The Space Between Her Thoughts (The Space in Time Book 1)

by Marie Curuchet

  “Time, Margot, time. I’ll repeat it again and again for you, I can see. These planetary cataclysms are very unpredictable. Not even our technology can determine with certainty what might happen. There was a chance that at any minute, your country or another with large arsenals of weapons may have fired off nuclear missiles to end it all more quickly, rather than let the suffering continue. You had many weapons to annihilate each other. It was a chaotic period. We couldn’t stay.”

  “How did you find him, then?”

  “A Das ship flew over, and he was spotted on a hill at night time. He had made a large fire in the oddest shape, so perfect, like a signal fire. He found logs somewhere and used a machine to move them into this shape, then started them on fire. It was quite a sight.”

  “What shape?”

  “I suppose you could say your letter “W” of the English alphabet.”

  “W?”

  “Believe me, we searched as much as we could. Our ship was not trying to find dozens, you see, we only had a certain amount of space, and could only take a few specimens, and so much had stopped moving on the earth by that time, the place was getting so quiet. Fires were everywhere. Animals were in their last throes of life, fidgeting and awkwardly moving.”

  That vision. That vision. Flies on my brother, Mom, Dad. Horrible.

  “Stop!” Margot cried. She yelled it loudly. Roger and Sergio were half way across the cavern floor when Roger heard the cry, even amid the flying Das, and he immediately stopped in his tracks, rolling forward headlong into the floor.

  “Sorry that brings the death of your family back to your mind.”

  “Doesn’t help.” Margot hung her head, then heard a distant moaning. She looked up and saw Roger running quickly towards them.

  “Stench! System!” Roger cried.

  Margot saw the look of terror in his eyes. Rovada immediately sensed what was wrong, and Margot felt the swirl of thick air at her face as Rovada flew past them, his wings expanding outward and inward. Margot responded quickly and was upon Sergio and Rovada within seconds.

  She stared for a moment at the boy, dumbfounded. Sergio lay on the brown floor surface, his left arm twisted awkwardly behind his back. His eyes were closed and his neck was thrown back with the tongue protruding through his teeth.

  Death. Aging. Death. Aging. The mortality of humankind. Fragile beings, we humans. Fragile, no more. Nothing, no more. Boy lying, twisted, accident, like the car flipped on the highway. The topless sports car. The first death I had seen. At least that I remember. The recognition of it all. It is time-bound. This life is time-bound, and I cannot capture and hold even a second of it. It is in my eye blink. What’s ten million more during my life, or ten billion? I could easily be the broken, ravaged body carried off in black silky bags, the unfortunate victim of life and circumstance. I could certainly be that, and my recognition of this was at five, as I stared at the body lying listlessly in the large depression between the lanes of the freeway. It was only the first of the bodies, the bodies that were sometimes intact, sometimes not, sometimes real and in my face like my grandmother in her casket, and many times just a face on video. I had become immune to it. It was all news all the time, the relentless voices, all the sensationalistic terror of billions of lives brought to me every day. No guilt in seeing it any more, no sense of shame or need for action. It was all so predictable, common, boring. But this one singularity was there with all of them, that life was drained, no more muscle tension, no more purpose. Yes, death was perhaps the ultimate loss of purpose. Loss of potential. Kinetic no more. It was at that moment, that viewing for five seconds, that I changed. The maturity and wisdom came to me at that age in a blink, that there is much more than this that I see, and that I am bound in the ignorance of these senses to see what it really is. Because it makes no sense to be this way, to be conscious, to experience, or be aware, and not to have it last for eternity. It must last. Bodies are fragile. Too fragile for this world, too fragile for any world. Life demands supple, but we cannot bend. It demands changing, but we resist. Mortal, we decline. Bodies grow old and brittle, if they even make it that long. This consciousness must certainly go on. It must. I will make it, and I don’t care if the rules say I cannot. I condemn the rules, I damn the rules if I do not go on, if there is no piece of me that remains in some form. And there must be pieces of others.

  Oh, how I long for lost opportunities, conversations with my Mom and Dad. With Joey. Staring into people’s eyes. My Mother’s hair. The smell of her hair. Those horrible girdles she wore. The flab hanging over the side. Not much of it, but the girdle was so tight. Holds the midriff bulge, she’d say. Midriff bulge, I’d laugh. Right out of the sixties, a statue, a monolith out of step with my own times, but not caring. Spanks, Mom, you’re not ancient! She was not caring about her differences, but I was, and she was my mother. Her life was cable television. She never left, never wanted to. That hairdo, Mom, let me take you to my stylist, she’ll do something a little nicer. No, she’d say. I have my own and she does my hair the way I like. ‘Can you hand me that can of hair spray?’ she’d ask, perched in front of her full-length mirror with the medieval girdle and pointed brassiere, just like her own mother, I suppose. Mom, you have some gray, I’d say and she’d say ‘I know’ and slap my hand away as I picked at her scalp like a humbled baboon.

  Margot leaned down and dropped to her knees. “Jesus, you, you idiot!” she yelled at Roger. “What did you do to him?” Margot fumbled to find his neck to press her fingers against Sergio’s artery.

  “Don’t!” Sergio laughed, bending his neck. “You know I’m ticklish!” He opened his eyes and beamed at her, then laughed at Roger. “Just playing!”

  Margot was livid. “You rotten little . . . Mexican!” was all she could think of. “Why would you want to scare me like that?”

  “Oh, Margot,” he replied, “you don’t understand. It’s impossible to get hurt here, don’t you know? The Wall reacts to your moves. Even the floor will get soft and make me not hurt. There’s no way to get hurt here, maybe, unless you do it yourself.”

  Margot felt like spanking him. She was embarrassed. But then it struck her, why should I be embarrassed? Who’s there to be embarrassed for? She looked at the expressionless Rovada, and Roger who had perspiration glistening on his high forehead.

  No need for embarrassment, that’s for sure. Should I apologize to Roger? No, he surely could not understand.

  “Do you want to meet the others?” Sergio asked, stretching his arm out for Margot to pull him up from the floor.

  “If they are like you,” she rolled her eyes, “I don’t think I want to.”

  Sergio shrugged. “Well, there aren’t any more Mexicans, if you mean that.”

  “I didn’t mean that!”

  My God, this is the last Mexican. I am the last white, except maybe for this Basque, whatever he is. “

  “What are the others?” she said aloud. Then she thought, no, that’s not right. “Where are the others?”

  “There are two more. They’re not so funny or fun to play with like Roger. I’ll have you meet Penny if I can find her.”

  “Penny? Is she white? I mean, does she speak English?”

  “She speaks American. So does Bing. They’re brother and sister.”

  Something hit Margot very oddly about this. She turned to Rovada, who stood by the three, motionless. “Why, um, what or where did you say you got us from?”

  “Well,” Rovada replied, “I could tell you the exact spots if you like.”

  “No, no, just tell me where we’re from, like cities.”

  “You, of course, were found in a hospital in Phoenix, or should I say you had been wheeled outside and your brother, we believe, was by your bed.”

  “And you got my records?”

  “Oh, we have fairly easy ways of extracting-stored information, such as in the hospital’s computers. That took seconds to do.”

  “But where are the rest?”

  “Sergi
o told you his story, of course. And I told you about Roger.” Rovada turned his head to each of them as he spoke of them. “Penny and Bing. We found them outside of Mission Viejo, California.”

  “Outside?”

  “They made themselves most obvious to us. They took over a small radio station that had backup power. You see, all power was off in the area, and they were broadcasting over many frequencies, otherwise, the radio spectrum was silent by that time, except for pre-recorded channels that were still powered.”

  “I’m not sure . . ..”

  “I mean that we left very late. It was almost the end. We did the best we could in searching, but many fires began obscuring the view of the ground. Many of the metropolitan areas, where we had the best chances of finding someone, were unstable from fire, nuclear fallout, interactions from caustic chemicals. Some of those places may have had a few who would have survived for whatever reason, but our time was limited.”

  “Why nuclear fallout?”

  “Plant explosions. Many nuclear power plants had begun to emit radiation as there were no longer personnel to support them, and the support systems were collapsing. No water pumping-in to cool them off. I could go on.”

  “No,” she said, her face pale. “No. My earth is not dead. I know it.”

  Rovada shook his head. "Funny," he thought, "head shaking seems to be an almost universal trait for disbelief."

  “What we assume happened is the most likely case. We have seen many others like this before.”

  Then it hit Margot. “You mean,” she sneered and raised her hand angrily, pointing her finger at Rovada and barely touching his hard-shelled body, “you mean you didn’t even stay to see what happened?”

  “Why?” Rovada said. “There was no reason to. Most of the animal life as you know it had perished. There was some slight possibility of a planetary explosion. Why would we wait around? When you have thousands of recordings of similar events, why wait around to see one more?”

  “But you must have done something,” she cried in disbelief. “You must have. What does your, uh, satellite, or whatever, what did you leave, did you leave something there to tell you, to tell us?” she stammered.

  “Margot, I know this sounds unreasonable, but we couldn’t leave anything. You see, nothing can be left that might disturb the re-generation of things. That includes satellites or monitoring devices.”

  “Then how the hell do you know it’s dead?” she shouted, her yell thundering throughout the large cavern.

  Rovada turned his head around to view the One where a dozen or so Das were still flying overhead. “We don’t. We can only speculate. Our observatory scans it occasionally.”

  “Observatory?”

  “Yes, of course, we have ways to scan the universe.”

  “Observatory?” she said again in a half-whisper. “What does it see?”

  “Your planet is still in its orbit. It is still green, maybe too much so, but it is too early to tell. You know, we see the planet only a short period since this happened.”

  “But I’m five years older?”

  “Yes, that’s because of your time in the hospital mostly. We traveled close to light speed. Obviously, things are happening today on earth that we will not find out about for a while because of the distance and time for light to travel.”

  “Cut the science crap, bug. I remember. I remember,” she said sadly, recalling her physics classes.

  The faces of the students, the teachers, friends, bio lab. All that is gone now, or empty of life if not gone. Desiccated bodies.

  “Again, Margot, it will take some adjustment time to understand, but for you, the past is as distant as the earth. It could just as well be a million years, except for recent memory.”

  Margot looked up at Rovada, scouring his face to find a place to focus. “No,” she said, shaking her head again, “I don’t understand.”

  "Margot, I am very old, many millions of your years old. I am this old because of genetic manipulation of the Das. In other words, we stopped our aging processes and live for virtual eternity, barring accidents of any kind. But you, because of the odd circumstance of your planet’s disruption, because you are one among the few of your kind or species, that we know of, we are allowed in our rules to genetically alter you to retain, well, your uniqueness, and we have stopped your aging process and improved your body’s ability to regenerate itself. But that is all.”

  Margot tilted her head to the side and stared blankly at Rovada. She didn’t notice Sergio tugging at her arm, begging her to get moving.

  “Hold it. I don’t age? I live forever?”

  Chapter 9

  I AM BEING DRAWN through a large dark tunnel, quickly. The stars and galaxies pull to the left and right, their gravity tugging at my limbs as I pass. The dust of stars gathers in my eyes as I try to clean it with my tears. My God, my God, I live forever. This mind, this body, is ageless, always the same, no growth, no shrinkage, no calcifications and osteoporosis, no sagging breasts, what’s left to sag, or will they sag anyway through the years from gravity’s pull? My God, my earlobes might reach the ground and beat my breasts there! I’d better not wear earrings.

  She turned and looked at Sergio, oblivious to his cacophony of pleas.

  I am a last human. I live forever. I am a last human. One of the few left. One of the few. God!

  She fell to the floor.

  A great weight has enveloped my body. It pulls me down at my gut. I can’t breathe. I can’t suck the air! I’m sinking in this brown floor! My gut moves but I cannot puke. My chest begs for air. Lungs burn. Blood throbs wickedly in my ears. Margot, stop this. I have to think. Hold on. Let me think. I am not dreaming. This bug is real. Gut, open up. Gut, distend! Gut, distend!

  “Margot!” she heard Sergio’s cry this time. “You’re so tight! Loosen up! What’s wrong with you?”

  The Basque looked on, confused at Margot’s sudden drop to the floor. Sergio grabbed furiously at Margot’s fists buried beneath her navel, thickly embedded in her gut. He pried a thumb free and bent it back hard with both of his hands. The sharp pain broke her daze.

  “Ow! Jesus!” she cried, holding her thumb. “Jesus, stupid boy, I think you broke it!”

  Sergio moved back to Roger who protected him with his arms, but he wasn’t sure what had happened and began to cry. Rovada looked on, unmoved.

  “I’m sorry, Margot, I’m sorry!” Sergio moaned, afraid that he had just lost his newly-found friend. “I did it ‘cause you fell down on the floor and were acting funny. It scared me!”

  Margot grimaced from the pain and the guilt of what she had called the young boy. She remembered that Joey was always so sensitive to her remarks. She spoke harshly between her teeth, “I swear I think you broke it!”

  “No worry,” a voice came from behind her that she did not recognize. She rolled back to see where it originated.

  “What?” she said, with a surprised expression.

  “I’m Bing.”

  “You’re Chinese,” Margot retorted with surprise.

  “My sister is coming.”

  Margot, clutching her finger, looked behind the man and saw the short, black hair of a lady, probably in her early forties and clearly of Asian extraction. The lady walked up to her and held her hand out stiffly.

  “I’m Ping Yi, or Penny.”

  “You’re Chinese!” Margot repeated in disbelief.

  Penny kept her hand out.

  “I can’t,” said Margot with a wince, holding her reddened thumb out in front of her. She turned to Rovada. “I thought you said they were American.”

  “We are,” Bing said. “We were. We are ethnically Chinese. What are you?”

  “English. Scotch." She thought for a second. "Scottish. Dutch.”

  Bing shook his head. “Before that?”

  “Huh?” she mumbled. “What?”

  “Never mind,” he replied.

  His sister stared at him sternly and sighed. “She expected a white face and feat
ures.”

  “Is there a doctor around here?” Margot moaned, her left hand elevated to alleviate the throbbing.

  “You don’t need one,” explained Bing. “You will heal quickly. It will take some minutes, but you’ll be fine, and the bone will heal if it is broken.”

  “Broken?” Margot cried. “Of course it’s broken! Did you hear the snap?”

  “I thought that was your knuckle,” Sergio whimpered softly, his eyes still moist with tears.

  Margot looked at Sergio with a frown. “I still can’t understand why you did this.”

  “I said I was sorry,” Sergio replied as he walked further back, away from Roger. He sat down against a wall of the large room. The Wall extended a seat close to the floor and developed chair arms for him. He covered his face and wept silently. Sergio’s sniffling caught the attention of Roger, who lumbered over to Sergio, sat down, and put his arm around him.

  “You’re cruel,” Penny said.

  “Hey, how would you like it if someone had just broken your finger?”

  Penny smiled a grimace and pulled all four of the fingers on her left hand back to the top of her forearm, grotesquely displaying their unique flexibility. “Many bones have been broken in my body. I know pain well. I have seen hard times and many bad people. I was just a little girl. My brother . . ..” She looked at Bing quickly, then bowed her head slowly.

  Bing spoke up. “In the time we have been talking, your finger has half-repaired itself. You have no need for a doctor. You’ll find you have a real need here for very little, very little.”

  “Just memories,” Penny whispered.

  “Is this it?” Margot looked up at Rovada. She was becoming accustomed to this brown being, robotish in his appearance, no face to speak of, no visual cues of his condition. “Is this all there is?”

  Rovada replied. “Yes, this is what remains, unless, of course, a few remain on earth. Seems there is a slight chance of that, always exceptions. Your species is quite adaptable.”