Spirit Tree of the Red Rocks: Future

by Clay, Verna

  Frannie's ponderings were interrupted when the tent flap lifted and Raven Sees ducked inside. For a long moment he studied her face before going down on his knees in front of her. Frannie's lips trembled. She had never felt so nervous in her life. She had no experience with men. Tears pooled in her eyes.

  Raven Sees lifted a hand to caress her face and spoke in his native tongue. She understood his words. "We will be happy in the valley of the red rocks." Then he encircled her in his arms and laid his lips against her cheek, whispering in English, "I love you, Spirit Woman."

  14: Waking

  Violet Morningstar felt incredibly cold as she gasped for air. Her lungs wouldn't inflate. She was suffocating. A drone of voices penetrated her panic and one in particular stood out.

  "Stop fighting the panic, Dr. Morningstar. The sooner you do, the sooner it will pass. That's it. Good girl. Now try to inhale slowly. No. You're panicking again. Inhale slowly. That's right. See, it's better now."

  Violet listened to the monotone voice of the person guiding her through what seemed to be a dark tunnel toward a speck of light. She willed herself to relax and breathe slowly. Sometimes her determination to follow the directions of the voice calmed her; sometimes the panic overtook her again. She didn't know how long she and the voice interacted, but it seemed like a long time.

  The light, brighter now, was hurting her eyes. The voice said, "You're coming out of the dark because you're squeezing your eyelids. That's great. Soon you'll be back with us. But for now, to help you, I'm going to cover your eyes. She felt gentle hands place something on her head and pull it down. The sharp pain caused by the light lessened. She relaxed. She wanted to go back to sleep.

  "Violet, I know you want to sleep again, but if you do, we'll have to repeat this whole process. Do you understand?"

  "Yes," she thought.

  "Try to answer my question with your voice. Do you understand that you must stay awake?"

  In her mind she screamed yes, but when she tried to respond, her mouth wouldn't move. She concentrated all of her effort again and an unintelligible sound escaped, which made the voice very happy.

  "That's my girl! You're almost fully awake."

  For a long time the voice and Violet continued interacting. Finally, they reached a milestone when the voice said, "Open your eyes."

  Violet obeyed and saw darkness.

  "Are they open?"

  "Yes," she croaked.

  "Excellent. Now close them again."

  She did what the voice said.

  "I'm going to remove the covering over your eyes and I want you to slowly open them. The light will hurt but this is something you must do. Do you understand?"

  "Yes," she croaked again.

  "Good. Now let's get you back into the land of the living, Dr. Morningstar."

  Violet stared at the white ceiling in the hospital room she'd occupied for a week. She'd been staring at it for over an hour. Throughout each day and night, white-coated people with masks over their mouths would enter and inquire as to her wellbeing and also check the machines she was hooked to.

  The process of bringing her out of cryosleep had been long, tedious, sometimes uncomfortable, and sometimes downright painful. When she'd become coherent enough to understand the happenings around her, the kindly doctor who had awakened her had visited. He'd been dressed in white garb and also wearing a face mask, so all she'd seen of his face were twinkling hazel eyes surrounded by wrinkles. He'd held her hand and said, "Dr. Morningstar, I can't tell you what a pleasure it is to finally meet you. I've been overseeing your cryocrypt for many years."

  "How long…asleep?"

  The doctor hadn't responded. Instead, he'd patted her hand with his gloved one and replied, "Please let me introduce myself. I'm Dr. Nathan Glasmir, the head of the cryogenics lab."

  Violet had nodded but repeated her question. "How long have I been asleep?" Speaking such a long sentence hurt her throat.

  Dr. Glasmir replied, "You mustn't overtax your vocal chords."

  When she'd started to ask her question again, he'd lifted a finger to stop her. "You've been here longer than anyone—605 years."

  Violet hadn't been able to breathe as her eyes rounded and tears clouded them. Everyone and everything she had ever known was gone.

  Dr. Glasmir had puffed a breath. "I know that information is traumatic, so I'm giving you a sedative. When you wake, we'll talk some more."

  Violet hadn't wanted to be sedated, but it was too late. The doctor had already lifted a tiny device to her neck that made her feel a gentle puff of air.

  Now, turning onto her side and staring at a wall as bland as the ceiling, she reflected on Dr. Glasmir's revelations over the past week. The year was 3320 and the entire population of the world still lived underground. A procedure for terraforming the earth had yet to be perfected because scientists had never been able to keep seeds germinating for more than a month—the same amount of time Violet had experienced. When three hundred years had passed with no progress, they had turned their scientific minds toward improving life underground. A hundred years earlier the universities had removed the study of terraforming from their curriculums.

  Dr. Glasmir had also brought her current on her own condition. About ten years previous a cure for radioactive influenza had been discovered and then gone through the tedious process of experimentation and trials. Only the previous year, GMADS, or the Governing Medical Association of Doctors and Scientists had approved its use. The doctor had assured Violet that she was inoculated during her "thaw" and her daily blood tests had revealed no sign of the disease.

  Still staring at the wall she wondered if the entire underground world was as stark as this room. She closed her eyes and rather than continue pondering her present predicament, returned her thoughts to life as Frannie. It was as real to her as this room, more real in fact, because it was filled with life, color, emotions, sunsets, sunrises, and especially family. She stifled a sob and whispered against her pillow, "Frannie, why did you show me a life I can never have? A life I fell in love with?"

  15: Smoking Gun

  On the eleventh day of her hospitalization the door to her hospital room opened and Dr. Glasmir entered. Before the door closed, Violet again caught a glimpse of a tall, dark haired man in uniform. Who was he and why was he guarding her room? He seemed to have the day watch, while another guard replaced him in late afternoon, and then after dark a third one stood watch. In the morning, "pale eyes," as Violet had come to think of him, would reappear. As far as she knew, the process had been repeated since her arrival. Today, she felt strong enough to demand some answers from Dr. Glasmir.

  As always, the doctor sat in the chair beside her bed and asked about her comfort level.

  Rather than wade through the trivialities, she said, "Why do I have guards posted outside my door?"

  Dr. Glasmir who had forgone his mask three days earlier, smiled widely, which gave his aged face a youthful appeal. "I wondered how long it would be before you asked."

  "Well?"

  His grin faded. "Before I answer that question, I need to give you some history that goes back three hundred years." He paused and puffed a breath. "Remember when I told you that approximately three hundred years ago the focus shifted from living aboveground to improving the underground?"

  She nodded.

  "Well, that paradigm shift was a calculated one."

  Violet frowned. "I don't understand."

  Dr. Glasmir continued. "Unfathomable amounts of money were being directed into terraforming research, which, in my estimation, was a good thing. But about that time, there came a breakthrough in crop production underground. In huge excavated rooms, life sustaining crops were being produced using the elements in the air. Soil was not necessary." He rubbed his jaw. "And, as you can imagine, the powers that developed this process saw the potential for unlimited wealth. This new food source practically eliminated the previous costly one of synthesizing nourishment in labs. Production costs were lower
ed but the savings was not passed on to consumers."

  Violet interrupted. "Why would the government want to get rich off its own population?"

  Dr. Glasmir rubbed his jaw. "It wasn't the government that discovered the breakthrough; it was a private company named SBG, Sustainment Below Ground."

  "But couldn't the government have demanded that something so remarkable be brought under its jurisdiction?"

  "Of course, and it did. But neither of us are naive to the power of wealth. At first, it seemed that the leaders were working to bring costs down for the good of the people, and maybe they were, but after many years, influential persons in high positions were bought or blackmailed by SBG to bring us to our current state. Most of the population doesn't even know how beautiful the earth once was. Daily propaganda makes them fearful of any attempt at terraforming. Other than a hologram of a starry sky, they have no idea of what a sunset or sunrise looks like. The few books that have pictures of the earth as it once was are being systematically stored in unobtainable archives under the guise of preservation of history. Large sums of money are offered to people who willingly turn in books that SBG claims encourage outdated thinking. Their advertising is very effective."

  "That's unconscionable!"

  "Yes, it is. But the power of the media is incredible. As is the power of wealth to control the media."

  Violet returned to her previous question, already suspecting the answer. "So why do I have guards outside my room?"

  "To protect you from SBG. Thankfully, the company has not gained complete control of our leaders. There is a small group who has kept the hope of terraforming alive, and there is a growing population who support them. And you, my dear—to use an old euphemism—represent the smoking gun. However, we have hidden your awakening from SBG. Your identity was exchanged for someone else's and we're using the excuse that you are a 'fight or flight' danger to keep guards posted. If your identity were known, you would be considered a threat to SBG."

  "But what about the staff who know who I am?"

  Dr. Glasmir grinned. "Everyone who works at this facility are members of an organization known as TEA, or Terraforming Earth Again. And only a select few have been allowed to interact with you. To the outside world, you are Mary Jones, a computer programmer with no family who was put into cryosleep two decades ago because of kidney failure, but awakened after a cure was found. Thankfully, the SBG pays little attention to our facility. We are low ranking on their list of potential threats."

  16: Secret Laboratory

  During her third week in the hospital, Violet was gradually introduced to her new world by pictures and videos Dr. Glasmir, whom she now called Nathan, showed her on a tablet. It was a world in many ways similar to the one she had left behind, but also quite different. The similarities were obvious—everyone lived below ground, commerce still existed with buying, selling, and trading, and the family unit was still intact. The differences, however, saddened her. The preeminent focus was enlarging and modernizing the underground cities by improving existing transportation and expanding the jet-train systems, expanding commerce, and electing forward thinking leaders. Of course, it all appeared marvelous on personal tablets and the gigantic viewer screens erected in heavily populated urban caverns, as well as the less populated suburban ones, but the fact that all reference to the surface of the earth, with pictures of what it could again become, was never addressed by the media. And that gave her great concern. Why would anyone want to live below the surface with no possibility of experiencing life aboveground? Then it hit her—like her, the present day citizens of planet Earth had never been aboveground. The difference was that she had read books and seen pictures of the beauty that had once existed and also experienced interaction with holograms of mountains, lakes, oceans, flowers, trees, sunrises, sunsets, and more. The powers-that-be had kept the current masses ignorant. According to Dr. Glasmir, moneyed factions were systematically destroying all reference to aboveground living and the science necessary to bring about that miracle.

  A month after her awakening Violet was moved into Nathan's home. The dwelling, carved out of rock in what appeared to be an exclusive area of similar dwellings, was comfortable, if not esthetically pleasing. Frankly, it was rather bland, the same as the hospital room. It appeared that for all the progress made in the six hundred years of her sleep, humanity had lost its creativity, or perhaps "flair" would have been a better word.

  The best part of her day was when Nathan showed her photographs and data from terraforming experiments. Some, she was familiar with because they were obtained during her tenure as a scientist. Others were from the first three hundred years of her cryosleep. She studied each one carefully, from healthy, sprouting plants, to finally, the same plants dying from an unknown cause or causes.

  Nathan was always secretive when he showed her the pictures and lab results. He would invite her into a small room off the main one in his home that he assured her was soundproof, and for hours they would discuss the photos and results. In essence, they would troubleshoot for any grain of insight.

  Afterward, they would return to the main room and join his wife to watch nightly news broadcasts that always propagandized subterranean expansion and a new world of absolute peace. Violet didn't buy into it and she knew Dr. Glasmir didn't either. As for his wife, her beliefs were not known. She was friendly, but not overly so, and she never discussed Glasmir's work. It was as if she either pretended it didn't exist or didn't know about it. There seemed to be little communication between the couple.

  As for her bodyguards, Violet had thought they were reassigned after her release from the hospital, but during a visit to one of the many shopping caverns for their monthly allotment of fresh vegetables that came from an underground garden—vegetables with practically no taste—Violet glanced across a vat of apples to see "pale eyes," the tall guard who had been posted during dayshifts at the hospital. She was close enough to realize his eyes were light gray, the reason for their unusual appearance, and also that he had the thin line of a scar slicing upward from his chin, across his cheek, and to the top of his ear. She guessed his age to be early forties. After that, she was always on the lookout for him or the others. Rarely, did she see them, and she had the suspicion that she only saw them when they wanted her to, perhaps for reassurance. They were obviously professionals who now dressed in street clothing.

  During one of their evening chats in the soundproof room, Violet confronted Nathan. "How long will I be guarded?"

  The doctor lay the photo down that they had been studying and met her gaze. "Potentially for the rest of your life. If anyone discovers you are actually the famous Dr. Morningstar, you would become a threat to the political and economic arenas. We only want to ensure your safety."

  Violet's eyes widened. "The rest of my life!"

  Nathan glanced away and responded by saying something Violet already knew. "You and I both know that money and power make for strange bedfellows. If you know your history, and I know you do, then you will remember how Nicola Tesla, in the twentieth century, was thwarted from bringing free energy to the people." The doctor again met her gaze.

  "So I have been awakened only to constantly stay vigilant over my safety?"

  Nathan replied, "Actually, the guards are doing the vigilant part."

  "So what does my future hold? Am I supposed to live with you and your wife indefinitely and continue nightly discussions in this tiny room?"

  Nathan gave the hint of a smile. "No, not at all. At this very moment a laboratory is being secretly outfitted for you and in a few months you will have your own apartment. We expect the lab will be completed within a short time."

  Violet's jaw dropped and she stared incredulously at him.

  He continued, "The group I represent has no intention of dismissing the progress made thus far in terraforming. We will never settle for living underground forever."

  And true to Nathan's words, within the month, Violet was once again set up in a laboratory.
Only now, she did her work in secret. Her new facility was in the Cryogenics building and accessed through a hidden door in Nathan's office. He explained that years before, in anticipation of her awakening or another major breakthrough, the secret space had been prepared. He said his work as a cryogenic scientist was a cover for the true nature of his work—facilitating the transfer of information to terraforming scientists scattered throughout caverns located in what had once been the southwestern United States.

  For the next three months, under the guise of personal assistant to Dr. Glasmir, Violet recreated the soil additive she had formulated hundreds of years previous and began the tedious process of reevaluating it.

  Over those months, she occasionally caught sight of her bodyguards. One evening while discussing the day's efforts with Dr. Glasmir in his private room, she asked if she could meet her guards.

  He responded without hesitation, "No. It's better if you don't."

  "Why is that?"

  "Because we don't want you developing an attachment to them. If something untoward happened, they would give their lives for you. And if you were attached, you might try to protect them. We need you alive, Violet."

  Although his reasoning sounded convoluted, Violet did not argue.

  Over the course of the next few days, however, she became plagued by a feeling of foreboding. At night in bed she would often replay Frannie's life in her mind and wonder if it had only been a dream of epic proportions. Was her premonition that life was about to change a gift passed down from her ancestors, or was she simply distressed by the turn her life had taken?

  As it turned out she didn't have long to wait for the answer.