Star Matters

by David John West

  “Get off my boy, you little bastard,” he grunted into Charlotte’s face attempting to subdue Charlotte as he arrived. He attempted to twist her arm away from his fallen accomplice. Charlotte went with the turn then struck into his abdomen with stiff fingers as she brought her knee up between his legs, crushing his testicles. He too fell to the street alongside the woman, gasping like a gutted fish as he was unable to breathe in the sudden explosion of extreme pain.

  I really can’t stand these kidnappers no matter where they come from and how many times I come across them! thought Charlotte as the Gayan Amily, pleased at being able to take this one opportunistic blow back against the Zarnha agents of Spargar that inspired preying on innocents to feed their fearful computer system back on Spargar.

  Charlotte was now only concerned with returning the child. “Let’s get you back to Mummy and Daddy,” she said to the child and this got through his confusion and settled him as that was all he was wanting at this moment. Charlotte guided him back to the main street where the parents had started frantically searching the immediate area.

  “Here he is,” she said simply with a concerned smile. “I think he must have wandered off,” and she handed the toddler back to the relieved couple. Straight away she walked off in the direction of the busy Magdalene Bridge in search of Professor Kitteridge to take up the plan she had been following before being so rudely interrupted. He was not a well man, nor a fit one, so she saw him walking slowly on the far side of the bridge and by the time he had crossed she was calm and back on plan. She caught up with him by the time he was turning right onto St John’s Street and tapped him on the shoulder. “Professor Kitteridge? I’m Charlotte, a friend of Doctor McGregor, I think you have been expecting me?” She smiled knowingly.

  Professor Kitteridge paused. He was used to being stopped in the street by members of the public or students as he was famous from his television appearances and was often seen in this area. But this was different. The third person he was expecting from his analysis of Doctor McGregor had just arrived and it was this charming young woman. “Hello, my dear. You must indeed be the Charlotte I am expecting. It’s good to meet you,” he said. “Come join me for a cup of tea, I am just on my way home and feeling quite thirsty.”

  They strolled through the tourists and into St John’s College. A father and daughter perhaps, maybe tutor and student, physically unremarkable but astrally momentous. A professor and student, though the polar opposite way round to the way it appeared. As they entered the doorway to Professor Kitteridge’s staircase a group of noisy undergraduate males observed them and enviously observed that Professor Kitteridge was a lucky old guy. How right they were and yet not in the way they imagined.

  Charlotte and Professor Kitteridge settled down around the same low table where he had entertained Joe, Daniel and Christopher recently. It was a much more overcast day so Professor Kitteridge switched on two lamps that cast a cosy glow over the antique wooden furniture of the room, burnishing the flame mahogany veneers to life.

  Professor Kitteridge was well prepared for this moment. He had played out his first meeting with an alien race in his imagination many times and in many ways. “I would start by saying that you are most welcome. I was so taken aback by the loss of Doctor McGregor and if you are even in some way like him I am delighted to meet you.”

  “I am most certainly here due to Doctor McGregor,” Charlotte replied, knowing that this man was ready and open to her messages. “None of us would have wanted us to meet in the circumstances that came to pass but now they have, so I am here to continue his work.”

  “In that case I am completely at your disposal, Charlotte. I have spent my entire life pondering the wonders of the Universe and I believed that Doctor McGregor could have provided some of the answers. Now he is gone I hope that you too can help me see through to the way things really are. For my part I will try to take a positive view and have never wanted to understand more than I do right now. I don’t think it makes much sense for me to say much more. It’s over to you.”

  “Hmm, this is a good, if not normal, situation for us and me in particular,” Charlotte opened. “Doctor McGregor’s passing through means that we have inherited his decision about continuing his work with you. Normally this requires a lot of trust being built up over a long period and Doctor McGregor leaving so abruptly makes that very difficult. I have no alternative but to start out as if you have spent all that time with me. Taking all that into account we made a decision and the decision is to go ahead without pause and for me to pick up his role as your Guide.” Charlotte paused to pick up her china teacup and let the professor digest the import of her introduction.

  “What Doctor McGregor would be telling you now is that we attempt to lead emerging human races to an Enlightenment that we call ‘Esprit’. We do this by working with a very few thought and technology leaders who reveal the path to spiritual and technological discovery in a positive way. This allows human races to grow towards the light of true understanding and eventually come together across the galaxy in mutual sympathy and respect. It may surprise you that human races evolve many times on many worlds, though thankfully very seldom at the same time. How unlikely is it that human races evolve on many different worlds? It was highly unlikely that human beings evolved on this world. It is just a fact that the all other possibilities did not occur as they did not fit the precise nature of this planet in this universe. As in the Goldilocks theory things are just right for human evolution on planet Earth and therefore in all other Earth-like planets in this universe. As well as this there are many human races in existence and there are ways accidental or deliberate for human DNA to arrive at the stage when a planet becomes habitable that goes on to form the start of a new human race. This would seem a lot like the story of Adam and Eve to early humans wondering about their genesis.” Charlotte smiled. “We are one of those human races that happened to develop earlier than you. We are the race Dawn of planet Gaya by way of introduction, but let’s leave questions on my home world to one side for now.”

  “The way we work with the people of emerging worlds is that we have a five-stage process of Enlightenment that prepares our selected local leaders for their roles. These stages are; Selection, Evaluation, Development, Revelation and Integration. We make a go/no-go decision at the end of each stage before we move to the next level; we can’t afford to make mistakes and these missions take a lot of our time and scarce resources. Having said that you can see the mark of our efforts down the ages and you can have a good guess at the famous people we have worked with over the centuries. Wherever you see a genius at work who made incredible leaps forward that seem unnaturally brilliant then you can be pretty sure they were indeed unnatural and that they would have benefitted from our guidance.”

  “So, let’s come to you. You have unwittingly passed the three first phases or I would not be sitting here with you today. I say ‘unwitting’ on passing these stages but Doctor McGregor would be deliberately instilling realisation in you that there is something extraordinary going on. This is also part of the process to prepare you for the final two stages that are overwhelming if they come out of the blue. You will have seen an engaging friend and valued colleague that helped you to develop your ideas and theories in surprising directions you may not have imagined on your own. And you will have been growingly aware that there is more meaning in this relationship from an academic understanding point of view than you have encountered before.”

  “That much is certainly correct,” replied Professor Kitteridge. “We had worked on the astrophysics of cosmology for a long time before McGregor started talking alien life development and I gradually wondered where that was all coming from. His knowledge and ideas were way outside what you expect from a zoologist, no matter how enterprising. As time went by I came to value his words and looked forward to his next ideas.”

  “So you completed the third development phase and passed this ready
for the biggest step of all in our development process – the Revelation. This cannot be done quickly as it is always mind-stretching and occasionally too shocking to deal with if the individual is unprepared. It also can be dangerous. Imagine when Pythagoras revealed the Earth is round. True indeed but shocking at the time and against the vested interests of ‘Flat Earth PLC’; religious and country rulers and businessmen whose rule was based on the Earth being flat and them being right in all respects. Vested interests typically want to keep the lid on advancement as it often means the end of their little empire, and several past empires have turned against our thought leaders in a vitriolic way; imprisonment could be their lightest punishment for simply telling things the way that they truly are.”

  “I can see that,” said Professor Kitteridge. “My history of science shows me these individuals are clear to see down the centuries with this kind of insight. And many of them introduced their discoveries with the minimum of preamble or cause. In fact some actually said that thoughts beamed in at them from outer space, or in a trance, or even standing in a bucket of water. No one challenged it. These historical geniuses were brilliant minds and if that’s how they said their insights came then it was as good a reason as any. People thought they were so clever they were a little crazy in the first instance. But not so crazy as it would sound if they explained they had an alien guide actually helping them, of course.” Professor Kitteridge had been sitting forward, now he relaxed back into the armchair soaking up both the comfort and this life-changing message. He raised a finger as if to make a point of order, “But there must still have been failures. However careful you are in developing these thought leaders some must protest, or seem crazy?”

  “Yes, that is correct. We are very careful so most can see that the knowledge must be handled carefully, and that is the final step, the integration part. Where it goes wrong it is usually self-correcting, much like nature itself. Where our newly revealed thought leaders resist our help, or declare themselves some new prophet for personal gain or power, they are typically ridiculed or castigated by the society they seek to dominate. They make enemies as well as followers and whatever truth we were seeking to build into society does not take root. We quietly move on, regroup and try again elsewhere.”

  “At the individual level, and this is most personal for you, Professor, at this moment, is what it means for you. It is about understanding the Universe in such a way that future generations can join with the other races and spread beyond the confines of this planet, which is wonderful now but will not be sufficient to be home for the people here forever. We will help you to guide the development of your human race in a momentous way. Your personal legacy, which is already impressive, will join with the great geniuses of the past that makes up the history of scientific advancement for the human race on Earth. These things are the highest possible achievements men have always dreamed of but vanishingly few realise in fact. Beyond that there is also what this means to you personally. The final Integration phase is about publishing breakthrough discoveries and driving them into human cultural development, but also about integrating your soul – with us, with Doctor McGregor who is still with us, with the race Dawn of Gaya. Ultimately this allows the human race here on Earth to take its place within the complete gamut of human races across the galaxy.”

  “Hold on a moment now, Charlotte. Let me try to catch up. So you are confirming you are in fact alien? McGregor, Joe and Daniel too? I had imagined such a meeting many times but not like this! In my old office at St John’s and with a young undergraduate. You don’t look alien, but you certainly don’t sound as you look either!” Professor Kitteridge interjected.

  “Oh, there is good reason for the way we look, and that is that our bodies are human and of this planet Earth. Our souls are not of Earth, mainly they are of our home world Gaya in the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters star constellation as you name it. Some are from other Earth-like worlds after integrating with us and joining us in our exploration of knowledge and the Universe. The Revelation for you personally should not be so surprising at this point. You have stared into the heavens and wondered as to the purpose of it. Most people on Earth rarely even consider it, they walk by and whistle into the wind caring only for their day-to-day concerns. But you see it, know it, theorise about it. With current technology though the distances are so vast there is no useful meaning as you can’t possibly travel across it and therefore the brightest among you can only look and wonder. Building space rockets that can barely reach your own moon, a trifling lump of rock a tiny distance away, just doesn’t cut it.”

  “Of course we could not travel around the galaxy on rockets no more effective than enormous fireworks barely escaping your own atmosphere. It would take lifetimes to travel around just our local spiral arm of the galaxy with the fastest rockets man can ever imagine or build. So we don’t do it that way. We have DMF drives that warp space to transport bodies and materials through space in craft that resemble earthly aircraft, but we can also transport individual souls between bodies here on Earth and across space to other worlds due to the separation of body and soul first described properly by one of my own students, René Descartes, a long time ago. Then those souls can join at birth with new human bodies just like is always the case in a ‘normal’ birth here on Earth and on every world in the galaxy.”

  Professor Kitteridge had been listening intently and so Charlotte paused to wait for his response. The great professor’s mind was brimming over with fascinating new ideas, each leading to multiple new avenues for thought.

  “Well, mmm… fascinating… if this is true then… ” he lapsed back into thoughtful silence then mused, “hmm, tell me more of these DMF drives?”

  “Ah, I thought that might be your first point of interest!” Charlotte smiled. “Dark Matter Fusion drives. They power crafts that warp space for carrying people and goods. They are what makes interstellar travel for people and things possible. Dark Matter Fusion is much more controllable than nuclear or matter/antimatter fusion and provides substantially more power. Dark matter naturally isolates itself in our universe and therefore its energy is totally self-sealing before and after fusion. A small amount of initiator starts the reaction then Dark Matter Fusion kicks in. The power generated accelerates the craft dramatically in the direction selected through a warp node by the DMF drive. This explains why some UFOs are occasionally spotted by pilots or people on the ground that move around slowly then speed off or just disappear. It’s unlikely that they would be one of ours though as we would take great care never to be seen by locals.”

  “Interesting comment right there, but put that to one side. You mention that you can do soul transport separate from spacecraft with DMF drives?”

  ‘That’s true and a bigger leap than DMF drives. DMF drives after all are an extension of spacecraft, just more advanced technology. Soul transport though is different and not even believed in by some of our rival human races out there, though that’s more a religious opposition than a technical one. Once you accept that the soul and body are separate and can combine to make a human being in bodily form then the question is, how are body and soul brought together? On Earth then souls are continually bonding with newborns locally to form new infants that grow to become adult people as we know through the complicated developmental process we call childhood. A tiny few people, like me,” Charlotte grinned engagingly, “have souls that originate off-planet and transport by warpwave – that is an ultra-long wavelength pulse. The warpwave is preceded by a harmonic description of its desired destination. A musical description of the target planet, if you like. The wave is then modulated by the detailed description of the soul in transport, like you already know, the genome in DNA describes the bodily characteristics of a newborn infant. So this is how I arrived here on Earth. And in fact how Doctor McGregor just left.”

  “All right, all right,” interjected Professor Kitteridge. “So what does this mean in practice? How does it feel t
o you when you are travelling just as a soul?”

  “Good question. Some people like it. Others are phobic. It makes Joe feel very queasy. He doesn’t like it at all. We like to tease him about it.” Charlotte’s nose twitched with amusement at the thought of Joe’s discomfort. “The way it works is that the directed warpwave accelerates to dark matter then warps space to emerge close to the target destination. If the wavelength is hugely long the amplitude is very small and it feels like travelling in a very narrow tube, as the stars fly by so quickly it feels like speeding in a long tube with bright walls depending on the concentration of stars in the stellar neighbourhood you are travelling through.”

  “And when you get to the far end?”

  “At the destination you slow down but it still feels incredibly fast relative to the arrival location, either to fuse with a newborn infant to fulfil the birthing process, or a target to arrive as a soul only, what we call solely-soul. The whole thing has almost no mass though so arrival feels like it’s a sudden stop, Joe thinks it’s more like a crash. Then if it’s a recombination with a newborn there may be enough of a shock to startle a baby visibly from the surprise of it all.”

  It had started to drizzle with rain outside. A few students were passing by the window of Professor Kitteridge’s study and looked in enviously at the warming illumination. They thought it was a standard Cambridge University student supervision, wise elderly tutor, single student having to concentrate on the lesson.

  “Right,” Professor Kitteridge’s mind was engaging now, “so let’s start with the fundamentals of the DMF drive first,” as he reached for a notebook.

  “Hold on a moment, Professor,” Charlotte replied. “The next and final phase of enlightenment is Integration and that takes a very long time, the rest of your lifetime in fact. I can’t just reveal everything right here and then you announce to an unsuspecting world. That just leads to disbelief and you would be ostracised – or worse, compared to how some of our prophesiers have been treated historically speaking. The way it works now is that you develop these theories over the rest of your career, and I will be there to guide you. It’s a long process but the good news is that you will always be on the right track and that’s very empowering compared to, say, putting out the Big Bang theory and being part right but never knowing whether science will prove you wrong in future. Your life’s work will always be proved right, like others before you, because what you will describe will have the benefit of being true!”