Dance of Life: The Belief Chronicles: Book One (Chronicles of a Planet's End)

by Tatiana Beller

  He looked at her with tenderness. “I know you will be fine. You are amazing. You are a survivor. You will make it.”

  “I need more than that. I need you to understand me for who I am and not for what you need.” She said at last.

  “I don’t know how – “

  “Then I have something to teach you,” she answered. “If you give me this chance to show you what I need, then I promise…”

  She was quiet. It was going to be harder than she thought to make the promise. Once made, she knew she would keep it.

  “I promise to let you die,” Emily said.

  Geoffrey’s eyes filled with tears. “You have a deal, Emily.”

  Chapter 16

  TJ56823

  Journal 1

  It was four in the morning, and Tristan was sitting in the hotel lobby alone. He finally left the bar. He arrived back at the hotel and sat in the empty lobby, thinking. The experience at the bar had been unexpected. The way people wanted more and more of Tristan. They wanted to share their fantastic experience with everyone. He had never owned a social media account because he never had a need. Tristan didn't like people. It felt absurd to create an account to connect with others when he didn't want to communicate with anyone.

  There was always the possibility of being tracked. Tristan knew he should be facing lethal injection for his crimes. It always felt better to hide away from the norm. It was best not to be too much in the public eye. The evening had been an eye-opener. He hadn't disclosed details, but he had told the crowd about his darkness. He explained this new lease on life, and they worshiped him for it. It made no logical sense. He couldn't understand why people would value something so fundamentally stupid. It was a show, but a very valuable show.

  He walked to the back of the hotel towards the ocean. He took off his shoes and walked along the beach. In the darkness, it was hard to see the perfect aqua color of the water. The sand was a little rough, but it was still pretty perfect. The water hit his feet as he walked down the beach, looking at the endless line of hotels along the shore. The moon shone in the distance. It made him think of Emily and Geoffrey. He wondered if they survived and were back in his two-moon planet. What would happen to them? Geoffrey would die. Emily would live, and she would become untouchable.

  Tristan realized he had no need to hurt Emily. He felt an odd tug when he saw that he actually wished her well. They were now eternally linked. He owed her this new power. For the first time, he understood the lack of control she felt when Tom died. She was exactly who she said she was. Emily never wanted to hurt anyone. Even at the moment when she could have destroyed him, she stopped. She stopped because she couldn’t hurt someone Tom had loved.

  His brother had loved him. Despite how terrible Tristan had been, Tom had always loved him. Somehow that mattered to Tristan today. His mind went back to the bar. The energy of the place was electric. It was magical. He held those people, and at that moment, he could have convinced them to do anything. He thought of the women who removed their shirts, and the stuffy businessmen doing cocaine. He had danced and touched and moved through them like God, infusing in them a sense of energy and purpose beyond their own capabilities.

  At the end of the night, he could have taken any of those women home, but it made no sense. He felt a more significant surge from the experience in the crowd than he had done with any woman. He felt alive in the middle of that attention. With a woman, it had never been enough. The petty power he felt in their inferiority seemed so very small. This was bigger. How could he make it bigger? How could he make it be a part of his life?

  He sat down, staring out into the water, watching the stars slowly dim. The color moved from deep black to dark blue, to gray and finally to the deep blue of the morning. Then the yellow, pink, and orange colors filled his vision, and finally, the sun came up. He looked out at the water, and the surreal aqua color pushed itself almost obscenely into the beach. A few people were walking the beach. In the distance, he heard bells. It was Sunday. He stood up and followed the bells.

  He saw a church in the distance. He cleaned himself up the best way he could and followed the crowd into the church. He sat in the back and listened. He couldn't understand a single word of the sermon because he didn't speak the language. Tristan saw the energy in the crowd. He saw the image of Jesus on the cross with his forehead filled with spikes digging into his skin, blood pouring from the injuries. The expression of both pain and ecstasy. He thought of his experience with Emily, and he had felt the same way. He had also come back from the dead. He wasn't supposed to be alive. He should have never survived the experience with Emily. Emily stopped. Emily's love for Tristan's brother had saved his life.

  He saw the hundreds of people dressed in their best clothes listening intently to the man speaking. He saw the saints surrounding the church. As people filed to the front to receive communion, Tristan saw them kneel at the altar. It was magnificent. He didn’t come from a religious family. His experience with churches was limited. This was a type of power he never registered. He read in history classes about the power of the churches, the mosques, and the hundreds of other faiths. He thought how far people would go to prove that they believed. This was a totally different kind of power. People were willing to do anything to prove they believed in you.

  Tristan switched that word in his brain automatically. People fighting to prove they believed in me. It could be done. He was a God. He could not die. He could not get injured. Nobody could stop him. He was immortal, like the Greek tales. The service ended, and Tristan stayed sitting in the pew unmoving. He knew, without a doubt, he had found his calling.

  EB26392

  Journal 1

  When Emily decided to make the deal, she imagined one scenario. The reality was crashing with her imagination. It was not bad, but it wasn't good either. Geoffrey was adorable. He was both attempting to be utterly romantic and charming, and at the same time, give Emily more information any human could learn. Maybe it was an advantage that she was not fully human.

  The morning after their arrival, Geoffrey headed towards the barn with Emily. He made some casual comment about the animals only really hunting at night, unless their habitat was disturbed. Emily noted the information and hoped it would be necessary to think about it again. Once in the barn, Geoffrey showed her a small room that had an odd series of machines.

  “This is the generator,” he said.

  “I thought you had no electricity out here.”

  "I don't feel it is necessary for most things on the farm. I really use it for three purposes. I have a well. The pump over here takes water out of the well and into a ground cistern. There is another pump in the cistern that moves the water up towards the buildings. The water heater is run from its own solar panel, one by the big house and one by the cabin. The generator also powers the lights in the vault under the mountain. But this here is the biggest use of electricity on the farm." Geoffrey pointed to a bizarre machine. "It is a sound wave emitter. We can't hear it. I don't think dogs can hear it. The chickens can't hear it. A long time ago, I actually had a dog here. What it does is create a perimeter fence with a ten-mile radius around the property. It keeps most of the large and dangerous animals out. The problem is that if I am gone for any length of time, it turns itself off. I have to turn it on again. I consider it a type of pollution on the land. If I am gone for a while, I don't believe it is responsible to leave it on. Truthfully, I turned it off before we left because it would make Tristan's life miserable and short. In the end, he decided to follow us."

  “Do you think Tristan is alive?” Emily asked.

  "He is probably more than alive," Geoffrey replied. Emily was about to ask what he meant. Still, he continued with the lecture, "It makes the return tricky, but since I can't die, after a few relatively bad experiences, I learned how to manage those flying monsters and other critters."

  Geoffrey laughed as he said this. Emily didn't find it that funny. He turned the machine on, and Emily heard se
veral pairs of leathery wings take flight. They waited for about ten minutes and headed towards the house. It was sad to see the difference in Geoffrey from when they left for this return. The walk from the cabin to the barn was challenging. The walk from the barn to the house was the same.

  “I check all of the solar panels once a week to make sure they are fully functional. If one is even remotely damaged, I fix it or replace it.” He continued.

  “How am I supposed to learn how to fix a solar panel?” Emily asked.

  “You’ll have time to learn.” He smiled as he said this.

  He walked into his home and looked around to make sure that everything was safe.

  "I am sure that with those animals around, we no longer have chickens. They are not that hard to get out here." He added. Obviously, Geoffrey took Emily's proposal to heart, and he was going to drive her insane.

  “How do you communicate with the outside world?” She asked him, and he gave an embarrassed look.

  He walked into his room. Emily hadn't been in his place before. It was nothing like the rest of the house. It was modern and had beautiful dark wood furniture, probably worth a fortune. There was another desk, but this one had some sort of a computer unfamiliar to Emily. It was a piece of glass that reacted as Geoffrey entered the room. It lit up, and as soon as it did, Emily saw there was a wall of other monitors that also lit up. She saw the news from every part of the planet, and information on a few other planets as well. There was a direct link to AA001. It looked like their technology.

  "You have search engines and online shopping?" Emily asked incredulously.

  “That is what Tristan did for me. He received any packages I needed and met me at the dry lakebed to deliver.”

  “Why do you keep such close track of everything happening on Earth?” Emily asked.

  “That is my purpose,” he responded. “With this technology, I can be here for as long as I can. I only leave when I see something urgent. It works.”

  “How does it work?” Emily asked.

  "It is powered by the gates. Truthfully, I only have a vague understanding of it. It is the Sentinels' specialized knowledge. I know that it is connected to me, and now to us. It works a bit like the Sentinels. It senses the body chemistry and reacts accordingly. There is some use of fingers, but it is also possible to think ideas into the machine. If there is a gate nearby, it can sense the gate and connect to all the other gates to read the information. It senses technological information highways of a planet and interprets it into the monitor. Pretty great, right?" Geoffrey said, sitting down at his desk.

  “Aren’t you terrified someone will steal the technology?”

  "Yes. This is why it only exists here." Geoffrey said. "It still has some important safeguards in place. It is programmed to read you or me. No one else could operate it. Very few people know about the gates. It would be improbable someone to stumble upon it and use it. Still, as technology improved on Earth, I felt better taking it off-planet."

  The computer flooded Emily with so much information she found dizzying. She found out that Geoffrey had more money than any person could spend in a lifetime. He had more money than he'd been able to spend in his lifetime. It was relatively insane. He made some remark about having the time to do it. She also realized that there were societies across the universe with its own kinds of money and financial institutions. Geoffrey kept track of all of them. The man who felt electricity was an unnecessary luxury thought it was necessary to keep track of all economic movements in the universe. He also kept investments throughout different planets. Even attempting that sentence aloud felt absurd.

  She saw he kept very close tabs on all the political movements. He was aware of everything that happened in every country on Earth. He communicated pretty freely with the others like Emily and Geoffrey across the universe. He was specifically close to Agandana, checking in with her almost daily. If he had a best friend, it would be her.

  “You know that Tristan said he had sex with her,” Emily said.

  Geoffrey had laughed loudly, “I am sure he did. She likes experimenting. I guess we all do after a while. It is a long life, and things get boring very quickly.”

  “Really?”

  “The stories I could tell,” Geoffrey replied.

  “I’m listening,” she replied.

  He laughed and walked away, leaving her at the computer to continue to do research. She would get it out of him eventually. Of course, the conversation would lead to the event, and she was not ready to discuss the event. She would watch him at meals and in the evenings as he sat with his journals. He had not improved at all. It was falling more on her to manage everything in the house. Most days, if he was not working with her, he would be on the porch in a chair, staring at nothing. He would go into his coma mode.

  “What are you doing when you get like that?” She’d asked him one evening during dinner.

  "I am just thinking," he said. "It is restful. I can just simply allow myself to slow everything in my body. It is a technique I learned long ago and perfected. It helps to make life a little easier."

  “Where did you learn it?” Emily asked.

  “I lived in a rather unique monastery in the late sixteenth century. The monks had traveled East and brought back all sorts of ideas. I had traveled extensively East as well, and it felt like the right fit. The brothers at the monastery became very dear friends. I stayed there well into the seventeenth century. Eventually, the Catholic church became more interested in our eccentricities, and I figured it was time for me to go.” Geoffrey said. “We were so small, maybe thirty monks at most at a time, it was easy to disappear.”

  “I can’t picture you as a monk,” Emily said.

  He had kissed her hand and her lips before answering. "We had a rather different perspective on that situation than most orders. We didn't go for poverty, chastity, and obedience. We felt learning and honoring divine felt more perfect."

  "You believe in God?" She asked, surprised.

  "No, of course not," Geoffrey answered. "It is hard to believe in God when I have lived through so many different faiths. I have seen the destruction caused by men believing that they have the truth. No, I don't believe in God. I've been confused for a God enough times that it loses some of its appeal. Faith is a tricky master. You will have to be so careful, Emily. It is terrible when people begin to think you are the One. They lose all sense of self-determination, and you become responsible for dreadful things."

  “Has this happened to you?” Emily asked.

  "I met many of the spiritual leaders. Some were beautiful people with amazing intentions. Some I have been lucky enough to call a friend. Yet, even those became part of the destruction. People are frightened. When you know death is imminent, life becomes so precious. The result is a blinding fear. The fear makes good people search for answers, and that search can turn them into terrible people." Geoffrey said.

  “What do you think happens when you die?” Emily asked.

  Geoffrey laughed, "I guess I will find out soon enough. It is not that simple. I think that somehow you become part of a whole. I think who you are and who you were, become a narrative, and the actual physical part of you dissolves into the greater cosmos. This is why the Sentinels like tracking with journals. They want a hard copy of the first-person account of a life. It must be in the technique used within that planet."

  “And divine? You mentioned it.”

  "There is incredible magic in the world. Of course, it can be explained by science, but that doesn't make it less magical. Science is special because it is never based on truth. It is built with the idea of uncertainty. It is constantly evolving, moving, changing. It is proving over and over again to make sure that it is right. And somewhere in the middle of that, people fall in love, give birth, write literature, create art, build and destroy civilizations. It is rather magnificent. There is divine in those actions." Geoffrey added. "Do you want to dance?"

  Geoffrey put music on an ancient Victro
la, then he stood up and took her hand. She followed his steps. They were slower and gentle. His body obviously had difficulty with the movement. She leaned her head against his chest and listened to his heartbeat through the music. She wished the moment would never end. At that moment, she was absurdly happy. When she saw he was exhausted, she took him to the couch. They lay together side by side, enjoying the company. There was no need to say anything.

  TJ56823

  Journal 1

  Tristan arrived back in Los Angeles, a new man. He was wealthy, powerful, and had a plan. He was sitting in his apartment. It was in a fashionable building with its own gym and walking distance from restaurants and shops. He was looking at the condo and hating it. It no longer fitted the man he wanted to be. He had walked into the apartment, looked around, and realized it could not be the image he needed. Tristan was a God, and he needed to become the God. He needed people to trust the God and not the man. For that, he had to make changes.