“Too adaptable,” Penny retorted.
Margot looked at Penny. She sensed some strange similarity between Rovada and Penny. Both were expressionless. Penny’s round, flat face and pressed nose could be lost in a sea of Chinese or Japanese, Margot thought. Rigid and hard. Margot wondered if a smile, or even a cry, ever cracked through Penny’s small, tight lips. Her face was overly taught, and Margot sensed that Penny had spent too many years in a dry, cold wind, somewhere in China. She furrowed her eyebrows. “I thought you were American.”
“We are,” Bing replied. He smiled politely. “We are as American as you.”
“Then why do you speak with an accent?”
“We left China many years ago and came to the United States, California, and became citizens a few years later.”
“Oh.”
“I said we are too adaptable,” Penny continued. “This is the second time that we are without a home,” Penny said dryly. “I hope you find yourself adaptable. We have experience on our side.”
Margot felt herself rise up in anger. “To this? Are you comparing going to America to this? How could you?” she yelled, her hand stretched out, shaking in front of her. “This is far from America, far from it. I don’t see any humans around. I don’t see any friendly faces. I see this bug over here, this brown ugly toad-faced roach.”
Sergio wiped his eyes. “Margot,” he screamed, “if you’re going to say that about my friend, I won’t be your friend.”
“Friend?” she cried. “How could you make friends with this? You, Penny, did you see anything like this thing on the shore of New York when your ship landed?”
“San Francisco,” Bing interjected.
“I don’t care. At least you saw faces, friendly faces, human faces. You didn’t see this.”
Penny stood motionless. “I find the Das much friendlier than most Americans. Many were boorish and bigoted. Fearful. Conceited in their fear. Never knew themselves. Never wanted to. Self-absorbed beyond recognition. Sit in front of the TV or Facebook all day, create nothing of value. Lazy and entitled.”
“You find them what?” Margot ran out of breath. There was a dull, uncomfortable silence.
“You think that coming to America was so easy? You have not traveled beyond the United States, this is obvious,” Penny continued.
“Certainly, I have. What does that have to do with anything?”
“You think all people need to be like you.”
Margot shook her head, sighed loudly, and looked at her feet. “I need shoes,” she said automatically. She looked up at Rovada.
“We can make you some, as we did your clothes.”
“Look, folks,” Margot said, beginning to walk into a small exit from the cavernous room, shaking her hand as the pain subsided. She noticed a slight tingling like the finger had fallen asleep, then glanced at Penny as she passed. “We can talk about this crap later.” Margot kept walking and glanced back. Rovada followed in lock-step and Roger and Sergio were close behind. Bing and Penny had not moved. “Aren’t you coming?” Margot asked, flustered that they had not followed her lead.
“You are going nowhere.”
“What?”
“There are a hundred exits. The one you choose has not been excavated,” Bing replied.
Margot continued walking, embarrassed that he might be right. She pressed forward with her small entourage until the light that emanated from the walls began to dim.
“Bing was right, Margot,” Rovada said after they walked the short distance.
Bing and Penny stood whispering to each other. They stopped as soon as they saw Margot in the distant dimness do an about-face.
“Hey,” Margot barked, “how am I supposed to know where to go? What are you whispering about?”
Penny spoke up. “We were on our way to tai chi in the Observation room when we came upon you. Bing and I were surprised to find you awake, conscious, as you had been comatose for very long, very long. We will continue with what we had planned.”
“Oh, let’s go with them!” Sergio urged Margot.
Jesus, of all the humans on earth to end up with, a couple of Chinese! I never did understand them or the Japanese. I got the Vietnamese – I had a friend in school. But why so damn secretive? Sometimes I think that shyness, modesty, whatever, it masks something devious in a person’s mind. What a mess! Nobody like me, nobody to help me through this. Jesus, I can’t believe this is all that’s left. Just can’t be. I couldn’t go on forever like this. I am the only white person?
Margot tried to stop her train of thought. Forever was too long. Regeneration was too new. A body that never dies? No aging? Lives and changes, lives and changes, wouldn’t her memory go?
Rovada moved forward, close to Margot. In her mind, he was uncomfortably close. “Margot, there is little harm you can do here, you have met the other humans, and I sense no violence from you, other than the natural desire to see familiar surroundings. Indeed, these walls will become your natural surroundings in time.”
“No! Never! My natural surroundings are my desert!” Margot responded.
“I must now go to the Council of Five and report to them about your conscious nature. They will make the necessary modifications in our living environment so that the Wall may respond to your needs and requirements. In the meantime, do as you please. I’m sure your friends can take care of you.”
“As I please? What the hell is there to do in this disgusting place?”
“Margot!” Sergio tugged at her blouse. “Let’s go with Bing and Penny. I like to watch.”
“Watch what?”
“Watch them do their kung fu. Let’s go.”
Margot peered at the brother and sister as they began to walk away. She narrowed her eyes and shrugged her shoulders. “Whatever the hell else is there? I have nothing to do.”
“Yes!” Sergio exclaimed. “They say they’ll teach me the whole thing.”
“What whole thing?”
“The exercise.” Sergio grabbed Margot’s uninjured hand and led her, step by step, some distance now behind Bing and Penny. Roger followed obligingly at first and quickly got lost down a pathway.
The course that Bing and Penny took led to a long, high pathway. Dark corridors veered off in many directions, and the constancy of the brown sandpaper walls seemed tedious and monotonous to Margot. She could occasionally sense movement in the side passages and noticed some areas that were highly lit in various colors. She passed areas where water was clearly nearby but saw no pools nor running streams. During the climb, she felt the floor begin to shift subtly under her, adapting to her step and propelling her forward, up the steep slope of the path.
“I think you got it,” Sergio said.
“Got what?”
“I think Rovada turned the Wall on for you. We can test it when we get there.”
“Where is there?” she wondered.
The darkness kept all four of them quiet. Margot heard occasional whispers ahead of her, and she thought that Bing and Penny were probably talking about her. Finally, the floor began leveling out and the walls began to shine a little more brightly. Margot saw Bing and Penny pick some simple black shoes from the floor ahead of her, more like slippers than shoes. “Where are you leading us?” Margot demanded. “This doesn’t look like an exercise place. It’s just a hallway.”
“No. It’s a door,” Bing replied.
“A door? Where?”
“You will come to know the places for doors.”
The wall in front of them seemed to shrink away, and a large opening appeared.
“The Observation room!” Sergio exclaimed as they walked inside.
The light of thousands of stars poured in through the high ceiling of the room. Margot looked around and had a difficult time distinguishing where the room ended and the stars began, but she noticed a distinctly bright glare from a star on the wall forty meters away. Margot took a deep breath as she drew her head back to take in the room. “Holy shit!” she exclaimed. “
Is this fake?”
“Stars,” Bing replied quietly.
“I’ll show you our sun!” Sergio pulled Margot towards the center of the room. He pointed at the star. “See, that’s our sun. At least I think it is.”
Bing looked up and confirmed the boy’s comment. “It is, Sergio. Good that you are learning the constellations.”
“And there’s Virgo,” Sergio said. “It looks a little different here than it does on earth, actually. Isda says they all look different because of where we are.”
“Isda is the astronomer here,” Bing said, anticipating Margot’s question.
“Go on!” Penny demanded as she pushed her hands out to shoo away the pair. “We have the tai chi.”
Margot was dumbfounded. The stars of the galaxy were brighter than she had ever seen from her backyard. She felt as if the stars were moving toward her, enveloping her. Margot’s eyes then fixated on that bright star that Sergio said was the Sun. She squinted to see earth.
“Earth?”
“Can’t see it from here. Isda, I call him Fishda, he can show you and tell you what’s what,” Sergio replied.
“My sun?” Margot felt herself plop down on the ground in the middle of the room, and it gently gave way while a chair formed around her. She sat back, amazed at the enormity of the sight.
Penny sighed and shook her head. “We’ll move,” she said curtly to her brother. He nodded and the two stood perfectly still for a moment. Margot was staring quietly into space, her mouth agape. The mutual crack of fists against open palms brought Margot out of her brief reverie.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Shhh!” Sergio demanded. “You have to be quiet.”
Margot looked away as Bing and Penny began to slowly raise their arms from their sides to their shoulders. She peered back up at the sky. For a moment she lost the bright star, then she found it again.
Earth? That is earth? There by that star? That star? That’s my sun? That’s the white-hot orb that would burn my skin by the pool, burn my hands on the steering wheel and seat belt buckle? My car? God, my car is there by that star. My jewelry. My mascara. My iPhone. My shoes and clothes! Jesus, a million people’s, a billion people’s things are there. But God, it’s all wasted. It’s all gone. Radioactive? I don’t know. Is it still blue? Is the ocean still blue? Are there still clouds? Monsoons? I can’t believe they didn’t leave something there to tell us what’s happening, whether or not it’s all gone. They must have. But my planet, my desert, I could touch it from here. I know it’s okay. It’s got to be okay. After all, the sun is still shining. You’d think that if something happened to the earth, it would have affected the Sun. I know it’s gotta be okay. I mean, one thing, one germ or microorganism, it couldn’t wipe out everything. Something at least is alive in the ice caps, if they’re still there. Maybe my sun was too hot for the virus, maybe it killed it and things are not that bad.
Margot, use your intuition. You know, force it out. How do I do that? How have I known things so automatically in the past? It’s always just come to me before, a thought in my mind just comes in. Then I know. But I need it badly, now. I need to know if I am biasing it because I have such a desire to see what is going on there. If I’m too anxious, it wrecks it. God, I don’t feel anything. Star, sun, you must tell me. Please tell me that it’s all still there, that it’s okay and they just made a mistake in taking us, that it’s not in some horrible mess, that the sickness didn’t kill off everything. Are there still people there? Anybody?
Margot felt a pinch on her shin. “You aren’t watching,” Sergio reminded her.
“What?”
“You aren’t watching,” Sergio whispered, and he pointed to Bing and Penny who were moving in a methodical, slow exercise.
“I don’t care!” Margot said out loud. “I’m looking for my home! And stop pinching me! You’re lucky I didn’t spank you for what you did to my finger.”
Sergio frowned at her. “It’s gonna be a half hour or so. They said I could join them, so I’m going to do it. You can too,” he whispered.
“I’m not interested,” she replied, glancing at the two moving bodies. “I’m looking for earth.”
Sergio shot up and stood a few feet behind Bing, watching and attempting to replicate his movement. Margot glanced back at Bing’s thick thigh muscles, clearly showing through the loose-fitting pants that he wore.
She glanced back up to the heavens and was sitting still, in silence, when Bing came over and tapped her on the shoulder. “Hsing-I,” he said. “Would you like to try?”
“Try what?” She looked over at Sergio who was trying frantically to follow the quick movements of Penny’s hands and feet. He was smiling and quiet. “I almost forgot you were here,” Margot said. “How long?”
“We must have gone forty-five minutes. Look!” His finger tapped his wrist. “No watch. One loses track of time around here, no sunset, no sunrise. We well could have been here two hours or twenty minutes. Easy to lose track of time when time is no longer pertinent, not the way it used to be. But doing the tai chi, that’s about the only thing that remains constant. I mean, we normally do our exercises in forty minutes, at least back on earth.”
“What do you mean?”
“That the exercises take about forty minutes? You know you are there because the pain in your legs sometimes tells you the time.”
“The pain tells your time?”
“The pain tells you if you are extending yourself beyond the norm, and one knows how long the norm is, or was, as on earth.”
Margot thought for a moment. “But gravity?”
“It is different in most rooms. It can be controlled by thought. In the corridors, really, or anywhere. In fact, you can fly out there if you desire, or in here. It’s just when we enter this room, Penny and I both want the gravity of earth. The Wall knows what this gravity is and sets it accordingly. It can control gravity very locally. Margot, there’s so much science here that they’ve implemented. Seemingly complex, practically simple. Funny, humans were nearly there. Well, anyway, the Wall implements it all actively, and after time you’ll almost think the Wall is you and you are the Wall.”
Margot was sitting down on the floor, still in her makeshift chair. She suddenly jumped up slightly to a prone position. “You make it sound like the floor and walls are alive!”
“In a way, the Wall is alive. It can sense your thoughts, bend according to them. It is a machine of sorts composed of organic, in our own sense of the word, and inorganic materials, generally of this planet, though of others too. But it’s much more than a machine, maybe less of a machine, than you might suspect.”
She looked at Bing directly and noticed his huge oval eyes, a brown so deep that she felt absorbed into them. “How did you get Sergio to stay so quiet for so long?” she asked.
“Discipline,” Bing replied.
Margot raised her eyebrows in wonder, wrinkling her small forehead. “I couldn’t do it. I don’t think I could ever have children around for any time. They’re constantly at you.”
“I will go back to them, now,” he said as he turned and joined Penny and Sergio.
Margot looked back up to the sky, still amazed at the magnificence of the stars above her. Minutes passed and Bing approached her. “We are finished now.”
Margot rose from her chair and began to follow them out of the room. She noticed Penny slowed a bit to walk next to Bing, peering at the floor and failing to look up at her. “Jesus,” Margot exhorted, “you’d think what the hell is the use of doing exercises if your whole damn body takes literal care of itself! So why do you do this stuff, anyway? Nobody cares about how you look. Around here, there is nobody to care.”
Penny stopped. “You will understand that more than ever you must retain your center, your sense of self. How do you think the Das manage time? With discipline. Self-discipline. Their own exercises. Their own meditations. Contemplation and analysis. Hard work. Creative pursuits.”
“What
are you talking about?” Margot demanded.
“You will find all things in time,” Penny replied.
“What does that mean? I’ll climb mountains, that’s how I’ll stay in shape.”
Penny was already through the door and didn’t acknowledge the response.
“Bitch!” Margot mumbled under her breath.
Why me? What crazy-ass fortune this is. A couple of Chinese and a Mexican boy and that other guy with half a brain. Literally. Jesus, I am a galactic aberration.
Sergio pulled at Margot in play. “C’mon, let’s go, we’re going to go watch the feeding. You can come too!”
“The feeding?”
“Yeah, it’s funny. It’s neat. C’mon.”
“Who?”
“The Das,” Bing said, “they all do it together. It is quite peaceful.”
“Peaceful?” Margot asked. “A bunch of huge brown roaches slopping away? Why should I want to see that?”
“Oh, Margot, it’s fun to watch. I thought you’d like to go.”
Margot looked at him and shook her head. “No, you go on. I want to think. To sit here and think. I want to be alone.”
Sergio frowned. “I guess there’s some other times you could see. We’ve just been doing it together for awhile, all four of us, when we can find Roger that is.” Margot looked around in wonder that she hadn’t even noticed that he had slipped away from them, like a ghost in the night.
“Go. I want to stay.”
They left the room, the Wall closed in on itself, and the door disappeared. “God, I wish I could see what all is there,” she whispered as she looked back up at the gleaming starlight.
Immediately the room became lighter. A huge light burned in the center at the ceiling through which she viewed the sky. The surrounding stars disappeared.
“No! Too much!” she yelled as she shielded her eyes from the brightness. Just as quickly, the light dimmed by half.
Margot laid back and gasped. “My God, Jesus, my God.” She got up from her chair and paced the floor, staring up at the huge burning orb. The star she was staring at a minute ago had grown to a huge size, drowning the room in starlight. Her heart raced at the idea that she had somehow injured or broken the ceiling.
The Space Between Her Thoughts (The Space in Time Book 1) Page 12