by Dan Glover
It was difficult not to rush into his grand endeavor yet with help of his miniature helpers he held his ambitions in check, biding his time until the lines of the music had come together in ways beneficial to his trip home.
He doubted Micah had understood what he told him about the nanobots being trans-generational. That was why he built safeguards into their eventual use allowing them to mimic the music as it played yet alter their rhythm when the time arrived.
The golden globe seemed to hover in mid-air as it pulsed with the first light of what promised to be a limitless source of power.
Chapter 67—Sorrow
It seemed as if they were in a place of no space and time.
The seasons refused to change as a perpetual autumn lingered on for what seemed like centuries. Lauren grew increasingly more passive as if she too was being overcome with a creeping malaise that seemed to gradually encompass the entire continent they called home.
"It's been so long since we visited Lake Baikal, precious Lauren. Let us make a sojourn there."
"The last time you talked me into that, we ran afoul of those awful monkeys... I'd rather stay here."
Year by year Lauren seemed to revert to her childhood. Her antics reminded Natalia of the nasty little girls she once attended school with in Moscow... the ones who were eternally teasing her about the Gypsy heritage of which she was so proud of.
"If you will not go, then I will, darling Lauren."
"You cannot go anywhere without me... you know that, Natalia. You will die."
Lauren made it sound as if she was her jailer. She knew the Lady was picking a fight but Natalia deplored such dramatics. It almost seemed as if Lauren was the sick one who needed Natalia to stay by her side lest she succumb to the dread of despair.
"Then I will die, darling Natalia... I count that as an improvement over the way we are living here."
"I miss Lady Lily."
"We belong together with her. Let us go home and do what we can to find her again."
Natalia's heart ached for Lily yet each time she had mentioned the girl, Lauren threw angry glances her way, as if jealous of the feelings that still grew between them despite the time and the distance that separated them.
"I am ready if you are, sweet Natalia. I am sorry for being so despondent. I do not seem to know what it is that I desire... or rather I know, but I also realize it is an impossible quest and so I deny the knowing."
"Kāne was here, darling Lauren... did you know that too?"
"Yes, I sensed it the day we arrived."
"We should follow him to Toulon, my precious Lauren... he senses the pull of Lily too. Can you feel it?"
"My son never got over his infatuation with the girl. I suspect even now he is risking his life to get to her once more. You love him too, do you not, my sweet Natalia."
It wasn’t a question and so Natalia could see no reason to deny the obvious. Of course she loved Kāne... who could not? He was so far beyond any man she had ever known that he wasn’t even a man any longer. He was a sort of demi-god... a fixture of the world who existed before human beings walked upright.
"Yes, I love Kāne too, my precious Lauren. Does that disturb you?"
"Not at all... rather, it gladdens me to know we might all be together again. I know it isn’t right... the way I've been with you, my sweet Natalia. You deserve better than I can offer."
"You miss Lily as much as I do. You need her by your side, don't you, Natalia."
Despite Lauren's incontinent moods reeking of unrequited sorrow, Natalia felt waves of emotion pouring from her every time they spoke of Lily. Taking her lover by the hand, Natalia led her outdoors where distant clouds were hanging like gallows and angry winds pelted them with a gritty dust pulled up from the surrounding stretches of desert that intermingled with forests and grasslands. It was as if the land couldn’t decide what it wanted to be so it was a little of everything.
"I've always told myself that I am a strong woman who needs no one, my precious Natalia, but I know I am wrong. Without Lily I am as weak as a child. I hate to admit it but yes, I need her."
"But what is wrong with admitting a weakness, my darling Lauren? Especially when it pertains to a love that we both cherish... come, let us leave this harsh and unforgiving place... it is time we find our beauteous Lily."
"I'm afraid, sweet Natalia."
"Of what, darling Lauren?"
She had never dreamed that the Ladies could fear anything. They both seemed so powerfully prepared to rage against a world set against them from the start. Perhaps living beneath the cold and isolated waters of Lake Baikal had rendered them supreme... or so she had always thought.
"I'm going to lose you too. I'll be left alone again."
"Oh no... not ever, my love! That will not happen. You can never lose me. Look at me, my darling Lauren."
She had the feeling she was comforting a child and indeed when Lauren raised her eyes to peer into hers Natalia caught a glimpse of the little girl lurking behind the scimitar-like gaze that everyone knew as the Lady.
"I want you to know something... last week while you were asleep I took the old sailboat we found in the boathouse behind the castle and I set out to sea. I thought that you know longer wanted me here.
"I knew I would perish without you by my side, darling Lauren, but I would rather die than hold you back from that which you are destined for. I sailed for hours expecting the Lake sickness to come upon me at any time.
"By the time the sky was turning pink, I realized I wasn’t getting sick. Something has changed. Either the parasites that we carry in our bodies are no longer there, or we have become immune to them.
"I turned the boat around and rushed back to you. I wanted to tell you about my discovery but when I entered our bedroom and kissed you awake you seemed so depressed I thought my news might only drive us further apart."
"But why are you telling me this now, sweet Natalia? Are you planning on leaving me too?"
"Oh no, my precious one... I want you to know I don’t have to stay with you, my sweet Lauren... I can live anywhere in the world now. I am here because I love you. As long as I am alive, I will never leave you willingly... and if something does pull us apart I will spend the rest of my life making my way back to you."
"Do you know how we may find our Lily, my beauteous Natalia? What is your plan?"
"I understood Nate to say our sweet Lily vanished into a flash of light when she ran upon his anti-gravity device too quickly for him to shut it down. Why can we not do the same thing, darling Lauren? Perhaps we too will be sent to wherever it is that our Lady is now living. I'm willing to take the chance... are you?"
Chapter 68—Omens
The stormy season had set in.
Watching the angry gray rain pelting the outside of the window Luciana silently thanked her father and her grandfather for having thatched the roof before they set sail upon a journey that would probably take them farther than either had reckoned.
The madness of the lightning storm early that morning surprised her—they had squalls all the time... the eastern coast of old Scotland was a land battered constantly by tempests rolling in from the ocean deep and bright—but this display was especially electric. Even the fine hairs on her arms stood up as if she too was a charge awaiting grounding.
The clocks all stopped at quarter of eight that same morning. Luciana had a fondness for old timepieces and as a girl and in her considerable spare time she often scoured the old homesteads in adjacent areas to where she lived for all different sorts of clocks.
Each morning an hour was devoted to their windings. The melodious ticking of a hundred time keepers filled the dilapidated home with tiny bright trinkets, a scattering of precious jewels bedecking every corner of each room with miniature memories of what once was but would be no more.
She had grown so used to the sounds of all her timepieces that when they stopped, she didn’t know exactly what troubled her... the silence was always deafening in the
old villa. It wasn’t until she happened to walk by the enormous grandfather clock—so tall she had to climb upon a stepladder to wind it—that she noticed it had stopped.
She was sure she had wound it not an hour before. Simultaneously she became aware of the oppressive darkness of the house heretofore lighted by the tiny tinny sounds of gear meshing with gear and the continual whirl of time pulling at the fabric of her sanity.
First walking about—and then rushing—Luciana checked each clock... they had all stopped at the same time, as if they were colluding against her, some secret clock plot designed perhaps to finally drive her over the edge into the dark abyss of insanity awaiting her.
Luciana was not an idiot. She knew clocks couldn’t talk to one another much less plan such an intricate arrangement like stopping together at a predetermined time. Something was afoot, however.
As a child she vaguely remembered reading stories in the old Archives of how gigantic coronal plasma waves ejected from the sun could disrupt electrical devices upon the earth. Similarly, electro-magnetic pulses given off by certain atomic weapons were known to render anything that relied upon electricity inert.
The problem with those theories was that her clocks did not run on electricity. They were all powered by springs which had to be wound up in order to impart the energy needed to move the tiny gears inside which in turn caused the delicate hour, minute, and second hands to rotate around the dial.
Perhaps she had made a mistake... maybe the clocks hadn’t stopped all at once. She meandered through the decrepit rooms again checking each time piece and noting the time it had stopped. There was no doubting it now. Something odd was happening at the Isle of Skye.
She wondered if she should flee... if some unknown geological disaster was about to befall her ancient home. She had read in those same Archives how just before a volcanic eruption or a massive earthquake took place, machinery of all sorts sometimes ground to a halt. The prevailing assumption seemed to be that the earth gave off vast electric discharges while under duress which tended to disrupt even non-electrical devices like wind-up clocks stopping abruptly and plowshares becoming clogged with chunks of iron ore... she couldn’t remember exactly why but thought it had something to do with electromagnetism.
The clock stoppage had to be somehow related to the lightning storm of the morning... or had that simply been a coincidence? The storm had ceased by seven o'clock that morning though Luciana supposed residual electricity might still have resided inside the enormous thunderheads drifting over the Isle of Skye silently ominous.
Around what she reckoned as noon she tried starting some of the clocks by pushing the ones with pendulums but none of them continued to operate for more than a few seconds. When she tried winding the clocks again the gears seemed somehow glued together.
It occurred to Luciana that she might well be dreaming.
Reality had become so surreal for her that she often believed she was wide awake even inside of her dreams. It was only when some telltale sign informed her of the condition of her consciousness that she realized she was asleep.
Conversely, there were many times when she thought she was asleep and dreaming only to discover she was actually wide awake. Late one night she found herself walking under a sliver moon on the pebbled beach a mile from her old villa having no idea how she came to be there. She assumed she was having a dream but try as she might she couldn’t seem to wake herself up.
"Is someone here?"
She called out involuntarily when a sort of clucking noise issued from upstairs... at first she thought someone was walking across the floor. The sound was so distinct that she thought she could see luminescent footprints dotting the ceiling. She wondered momentarily if perhaps father had returned unbeknownst to her but she knew better. He would never enter the house without first asking.
The noise was coming from the roof.
It had to be her father. He was up on the roof working on the thatching. Grandfather was up there too. But why on earth would they be laboring in the rain? Not only that, but the twisted grass that they used to cover the rotting shingles wouldn’t allow any signs of their footsteps to leak through.
She walked halfway up to the second floor before a feeling of anticipation stopped her in her tracks. Something was waiting for her up there. A tingle ran up her spine as she called out once more.
"Hello? Is someone upstairs?"
A baby cried out.
Now she knew she was dreaming. There hadn’t been a child in the house in centuries. Perhaps it was some weird sort of delirium she was suffering... she recounted to herself everything that she had eaten or drunk that morning wondering if she had inadvertently ingested a hallucinogen... magic mushrooms grew in abundance near the estate but she had always been careful about those.
Dashing up the stairs, Luciana found the infant lying upon one of the old Persian rugs that Karen had brought over with her from Orchardton Hall when she and Pete arrived some eight hundred years prior. The rug was scarred and burned all around the baby's body but the child seemed unharmed.
The little boy had his arms and legs lifted into the air as if trying to grasp some invisible lever. When she stepped into the room, he turned his head and looked at her and cried out again as she stifled a gasp.
It was Kirk.
Luciana had no idea how she knew that, but she did. The thought came to her viscerally, as if she herself had given birth to him. Rushing to him, she scooped him up to swaddle his body in warm soft blankets while telling him how much she loved him and how she would never again let him go.
He watched her so intently that she wondered if he actually understood what she was saying.
Chapter 69—Giving In
They were asking the impossible.
He understood their need to be with the ones they loved but he hadn’t the answers nor did he want to shoulder the guilt of something untoward went wrong, which it doubtlessly would.
Ena would know.
Nate never realized how much he relied on the girl until she was gone. She always had a simple answer to the most difficult problems confronting them. He remembered how centuries ago she arrived at Toulon, took one look at the anti-gravity device that he and Pete couldn’t seem to get to work, and proceeded to tell them how to fix it in such precise detail they both thought she was delusional.
It wasn’t until the next day when they discovered Ena and the machine missing and a prototype altered to her specifications that they realized she was right all along. He never understood the gift she had but that didn’t stop him from taking advantage of it.
Now he was stuck again.
"Ena is calling out to me, Grandfather Nate. She has been teleported back to Lake Baikal when it was first formed."
"But that Lake is twenty five million years old, Alpin. It's not possible she is there."
"She had to go somewhere, Grandfather Nate."
He had to admit the boy was right. More and more, Alpin reminded him of Kāne. Not only did they look like twins but their demeanors mirrored one another as if they had carefully practiced their moves in anticipation of a performance.
Nate hadn’t been happy to see Kāne. He knew right off why the man was there and though his first impulse was to leave Toulon until Kāne saw fit to depart, he had stayed. The man needed his help.
"Are you here only for a visit, darling Nate?"
When Amanda asked him his intentions, he broke down and wept. He could never remember doing so in the past, even as a boy. He had always prided himself on his stoicism. But seeing the look of longing in his wife's eyes triggered something deep inside of him and he could not lie any more.
"No, my sweet Amanda... I would love to stay... that is, if you and Ginger will have me."
When Kāne appeared, Nate knew exactly why he had come. Lily was calling. He had heard it too... the lament wafting through his psyche just before he fell asleep or perhaps the moment of awakening on the soft Mediterranean mornings.
This
time he ignored it. He had no desire to chase after a figment of his imagination, which was all Lily had ever been. He finally recognized the love she had was not aimed at him nor had it ever been. She had allowed herself to be used in a misguided attempt at perpetuating the species.
She belonged to Kāne, and he to her. Though he had never been able to sense the music as did the Ladies, Nate knew without a doubt that his destiny lay here, not out there in space on some primitive planet. If he lived as long as a billion years, it would be enough, as long as he lived those years those he loved... with Amanda and Ginger.
"From what I understand, Alpin, when someone or something comes into direct contact with the singularity produced by the warp field on our anti-gravity machines they are instantaneously teleported to the other side of the wormhole that has opened allowing travel in between what we know as space and time.
"We experimented with sending probes through a wormhole we established between earth and Miranda, a moon that circles a gas giant in the Bernard's Star system. We were unable to communicate with our probes, however, so we gave up.
"If Lily was actually teleported there when she came into contact with my warp field before I could shut it down, she most likely ended up either in the future or the past. Our probes are still there in the same place she is at, or so I assume. It would be easy enough to reestablish the wormhole but I wouldn’t want to be the one to step through it."
"I will volunteer."
Kāne stepped forward. Nate had never before realized how big the man was... he had always kept a distance from him, not only on account of the debilitating effects he had upon his mind, but because of his relationship with Lily.
"You could be stepping into nothingness, Kāne. I cannot guarantee success."
"I will volunteer."
"I'd like to consult Pete first. Please allow me two days to come up with a viable plan, Kāne. As far as sending you to Ena, I'm not at all sure how to even begin, Alpin."