setting them up somehow, but Evita smiled warmly and said, “Yes, your Spanish is perfect.”

  I glanced back over my shoulder at Edward and Freuchen. “I hardly speak any Spanish.”

  Jacquetta’s face broke into an amused smile. “This is very strange, very interesting, but mostly very strange. The question would appear to be which of you is the one responsible for this… psychic translation.”

  “Let’s find out,” I said and walked away from the group. When I was about fifty feet away, I waved my hand and waited as Freuchen, Edward, Jacquetta, and Evita talked amongst themselves. I was out of earshot, so saw only their mouths working silently and then the shrugs and raised hands that seemed to indicate they could no longer understand each other.

  Freuchen waved me back, and I jogged over to them.

  “Well?” I said.

  Jacquetta answered, “As soon as you moved away, only Freuchen and I were able to understand anything that was said.”

  “I can understand you now,” said Jorge, nodding sternly.

  “Now, I too can understand you,” Benito added.

  Evita smiled and nodded enthusiastically. “As can I.”

  “Vell,” said Freuchen, “it seems ve have an answer to who our new interpreter is.”

  “Let me try something else,” I said. “Keep talking until you can’t understand each other anymore,” I said.

  Edward nodded and began to recite aloud to Evita a poem that seemed familiar to me.

  I began to back away from the group, taking one step at a time and pausing. Around thirty feet, as Edward’s voice became muffled and indistinct, I saw Evita’s head tilt sideways in puzzlement, her smile turning into a look of confusion and mild amusement. Edward turned toward me and yelled for me to come back.

  “It looks like I have to be close to you for whatever this effect is to work,” I said. “As soon as I can’t hear you, the translation ability stops. It’s like I’m some kind of human Wi-Fi router.” I realized by the puzzled looks directed at me that no one but me knew what a wireless router was. “A radio transmitter. It’s like I’m a radio transmitter, but with a very short range.” That explanation seemed to do it for the majority of the people to grasp the concept.

  “This is incredible,” Freuchen said, but I barely heard him. My mind was occupied with wondering why I had been singled out to receive this… ability.

  “So many questions,” I said.

  “Excuse me?” said Edward.

  “Oh, nothing. Just thinking aloud. Look, we’re obviously not going to get any answers as to why I have this ability any time soon, so we might as well make use of it.” I turned and smiled apologetically at Freuchen. “Sorry to put you out of a job, big guy.”

  When Freuchen laughed, it sounded like thunder echoing down a valley. “That is fine vith me. I have other things I could be doing.”

  Edward nodded slowly. “Let’s get on with the introductions then, shall we?”

  As I’d noted earlier, the Garrisonites were just every day, normal people. Jorge was an Argentinian fisherman who had drowned during a storm at sea in the winter of 1908. Oliver Schwartz, a tall, gaunt-looking man in a gray business suit, was an architect. The Voice had plucked him from his time when the private airplane he had been piloting alone to Bermuda had crashed into the ocean just before Christmas of 1965.

  Benito Bella was a lumberjack who'd been in the process of bleeding to death after an accident with his saw in the Venezuelan rainforests in late 1898. Tabitha Keenan, a strikingly beautiful Irish botanist, said she died of malaria while on a solo expedition to the Amazon in 1958. Sarah Harmon, a veterinarian, had chosen to end her own life for reasons she was not willing to talk about. And Jacquetta was an archaeologist.

  “I had a bit of an accident while exploring a tomb in Egypt in 1941,” Jacquetta said, by way of a cryptic explanation as to how she had ended up here with us.

  Caleb Doggett, a haggard, stone-faced man of very few words told me he had been close to burning to death after his Texas homestead had caught fire sometime around 1902.

  And last but not least was Evita Samaniego; the quiet-spoken woman from Mex
ico in the beautiful red and white dress which, it turned out, she'd made herself. She was a seamstress from San Pedro. Evita thought she'd probably died from tuberculosis, as her husband and three young children had already succumbed to the disease weeks earlier, leaving her alone. The last few weeks of her life were still so foggy within her mind, she couldn’t be sure. All she remembered for certain was the Voice offering to save her.

  Everyone remembered the Voice.

  There were no geniuses among them. No great leaders (at least that I knew of at the time) and, apart from Wild Bill, no one I recognized as standing out in history. But when you considered them as a group, they all had very specific skills or knowledge; knowledge that would be really useful for sustaining a civilization… or maybe for starting a new one.

  As darkness settled over the garrison, and the shattered moon rose deathly-white to haunt the sky, we pulled the salmon Evelyn and I had prepared out of the fire’s ashes. We ate as a group gathered around the fire and talked for the next couple of hours about our own times, safe within the campfire’s lambent glow, burning furiously now as it was fed more branches. When everyone had eaten their fill, Edward dispatched Wild Bill and Benito Bello to stand watch on the perimeter of the camp.

  The fire pushed back the darkness far enough that I could see all the way to the edge of the camp in one direction and almost to the bank of the river in the other. Overhead, the sky was cloudless and already buckshot with stars, the likes of which I had never seen before. Thousands upon thousands of them peppered the black canvas, mingling almost imperceptibly with the mysterious network of lights between us and the sun. I could not recognize one constellation amongst them. The moon, its tail of debris dragging behind it, crawled across the night sky. I strained my eyes to try to see the structures I thought I'd spotted on its surface earlier, but all I could make out now were shadows and craters. I would need a decent pair of binoculars or a telescope to be certain there was anything really there or whether it had been a trick of the light.

  I noticed Bull kneeling next to Chou and excused myself from the group. The doctor held Chou’s hand in his own, the back of his other hand placed against her perspiration covered forehead.

  “I fear your friend has taken a turn for the worse,” Bull said, looking up as I approached. Chou was soaked with perspiration. Her skin pallid, almost the color of chalk. Her eyes moved constantly and rapidly beneath her eyelids, and she groaned deeply as though she were caught in a nightmare she couldn’t wake from.

  A wave of panic spread through me. “Isn’t there something you can do for her?” I begged, clutching Chou’s hand.

  Bull shook his head slowly. “I am sorry,” he said, by way of a final prognosis, then, head hung, walked slowly away.

  I felt a deep sense of frustration at my inability to help the woman who had undoubtedly saved my own life the previous night, and then again today, potentially at the cost of her own. I mopped the sheen of sweat covering her forehead with a water-soaked rag. Beneath Chou’s lids, her eyes would occasionally jerk left and right. And twice I could have sworn I heard her mutter what I thought was the word ‘husband,’ but I couldn’t be sure, her voice was so fragile, barely even qualifying as a whisper.

  I continued to gently stroke Chou’s hair until she quietened again.

  Shadows leaped across the camp in a synchronized dance with the flames of the campfire, pushing back the darkness then allowing it in again as the flames rose and fell. I watched my new compatriots talk and eat together, my translation ability passively allowing them to finally converse freely. I felt a faint sense of pride that I was, at least, able to do this for these people, but again I wondered why me? What was so special about me? But my mind was too exhausted with worry for my dying friend to hold onto the question for longer than a few seconds.

  I stretched out next to Chou. If she was going to die, I was going to be right here at her side when it happened. It was the very least I could do for her. I cast my eyes skyward; the aurora couldn’t be too far away now. She just needed to hold on a little longer.

  Chou breathed raggedly, then slowly dropped again. Once, twice more. A wheezing, high-pitched whistle escaped from between her lips, then Weston Chou, pilot of the starship the Shining Way, the woman who I owed my life to, took one final breath and then breathed no more.

  Twelve

  “Chou!” I cried out, shifting position from my side to my knees. “Chou! Wake up,” This time I yelled the words, but still, there was no response.

  Her mouth hung open, exposing perfect teeth tinged with blood, her eyes stared sightlessly at the roof of the lean-to through half-closed lids. I glanced over at the Garrisonites, but no one noticed me, the crackle of the fire and their energetic conversation covering my words, the shadows hiding my frantic movements.

  “No. No… no.” I leaned in close to Chou’s mouth, listening for any sign she was breathing. There was nothing. I placed two fingers against her neck, checked for a pulse, but felt none.

  “You can’t die. I won’t let you,” I hissed into her ear. I’d taken a first-aid course, years ago, and I wracked my brain for the memory. I’d checked her pulse, checked her breathing. I had to get her heart going again.

  Leaning in, I tilted Chou’s head back, pinched her nose shut, and placed my lips over hers which were already blue around the edges. Was it three or five puffs? I couldn’t remember. I settled on four and quickly breathed them into her and was rewarded with a corresponding inflation of her chest, but the second I stopped, she did too.

  “It’s okay,” I said to myself, “you can do this.” I placed one hand on top of the other, interlaced my fingers and laid them over the center of her chest. The instructor had told me the easiest way to remember the correct rate of chest compressions was to follow the beat of the Bee Gee’s song Staying Alive, so I started singing it to myself now as I pushed up and down on her chest.

  One-two-three-four.

  One-two-three-four.

  “Oh God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I cried when I felt one of Chou’s ribs crack beneath my hands while trying not to lose count of how many compressions I’d completed. When I reached thirty, I stopped and gave her two more quick breaths then went back to the chest compressions.

  “Meredith?”

  I looked up and saw Edward and the rest of the Garrisonites standing around me, their faces marked with concern.

  Albert clung to Evelyn, his eyes as large as saucers. “Is… is Chou going to be alright?” he barely managed to mumble through the tears rushing down his cheeks.

  “Yes,” I said, “I just… have to keep… this going… until the—”

  A thunderous boom cracked apart the silence of the night, and everyone turned to look skyward.

  Albert, Chou, and I had been deep in the forest every night prior to this one, so clouds and the forest’s canopy had blocked most of the sky and the aurora from us. We’d caught glimpses of it, of course, but tonight, here in this clearing, I had an almost completely unobstructed view. I looked up in time to see a column of blue-green light shoot into the sky far off to the east; the same direction as the first monolith that dominated the horizon in the daylight hours, I noted. More light columns exploded skyward from the west, south, and north.

  There was a collective gasp of amazement from almost everyone as, in a split-second, the light columns split into branches that traveled across the firmament high above our heads, tendrils of color shooting off from larger bolts to create smaller light trails (smaller at least in comparison to the main bolts. These lesser off-shoots must still have been tens of miles in length). In graceful arcs, the aurora crisscrossed the sky from all four cardinal directions, converging on a central point, as though seeking each other out. They had to have originated from the monoliths; it couldn’t be coincidental. Right? I mean, what were the chances?

  All around us, tiny spots of brilliance flickered into life, just as they had in the forest, suspended in the air and covering every object and bu
ilding; energized it seemed by the aurora’s raw, naked energy.

  “Pixie dust,” I heard Evelyn say.

  The nano-particles that had, until now, floated, invisible in the air around us glowed and pulsed, shifting on the night’s warm eddies and currents. Within a matter of seconds, everything was aglow with their strange ethereal luminescence. The trees around the perimeter of the camp were turned into lamps, their trunks and branches ignited with the tiny motes. The lean-tos glowed like Christmas decorations. My hands were covered in hundreds of tiny glowing dots, shimmering with an intensity that was quite beautiful, unthreatening.

  Chou too was covered in the tiny specks of light, but unlike those on my hands, hers were moving in what appeared to be a very deliberate fashion. A gentle stream of particles drifted across her chest, then over my hands as I continued to administer chest compressions, as they moved toward the wound in her hip. More lambent streams flowed into her mouth and nostrils.

  The Garrisonites had all turned to stare at the sky, gripped by the awe-inspiring show playing out above us. Sarah and Evita stood together just outside the next lean-to. They moved their hands through the air, shifting the glowing pixie dust like they were water droplets, a look of almost mystical awe on their faces. With each passing second, the aurora grew brighter but other than the initial crash to announce its arrival, the event was silent. As the light grew in intensity, I felt an electric tingle move across my skin. It was like the feeling of pins and needles you get after a limb goes to sleep, but this was a pleasant sensation, almost soothing. I hadn’t realized how badly my neck and back ached from the continued exertion of trying to resuscitate Chou until I felt the dull throb of pain fade away as a wave of relaxation washed over me.

  Beneath my hands, I felt a growing warmth; it came from Chou’s skin! The warmth quickly grew to heat, intense enough I had to pull my hand away. I looked down again at Chou and gasped in amazement. She was almost completely cocooned in the nanites, radiating so intensely it hurt my eyes; the heat was emanating from them as they worked whatever magic it was they did.