Rumi's Field (None So Blind Book 2)

by Timothy Scott Bennett

  The "container" appeared to lie in the middle of a vast, flat, reddish-brown, dusty plain, with various low hills and sharp mountains poking up in the distance on either side of her. Some of the mountains were huge, and all of them stood relatively alone, rather than together in a range. One of them appeared to be a pyramid. As the tiny sun had set in a blaze of blue, the mountains had shone like bonfires, demanding her attention. Linda could not shake the feeling that she had seen those hills and mountains before.

  A memory of Cole arose in her mind and Linda's heart began to ache. He'd been so happy. Using his connections as "the First Gentleman," he'd obtained a used but working iTab to give Emily for her birthday. He knew she'd be ecstatic, as her previous tablet had died months before and new ones were no longer to be had. He'd wrapped it in newspaper and hidden it in their bedroom closet, to give to his daughter the next day. But the next day was the day Linda had been taken away.

  That was the hardest part now: not being able to reach out to Cole and the kids. Not knowing how they were. Knowing they must be worrying about her. Knowing they were being manipulated by those who had created her virtual doppelgänger. The confinement was bearable. She felt no physical pain. And the Fisherman had promised to soon release her from "the prison of materiality," whatever that meant. But there were untold millions of miles now between her and the people she loved. The strings of her heart had been stretched to the point of breaking.

  Linda moved her head slowly from side to side, taking in the splendor of the Cosmos one more time, reaching out with her thoughts, with her love, hoping, in some dimension beyond this realm of stone and dust, that her heart was touching theirs. Then she closed her eyes. This vast Martian plain, though beautiful, was the loneliest place she’d ever seen. Perhaps, in sleep, perhaps in dreams, she could find some comfort.

  2.9

  “Do we need to bring anything?” asked Iain. He grabbed his watch from his desk and strapped it around his wrist.

  Grace shook her head. “Not where we’re going,” she said. “Just don’t drink anything. We don’t know how long this will take.”

  “We don’t get a pee break?” Iain smiled.

  Emily stood and walked to the window to scan the wooded grounds that surrounded the Presidential Home. The Grid was fading in the pre-dawn sky. “It’s getting light out,” she said.

  Iain checked his watch. “It’s still only 6:15,” he said.

  “Ness’ll be up,” said Grace. “And she’s the one who should take us.”

  “Will Mary be awake?” asked Iain.

  “We’re not actually going to see Mary,” Grace said.

  Iain scrunched his forehead in confusion. “And how are we going to pull that off, Gracie?” he asked.

  Grace smiled slyly. “Ness has been drinking tea since she got up,” she said. “And she will need a pee break.”

  Iain nodded slowly as understanding came to him. Emily pulled the curtains closed and headed for the door. She looked at her brother and sister. All three of them were dressed in sturdy jeans and t-shirts and tennis shoes, as if going on a hike. “You guys ready?” she asked as she turned the handle.

  Grace closed her eyes. The image of Alice still hovered in her mind, beckoning. Alice was older now. Older than it seemed she should be. A strange, beautiful teenager. But it was undeniably Alice. And Grace knew that Alice had a plan, even if they didn’t know what it was. “Ready,” she said, inhaling deeply.

  The three of them headed down to the kitchen.

  2.10

  "That's not a word," said Carl.

  "Yes it is," said Ted.

  "Musth?" said Carl. "What the hell is a musth?"

  Ted grinned like a rogue. "It's a word," he said.

  "What does it mean?"

  "The rules of this game don't require me to tell you that," said Ted.

  Carl scooted his metal folding chair back from the card table and stretched his arms over his head. He surveyed the bare room: four walls, a floor, a ceiling, a table, two chairs, and a Scrabble game. In one corner was a door that would not open. That was the whole of their Universe. "They should have given us a dictionary," he said in a musing tone.

  "They who?" asked Ted.

  Carl lifted his shoulders. "I don't know," he said.

  Chapter Three

  3.1

  Gabrielle's guts churned like a washing machine, cold and wet and hard. The note she'd found on her floor when she got up, the note she'd crumpled and tossed away and retrieved and stuffed into her jeans pocket, the note clearly written in her own loopy hand, the note she did not remember writing, burned at her awareness, hot and demanding and terrifying, as though it were a chunk of nuclear waste she carried, rather than a piece of paper. The food in the cafeteria was hard enough to eat on the best of days. There was no way she'd be able to stomach it now. Not with her heart pounding like this. Not with this dread pulsing through her veins. Not until she read the damned note.

  She took a sip of her coffee and pulled the paper from her pocket, wondering vaguely why her fingers were so stiff and sore. The note slipped happily from her pocket. She tossed it onto the table before her with a shudder of distaste, as she might a dead bug she'd found on her plate. The paper lay there, folded and crumpled and smiling smugly, as if content to wait all day. Gabrielle stabbed a forkful of pasty pancake but then put her fork back down. With a muttered curse she picked up the paper and unfolded it.

  It was the same as before, the same as it had been for over a week now: first person present tense, the scene unfolding in a lively way, the words restoring to memory a dream she hadn't remembered that she'd had. She was there, watching it happen and writing it down. She was there. And so was the tall, thin man with red hair.

  Around us is a vast plain, dark and lifeless, with impossibly huge machines moving noisily in the distance, pushing, pulling, digging, loading. Smoke rises into the sky in dozens of places, wispy tendrils of black and gray. They remind me of offerings on an altar. I do not know why.

  His back to me, the thin man stands and gazes out over the plain. He sobs loudly, his shoulder blades hunching forward and back like the stubs of wings. When he turns to face me, I see that his face is wet with tears. His lips form a quivering O. He opens his hands in helpless despair but says nothing. Behind him the impossible machines cough and scrape.

  "Will you tell me your name?" I ask. If these meetings are going to continue, I need to understand them. The thin man jerks away as if he's been slapped, then slowly returns to me. It feels like my question stuns him in some way. As if the last thing he expects from me is kindness, or even interest.

  The thin man smiles momentarily in his strange, robotic way. "I have been called Zacharael," he says. His voice is soft and muffled with tears. Gentle. Open. I have no sense that he wishes to harm me.

  "Why do you come to me?" I ask, casting further for answers. "Why do you show me these things?"

  Zacharael looks down at the abused ground at his feet, then directly into my eyes. "I am trying to break your heart," he says. One of the machines, its huge shovel rising before it like the jaws of a tyrannosaur, turns and approaches us, moving more quickly than I would have guessed it could. Zacharael steps forward and takes my hand and we are at once hovering in the depths of space.

  I should not be alive. The hard vacuum should have killed me instantly. But I feel comfortable and whole. The thin man, Zacharael, hovers beside me. The stars blaze cold and bright all around us, familiar in their configuration yet strange in their clarity. The closest star, the size of a housefly at arm's length, bathes me with its radiance. I sense that this is our own sun. Underfoot, sliding slowly beneath us like some vast whale in the black ocean of space, moves a huge rocky sphere, dirty white and pocked with holes. It tumbles unhurriedly forward like a slow-motion snowball rolling downhill. I cannot guess how big it is. There is no way to tell.

  Before I can ask another question Zacharael reaches out and takes my hand again. Now we are zooming over the
Earth, our bodies horizontal and close to the water, as if we are Superman and Lois Lane. A vast stretch of sunlit ocean sparkles underneath. And ahead of us is a small island, rocky and green. We slow as we near the island, rising up for a better view from above. Zacharael points and I follow his finger. In the tall grasses that cover the gently rolling ground, I see a symbol of some sort. One of those crop circles, though this is not a field of wheat. The symbol is huge, a perfect circle, with a capital L running right through the center. I turn to ask Zacharael what it means, but he is gone. In his place I see a shiny black sphere the size of a grapefruit. I fall toward the ground and am gone.

  Gabrielle placed the paper gently on the table before her and bowed her head, noting then the tears that dropped from her eyes. She knew that those were Zacharael's tears. Not hers. The strange, tall man had given them to her. He was trying to break her heart.

  The clock on the cafeteria wall said six thirty-seven. Less than an hour and a half before her eight o'clock lecture and she had yet to do her homework. She grabbed the note and stuffed it into her backpack, then grabbed her fork and stuffed the bite of pancake into her mouth, determined not to think of Zacharael and tears and crop circles and comets tumbling through space. Determined to ignore this until it went away. Whoever this man was, whatever it was he wanted, however it was he could come to her in the night and show her these things, Gabrielle was certain of one thing: he was a friend of her father's. He had to be.

  And that made him her enemy.

  3.2

  Cole remembered the pre-dawn light that seeped in around his window shade. He remembered getting up to use the toilet. He remembered flicking on the bathroom light. But then he was lost to himself, his life once again hijacked by another. He was a young woman, married, with a child at her breast. And she was in horrible trouble.

  The herbs had worked, and Lady Guthry's eldest, James, had recovered quickly, as Agnes had known he would. But the madness of North Berwick had spread across the countryside like wildfire as James VI's persecutions continued. Agnes' healing cures had worked too well, too quickly. It was miracle and magic. It was of the Devil. The mutterings had begun almost at once. The raised eyebrows. The turning away. And then came the accusation. Witchcraft had come to Lankirk.

  So quickly it had started. So slowly it had played out. Her baby crying. Her husband, attempting to fight off the constable and priests, knocked senseless and falling to his knees. The ropes and manacles. The squalor of the Tolbooth. The torture of the bridle and the turcas and the pear. The insistence on confession. The Devil's mark found on her shoulder. The trial. When it was done, Agnes had confessed to acts of evil ranging from the poisoning of the Earl's prized heifer to leading a treasonous conspiracy against her king. The madness had picked her up and carried her to her doom, a powerful wave she could neither fight nor flee. Before the wave was spent, it would carry her husband and daughter to their doom as well.

  The faces of those she had known and loved were twisted with fear and fury as she was led to the stake. She could not voice her protestations. Her tongue had been cut out, so as to prevent her from spreading her evil to the watching crowd. She was lashed to a pile of dry tinder and stripped to the waist. A thick, scratchy rope was looped around her neck from behind and slowly tightened until she was dead. Agnes watched from above as they set light to the wood beneath her body, watched as her flesh was reduced to ash and bone. The pain of her body was gone by then, but the pain in the hearts of those who had tortured, strangled, and burned her body rang inside Cole as he woke again on the bathroom floor. Weeks had passed, it seemed, but it had only been minutes. The dawn had not yet come.

  Cole lay panting and shivering on the cool tile, his pajamas wet with urine and sweat. His chest heaved with great silent sobs as his heart worked to expel the experience from his body. As the pain flowed, it picked up other pains, a glacier of old hurt moving inexorably to the sea. These past years with Linda had been harder than he could have imagined, even as their marriage had grown and blossomed in joy and trust and vulnerability. Their strange and trying times with the Strangers, and with the hidden forces that had been working with these so-called "aliens," had left them full of self-doubt, and unsure of reality itself. Nothing had been found in the sinkholes left behind. No woks. No alien machinery. No strange bodies. The "aliens" had vanished, leaving nothing in the real world to which Cole and Linda and the kids could bind their memories. And The People, the humans most directly involved with the aliens, had simply disappeared, melting back into the general population like ice cubes on a hot sidewalk. The accusations and ridicule had risen to a fever pitch, only to burn even hotter as the Christmas Crash unfolded and the country sank into a depression so fierce that “the great one” paled in comparison. Linda has been called names and threatened with both impeachment and assassination. Cole and his children had been ridiculed and harassed. Pastor Clinton brayed that they were all in league with "the mighty Satan himself." And Linda had been away from home so much...

  The sobs at last fell to gentle heaves and Cole took a long, cooling breath. A soft knocking sounded at the outer door and Cole swiped the tears from his face with the palm of his hand. Afraid that someone had heard his cries, he pushed himself up onto his elbow and grabbed the edge of the sink to go see who it was. As he pulled himself to his feet, he slipped on the wet tile and fell backward, his arms wheeling wildly about but failing to find a hold. His head smashed down on the toilet, breaking not only the seat but crushing and splitting the bowl itself, as though his skull were a concrete block. Toilet water spilled out onto the floor, mixing with the sweat and urine. Rolling over onto his hands and knees, Cole crawled through the door to the relative safety of his carpeted bedroom. He pushed himself to his feet and stripped off his wet pajamas.

  He spied himself in the large mirror over the dresser and stepped forward to examine himself, rubbing at the back of his head and neck. There was no damage. No blood. No cuts. No residual soreness. Cole realized that the fall had not hurt him at all. As if his head really were made of cement.

  But that was not all. From the palms of his hands came brief eruptions of pure white light.

  3.3

  Their security escort took up position at the front door as Ness and the kids headed toward the main desk. The hospital was a secure facility, patrolled at all points of the exterior, including the air and the river nearby, and regularly patrolled within. There was no need for Agent Burke to accompany them to Mary's room. The nurses weren't going to release Mary this early unless her doctor okayed it, and Dr. Gholson was dealing with an emergency out beyond the cordon. They wanted some private time with their friend.

  Ness, Iain, Emily, and Grace stopped at the main desk and found out that Mary was just down the hall, at the end on the right. "I gotta pee, loves," said Ness as they passed the visitor lounge. She stopped at the ladies' room door and turned. "I'll meet you there in a sec." With a wink, she ducked inside and closed the door.

  With a quick exchange of glances, Cole's three children headed down the hall and then turned and passed quickly through a pair of double doors on the left. Iain pulled a folded piece of paper from his jeans pocket and placed it in the middle of the floor. Breathing deeply, hoping to look as though they knew exactly where they were going, they hurried into the stairwell and headed down the stairs. On the one hand, they did know exactly where they were going. But of course, in retrospect, they could never have anticipated where they would end up.

  3.4

  Colonel McAfee plucked a bit of lint from his uniform as he walked down the hallway. He rubbed the short bristles of dyed-black hair on his head. When the aliens went on the lam and The People dissolved, it was this haircut and this uniform, more than anything else, that had saved him from ruin. Gone was the long blonde hair. Gone was the surfer vibe and the torn blue jeans. Gone was his former name: Phelps. Now he was Colonel Aidan McAfee. Career Army. Spit and Polish. Honor and Discipline and everything that went with it. And
the General, bless his heart, had somehow pulled some strings for him. McAfee had been put in charge of Operation Changeling.

  And what a precious piece of cake was this gig! Long walks on rocky beaches. Beautiful views of both bay and deep ocean. Seafood up the ever-lovin' wazoo. Even with a buzz cut and military threads, McAfee could still appreciate such things. Though he longed for the sandals and shorts in this unseasonably hot weather - the Phelps persona being closer to who he knew himself to be - he found that he didn't really need them. It was rather fun, being incognito. And there was way more job security in a uniform.

  And the duty? What was there to do but watch over the old girl in deep freeze and hold the reins on his techs? Changeling got every bit of funding a high-tech, top secret, extra-military program needed and deserved, and then some. The project was being personally overseen by members of The Families themselves. Colonel McAfee smiled at the thought of it. Maybe he'd get a ticket after all.

  Unless this mole thing took a wrong turn. Tollerman and Evans had checked out, their stories confirmed by wholebody scans while he'd questioned them. That meant that somebody else, somebody with access and motive, had interfered with their operations. Why anyone would go to that much trouble simply to move a tiny facial blemish on the President's virtual face McAfee could not imagine. That it had alerted the President's children felt like a bad joke, and it seemed impossible that it was all connected. McAfee's security office had no idea how to proceed. So far, his people had found no track or trace of the telephone call Evans had claimed to receive, though there was a telltale hole in the qputer's mematrix from the day and time in question that could have resulted from an excision. But, Christ, who could wipe data from a qputer? McAfee had no idea. He just wished the whole affair would go away. The last thing he wanted to have to do was report it up the food chain.