“Victor, if you want to pick a fight with celestial wizards out of your weight class, that’s fine,” Ramon interjected, “far be it from me to get between you and your suicidal efforts. With you gone, I’ll be the premiere mandala magician on the planet, not you. But this is not a fight you can win like you have the others, by throwing the planet’s most powerful wizards and scientists at the problem, learning from their mistakes, before intervening to save the day.”
Victor sighed. “No doubt you’re right.”
Lar and Ramon sighed as well, relaxing out of the bubble of tension suffocating them in an envelope of dead air. Thank God Victor was going to listen to reason this time.
“But that’s the fun of it, isn’t it?” Victor clapped his hands together, and then rubbed them together as he kept his eyes on the prize—the aliens. “This is likely to put all my past exploits to shame.”
He meant, of course, this showdown with a master race that the hybrid had barely managed to rescue his people from, whose technology would rival the most powerful magic known, by the sheer virtue of how much more advanced the science would be relative to anything on Earth.
Ramon and Lar groaned, their voices sounding different by the various registers of their voices, Lar’s being a tad higher and whinier.
“You do realize that the super-volcano at Yellowstone has been showing signs of erupting, ever since we disturbed the crypt?” Ramon said.
“Ah, that would be the eruption that all predictions suggest will end life on the planet as we know it and trigger an ice age to last thousands of years,” Lar clarified for him, “just in case you aren’t much on headline news.”
“And that’s not the only fire we have to put out.” Ramon’s voice conveyed the urgency of someone whose plans looked to be every bit as interrupted by Victor’s little coup as Victor’s looked to be advanced. “There are signs of the earth’s polarity fluctuating wildly. Forget the beaching whales and dolphins and birds formerly able to navigate around the world no longer able to find their way due to the magnetic shifts… The waves of locusts, the frogs raining out of the sky…. It’s like the seven plagues Moses sent against the Pharaoh….”
“Only this time he can’t be bothered to send them one at a time,” Lar finished the thought for Ramon. Lar’s tone was that of a professor desperately trying to pierce the dense skull of his student with understanding.
Victor waved them both off dismissively. “I’ll let you two sweat the small stuff. Besides, what do I care if this planet is sacrificed for the greater good of getting me recognized as a serious contender among the celestial wizards of space-time? Small price to pay.”
Lar took a deep breath and rubbed his temples, feeling the mounting migraine whirling inside his head like a category five cyclone. Ramon slackened his jaw and moved it in slow motion as if he was trying to pop his ears, as if he were aboard a plane descending too rapidly, no doubt responding to spiking blood pressure changes in his own body. Neither of them wanted to play lion tamer with Victor as the lion. That was Soren’s job. And Soren was currently out of commission; of no use to anybody, not even himself.
“Oh shit!”
Victor’s exclamation caused Lar and Ramon to shift their attention from one another and from telepathically trying to answer each other’s question of “How the hell do we get around this maniac’s ego?” back to the aliens.
The mother’s eyes had opened.
Her body was already starting to shake off the stasis of thousands of years of hibernation. However hibernation had been maintained all this time, the technology was beyond presently anything known to man. It was cold down here, but not that cold.
“How the hell…?” Ramon said.
“She’s sucking up Victor’s tremendous mental energy,” Lar explained, slipping into trance state to access the combined insights of Captain Klutz—and his ability to read any situation this calamitous for exactly what it was—and Cypher—just as capable at pulling meaning out of the most ambiguous of contexts. “Not just from this incarnation of Victor, but from all incarnations of him in all parallel universes.”
Victor snorted. “Cool.” Then he threw a glance at Lar. “You do continue to surprise, kid. Looks like you found a way to access those alternate personae you broke off when you couldn’t believe in yourself being capable of anything, far less greatness. Even if you can’t always open the link when you want, for now, I’ll settle for these rare epiphanies.” He returned his attention to the stirring mother.
The mother, fully awake now, focused on Victor. Victor buckled at his knees, screaming, his hands going to his head instead of attempting to break his fall. “Don’t fight it,” Lar said. “She’s pulling what she needs out of your mind to open communication with us. Cease all resistance before she pulls you apart and you explode all over us like some damned water balloon!”
Victor was on his knees now, and panting, but no longer screaming. Lar took that as a good sign he was heeding Lar’s advice.
Seconds later, Victor pulled himself back to standing by grabbing on to Ramon and Lar who couldn’t be bothered to assist him because they were now too transfixed by the mother.
“You fools. You know not what you’ve done,” the mother said, her voice, despite not being particularly loud, and somewhat breathy, echoing through the chamber, and resonating throughout the rest of the pyramid; Lar cold detect it traveling down the adjoining corridors as if it were looking for a way out.
“Au contraire, my alien friend,” Victor said, smiling. “We know exactly what we’ve done. You’re my ticket off this world. As to summoning the oppressor race who will put you back in bondage, well, that’s really not my problem. Though rest assured, I intend to trounce them for you, if only to prove I’m the baddest bad ass in all the land.”
The mother shook her head. Took an imposing step forward. “The master race is no more. Only the queen remains.” She picked Victor up in one hand and dangled him off the ground. “She is enough. She is the most powerful. And she can reassert her dominion over all of creation with the teachings I have inscribed in the cabbalistic images throughout the pyramids.”
The mother was so pissed, she threw Victor against the far wall. Anyone else would have shattered into a million pieces from the inside out even before their body exploded the rest of the way. But he was Earth’s most powerful magician, capable of bending space and time; more than enough to soften his landing, even if he had to climb out of a hole in the wall made by his own flexible body armoring.
Victor’s typically expansive forehead, big head, and piercing purple eyes—all clues as to the vast intelligence lurking under the hood—revealed, for now, a bit more than the usual; he was already working out the implications in his head; that much was painted across his handsome, chiseled face with its aquiline nose and vacant eyes.
“Let me guess,” Victor said. “She has a score to settle with you. You’re the one that figured out how to put an end to the blight that was she and her many minions spreading across the heavens.”
“She went into hibernation herself until she could sense my awakening. It was her last best play. The other civilizations existing then throughout the cosmos were too powerful for her to infiltrate. But if she gets ahold of my work with the cabbalistic language…”
Victor’s eyes lost their distant look. “But that was thousands of years ago. Surely by now…”
“You underestimate my handiwork,” the mother said.
Victor actually smiled. “All the better. It looks like you will be a key to unlock the heavens for me that surpasses even my wildest hopes.”
The mother emitted a roar that brought the entire temple down on their heads. But it was already too late. Victor had committed every wall, every surface with the cabbalistic etchings to memory; he could easily recreate the entire temple in a virtual reality walkthrough. Which was no doubt exactly what he intended to do to help him and the rest of his team translate the rest of the cabbalistic images.
And he’d already beamed the alien family, Lar, Ramon and himself back to his lab. The alien mother stroked her husband’s and children’s faces, as if admiring the statues erected, raised in their images. For whatever reason, she was unwilling to awaken them out of their hibernating state for now.
She glanced around the rest of the lab at the other scientists that had taken a collective step back at the sight of the party arriving through the portal.
Airy and Aeros, the husband and wife team of aerogel people—whose bodies had been so hollowed out by nanites they were lighter than air, and who needed special shoes to keep from levitating off the floor were in attendance, working at their station before being interrupted. Ry and An, the two transsexualists from the Transhumanist district, where Victor kept his lab were also present. One look at the alien mother had caused both of them to shift sexes right in front of her. Lar wasn’t sure if it was an empathetic response, or if they were simply going into phase with a more powerful one of their kind. The alien mother had alluded to the hypnotic effect of the queen of the oppressor species; maybe the savant of the slave species had learned a thing or two from her in this regard.
“This…. This is all you have to throw against the queen?” the alien mother asked tentatively, surveying Victor’s cohorts and his lab’s equipment.
The other scientists took umbrage at the remark, though the alien mother was clearly referring to everyone in the room, not just them. “No wonder you awakened me.”
Ramon stepped up to the savant in a posture that reeked of challenge. “Wait a second… You said earlier that it was your awakening that would summon the queen.” His eyes went vacant as he started putting two and two together, much as Victor was inclined to do, employing that giant mind of his to fill in missing pieces that typically only full-blown psychics could fill in.
Lar hated to admit it, but this kid was coming into his own ahead of schedule, and Lar feared the implications. The dawning of awareness on his face, even before he spoke…. “Soren and his beast. You foresee them coming together again. They will be enough to summon the queen. So—it no longer matters which came first, your awakening, or theirs.”
“Hmm,” the mother intoned. “You two mandala magicians show promise. But, much like your compatriots, you are too early along in your development to be of much help to me. Now, get out of my way.”
With a wave of her hand, and an impressive show of telekinesis, she sent the cluster of humanoids in the room flying to clear a path to the lab’s instruments and computer stations, which she just as readily engaged telepathically.
“Stay here,” Victor commanded his team, and Lar; though Lar was technically part of Naomi and Soren’s posse, not his. “Find out what the savant is up to and how you can assist her.”
And then Victor was gone, sailing along a bridge of energy formed by his mandala magic, the interlaced sacred, complex geometries forming the links in the bridge, and allowing him to surf the rainbow the bridge made across the night sky to his destination.
Lar guessed he was going to meet up with Soren.
With Victor gone, Ramon approached the alien mother. “What are you up to?”
She ignored him. His eyes turned to the screens and the cabbalistic images being fast-forwarded through, the ones inscribed in the temples explored so far—and the ones they’d yet to get their hands on from the other temples. She’d already added to their data bases.
Lar stepped up to Ramon, as the others in his team were still pulling themselves up off the floor and trying to wipe the stunned expressions off their faces. They were getting sucked in by the work the alien was doing, arriving at their own conclusions. “She’s advancing Airy’s work decrypting the cabbalistic images,” Lar explained, “giving us access to the entire language.”
“What?” Ramon declared, doing a double-take Lar’s direction. “She’s actually trying to imbue us with the mind power of that master race? That language was made for brains much bigger than ours. Even if we had access to the entire language, it would take lifetimes and generations of genetic mutations to begin to wrap our minds around it.”
“Maybe not,” Aeros said, smiling. “You forget, we transhumanists are very good with upgrading humans with our nanite cocktails.”
“You might be able to collapse the timeline from millennia to mere decades. We’re lucky if we have days,” Ramon protested. He seemed genuinely scared, eying the keys to their future being handed them on a silver platter, or in this case, on the closest analogue for silver nitrate—the big screen monitors. Lar suspected once again that his real fear had to do with the possible circumvention of his own plans, no doubt no less nefarious than whatever Victor was up to in order to put himself on the throne chair as king of the cosmos.
“Have faith,” Ry said. “You’re forgetting our secret weapon.”
An, her partner smiled. “Once Soren and the beast are reunited, we’ll have the accelerated learning curve we need to fill in the missing pieces.”
Ramon shook his head. “Not unless it’s a David versus Goliath scenario you have in mind. No one, not even Soren, is about to collapse millions of years of advanced alien learning in a fortnight in the space of even an upgraded brain, whether or not cabbalistic nanites infest said brain.”
“We’re always the underdogs,” Airy said smiling ruefully. “Or haven’t you been paying attention? Until Victor changes the nature of the game, and I don’t suspect he ever will.”
“No, no he won’t,” Ramon blurted. He opened a portal back to Victor’s penthouse flat. Lar could see him reaching for another of the medallions Victor kept in his collection on display throughout his flat before the portal closed back around him. No doubt he’d already determined his best play was much as it was before, to decode the secrets in another of those medallions that might just be enough to save the day. Or at least fill in the one vital missing piece that the rest of the team was going to need to save Earth from certain annihilation.
It was a long shot the strategy would lead anywhere. But it was definitely a David versus Goliath move, so in keeping with the theme.
Lar wondered what his end of things would boil down to, if he had a value-add in all of this worthy of more than a bit player. He was standing in a room with a savant from an alien species whose super-intellect was miles beyond any of their own, even awakened from ancient history; even though those standing in the room had over seven thousand years on her to catch up. It was as if all that time had been for naught. No doubt the other scientists in the room were wondering the same thing, how they were going to make any significant contribution to the war that was coming.
Soren might well be the answer. He had a way of pointing others to their higher selves and their higher powers even when they themselves had lost their way. If only Soren could be made whole again. The last time that happened—it was the gravest challenge the world had ever faced. Right now, their greatest hope was akin to jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.
THREE
“Okay, I know I belong in a Disney movie, I get that,” the donkey said, addressing Soren and Naomi, spread out on their patio chairs at the foot of the pyramid located in the Yucatan Peninsula. Well, technically speaking, they were all in Soren’s lab in the Victorian London reenactment district in Syracuse, New York, thanks to Natura’s magic, but that was a whole other story. “But if you two don’t get to humping real soon, I won’t be able to stop the epidemic of depression sweeping through the forest, catching up every animal, and possibly a few insects, too.”
“I don’t know,” Naomi chided, “humping before an audience of forest creatures is kind of a tired scene, you know? As in been there, done that.”
“So not tired,” the wolf said, stepping out of the tropical foliage and making his formerly masked presence known, before letting out a howl.
“I can attest that the idea,” yawn, “is a long way from boring me,” yawn, “with its insidious lack of originality,” the Sloth said, also stepping into the cleari
ng, before letting out another yawn, and collapsing on all fours. “If I fall asleep, make sure no one steals my front row seat to the next showing of ‘The Great Humping’.”
“There will be absolutely no human humping,” the purple male lion with the lighter, lavender-tinged mane said, stepping out of the camouflaging foliage and into the clearing. “Natura put me here to ensure the G-rating of her Dr. Doolittle world stays just that, G-rated. I will happily maul to death and strip the flesh bare of anyone who even suggests such a thing.”
“Oh, yeah, way to hold on to the G-rating, pal,” the panda bear said, taking up a front row seat and yanking a young bamboo tree out of the ground to munch on.
“Hey, the Hollywood standard applies here,” the lion said in his defense. “No amount of violence is enough to lose us our G-rating. Just no tits, ass, cock and balls, graphic sex, and foul language. But by all means, kill one another to your heart’s content.”
“Will someone please just kill this conversation?” Soren said speaking up, still refusing to open his eyes. He supposed his mock protests were just that. He found the creatures of Natura’s forest quite the de-stressor; normally. But at present, they were disturbing his shuteye.
He dared to open an eyelid, just one, mind you. Spied the expression on Naomi’s face. It had to work hard to cut past the distraction of those timeless jade green eyes and the long flowing red hair and her satin-finish skin to get his attention. “What?” he said, testily.
She shook her head. “It’s probably nothing. Of late, it’s like I can’t even trust my five senses, to say nothing of my sixth sense.” There was a time when, to feel that way, she had to gaze into his preternaturally beautiful face, at the highlights of his dirty blond hair which gave it the look of frozen flames, his straight nose that pierced the heart like a dagger, or his eyes, which he could make glow with the nanites populating his irises.
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