Keeran could hear that musical identifier for Earth now as he raced past star Sun in a bloom of yellow-white light that shot from his feet to his head as he passed by the star and then progressed on towards the relative dimness of distant stars bypassing his feet. Sun’s light above him formed a halo in the warp tube above his head. Keeran had visited the solar system and planet Earth in particular several times before and he relived the drop towards the blue planet now with the same trepidation as always. Planet Earth approached seemingly slowly at first then rushed to become a blue disk extending out from his feet in all directions. The Worders of Dawn administration had plotted his course from this point to the newborn awaiting his soulfire and he hurtled down in a lightning bolt of pure energy directly at the hospital in northern England.
To Keeran this final descent happened almost instantaneously so his only real perception was that he knew what was happening to him from prior lives. He was seeing it more in his memory and imagination than in real time and space. It was a grey day in a small town in northern England and for those very few people who cared to look skywards at that moment the flickering burst of energy was so infinitesimally short that it would go unremarked by passers-by or scientific instruments.
In the birthing room, the smiling midwife passed the baby wrapped in a tiny white blanket to Charles. This distracted him from the alarming spectacle of Doctor Forbert attending to Margaret’s physical reparations, and forced him to concentrate on the baby, now quiet and seemingly peaceful after the dramatic birth, eyes closed, face puckered and pink, for all the world looking more like an old fellow than a new baby. There was some minor facial inflammation from the rough birth, but forceps marks and bruising was hidden by the cotton blanket wrapped around the baby’s head as a hood.
Keeran was plummeting to Earth and he swallowed hard in his quiet centre as he tore to the ground; he would never get used to this high-powered vertical descent into the solid mass of the building below. He shot through the roof of the hospital and the ceiling of the birthing room. He felt like his body was being stretched impossibly, his feet a hundred metres from his eyes. His feet were so far away indeed that they seemed tiny as they approached the baby and then his long wave form compressed hard, concertinaing down as his soul slammed into the tiny form of the newborn in its father’s arms. The baby’s eyes flew open as it was struck by Keeran’s soulfire and Charles was confronted by an unblinking gaze that seemed to convey the wisdom of the ages between father and son. The birth of Charles’ firstborn son had provided him with surprises no matter how he had educated himself to be the new father, but like many things that had happened that day he could later say that these were the things in life you could never be prepared for. Birth, death and all the Really Big Questions humans on Earth had never faced up to at that time. They merely glossed over them with a veneer of trite explanations. As he looked into his son’s eyes of newborn clearest blue he was deeply affected by the sudden significance of the event. This was good as, after all, wasn’t fatherhood supposed to change you? This is surely what people meant when they referred to experiencing the miracle of birth! Charles was unaware that interplanetary forces were at work in creating his child, one in ten million births.
Keeran spent a few seconds in recoil from the vertiginous descent after joining with the flesh and blood of the baby boy and migrated to the brain area known as the limbic system and specifically the ‘home of the new soul’ within the tiny pineal body. He had flashed open his new eyes and stared into the distraught face of his new father as he arrived as the new life force of the baby. Keeran recognised the surprise on the face looking down on him and then the peace of the gentle smile of the father he would grow to know so well.
After a few more bonding moments, Keeran closed the eyes of his new body and gathered himself to issue the ‘red threads’ that would appraise the key individuals of his life who were in bodily form on Earth that he had arrived – again. The spiritual ‘red threads’ were invisible but when he arrived at birth they joined him to the key individuals of his new life. The Gayan souls among them recognised the jolt that Keeran was now back with them and that at some future time they may re-form their bond together on meeting. The red threads would burst into activity if Gayans came into proximity and they would both recognise that the important connection was there. Spiritually aware human beings on Earth also had a milder form of the same sensation and could recognise other people of importance to their lives from all those about them.
Gradually, events calmed down and Charles and Margaret thanked the medical team. Margaret was physically anaesthetised and Charles emotionally so. The medical team congratulated them and after Margaret had a period of recuperating, the staff helped her and Charles with their newborn to the car to go home. The infant seemed much too small for the complicated plastic seat contraption they had bought for the purpose but Charles had checked exactly how such a tiny one would be completely safely ensconced and he then drove the car home more slowly and more carefully than ever before, as if the back seat were stacked randomly with full egg boxes.
The next week was one big round of feeding, changing baby and showing off to beaming relatives and friends. They named him Joe as they both liked the name and both had Joes in ancestral strands of their large family trees.
Gayan naming convention meant that he would now be known as Joe in his latest bodily reincarnation on Earth and his long-term soul name remained Keeran. He would need to be called Joe at all times to fit in with local custom and also to protect him from enemies who may be seeking out those very few with Gayan souls. The joining of Gayan soul energy and earthly body in an intimate embrace such that Joe would become one completely unified being would now take his entire baby and toddler stage just to complete all the mind-to-body connections so that the child would grow as quickly and as normally as possible. In early childhood this development would provide speech and early reasoning from toddler to school age. This would of course have been exactly the same process as in most cases where an earthly soul would have arrived as a matter of natural course and joined to a new earthly baby body. Child psychologists on Earth characterise this period of early childhood as basic cognitive development, incapable of thinking in logic or abstract terms, and thereby explaining why so few adults can later remember many or any events before approximately five years of age.
The baby Joe was already endowed with instinctual knowledge of essential life dangers and processes from his earthly body. His genetic code knew automatically functions like breathing, eating and certainly excreting – ‘Phew’ went Charles as he revealed Joe’s early digestive successes in his disposable nappies. Baby Joe’s body was also pre-programmed with things he liked, such as songs at bedtime, smiley adults and being bounced and swung in the air as long as it was from a trusty parent imprinted in his mind at birth. Equally Joe was programmed with things he didn’t like: growls from animals, hostile aggressive faces, and a whole bunch of things recorded in his DNA that had hurt his ancestors, like fire and cold, dangerous animals and flowers, spiders, snakes and deadly nightshade, as well as hostile hordes from ages past who charged through your village swinging swords or stole you into slavery in some ancient history so dramatic the experience was worth coding into the DNA record of Joe’s new body.
Keeran’s soul energy was completely entwined with the labyrinthine development process of the growing brain and its control of his new body. This took all his soul’s capabilities and his adult knowledge of Keeran of Gaya was deferred until much later. His mental processes were growing larger and more complex as the sheer volume of his brain increased and went to work managing the growing bones and muscles to master the enormously complex skills of walking and talking. These huge changes took place in the first two years and beyond that Joe’s soul and physique developed in unison, physical prowess developing alongside mental processes the same as any other earthly child but rather more amplified.
Joe w
as a happy child. Undemonstrative, quiet and peaceful in his temperament and successful in all his growth milestones. Charles and Margaret were pleased with him and with the exception of a few childlike accidents along the way they were very proud of his progress and gave him a lot of loving attention. He didn’t attend nursery school as Margaret stayed at home and looked after him as Charles went to work. Joe enjoyed Dad coming home and looked forward to being read to before bed and a song to go to sleep by.
Just prior to Joe first attending school at nearly five years old, Charles was reading the Sunday Times newspaper and Joe came to sit on his father’s lap, messing up the large pages in the scramble on to his dad’s lap.
“Hey, Joe, mind where you’re going,” protested Charles, trying to straighten up the broadsheet newspaper.
“Read to me, Daddy, read to me!” commanded little Joe. They settled down and Charles turned the pages looking for something suitable to read to his boy in the bad-news welter of grown-up stories. There was an article about the early Hubble telescope, with colour photos of distant nebulae and galaxies. Charles started to read to Joe and after a couple of paragraphs paused for a drink of water. He was stopped in mid-gulp when Joe picked up reading from the newspaper where he had been following his father’s words and carried on reading aloud the story to his father. Margaret could hear the reading from the kitchen and paused from cooking to come in and see. She stood there and watched Joe, aged four years old, reading from the paper, stumbling a little over ‘Horsehead nebula’ but reading the common words perfectly well and with appropriate animation.
Father and mother exchanged meaningful glances and would refer to this moment many times as the years went by as they dwelt on Joe’s childhood achievements.
Charles had always been interested in astronomy. Father and son enjoyed winter walks (Joe particularly liked carrying mysteriously exciting parcels on Christmas Eve to nearby relatives). Sometimes the skies would be cloudless and clear and the stars would reveal themselves in their multitudes. Occasionally one tracked across the sky and Charles explained that would be a satellite carrying the news and indeed Father Christmas would soon be doing the same in his reindeer-powered sled to deliver Joe’s Christmas presents if, of course, he had been good that year. Joe was intrigued about the itinerary and logistics of delivering presents by reindeer sled to every child in the world pursued by the advancing arc of sunlight chasing the frenzied Santa Claus across the planetary orb.
Margaret and Charles had prepared Joe to look forward to starting school. He took great interest in all kinds of books and particularly liked the illustrations and verse in children’s classics, Doctor Seuss and Edward Lear, The Cat in the Hat, The Owl and the Pussycat. Dad’s books looked boring and impossibly long by comparison, though father and son could sit together and read and Joe could look just as serious as Charles even though he was reading ‘Jabberwocky’ rather than John Le Carré.
Eventually it was time for Joe to start attending school. The great day came around after fussy preparations involving grey shorts and white button-up shirts, haircuts and crayons. Margaret dressed Joe smartly in his new clothes for the first day of school. It was a sunny day in early September and mother and son drove to school and then walked in together hand in hand. Little Joe was being brave but anxious expectation was in the air as the new class gathered and the teachers helped to separate the mothers from their offspring to start the day. One of Joe’s friends was clinging to his mother and wailing, setting off other similar situations around the room. The truth was that several mothers were as reluctant as their children to signal the start of schooldays and the end of the age of innocence.
Gradually the mothers were persuaded to leave and the children sat expectantly on brightly coloured tiny chairs at low tables. The room was brightly lit and painted and the chairs and tables were just the right size for the comfort of the children. Mrs Dashly was the Year One teacher and was being assisted by several of the other teachers. She was chasing around full of smiles and leading various games so that the children were engaged swiftly in interesting activities. A couple of other teachers recruited to help on the first day were ensconced in trying to calm down one of Joe’s friends, Richard, who was now without his mother but still very distraught. Joe thought that school would not go well for Richard if he could not cope just leaving his mother!
Joe soon became so engrossed in the painting and numbers and letters games of the first day that lunch came around very quickly. Mrs Dashly led the new group to the dining room and it seemed very big and crowded as the rest of the school of five to eleven year olds were crowding in. Joe was trying to come to terms with the overpowering noise combined with the worries of whether the food would be edible when a very pretty blonde girl with impish features came to sit beside him on the wooden bench. She was wearing a yellow summer dress with button-up cardigan in navy blue and matching round-shaped shoes with a strap across to a tiny buckle over frilly white socks. Joe approved that she had scuffed knees and wavy hair for a girl. As they stared into each other’s faces they both felt red threads connecting for the very first time in their new lives without understanding what was occurring. They were soon engrossed talking to each other in the knowledge they would be friends forever. The rest of the crowded throng of the dining hall was forgotten.
“Hello, my name is Charlotte but my brother calls me Charlie. That’s him over there. He started here last year.” Charlotte’s brother seemed very worldly indeed, laughing with his friends and very much at home here. She whispered in Joe’s ear, “My name here is Charlotte and we can be special friends.”
Joe felt a little overawed by this unexpectedly intimate development on such a Big Day, but his words came naturally as he surprised himself by saying, “My name is Joe but I want to be best friends too,” and the bond between the new schoolchildren but very ancient colleagues was sealed.
Across the small table another small new boy called Christopher James sat and watched the whole scene play out with Charlotte and Joe. He didn’t say much but noticed everything. He was envious about the easy way the boy and girl opposite had made friends so early and he felt he was an outsider. He had a pale complexion with straight dark hair. Despite living locally the other children did not know much about him. They had heard that his mother didn’t let him out of the house much. Consequently school was even more overpowering for Christopher but he was strangely pleased to be experiencing the world outside the four walls of his home pretty much for the first time in his life.
Joe’s infant schooldays passed in a blur of lessons in words and numbers, enjoyable art lessons and brightly decorated classrooms. He painted scenes with complicated star patterns and his teachers thought he had an overactive imagination. He painted skies with deep blue top layer and the earth below with happy people with long legs, small torsos and happy faces. Sometimes he painted slender whirlwinds that sucked the painted people up into the heavens. Sometimes he painted many dark, thin-limbed people with large eyes and no smile moving other people onto flying saucers. “Too much television,” thought his teachers who pointed out that the blue sky comes all the way down to the ground if you look out of the window. “Actually,” Joe replied, “the sky starts at the ground and goes up to space where the sky runs out.” Teachers were baffled and moved along to supervise less challenging artwork.
It was soon time to leave the infant part of the school and move up to the larger junior section of the same school complex. Joe’s progress at school was high end academically and good in physical sports especially football and athletics. Charlotte was similarly gifted and more so on the sporting side having come to the attention of county scouts for gymnastics and swimming. Joe was particularly struck one day by the head teacher at morning assembly proudly explaining to the school that a prior pupil had now been accepted at the famous Oxford University. Joe had read many storybooks about schooldays of public school boys and knew that Oxford University was a
s high an academic achievement as you could hope for beyond school. He did not know quite yet how it all connected up but was aware that you had to do well in all your subjects to make that happen. As he sat quietly and listened he resolved to make that his own goal and later explained as much to Charlotte at break time.
Christopher had attached himself to Joe and Charlotte over the years in no formal sense but the three friends naturally accepted each other’s company as young children do. There were many shifting social groups; not quite gangs , but based around gender, the local neighbourhood where each child lived and how they spent their social time outside of school.
As junior school progressed at a Gayan developmental level Joe’s earthly body and Keeran’s Gayan soul were now completely entwined as was necessary to provide the foundation for his extraordinarily complex adult skills. Charlotte/Amily was going through the same process. Both would demonstrate their prodigious skills in different ways at this stage but the full knowledge of their prior lifetimes would emerge later in adolescence.
Like all the children, Joe was becoming increasingly aware of his growing physical and mental prowess but he was conscious that things he found easy were difficult for some of the others. This was not off the scale in any way but seriously high end enough for teachers and his parents to stop and remark on his abilities. The first time the head teacher did a development check of every younger pupil on reading and writing, Joe managed words with foreign pronunciation, like ‘Antique’, and completed the count to one hundred out loud at first time of asking.
Star Matters Page 14