ALEC: An Action & Adventure Fantasy Novel (Alexander Trilogy)

by Stan I. S. Law

  A little too scary.

  The Universe responded, well... it responded to his every whim. It contracted and expanded at his bidding. It changed the proximity of stars and nebulas. It brought into his vicinity his Home planet. This last he couldn’t think of in any other terms. He knew with utter certainty that it was his Home planet. Even if he didn’t really know what it meant.

  But if he did command the Universe, then why did he feel so very, very insignificant? So puny. Was he really that small, that inconsequential? The bug the fish swallowed had more use than he. He just moved stars around, but why? For his amusement? Out of curiosity?

  What was the purpose of life, anyway? He had to go to school, pass his exams. Grow bigger, eventually meet a girl, get married, have at least two children, feed them, clothe them, educate them. Then grow old and die. And the children, in time, would do exactly the same. Isn’t that what life was all about?

  He refused to accept that.

  Alec thought of himself as a conqueror of the unknown. He was more scared by the prospect of a dull class in school than of being on the receiving end of a herd of charging elephants. In his dreams, of course. Actually, he never had a bunch of elephants charging at him in any type of dream; but he still preferred it to the doldrums of an average life.

  Every fiber in his body rebelled against being a cog in a biological wheel. There had to be more to life than being a self-reproducing biological robot.

  Alec came back home no wiser than when he left. His head was much too full of possibilities for any of them to take precedence. Somehow he felt that Sandra could provide all the answers; but he was equally as sure that she wouldn’t.

  “You have to live your life, not just escape,” she’d said.

  Was living just walking in circles, he asked himself again. Just doing what his parents did, and their parents, and their parents before them?

  “No!” he shouted. “No! No! NO!” he repeated, through his teeth. “If I can live so fully in the Inner worlds, why can’t I do so here also?”

  Columbus did not have a dull life. Nor did Marco Polo. Nor did, surely, many great artists, not if what Sandra had said was true. And Sandra never lied. Could it be possible to live a life as exciting in the... the physical world, as he experienced in his travels? As in the Far Country?

  He knew instinctively that it was not. No matter what you did here and now, it could not possibly match the There and Then! Never! There simply was no comparison. Why did Sandra say that he must live his life here and now?

  ***

  The night before leaving for London, Mr. Baldwin had decided to cough up for an extra ticket and take Mrs. Baldwin to London with him. The hotels invariably offered queen-size beds, and food would cost as much there as here.

  “But, darling, there’s Alec. We simply can’t leave him alone. Not again.”

  She’d also have to postpone the stories she wanted to tell all her friends. Of course, the stories would keep and, well, she hasn’t seen old London Town for ages and ages

  “You want to take him with us?” He hoped she’d take it as a rhetorical question.

  “He’s got his school,” she countered, evidently taking his offer seriously.

  “Darling,” he tried again. “It’s only three days. It’s ages since we’ve been to London together. Think of the shopping…”

  Alicia looked in the mirror. François had done his usual excellent job. Her hair was hanging loose, straight down, straighter then before the rinse in the brine. She smiled. She was thinking about shopping on Oxford Street. From Oxford Circus all the way to Marble Arch.

  “Well,” she said softly, “if you think that he’d really be all right…”

  ***

  Alec’s parents came back as happy as always. There was the usual hugging, squeezing and inquiries if he was sure that he was all right. Finally they let him go. They both seemed tired. Really tired.

  “We’ll tell you all about it tomorrow, darling.” His mother smiled sadly. “Now, I rely must get some sleep. Window-shopping is very exhausting.”

  For a moment young Alec wondered what was it that made his parents so tired. Sitting in First Class 747? And what was so tiring about window-shopping anyway? He’d never shopped for any windows, and if he did, he certainly wouldn’t go to London to get them. He also wondered why his parents seemed so contented. His father, a structural engineer, had some interesting problems to solve, but even those problems, except for the details, seemed repetitive. His mother was content with just about everything. How lucky she was... A single look at a fresh rose sprouting in their small garden seemed to fill her with joy to last the day. Was that the secret of life? To be happy with the minute things in life? To expect nothing from life, and then rejoice in every something which came your way?

  Somehow he felt that this wasn’t for him.

  He went to bed early, but his poor brain was still in turmoil.

  And then there was the problem of the Home planet. He had an idea what it was; Sandra had told him that he, or they she’d said, had been there together over a thousand years! What on Earth did she mean by that? People didn’t live that long. And if he could get bored by a single dull lesson, what in heaven’s name would he do for a thousand, or for that matter, one thousand three-hundred and twenty-three years? Did children remain children there for, say, three hundred years before they grew up? Did people change jobs every hundred years or so, when they couldn’t stand doing the same thing, over and over, any longer?

  “Sandra!” he sighed. "Sandra,” he whispered with resignation. “Please help me. I am only thirteen...”

  It was too much for him.

  “Please...” he repeated, as the sound of grass rubbing against other blades of grass produced a sound more caressing than a thousand violins could do with a thousand bows. The gentle sustained chord massaged him.

  “Please...” he whispered again. As his eyes closed, his lips curved in a joyful smile. He was going Home.

  12

  Zooming In

  “Don’t you know that you can come here whenever you want to?”

  For the first time Alec did not react immediately to Sandra’s evocative voice. He was still torn by turbulent thoughts, concepts playing havoc with his mind. The music helped a lot, but it took time. Even though time did not exist here—not in the ‘real’ sense.

  “Thank you,” he managed. He couldn’t find words to say how glad he was that she’d heard his plea. He really was at the very end of his tether.

  “Take it easy,” she whispered. “There is no rush... not here.”

  He knew. Slowly he took in the now familiar stars, the embracing darkness, the unrestricted freedom. The velvety darkness didn’t seem quite as frightening. It was more like a womb. At least he thought so. Who knows what a womb really feels like? But it offered a sense of security he had not detected before.

  There seemed no “must” or “have-to” or anything here. There was nothing pressing, commanding, or requiring any effort on his part. He practically just was. Sandra was right. This could be relaxing if he could only accept this unimaginable infinity as home. Down there, on Earth, he was preoccupied with action. With doing things, no matter in what reality. Here... here time didn’t count.

  “Why am I not bored then?”

  Her smile washed over his body. It was the nearest thing to a giggle that wasn’t a giggle. But definitely a smile.

  “You are never really bored, Alec. Occasionally, you just think you are. It is a sort of stimulus to action people use on Earth.”

  “But don’t I have to do things?”

  “Of course you must. But not here. Here you are learning to essentially just be.”

  “Be?”

  “Yes, just be. To experience action, to be active, you descend to lower levels of consciousness. The lower worlds are the fields of action. There,” she almost giggled again, “there, if you’re not active, you’ll die of starvation, soon enough!”

  Suddenly Alec
realized that, although he had eaten occasionally in his previous escapades, he’d never actually felt any hunger here. None at all. In fact, he didn’t have any physical desires whatever. Strange, he thought. But then again, just about everything he was doing with Sandra was strange.

  “Your body, here, is not the same body as on Earth, or in the realm of your imagination. It is always the body you occupy which is the seat of desire. It is a personal expression of the reality you select to live in. In a way, it is your reality.”

  Seat of desire? What was she talking about? He had no desires. He just wanted to... what did he want? In here he wanted to listen to Sandra. What he wanted was knowledge. That’s right. What he really wanted was to know the thoughts...

  “...the thoughts of God?” Sandra smiled again.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. A very wise man, on Earth, once said that. His name was Einstein. Albert Einstein. You will be studying his theories in about three years.”

  “You know the future?”

  “It is not exactly knowing, nor exactly the future. You will learn about it when we take the next step.”

  “There is a Next Step?” Alec would have sat up had he been sitting. “When?”

  “It may be tomorrow, it could be in a million years. Is time still so important to you?”

  On this occasion it was his turn to laugh. He stopped short when he realized that her tone wasn’t joking.

  “I’ll be very dead and eaten by many little bugs,” he said wistfully. “Like the bugs by the fish in the canal...” he added pensively.

  She said nothing. She knew he would work it out for himself. The more he worked out himself, the more real it would be for him. It would be his reality. In a very short time he would become the master of his own perceptions. Here, that is, he would only allow into his thought-stream ideas or concepts, stars for that matter, which he desired. And it would all be his alone. His contribution to the Whole. It would also give him confidence. Maturity. And most of all, it would prepare him for the next step.

  For the next segment of eternity they just hung there, suspended in the vastness of the Womb. Alec experimented with moving stars, closer and farther away. He found he couldn’t move them sideways, nor up and down. Just to and fro... And then it hit him. The stars remained where they were. It was he, or the body he now occupied, that moved farther from or closer to the stars.

  “Body? What body?”

  He tried to look at himself. He remembered trying to see his hand and thinking it was too dark. Well, he began to suspect he didn’t know what he was looking for. Sandra did say he occupied, here, a different body. Was it really a body? He must be something. His consciousness must be somewhere. He tried looking at his hand again. Slowly, very slowly, he became aware of a blue-violet outline. Even as he looked, he was creating a hand. More and more of it was coming into focus. He tried it with his other hand. The same thing happened. As he looked closer, the outline became filled with countless moving pinpoints of light. Pinpoints with little halos around them. He looked closer still. The pinpoints became fiery miniature suns, the halos resolved into individual planets swirling around them. He was looking at the Universe concealed in one of his hands. Even as he thought of sharing his discovery with Sandra, the ethereal outline began to waver and fade. His hands and arms were dissolving before his eyes. That is, if he had any eyes.

  “If I need them, I’ll just make them,” he thought to himself.

  And his invisible, non-existent mouth formed a smile. It was as real to him as the stars all around. “How come the stars remain when I dissolve so quickly?” His ethereal lung heaved with yet another sigh. There was so much to learn. Maybe that’s why one didn’t have to do anything here. There was so much to think about. Yeah, so much to learn.

  Sandra’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “It is time we said hello to some of our friends.”

  “Friends? Here?”

  “Not here. At Home.”

  For an inexplicable reason he knew exactly what Home she was talking about. The Home away from home. She intimated it was his, or their, real home. It must have been, if they spent so much time there.

  “Lead on, my Princess. I am at your service.” He waved an invisible hat sweeping an invisible floor with its feathers. He loved being a knight, even if he confused the part he played with one of the three musketeers.

  The next instant they were hovering just above one of the peaks that pierced the multi-layered clouds. The tallest peak was surrounded on all sides with other crags, showing their inaccessible crowns through mysterious mists, even as their lower regions seemed lost in misty, mysterious emanations of some hidden gods. Though they were still much too high to tell, Alec could sense the pure mountain air awaiting them. The main peak, towards which their attention brought them, was more like a plateau. Looking still closer, he saw some buildings there. And people! People moving about!

  “There are people moving there!” he repeated to himself.

  “I know, Alec. I can hear you.”

  People on top of a mountain about ten times higher than Mount Everest. How could they breathe? For that matter... what am I breathing here? Yet I must be, he smiled. And he could not contain his happiness. He zoomed down to the clouds, punched a hole in their puffy whiteness with his fists, bounced, and arrived exactly back where he had started. Just for fun.

  “Let’s meet our friends, Sandra.”

  The moment they landed on the plateau, he saw her. Here, on the top of the highest mountain, she became visible. She was more beautiful than ever. Anyway, than the last time. It was good to be able to see his own body. Even better to see hers! Evidently, they were back in the world of imagination—only much, much larger than any imaginary world he’d ever visited before. It was also by far the most beautiful world he’d ever seen.

  “Is it Machu Picchu?” he asked, not really expecting confirmation. None came.

  As they neared the plateau, the city revealed itself in some detail. Almost immediately, Alec became aware of his lungs and took a deep breath. And then he held it. He had to. It just felt so good!

  “This is my Home?” he whispered, apparently to himself.

  It was not really a question. He knew the answer. He felt it. It felt right. It felt as full of memories of the past as, in a strange way, memories of the future. This is where he had learned to dream. This is where he had learned to create reality in the depth of his heart. Although his knowledge was limited only to his feelings—no details were familiar. They seemed almost fluid, as though in a constant state of flux of becoming—he knew he was home.

  “Let’s go down,” she said softly. “Here, hold my hand.”

  And then Alec looked at Sandra again, and once more he caught his breath. This was definitely Sandra. But she was no longer a thirteen-year-old girl. She was tall and slim. She was a young woman. And she was still some six inches shorter than he was. I wonder how she sees me now, he mused, what I look like in this world. Life had become more beautiful than he ever dared to imagine.

  ***

  It didn’t quite work out the way Alicia had imagined. She went to see Dorice. Her host, Dorice Gladbright, had invited three other ladies whom Alicia intended to invite herself to recount the story of her sailing trip. Of her sail. Too bad, she thought. That makes it four down and three to go. Oh, well, you can’t win them all.

  There was one other problem.

  She soon learned that two of the girls—she preferred to think of them as girls, not ladies, regardless of age—have had some experience of sailing. She’d have to get her terminology right and go easy on exaggeration. Pity. She could have made it such a nice story. With storms and giant waves, and dolphins and maybe even sea monsters. She was hoping that all the girls would have been as ignorant of the open sea as she’d been until just recently. No such luck.

  “Daaahling!”

  “Daaahling!”

  “Daaahling!”

  “Daaahling!”
<
br />   She was glad that was over.

  Only two of the girls had hair straightened out. Why can’t they keep up with the times, she wondered. As a matter of fact the short and curly looked good on them. Surely, it couldn’t be the latest fashion. Not yet. She’s only just got used to the long and straight. It took her six months to grow them that long. She wished whoever was deciding on the fashions would make up their mind.

  The low table was set up in front of a settee and three deep armchairs. Beautiful china set for tea and an assortment of petit fours and colorful amuse-gueule were strategically placed along its length. No one would have to reach far to nibble. Dorice had done it before.

  “Do have another one, daaahling,” Dorice tempted. “We’ll all go to my gym together,” she smiled, a twinkle in her eye. “Tomorrow.”

  “And then do tell us about your sail…” Another lady encouraged. Was she the expert sailor?

  A slight shiver tickled Alicia’s back.

  She couldn’t delay any longer. She was desperately trying to remember which was port and which starboard, stern and bow, and wasn’t there a bowsprit? And the main and genoa, or was it gennie… and jibs, and lines, stays and shrouds, only which are which… and warps, and… and of course the halyards—what on earth did they do?

  She reached for another amuse-gueule. Or are they amuse-bouche? Oh, dear. Now I’m really confused, she sighed.

  And… oh, my God, there were so many words that but a such a short time ago have been completely strange to me. Now? Now they are just confusing. And wasn’t there keel somewhere? I looked for it everywhere. They talked about it but I’ve never seen it.