I said, “You don’t know the quarter of it. I’ll explain later. But right now we have to put an end to this canyon episode and go below and do our briefing. Ike, can you see to the Reverend, thanks.”
Louise said, “I’ll make a note that we’re planning another route into the valley, and that anyone should come back tomorrow after 10 o’clock.”
“Good idea. Coffee, anyone.”
I poured and everyone sipped in silence. Evidently, wrestling with their demons. I checked to see if Computer had gone into combat mode where it bombarded me constantly with reports rather than waiting for me to download. Sure enough, / all stations on yellow alert -- All areas reporting 99.7% readiness – recommend maximum rate development of fighter force – recommend 24 year time drop back to accommodate – recommend minimum 20 fold increase over planned 10 rail ships and corresponding increase in launch ships and fighters – recommend-- I cut in and commanded, /// recommendations for projected increase approved//calculate factor of thirty % safety in time drop back//locate manufacturing in area of asteroid belt 180 degrees from Ark manufacturing area//put resulting ships around Earth in standard 360 cubed placement///
Acknowledged – —
I tuned it out. I had already written and recorded 10 level contingency plans for everything I could think of. If someone came up with something new, well, shame on me.
Ike came back and said, The Reverend Haskin says he’ll say a word at the canyon and that he’ll pass the word that new routes are being readied.”
I said, “That’s good Ike. We’ll have a breather. I’m going to have Poseidon copied and placed 50 miles away, along with any of our people who are currently in the town. There will be a sweep by our enemies, and I don’t want anyone caught being asked questions they don’t have answers for. When we get back we will gently encourage wider exploration of the Habitat. Perhaps someone will discover the central lake and the 22nd century city around it.”
Everybody threw up their hands and Jason said it for everyone “What the hell next?”
“Next we confer.”
Chapter 12
THELMA
When below, I led Ike, Jason, Rafe, Marilyn, and Louise, to the briefing room, with the triangular table in a pit area. The room had a projection screen on the stage, behind the base of the triangle. I had them sit along the sides of the table so they could see me easily, and the screen behind me. I had their instructors sit with them, and even had my personal aide, Derek attending, to serve drinks and snacks. We were going to be here some time. Behind the table, seats rose in a theater setting. I sent out a general call that any Ship Born could observe if they cared to.
I began, “I see all have food and beverage so we’ll begin with a look at what was really in the canyon, which some of you know, and some may have guessed, was a portal through time.”
I prompted /// canyon view/// and on the screen appeared a couple driving a wagon. That they were tall was evident despite the sitting posture. Their narrow faces were startling, slanted eyes, and they had an agitated manner.
“What you see here folks is the latest; that I know of, version of the Serpentine Workers who carry out Earth surface tasks for the IL ANNU KI, which we’ll get to in a moment. These two, male and female, were carrying, in their wagon, a weapon which they set off. This weapon creates static to a degree which shorts out any life forms, or electrical current. The result is a dead ship and people. It didn’t succeed because the portal wasn’t a continuous one between here and there, rather 17 different portals, each with its own collector and rebroadcaster. You’ll recall the twists and turns of the canyon. Consequently the effects of the weapon were contained and the wagon, people, team, and all were launched into a swiftly decaying orbit around the sun. Of equal importance is the fact that the messengers can’t report to their base. Said base is here /// Missouri Map \ in the central part of the state. Computer gathered that much from their minds, and the fact that they had thirty days to report. Plus some other miscellaneous items which are now being correlated.”
Rafe said, “IL ANNU KI.”
“Right. Here’s our latest design.”
I prompted /// human-ANNU KI comparison\, and on the screen appeared a Human and a figure human like but 14 feet tall and correspondingly muscular. You could say he was an overgrown human before you noticed the third eye in the middle of its forehead, on magnification the third eye wasn’t like the usual two but rather a membrane three times the eye size.
“That’s the basic ANNU KI. There’s a female type, just as tall and strong. This image is about 6,000 years old but there’s little likelihood they’ve evolved. The ANNU KI's natural habitat is outer space. They live in immense ships of different shapes. They might have had a home planet at one point in time but nobody I asked knew. They visit planets for one reason, to mine gold. Sometimes they just rip at a planet and sometimes they bore deep under the surface, using Atomic Powered tunneling machines. Those tunnels become useful later for habitation. The gold they get is then powderized and they breathe it by it being released into their onboard atmosphere. The powderized gold then goes through their bodies. The reason for that is an increase in their personal capacity to absorb and hold energy. They sleep a lot in special chambers during which they undergo rejuvenation. Consequently any individual is likely to count their years in the thousands, of thousands. The chambers keep them physically fit for their frequent quarrels, which lead to violent confrontations.”
Rafe questioned, “Why do they come here. There’s plenty of gold in non planetary bodies?”
“Yes, true, but no miners to dig it for them. They showed up here on Earth many thousands of years ago and at first mined the gold themselves. But they grew tired of that and created a race of people to do their mining for them. That race was wiped out due to a planetary pole shift. So they came back later when things had settled, geologically speaking, and started over again. The race then created became us.”
Marilyn interjected, “They should have done a better job.”
“They probably would have, but they shot themselves in the foot by doing as good a job as they did. Because some representative of the Galactic Government came by and said, These creatures are sentient. You can’t enslave them. You have to let them develop on their own. Being able to accomplish their purpose with surrogates, the ANNU KI lifted off, but not before leaving some underground colonies and surface helpers. Worse than that, they built into the human psyche a craving for gold. When you think in a reasoning manner about gold, if you can, mankind would have been much better off to have searched after iron ore, rather than gold.”
Louise said, “Now that you point that out it does seem rather dumb.”
“But worse than that, they gradually, over thousand of years, developed a hybrid, human/ANNU KI and put them into positions of gold collectors, money exchangers, bankers, fine metal brokers, etc. So the gold they need is being collected for them. They intend to come back later for it.”
Ike looked pale, “I feel a definite need for something strong, but I don’t think we’ve come to the really bad part yet.”
“Too true, Ike. Look at the screen. You know from theory that time is a fixed constant, but when one is outside of time one goes where one wants to and jumps back in when one wants to. ///Show Earth 2050\ You see here planet Earth in 2050. This is remarkable, from the turbulence in the atmosphere, 200 plus miles per hour winds, the after effect of the planet itself tearing loose from its electro magnetic field. Rafe, would you carry on from here.”
“Naturally I wasn’t there, and didn’t take those pictures but I can draw on my Terra Forming experience and say pure hell must exist on the planet’s surface. I would be surprised that anyone above ground survived. And those underground would have to fear planetary plate shifting. Did the ANNU KI do this?”
“No. The planet Nebu did this. Let me explain. You’ve all been told in school that this solar system consists of eight planets. A ninth planet was discovered la
ter and the thought was that was it. Not so. There is a tenth planet. It’s on an epileptical orbit which brings it to the inner solar system every six thousand years. These years are almost at hand. In 2050 it’s already, but just barely, on its journey outward again.”
Rafe said, “We knew of it, not that name of course, but we discarded it as a factor, or we would have done something about it. In the time of our Space Stations its innermost orbit point was closer to Pluto than Saturn. Something must have happened to alter its course over the years. What the hell can we do, now?”
I said, “That’s the question. That was the question when I departed for my two hundred year journey. The Elders consider Earth a nice vacation spot. But, not important enough to them, to do something about Nebu themselves, mind you. When you roam time and space I guess it’s hard to get excited about any particular space, or planet, and the few remaining years of its society. Especially, when you don’t mix much. So they had me trained. I never knew why. And sprung this situation on me, recently. They gave me these resources, vast resources, until you consider what we’re up against. I say we, because the Elders drafted you, who were my companions along with me. You can rebel and I’ll surely set you back into our time, or any time, if you insist, and go onward with my Ship Born.”
Rafe said, “Personally I wouldn’t miss this way to die for anything. Do I speak for everyone?”
I turned misty when I saw the willingness to overcome that my old friends expressed.
“Agreed, we go on. It was my plan to recruit folks who had been displaced by the War and gradually build a fighting force to carry out a rescue plan later, perhaps immediately before the actual planetary collapse. Evidently we aren’t going to have enough time to gather troops on a voluntary basis, and train them. If we drop back in time any further, we have a mind set, and an educational level that’s too time consuming, too difficult to overcome. But we have options. One, we can go back to different highly developed technical societies in Earth’s past, like the Atlantian, though they had a slave caste of created workers also. Or we can go recruit in Lemuria. The temple technicians had an evolved science. But there we risk getting involved in their caste squabbles. Or we can go up in the Himalayas and try to connect to the Psychic cities. But then there’s the rub that once folks are out of their bodies and functioning they sort of don’t want to do the body route anymore. There were more developed societies but the further we go back the more immediacy we lose. So when someone says to you, what effect are the future's problems going to have on me? You can’t say but, damn little.”
“So,” Marilyn observed, “We’re out of luck.”
“Not necessarily. We can forget trying to recruit bodies, and just recruit essences.”
Louise asked incredulously, “However do we do that?”
“The doing isn’t hard. I have frequency collectors which are ship mounted. I could park one over Gettysburg in the middle of that battle and collect thousands of poor people who have just died. That’s no problem. The question is what do you do with them, and to begin with whether that is a morally correct thing to do.”
Rafe remarked, “Ike, Jason, and I have seen lots of soldiers die. If they knew they were going to somewhere where someone cared, I feel they would welcome that. I know I would have been in favor of knowing my destination would be anyplace other than Hell. But I don’t see what practical result the whole exercise would be in light of our problems?”
"Let’s go through the whole sequence. We pick up these recent dead and bring them back here, console them, stabilize them, insert them in healthy bodies, while bridging the technology transition in a plausible manner. Then they awake knowing the basic tasks which they will be called upon to perform.”
The Doctor who had been silent up to now asked quietly, “Who does the soothing; and do we have time? You said thirty days.”
Yes we have thirty days before the enemy camp goes into alarm mode. But we aren’t going to give them thirty days. We’re going to attack and wipe them out to a being, completely remove them. We would be out doing that now but we have to locate where the other nest is first. I know their thought processes. They think in twos with a third element/person/group being the force initiator. The force initiators on Earth are their servants, the people who are living among us, hiding among the general population. But there will be another base, the two in the equation. Probably, directly around the globe from the first one. That would put it in Western Australia. I’ve dispatched probes.”
Rafe said, “I’ll go over the weapons list again and see what my Long Time experience can add. You’ll help me with that won’t you, Ike, Jason, thanks.”
I said, “I’d appreciate any help. I know I don’t see the whole picture all of the time. But, to answer the good doctor’s question, about soothing of essences. Not many years before Earth’s end event, I studied with a group who had developed the technology of working with the mind to reach an essence and reason with it. I sponsored some members of that group with the understanding they would join me after they died. Those who made that arrangement did, and they tell me they can multiply at will.”
The Doctor asked, “Can we meet a couple of them to see with our own eyes.”
“Of course. They monitor all events; a couple will be here shortly. They prefer to maintain a non body state but can create a body at will.”
I sensed movement outside the door and immediately a couple walked through. They were tall, but not too oversized. The man was about 6 foot 6 inches and the woman 6 foot. They walked to the head of the table and took seats on either side of me. They had on black dress uniforms; the woman wore a long skirt. They had some silver braid on their shoulder tabs and wore peaked caps with more silver braid. They both laid their caps on the table and the man asked, “Doctor Wallace, Lawrence Wallace, what questions do you have of us?” He spoke with a very deep unhurried voice. The manner of both of them was completely at ease. They neither pushed nor pulled with their presences. I had looked into their eyes before and the eyes were bottomless pools. I was surprised the good doctor didn’t completely lose his composure. Evidently Tina had done an outstanding job with him.
The doctor asked, “To the point, how do you do this soothing?”
The woman answered, “We live in a space of our own creation in an energy state when we’re not pure thought. Our area of operation is limited only by our considerations. In our space there is no time, nor matter, so to address one Essence, or a million, that’s all the same.”
The man continued, “You, Doctor, are on the same road we trod. Just starting, by the steps you have achieved, you know that you don’t have to go back to not knowing, and despair. That progress has taken you many hours and you’ll spend many more hours before you’re us. The road is laid out and we welcome you at the end. You, unhampered by your mortal coil would understand what you’ve achieved in a second, or less, to put the concept in your present frame of reference takes many hours.”
“I see. Thank you Commander---------“
“I’m Commander Turquill and she is Commander Lesten. Do you need our presence further, Thelma?”
Before I could answer, the Doctor broke in and asked, “Could the Commanders be a bit longer with us in person. I for one feel a lot more reality with them present.”
I could see that was the consensus so I looked left and right, and got nods from both of them, and said, “The Commanders will remain with us until we can go on alone. Do I feel a consensus here at the table that we adopt the Essence route and further that we start with Gettysburg. Please let’s have a show of hands.”
Everyone agreed.
Rafe then asked, “I like a further show of hands that if this one try works we gather all who’ve died, man, woman and child , from the years between 1855 and 1870 in the whole of the United States.”
With no objection from the Commanders I said, “So asked, show your hands to concur.”
They all raised their hands.
Rafe said, �
�After that we will have the option of taking a meaningful number off of Earth before the end comes, or altering the lead up events.”
I said, “That’s so. I know you want to get to your Research, Rafe, Ike Jason, and maybe Louise can help you with the recall devices to find out about ANNU KI weapons. Marilyn, the Doctor, the Commanders, and I need to go to the Med Deck. If there are no further points of discussion for now we’ll split in these groups.”
There weren’t, so we split up, the assigned Ship Born going with their principals. I sent to my steward/aide, Derek, YOU COME ALONG, YOU DON'T GET OUT OFTEN ENOUGH.
Those permanent crew members, who had gathered to observe went back to their duties, or to their leisure time.
While we were underway to the Med Deck I reflected how glad I was no one had asked why I hadn’t suggested the Essence route first. I knew what no one else did. The moment we made our first collection the Rangers would be down on us straight away. I just hoped they would give me a few days before they got here. Maybe I would be able to, at least, crew one Ark fully.
When our group got to the Med Deck, to my surprise, the Doctor took over and insisted on giving the Commanders a tour. I didn’t know whether they had bothered to make themselves aware of the facilities, or not, so I just let him carry on. Tina smiled at me and I said, “WHAT HAVE YOU CREATED?”
“WHO KNOWS? BUT HE DOES HAVE A GRASP OF THE PROBLEMS INTEGRATING ESSENCES WITH NEW BODIES.”
“YES HE DOES. YOU’LL HAVE TO SET UP SOME SORT PHYSICAL ACTIVITY TO TEST COORDINATIVE FUNCTION. MAYBE A RUN THROUGH BASIC SHAOLIN KUNG FU, WHICH THEY WILL ALREADY BE PROGRAMMED FOR.”
“GOOD POINT. AFTER THAT THEY WILL BE ABLE TO WALK AND TALK.”
The Commanders and Dr. Wallace concluded their tour and came back to where Tina and I were standing.
Commander Turquill observed, “This is the most elaborate arrangement of reintegrating bodies that I’ve ever seen. I’m sure it will work, if the ‘essences’ are gathered in their individual eternity. Perhaps we can be familiarized with that and test it ourselves to make sure of the harmonics.”
Greener Green I: Where Does the Circle Begin Page 8