“She seems a bit tense,” Torin said.
“Must not have had her superfood shake this morning.”
“Guess not. And since when do you drink?”
“Since finding out we’re investigating a guy who just traveled back in time.” She poured another glass and swigged it.
“You used to not take everything I said at face value.”
“Yeah, well, that was before the world got even uglier than your revelations.”
***
They were well inside the commune, beneath the energy dome. Curious, Kendra looked up and away from Torin, whose presence was a stabilizing influence. From underneath, the dome presented as a traveling rainbow as the sun tracked across the sky and its rays caught the otherwise invisible energy field just so.
“Are those tomatoes? Seriously? I thought they were pumpkins.”
Kendra took a look at the ground crawling tomato vines Torin was gawking at. “Don’t be impressed,” she said. “It just encourages them.”
“Encourages them to what? Let’s hope one of these guys is into penis enlargement.”
“Your penis is the only thing bigger than your ego, so relax. Where is everyone?” Any more efforts to crane her neck every which direction and she’d give herself whiplash.
“They’re all around us. Talk about tunnel vision.”
In a final ditch effort, Kendra turned around three hundred and sixty degrees. “I’ve got twenty-twenty vision. How good are your eyes?”
Torin shook his head. “I don’t think it has to do with the sharpness of those eyes, but of this one,” he said, pointing to the center of her forehead.
“What are you going on about?”
“It occurs to me that they might just be invisible to people without the eyes to see.”
She glared at him.
“Just take a deep breath. Think loving thoughts.”
“How do I think loving thoughts when all I want to do is strangle you for talking in riddles?”
“I’m not talking in riddles. I’m giving it to you straight.”
She made a screaming sound of frustration. It didn’t help that her heels were digging into the dirt path, threatening to mar her three-hundred dollar shoes.
“Okay, okay. Forget about relaxing. Forget about loving. We’re clearly making this too hard on you. Just think of changing brainwave patterns.”
“Say what?”
“You must do yoga to stay so nimble in bed.”
“I do you to stay so nimble in bed.”
“Ah, that’s sweet, but a bit off point. Very well then, think of the off-work you, the I’ve-thrown-in-the-towel-for-the-day you. Forget about the investigation. Pretend we’re on vacation. Can you do that?”
She still glared at him impatiently but her defiant face was just camouflage at this point in the event she couldn’t pull this off. “God, it’s working. I can see them. What the hell?”
“It’s possible they don’t even know they’re doing it. I’ve read about this. Walking meditation, the hatha-yoga people call it. That two minutes a day we Americans are lucky to get, assuming we can even settle into an asana pose, they’re in that meditative state twenty-four seven.”
“How come they keep blinking in and out of view?” Kendra put her hand up to her forehead as a visor and squinted her eyes just in case it was her retinas that were taking too much of a beating.
“Really? They’re just there to me. Maybe you’re fluctuating between mental states.”
“No.”
“Maybe you jumped past me into an even higher state of consciousness. Maybe they are blinking in and out.”
“Why? How?”
Torin got that all-too familiar intense look that suggested he was dialing into his psychic self. “I think they might be slipping in and out of parallel universes.”
“Same questions. Why? And how?”
He sighed. “It’d help if I could see for myself.” He took a deep breath and tried to relax further as he let out the trapped air in his lungs. “I’m imagining myself luxuriating in the tub at home. Bubble bath. Epsom salts. There.” He opened his eyes again. She was right; some of the workers were blinking in and out. “Come on. Let’s take a closer look.”
They walked aside one another through the garden the commune residents in eyeshot were tending. It was vast, the paths trailing through it quite the maze. Torin ignored the ones who weren’t blinking in and out like Christmas tree lights for the ones that were. The first woman they got to was on her knees so she could reach the raised bed with her hand trowel, talking to herself. She was dressed more like a cook than a gardener in her apron. Her hair was tied up and she wore some silly thing on her head that made her look as if she belonged in a Dutch painting, going from the stains on her, from the impressionist period. “You can’t seriously expect me to do that?” she said. “Help?! They’re seedlings. Might as well pour battery acid on them. Just do it, he says. Fine. But I swear if…” She pulled her dress up, squatted and peed. Half way through peeing, she disappeared again.
“I think I know what’s going on here,” Torin said.
“I’m happy for any explanation that doesn’t involve me losing my mind.”
“She’s talking to some kind of garden elf or gnome. There are legends even in our world of magical beings that protect the forests and are partial to anyone who loves nature as they do.”
“What’s that got to do with the blinking out?”
“I think the more in tune she gets with these creatures, the more she’s drawn into worlds where they’re the norm and not the exception, and everyone can see them.”
The woman reappeared in time to, having finished peeing, release her hold on the bottom of her dress, stand, and work the soil to spread the moisture around.
“And she blinks back here because?” Kendra said. Remarkably the woman had taken no notice of either of them. Perhaps from her altered state, Kendra thought, they were as invisible to her as she was to them just seconds ago.
“When she loses her train of thought and some other idea intrudes in her mind that relates more to her cruder, less enlightened self, the one more anchored in this world, Poof!, she’s back here.”
“As always, you have a real gift for making the insane sound plausible. Of course, today you might be getting more than a little help from the locals.”
They walked on through the carefully tended beds trying somewhat fruitlessly not to get lost in the maze. It was in fact as much hedge maze as a series of enclosed gardens, seemingly without end.
The next man they bumped into that was blinking in and out was swinging a scythe at a patch of oat straw. Torin bent down quickly and snatched up the handkerchief that had fallen out of Scythe Man’s right hip pocket, cuing Kendra by how he was handing it to her that she was to treat it as evidence. She did so, sticking it into an evidence bag and back into her purse, without objecting, probably figuring he’d explain later.
They stepped a little closer to the guy, still keeping a respectful distance owing to his reach with that scythe. He seemed angry and prone to ranting at the air. “Always the backbreaking work falls on me. I don’t care how long I live here, I’ll always be a second class citizen in their eyes. It’s my anger, they say. As if they don’t take pride in making me angry!” he shouted, swinging the scythe even harder. And the next thing Kendra knew she and Torin were battling alongside him on horseback, sword to sword, shield to shield against bandits traveling the king’s road. The threesome was too busy holding their own to philosophize about what was going on.
What felt like hours later, though it was probably more like minutes, the skirmish won, in their favor, Kendra and Torin dismounted their horses. “What is this place?” she asked.
“Medieval Britain, I’d say.” Torin seemed unable to keep a smile off his face and sounded a bit too bubbly for her tastes. He’d rather enjoyed the sword fighting, and was as pumped up as she was exhausted. “Of course, I’m no historian.”
“You mind telling me how we got here?”
“We must have gotten so absorbed in watching him our brainwaves entrained with his. We lost ourselves in the drama, so we got caught up in his slipstream.”
“Get us out of here, Torin!”
“You sure? We just got here. Might be worth staying a while. Seems like a fun place.”
They turned to the sound of encroaching horses. The animals were snorting hard. That might be owing to the weight of the knights they were carrying under all their battle armor. Kendra’s little party of three seemed to be the sole focus of the rabid posse. She was impressed by their ability to keep their beady eyes attuned to their prey no matter how much they bobbed up and down on those horses. “You were saying?” she said.
Torin walked over to the tall man who was wiping his sword free of blood on the tall fronds of grass, taking the news of the encroaching death squad rather impassively. “It’s just not right how they treat you,” Torin said to the field hand. “You don’t think their disdain is racially motivated, do you?”
The man turned to face Torin, his face twisted up in thought. The sword shifted in his hand to a scythe again, and suddenly they were back in the world Kendra knew and took to be her own. The man had already forgotten about them and returned to his swinging of the scythe and swearing under his breath. “You can just bet they’re racists too,” he exclaimed. “It’s my Navajo blood is what it is, makes them feel like they’ll never be as true to living in sync with the land as me. Calls their whole self-enlightenment trip into question.”
Torin grabbed her by the arm and dragged her away. “I think that’s enough sight-seeing for one day,” he said. “We’re a little too impressionable for this lot. Don’t fancy awakening in another world just yet, thank you. The next time, might not be as easy to get back.”
“For once we agree. They can’t all be nature lovers and tree huggers here. Every community needs administrators and bill payers and people to deal with the madness of the outside world if only to keep it off of everyone else.”
“Good thinking,” Torin said. “I suggest we avoid the hobbit houses that look a little too much like portals to other worlds themselves, and stick more to the uninspired architecture. Maybe we can find some types inside them whose consciousness is crude enough that we can relate to them.”
“And just what brainwave pattern do you suggest to get us out of this maze?”
They both took a moment to take in the hopelessness of ever finding their way out. From the top of a hillcrest, they could see how vast the maze was, but they couldn’t divine which paths led out of it.
Torin sighed. “I would think your ordinary detective’s consciousness should suffice for that.”
“Praise God,” she exclaimed, “assuming I can still access it. Five minutes inside hippy-dippy land, and I’m coo-coo for coco puffs.”
She kept countermanding his intuitive hunches about which direction to go until she got them out of the maze. “So much for your intuitions.”
“Says you. If we’d followed my hunches we’d have been out a half-hour ago for all we know.”
“I’m feeling rather partial to that flat roofed building over there.”
Torin grimaced. “God, what an eye sore.”
“Right now it ranks higher than a vision of the Virgin Mary as regards our salvation.”
“No argument there.” He marveled at how difficult it was to keep up with her even in her heels, his eyes going repeatedly to her feet. “Clearly all women were stilt walkers in former lives. A past in the circus might explain all that flexibility in the bedroom as well. Maybe you’re more in touch with past lives than you know. We might have found our home away from home.”
“So long as I feel threatened, I think you’re going to find your jokes falling a little flat.”
“Thought you were just deaf in this ear.”
They had crossed the threshold of the crude cement structure just outside the maze, like some ticket booth entrance to “the theme park.” Turned out the building was anything but crude. The exterior was a hologram disguising the true nature of the dwelling. Once inside, they realized they were no longer anchored to the planet.
She and Torin made their way to the portal overlooking Spaceship Earth, with a little coaxing, make that arm-pulling on his part. The blue gem of a planet gleamed below, sporting its latest black eye, a super-storm wending its way across the Caribbean. “It’s a satellite station of some kind,” Torin said, “a rather advanced one.”
“Space station, my ass. Look at those weapons bays, and the thruster ports. This is a spaceship, to be more specific, a war ship. Just what rabbit hole did you drag me down now?”
“You do realize that for my intuitive insights to work, I need raw data to isolate patterns in. It’s not too unlike those data-mining algorithms AI use.”
“Ordinarily I’d say spare me the lecture, as it is, your babbling is the only thing keeping me sane.”
“Can I help you?” the woman said, appearing out of nowhere. She stood more upright than a pencil. When Kendra looked for curves where they were supposed to be, she found the pencil analogy held there as well.
“Forgive me, I don’t mean to be rude,” Torin said, “but are you a hologram?”
“No. They just elected me to deal with outsiders. I was a linguist once. Now I use that ability to slip and slide through various mental states in order to communicate with those of you of baser intellect and consciousness.”
“Don’t sugar coat it on our account,” he said.
She smiled. “I actually was joking. I figured since you were aware of your shortcomings, the comment might put a smile on your face. Being able to take a step back from who we are so that we can change who we are is the first step to enlightenment.”
“And the last, or so I hear,” Torin said.
Pencil Body smiled. “You’re quite gifted, you know?” She shifted her attention to Kendra. “You both are, though he’s far more in touch with his abilities than you are.”
“So I’ve been telling her for ages. Traumatic childhood. All sorts of repressed nasties inside her head. I suspect the angel is hiding amongst all the monsters. She’s afraid she can’t get to her without letting out the demons.”
“A rather accurate assessment of her psyche, I’d say.” The woman hit them both with another of her wry smiles which struck Kendra as more than superficially polite. She seemed genuinely warm.
“You mind explaining what the hell’s going on here?” Kendra asked. “I’ve shot people for persecuting me less.”
“You just keep making jokes. Might get you through this. Walk with me,” Pencil Body said, as she headed down the spaceship’s corridor. Kendra’s mind wandered to the workmen outside the ship in their nexgen spacesuits attending to the ship’s repairs. She pointed outside the portal for Torin to get his eyes off of Pencil Body.
“What do you think is going on here, Torin?” Pencil Body asked.
“Don’t encourage him,” Kendra said.
“You’re using the power spot in the shadow of the mountain where so many Ley lines intersect to magnify your psychic abilities. And you’re using those augmented powers and the site itself as a jumping off point to alternate realities. But you’re not doing it in any systematic fashion that I can discern. It’s sort of every man and women for themselves.”
“You’re right and you’re wrong. By the way, my name is Acretia. I suppose I should have led with that, but I’m guessing you’re getting used to things coming at you out of sequence.”
“Not hardly,” Kendra said, parting her hair.
“We’re exploring the multiverse for now in an ad hoc fashion, you’re right about that part,” Acretia said. “Letting each person in the community connect with it in a fashion that suits their personality and temperament and interests. Don’t see how it could work any other way. Our sensitives are naturally attuned to different parallel universes as extensions of who they are. For them it’s a matter of rememb
ering, their past lives, their future lives. They’re slowly becoming whole.”
“Wholeness defined in your world as the ability to move in and out of all of our past and future lives as part of one timeless present,” Torin said.
“Correct. You sound skeptical.”
“I am,” Torin said, “but that might be the fear talking as opposed to my latest penetrating intuitive insight.”
“And this spaceship?” Kendra asked. “How does it fit in with your explorations?”
“Here is where we attempt to be more systematic in our explorations of parallel universes. Our scientists study the comings and goings of the community members, look for patterns, hidden meanings not available to any of them, to see if refining the process is possible, or if the AI running the ship can be trained to open the portals to other times and places. If so, maybe it can dumb it down enough so the implant can be injected subdermally into unupgraded humans, lending a technological fix or crutch to those who are less psychically endowed.”
“About that psychic endowment of yours,” Torin said. “It’s what brought us to this place. We’d hoped to find your sponsor, the man who I suspect started all of this, Clyde Barker.”
“Ironically, he’s not here,” Acretia said, “as he’s the greatest scientist we have.”
“Where is he?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. So long as he’s shielded, our scientists can’t track his movements across timelines.”
“You’re referring to his apprentice,” Torin said.
“Yes,” Acretia replied, “a young girl, nine years old. Highly impressionable, I’m afraid. And a strong enough psychic to keep him off our radar.”
“Neither has aged after all this time?” Kendra asked.
Acretia shook her head. “They didn’t stay long enough to. We keep waiting for her to break free of his influence, but his ability to keep pace with her meteoric growth with guile and cunning continues to surprise us as much as I imagine it does the young girl.”
“So you know he’s bad news,” Kendra said.
“His aims are quite good. His sole purpose is to empower every last human on earth as gods, to give them the kinds of abilities that will ensure no one will ever manipulate or oppress them again.”
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