As they reached their destination, a big sign greeted them.
Yacht-Club Royal Saint-Laurent
The Royal St-Lawrence Yacht Club
This was Québec. Bilingual. If the opposition had their way, it would be unilingual—French only. For now it was French first and in bigger letters. Comme il faut. After all, the Québécois and Québécoises were in the majority. The minority were Canadians. As were some of the others, but they didn’t brag about it.
Alex smiled. He remembered when only English had been spoken at the club. Then came French. Then French on the top of the sign, the letter of equal size. L'Office québécois de la langue française, better known as the Language Police, forced the club to enlarge the French letters, “or else”. They were not very nice people.
Alex had made arrangements with the Commodore of the club to spend some time with Alice on the Commodore’s O’Day. A sloop, all of 32 feet OAL. That’s overall length. Actually the specs called for 32’2”, with a 10’8” beam, not much Alex thought, but with a draft of only 4’2”, which was as deep you wanted to be on a lake the size of St-Louis, or the adjacent Lake of Two Mountains. Of course, a good Yanmar engine didn’t hurt either. Just in case. Real yachtsmen hated using engines other then to get in and out of their berth.
They were here for Alicia’s first lesson. She carried a list of questions and a notebook. Alex would point things out to her as she went through the list.
“Once you’ll see it, you’ll never forget it,” Alex assured his wife.
“You wanna bet?” she murmured, looking the other way.
The Commodore hasn’t arrived yet. They strolled the finger docks, looked at different yachts. Alicia was learning even as they walked. Sometimes they’d look farther out.
“That’s a spinnaker, out there on the horizon,” he’d point out.
“That balloon?”
“Spinnaker, darling, spinnaker.”
She nodded. She knew a balloon when she saw one, whatever they called it.
“Why are they scrubbing her bottom?” she asked. She’d already learned to refer to a boat as ‘she’. Alex had insisted on that.
“That’s hull, darling. The hull. To remove the barnacles. They must have sailed in salt water, and the barnacles are sucky things. They don’t drop off in sweet water. So they have to take the boat out on the hard, or dive to remove them.”
Recently barnacles had also been found in fresh water, probably brought in by touring yachts. But, there was no need to confuse her, he thought.
“On the hard what, ice?”
“No dear. On the hard means ashore. Out of the water.”
“Why would they want to take the boat out of the water…?” she was thinking aloud.
Alex sighed. He’s done a lot of sighing since Alicia decided to take up sailing. Even in theory.
“Oh, I see, you mean to clean her bottom?”
Alicia was leaning forward, bending slightly over when she’d asked that.
“Yes, dear. Her lovely curved bottom.”
“The hull?”
He was beginning to like bottom better. It sounded sexy coming from her mouth.
Commodore Joshua Thémens, arrived at the stroke of noon. He caught up with them on the finger dock of his yacht, where they’d agreed to meet.
“Ah, so you’ve found her, I see.”
The men shook hands with Alicia getting a kiss on both cheeks.
“You’re just in time,” he added, taking Alicia by the arm and leading her towards the clubhouse. “They serve the best Martinis in Town, my dear. Absolutely the best, n’est-ce pas?
The Commodore was of English mother and French father, and was perfectly bilingual; ideal for the job of the Commodore. That way he didn’t offend anybody. Or both, as the case might be. He probably wouldn’t anyway. He oozed French charm of Maurice Chevalier.
After the third four-ounce Martini he called for menus. “Better have a snack before we cast off,” he mused, his word on the verge of becoming slurred.
“The wine list, garçon,” he added when the menus were brought.
Alex was beginning to wonder about sailing after three four-ounce Martinis followed by wine. Still, the Commodore was the boss.
“Please, call me Josh,” the Commodore asked, trying to cajole the last drop of his third Martini. Joshua was a true old salt.
He was also a very good-looking man. Tall, dark, with just a smattering of grey adding distinction to his noble profile. He also looked good in a Commodore uniform. Well, a club jacket and white trousers, anyway.
Alicia was beginning to enjoy sailing. She was beginning to enjoy sailing a lot. She quite liked the Commodore, also.
***
So what is the purpose of life? Surely, not to fall into the abyss of time. For that is what his experience yesterday must have been. And Alec hadn’t gone there on purpose. He hadn’t created the experience with his imagination. Nor had he asked to be detached from his body and hung over a herd of wild misbegotten monsters.
The next moment he felt ashamed at his cruelty. Poor monsters, he thought. I wonder how long it took the mad scientist to make head and tail of them. Then he laughed under his breath. Making out head or tail of those beasts wasn’t as easy as you might think. It’s as though the scientist couldn’t make up his mind which end was which. Nor could Alex.
Who designed those animals? Were animals designed? They couldn’t just happen. Nothing just happened… a purpose to all things, and all that. But surely, anyone with any brains at all could do better. Unless... unless they’d never seen a grazing animal. Unless there really was no model on which to base your design. And that huge moving mountain of flesh, that elephant thing. Why so huge? Was it necessary for their survival? What did they eat, anyway? Alex hoped it wasn’t the double-ended cattle, or whatever they were.
What a strange world he’d visited.
Why wasn’t he more scared? Was it the absence of a body? His own body. Is it your body that makes you scared? Perhaps when you don’t have a body, you don’t have anything to be afraid for. That sounded right. No body, no pain. He supposed—no death. So life had nothing to do with body?
That didn’t make sense, either. There must have been something which held his consciousness. It may have been invisible, but it must have been there. Otherwise he would be, sort of, spread all over the place. And his attention was definitely focused from definite coordinates. Coordinates. That sounded right. That was a word dad had used when talking about their sailing trips. In the vastness of the ocean, the coordinates defined where you were. So it must be with consciousness. Your body, or something like a body, defined your coordinates in relation to the world. Maybe to the Universe.
Whatever life was, it was fascinating!
Vacuum cleaners! That’s what they were.
The great, big, monstrous behemoths with six-foot feet and jaws to match were the vacuum cleaners. That’s what must be happening. The herd kept the bushy grass from running away with itself. And the big monsters must eat the excess of the herd animals. When oversized, the monsters would fall into the ever-forming crevices. They would burn up and be thrown up as fertilizing ash. That was the food chain. There must have been thousands of other biological experiments, but this trio was meant to show him the cycle of nature. No animosity, no hatred, just a cycle to keep things clean. Vacuum cleaners.
But how can animals kill each other without anger, without ill will? Obviously without remorse. Why were humans not allowed to kill, while other animals could? Unless they encroached on human interests, of course. Then they were exterminated. Usually also without remorse. Some people actually liked killing. They derived pleasure from it. Alec could not quite understand it. He would fight for his life if attacked, kill if that’s what it took, but to derive pleasure from it? That would be sinking lower than the behemoth in the abyss of the Home planet. At least they were just doing their job. Mind you, they were probably too dumb to enjoy or not enjoy anything at all.
<
br /> Animals must be programmed; they must carry some software, like his computer, which made them behave in a certain way. Yet if humans were also animals, then in what way did their program differ from other species? Did it differ?
Were we any different from other animals?
So the world was designed to keep itself clean. Was this the purpose of life? A sort of glorified hygiene? ‘Thou shalt keep the Earth clean and tidy’ principle? That didn’t sound right. But if humans could detach themselves, or be detached from their bodies as he had done, then what was the purpose of our bodies? But he’d established that already. To determine coordinates. But why should that be so important? Perhaps having one’s consciousness spread evenly over the whole Universe was just as good...
In fact, isn’t this what God does? Be everywhere, at all times, forever? Just be?
But what if He wanted to have a particular experience. He couldn’t do it without a body to give him coordinates in relation to the rest of the Universe. He would have to assume a body that was apart from other bodies. Then the experience would not be universal, only particular.
Maybe being God wasn’t so much fun, after all. To be spread all over the place without identifying with anything in particular would be no fun at all. Unless it had something to do with the pods. Unless he and Sandra were in one pod, and Sandra and other Princes and Princesses were in another, and the Kings and Queens... Unless God got His experiences through all these coordinates, the world over. And he, Alec, and mom and dad, and all the people gave God those particular experiences and a free ride in the process.
Is that what life was all about? Providing an abundance of experiences for God?
16
The Abyss Revisited
It was raining again. Sunday tennis was again washed out; mom and dad went to the cinema to see a film that Alec was told was a real tearjerker. Alec didn’t like tearjerkers. Not because he didn’t like romantic stories, but because he was too embarrassed to be seen crying. His mom loved them. Even in front of the TV, on a good day, she could go through a box of tissues.
Well, almost a box. That, and both sleeves.
When Alec felt tears welling up, he always found a pretext to go to the bathroom, or remembered something he had to do. Some people just didn’t understand that boys, or men for that matter, don’t cry. Not in public, anyway. Not even in front of mom and dad.
Only once he couldn’t hold back his tears when he thought that he’d never see Sandra again. It was late last week. It was the first time they were together on the Home planet when this wondrous world was asleep under a cloak of darkness. The sky was, well, you know, it was out of this world. The stars were all different colors, some steady as cold diamonds, others winking at him, as though sharing in some secret joke. They were strolling arm in arm—there was no one else around—just enjoying the night air filled with the scent of tropical flowers. Sandra looked particularly beautiful that night.
“You must learn to do this on your own, Alec,” she said, her eyes shining with an unusual light.
For a moment he was sure that this was Sandra’s way of saying a final goodbye. It was then that he couldn’t hold back his tears. She pretended not to notice and said immediately that she meant that he’d have to learn to light all the stars and fill the night with the aroma of flowers. By the time he realized what she meant, it was too late. Two great, painful tears were rolling down his cheeks. By then, also, he was so happy that he didn’t even bother to wipe them off.
But that was all behind him. She would never, never see his tears again. Never.
Anyway, now with summer vacation coming up, there were so many things he had to do. There was not just tennis, but swimming, trips to museums, galleries, fishing, hiking, planning for the big sailing vacation… and all sorts of other things.
Home alone, he was looking for one of those things to do.
When he became aware of what was happening, he was already in a free-fall into the bottomless pit. That’s what he called the Home planet canyon. Or whatever it was. One minute he was sitting in dad’s favorite armchair, his eyes wide open; the next he was in free-fall. Yes, it was scary. Even the second time around.
Strolling the gardens with Sandra, he’d learned that on the Home planet one could visit any period in history: human, pre-human or, and this he didn’t quite believe, post-human history. Not that he’d lost his trust in Sandra, but the Home planet was a training college relying on imagination, and he couldn’t quite imagine going forward in time. After all, the canyon went in one direction only. It descended forever... And above was the Far Country. At least, that’s what he knew so far. So how could one go forward in time?
By the time he realized what was happening to him, he was already slowing down. The landscape was even more forbidding than on the previous occasion a week before. As far as he could see, volcanic cones of all sizes were separated only by green slime. The disgusting soup was bubbling with the most foul stench of any witch’s cauldron he could imagine. He didn’t relish going out into this environment. Not for all the tea in...
The next instant he was suspended no more than a foot above the bursting boils. Here the smell was even more overpowering. He knew that if he had had a stomach, he would have thrown up.
“What on earth’s happening to me? I’m in hell!” he screamed.
Alec mastered all his will and, to his utter surprise, he found himself about ten feet higher up. Not that the air here was any better, but the sight was just a bit less revolting. There was a slight detachment from the reality below. He recovered somewhat from his attack of panic. If he were to be sentenced to hell, Sandra would have told him. Nevertheless, if there really was a hell, then they wouldn’t have to look any further. This would do just fine.
What in heaven’s name am I doing here, he asked himself. Another lesson?
Of what?
And how come I can smell this green vomit if I don’t have a nose?
A larger bubble, almost directly below him, expanded suddenly and exploded, spewing its slime almost as high as he was. This time it was a lot easier. He raised himself another ten feet or so. “You have to learn the laws of each reality,” Sandra had said. He hardly thought this reality had many laws. He couldn’t stop wondering what he was doing here. What can one learn, hovering over a field of green slime with volcanoes regurgitating their supper all around him?
A question zipped across his mind: was this the beginning of life?
Something inside him nodded. Of biological life, he corrected himself. Life itself had little to do with it. This was the original laboratory in which the self-reproducing unit of biological life started. The gene, the self-reproducing gene.
How do I know that? What is a gene, anyway?
And then he remembered something else Sandra had said. It hadn’t made any sense at the time, but now it seemed to. “In the Abyss, you can travel in both directions.” Apparently he just had. Simultaneously. He’d fallen down the same crevice, but somehow he’d ended up further back in the planet’s history. And at the same time, he’d recalled all the details of a lecture about genes he was going to hear when he was eighteen. Both backwards and forwards in time, in the same instant. And the memory of the future lecture was perfectly clear. The only purpose of a gene is to procreate itself. It is the essence of biological life. It is the original building block. The purpose of any advanced biological form is to make the gene mobile and thus further assure its survival.
Pretty selfish, Alec thought. But again, isn’t all biological life pretty selfish? He heard about it in school.
And then another enigma presented itself. If this is the beginning of life, that means that man hasn’t evolved yet. Then, once again, what am I doing here???
In fact... Who am I?
“Who am I?” his awareness repeated. I have no body, none that I can see or sense, yet I can see and sense all that’s around me. I hear the bubbling slime, I smell the stench, I am aware of the heat rising from bel
ow...
Who am I?
Something exploded. Again.
This time the noise was so ear-splitting that he was glad that he had no ears. A sonic boom mixed with a swoosh, a splash, and a reverberation that sent tsunamis in all directions. A large chunk of the nearest cone was splattered all over the vicinity. This same instant Alec realized that he was observing all this from a mile up. He must have reacted to the cataclysm the instant it happened. What had just happened? An eruption? A meteor, maybe? He looked up. The clouds were closing quickly, filling in the hole that had just been ripped through them. From the ground a plume of liquid fire shot up into the air. Probably tens of kilometers high. A beautiful and dangerous sight. At least I’m far enough away. I don’t think I would survive that, he thought. Come to think of it, am I even breathing? He could smell and even at this height the smell didn’t resemble any air he had ever breathed, even when he had lungs.
Can life be born in such surroundings? Life as we know it on Earth today? Can this be our biological kindergarten? The beauty of flowers, the softness of a kitten’s fur... the clear blue of the summer’s sky... It all comes from this slimy hell?
How can green slime be the progenitor of a human being? Of our intelligence?
None of this made sense.
He’d been brought here by whatever forces transformed this witches’ brew into the world above. He obviously had some connection with both. The selfish gene and the bodiless awareness. But what was the connection? Was he, like all people, the missing link? Are we the pinnacle of evolution so far? The best? Or are people just a link that joins the animate with the inanimate? But stones and rocks and all minerals were inanimate.
ALEC: An Action & Adventure Fantasy Novel (Alexander Trilogy) Page 13