“That’s risky. You don’t know the currents. Or if there’s anything harmful in that liquid.” She was referring to the seawater. Or what looked like seawater.
∆∆∆
The current was strong, but Joseph was a good swimmer. Still, he had to swim far out to avoid the waves crashing against the lava rocks. He had almost given up when he spied an opening, an inlet into the rocks.
It was too dark to see where the inlet led. It went under the edge of the outcropping, but into what was impossible to tell.
An important decision presented itself. Joseph’s thoughts were fleeting as he weighed his options, but his nature was to explore. He reasoned that his predicament had become tenuous at best. He thought of Margaret should she find herself alone in this strange world. At least she would have more supplies for herself if he never returned.
He swam as he thought and entered the darkness.
∆∆∆
Margaret had mixed feelings. She thought Joseph was being rash and taking unnecessary risks by going on this swim. But she knew that their situation would quickly become desperate. She quickly dismissed the thought that if Joseph did not return, she would have more supplies for herself. She would be alone, and the supplies still would run out. Did she truly have nothing to look forward to but to die of thirst, not just separated from Joseph but from all humanity?
She chided herself for what she considered her self-indulgence, but time was passing, and she was becoming increasingly, desperately worried.
She removed her clothes and entered the water.
A dolphin, or something much like a dolphin, splashed behind her. She spun and saw its perpetually smiling face and heard its characteristic squeal. The only surprise was that she could no longer feel startled.
This dolphin from another world nudged her gently. She saw that it was pushing her farther from the shore, and yet she did not have the strength, or the will, to resist. She obligingly grabbed onto its dorsal fin and relinquished control. With an easy, gentle, even sympathetic effort, the creature bore her around the outcropping and into Joseph’s nook.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
The Greening
Joseph continued his swim into a darkness he could not explain or comprehend. It drew him into itself and silenced rational thought. He felt compelled to reach an end. It was no longer an option.
Beyond the emptiness of his vision a light suddenly appeared. It was dim and small.
The small light grew until it surrounded him. He could see his arms slicing the dark water, and he could feel them protest their exhausted purpose.
He floated, as blind in the soft light as he had been in the stifling darkness until a golden glow of sand interrupted his vacancy of vision.
He clutched, at what he did not know. A damp grittiness filled his palms, and the roughness of tiny edges grazed his cheeks. He lay prone as the warm waves washed over his spent body. And he heard a voice.
“You have arrived.” It was StarTat once again. She always seemed to appear at some critical moment, like the fairy, or maybe angel, he imagined her to be.
“Where? How? What am I doing here? Where am I supposed to be? Where is Margaret?”
“Margaret is well. She is being guided here. In fact, she will arrive here soon and in greater health than you.”
“How will she know…to find…?” Joseph’s words trailed softly.
“And you are transforming. You will be different once you exit the cave.”
“Always a cave.”
“As always, your personal space, as indeed, your entire journey has been.
∆∆∆
Margaret’s dolphin pulled her into the darkness. All she could do now was hold tightly to its dorsal fin with one hand and its pectoral with the other. She shifted her arms to approximate a tight hug. She dared not risk being dislodged. There was nothing else to feel or see in the darkness, but at least the water was warm.
Suddenly the dolphin was gone. She floated freely in a darkness that was warm and, somehow, surprisingly reassuring.
She asked herself if she had been dreaming. Was this an illusion? A delusion? A hallucination? Was she still in a cabin on the space-bound cruise ship, plying the stars and parting nebulae as she and Joseph ventured into places unknown and unimagined?
She shut her eyes against the dark and opened them to the golden light.
Joseph and StarTat were standing on a shore, and Joseph, with great effort, moved to draw her out of the water.
The golden light was turning green. So was their naked skin.
∆∆∆
A green Joseph and a green Margaret embraced each other with the intensity of having survived a life-threatening crisis. StarTat looked on, her shimmering translucent stars and skin glowing softly green in the soft green light.
Joseph and Margaret finally broke from their embrace and looked around them.
“Why are we green?” Joseph asked.
“I’m not quite as green as you,” Margaret answered without much conviction.
“You are as green as you need to be. You need not match.” StarTat stepped forward as she answered. “Your melanin and hemoglobin have been replaced with what you would regard as a chlorophyll analogue. In short, you have become autotrophs. The sun will feed you through your exposed skin. You no longer require food, just sunlight, water vapor, carbon dioxide from the air.”
“We are…plants?” Margaret asked with astonishment. Joseph remained silent.
“Your plant/animal dichotomy has no meaning here. Now step through this chamber into your new home. You have neighbors to meet.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
A New World
There were glaciers on the mountains. They slid ever so slowly toward a world they would never meet. Verdant forests and field rose toward the slopes. The air was warm and fragrant with the smells of life.
The green and naked people approached.
“Margaret! We meet again! Welcome to this, our new world. We have seen this world in our dreams. This is why we knew that you had to go to the moon.”
Margaret recognized Ritual Don, as she had called him in her accounts of the ritual she had attended seemingly so very long ago. She did not expect to see a green and naked version of him here.
“Don! Don…this is…my…companion, Joseph. We have…traveled together.” She stumbled over each word and over her thoughts.
“And so you have,” said Ann. “We have our own stories. There have been many changes since we saw you last, not the least of which is that we are all…green!” Others were joining Don and Ann. Margaret recognized many from the ritual she had attended on the Henson property.
Others she did not recognize.
“We seem to be more than one group. Some are from your time and know you, but we came here from a festival we were having on Don Henson’s land. There was something, a glowing oval perhaps, that appeared, and then we only saw stars swirling around us. And then we were here, in this place with the mountains, all of us naked and green.”
“I think, I’ve read of you,” said Margaret. Don Henson wrote about a group that disappeared one night. They had a bonfire and an oval, as you say, appeared. And then you were all gone. Your cars, everything, he said. We are not from the same time then. We are many years in the future.”
StarTat spoke, “Space-time is not a limit to your experience, and neither are dimensions. There are many extra-dimensional entities in the universes. Some of them have directed you to be here. You have been chosen to begin a new experiment. You are autotrophs now, feeding on sunlight. You will not need to consume other life, or each other.”
“Autotrophs? Like drooling autotrophs?” Someone from the past was asking.
“Dueling autotrophs?” asked Joseph, in continued total disbelief.
“Drooling. It’s from a song. On TV. The only autotrophs I know about.”
“And now you are one.” A green and naked Jim Drake had appeared out of nowhere.
�
�Drake!” cried Joseph. “Where in the world are we?”
“You are not in your world, Joseph. You have been selected to begin a new one. You are the seeds.”
“Wait a minute! I don’t know that I’ve consented to becoming a green seed.”
“But didn’t you, Joseph? By the choices you made. Both you and Margaret wanted to explore, and to escape. You had few ties to your familiar world. And you have bonded to each other quite nicely.”
“An arranged marriage?” questioned Margaret.
“You arranged your marriage if you want to call it that. Now you can go forward to exploring this world, which as a matter of fact, you are going to find fascinating in ways you cannot yet imagine.”
“I’ve imagined nothing so far, except for ways to try to escape, most of which were unsuccessful.”
“They were always successful, though not in ways that you did imagine. Your space, if you will, was always personal to you. Speaking of….”
In the distance was a personal space vehicle.
“We thought you might like to do some flying,” Drake said. “And, Margaret, this one has two seats!”
∆∆∆
Joseph and Margaret looked down from the PSV upon the great mountains surrounded by verdant and inviting valleys. Margaret, for a change, had a splendid view from the bubble in which they rode side-by-side.
“This is an amazing world. It’s perfect, isn’t it?”
“It’s perfectly beautiful, what we have seen so far. And to think our little group are the only people. We’re the only ones.”
“And we don’t even have to eat. Although the mineral water in that stream tastes really good.”
Joseph set the craft down on a glacier in a spot that looked relatively safe. He cracked the left side door.
“Wow! It’s cold up here. And the wind. This craft handled the wind so well that I didn’t know that it’s blowing so.”
“Thank heavens we found the flight suits, so we don’t have to be green and naked here.”
“We’re still green, although I guess I’m getting used to it…a little. But the PSV didn’t come with space suits. I guess we don’t need them since, for a reason I don’t understand, we are limited to flying in the atmosphere. It simply will not increase altitude beyond breathable. So strange. On the other hand, we seem to have unlimited fuel. I don’t know how that works.”
Joseph closed the door, and the cabin became comfortable once again. He lifted gently from the glacier, not wanting to disturb the ice.
The valley beyond the mountain range was as verdant as their new home, but the vegetation looked different. It was, somehow, more earth-like he thought.
At a lower altitude he saw a clearing, what appeared to be a field of some sort of planned growth, and then…a house!
∆∆∆
Joseph gingerly set the PSV down in front of a very familiar house in a very familiar yard adjoining a familiar-looking cornfield. An older couple rushed as well as they could down the steps from the porch. They wore ordinary clothes for their time, but they were still slightly green.
“We are so pleased to meet you. We’ve been expecting you ever since we arrived. I’m Don; this is Sue, my wife.”
“We’ve seen you before. But on earth.” Joseph was perplexed and stammering a little.
“I’m Margaret. This is Joseph. We are traveling together on this new earth.”
“We know. We were told this.”
“Who…who told you?” Joseph was experiencing an excitement that bordered on agitation.
“Jim Drake. Do you know him?”
“We have…met him, actually several times now. How did you get here? How old are you anyway?”
“Don’t be rude, Joseph,” Margaret said quickly.
“It’s all right. You must be as puzzled as we are. I myself finally met Jim Drake. For a long time I doubted if he was even real.” Sue was almost as perplexed as Joseph, but she was calmer.
“We were transported here, through a quantum gate, I guess. It was a very strange thing to find our whole house traveling through space for what seemed like days, weeks. We don’t know. We arrived here, and Jim Drake showed up. Said we need to rebuild the garden, there in the corn field. We already had a garden in what used to be my field until the oval and the glass cave and Driscoll and his bunch dug it all up. So we made the garden there after that. Drake said it had some special significance.”
“We’ve been told repeatedly that we need to rebuild your garden,” Margaret said. “And we’ve traveled a great deal and through many experiences that we did not understand. But back to what Joseph asked, somewhat rudely, there does seem to be some kind of asynchrony in time. You lived on earth many years ago to us. I first learned about you in an old book I found because I am, or was, an archeologist. Then we traveled, well, here, but we weren’t actually here. We were observing. It’s hard to explain.”
“Never fear. Drake is here.”
“You do seem to show up at auspicious moments.” Margaret was hoping for some explanation.
“I’ve got lots of ‘splainin’ to do. Okay, the Others determined that you need to be here to start a new earth for one thing. And to rebuild that garden, here, in this time. It doesn’t matter what time you came from. This is your home now. And, Don, you have a great new toolshed and some new equipment. You can farm, if you want to. But first…the garden. You’ve got to rebuild the garden. If you don’t build it here and now it never existed, not then, on earth, or anywhere else. What you do here and now determines everything.”
“I don’t understand this, Jim. I never did.”
“Well, Don, you have a new home, some new neighbors.” Drake glanced at Joseph and Margaret. “And a new mission. In what is your new personal space.”
Drake vanished, and Don and Sue and Joseph and Margaret were left alone in the front yard, gazing at a mandrake plant that had not been there before.
“We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden”
~ Joni Mitchell
About the Author
William David Hannah is a writer, photographer, and musician who lives in the mountains of North Georgia, USA. His science fiction novels include Angels of the Quantum Gate and Personal Space.
Personal Space- Return to the Garden Page 14
