by Pamela Davis
"They're dead, aren't they," she said matter-of-factly.
He nodded.
"You have to move so I can get by. I have to see them, you know." This said gently, almost apologetically.
He sighed and squeezed past her.
"You need to be prepared, Maria. There's lots of blood, and your father--well, he--"
"Shut up and let go of my arm. I've reported from Bosnian and Iraqi war zones. Now get the fuck out of my way and let me see them. I have to know!" She paused, took a breath and said more quietly, "It has to be real...to accept it."
He nodded sorrowfully.
Sonoran Desert, Arizona
"Why did you come to me?" the shaman woman asked Margaret.
"I've been searching, most of my life it seems, for answers and for peace. I've done a lot to heal myself and was feeling that perhaps the craziness of my life was coming to an end. Then this strange thing started happening." Margaret stopped, looking for the words to describe an experience that felt supernatural.
The shaman, whose name was surprisingly enough Irene, sat on the ground with blue-jeaned legs crossed, waiting patiently for Margaret to continue. As she watched Margaret rake her hands through a mass of wavy, reddish-gold hair, she wondered what could make a successful attorney leave her practice to spend months in the desert searching for a shaman. It wasn't like Irene advertised in the yellow pages. She was hard to find.
"This is the thing," Margaret explained. "I've had a difficult life. But then, who hasn't? Still, mine took a while to recover from, get beyond. I thought I was finally past it all. Done with the bad memories, the panic and anxiety, the weird times of dissociating from myself. Then one day...I started hearing a voice, not a voice from inside me, it felt like a voice that was inside everything. I didn't understand what the voice said at first--it was waves of pain and loss--almost like hearing a different language." Margaret paused, and then smiled ruefully. "I guess this is all sounding pretty strange."
"Go on, keep talking and perhaps it will make sense," said Irene.
Margaret nodded and realized what a relief it was to finally talk about all of it. She'd been too afraid to tell anyone about the voice.
"When this started happening, I was studying crop circle formations. It was something that interested me. In fact, I felt drawn to them. I thought at first that it was because they were a strange phenomenon and I had led a fairly weird life. But it was more than that. The more I read about them and viewed photographs of them, the crop circles seemed to me to be saying something. Like they were an actual communication of some kind. I travelled around to see them whenever I got the chance, and then I heard about the ones that had appeared out here in the desert--not exactly crop circles, but unnatural patterns in the sand. Again, I felt drawn, no, more like compelled, to visit them. I decided to take some time off from my job to work more on self-healing, and made arrangements to come here. That's when I started hearing the voice."
Margaret paused to sip herbal tea from the ceramic mug at her side. The shaman watched her sort out her thoughts and wondered if Margaret was the person she had dreamed about. For several months, she had dreamed that someone of the earth was coming, someone more deeply connected to the earth than anyone ever before, but the images had been unclear. The woman before her was a shock because she was not Native American, but white with lightly tanned skin, deep emerald, oval eyes framed by heavy dark lashes under straight, reddish-brown eyebrows. The strong face showed traces of humor in the deep dimples when she smiled and the fine laugh lines around the eyes. A light scattering of freckles across the bridge of her straight nose gave Margaret a look of youth not totally congruent with her stated age of thirty-eight. Yes, the shaman thought, this might be the one from the dreams, the one who will be the connection.
"Please continue," the shaman said, leaning forward with interest.
Margaret glanced at her and smiled, saying, "So you still want to hear my story? Hmm, I'm not quite sure what that means--either you're as nutty as I am or my story has more validity than I thought--and I think I'd prefer it if we were both crazy! All right, here's the rest of it. I came here and saw the crop circles in the sand. I'd read of them appearing in ice, but these were the first I'd seen in sand. I guess we shouldn't even call them crop circles since there weren't any crops on the ice or sand--but they were the same kinds of patterns as crop circles. And they were amazing, more elaborate than anything I'd heard of. I hired a small plane to fly over so I could get pictures. Then I studied the pictures and somehow, I don't know how, they started to make sense. It was like a puzzle, finding a key that allows you to decipher a code, and suddenly, I could read them! It was a message."
Margaret fell silent, remembering the excitement and stunned surprise she had felt. How to describe it? "I don't know how to explain what that felt like. There I was in my hotel room thinking I'd discovered something wonderful, yet not knowing how I did it. I have to say, I wondered if I needed to be on major psychotropic drugs at that point. I'm a person who needs logic, things need to make sense in my life, and this made no sense at all. I mean, the message made sense, but the voice and my figuring out the code to the crop circles...well, it was just impossible! Yet, there it was. After a few days of looking over other photos of the circles from various places around the world, I realized that I was getting better at it, that I could understand almost all of them. And the whole time that was going on, the voice was becoming clearer, more understandable. Finally, it dawned on me that the voice must be providing the translating key, the information I needed to de-code the crop circle pictograms. I still don't feel I understand all of this, but I also feel strongly that it is happening, that it's real, and that I need to learn more, to know what to do with the information I'm getting."
The shaman asked, "This voice, do you know who or what it is?"
"I was hoping you could tell me. I have an idea," Margaret replied.
Irene waited and nodded encouragement for her to go on.
Margaret hesitated, and then blurted out, "I think it's the voice of the planet, of the Earth. I don't know if you've read any of Lockley's books, but if I had to put a name to it, I'd say it was the voice of Gaia, the planetary consciousness--the mind of the Earth."
"Ahhh," sighed Irene, a large smile creasing the deeply tanned skin of her face.
Los Angeles suburb, California
Clutching the gold cross removed from around her mother's neck, Maria gazed unblinking out the windshield of the van. Her eyes were dry now. Jaw clenched so tight pains shot up the side of her face. Maria repeated the words to herself spoken to her dead parents less than an hour before. "I'll make you proud of me. I'll do a good job."
Turning abruptly to face Zack, she asked, "Where's the cat?"
"What? What cat?" Zack asked.
"Cleo. She was Mama's cat. Where is she?"
"Uh, Maria, she's probably dead somewhere in the house," Zack said gently. "I'm sorry."
"No, you don't understand. Cleo always, always, slept on top of Mama's feet. She's a big tabby cat, and it was a running joke how Mama had such cold feet even in the warm weather here and how Cleo took care of her. That cat never slept anywhere at night but on Mama's feet. You and I both saw the bed." Maria's eyes glazed over for a moment, the scene of her parents' death forever fixed in memory. She shook herself. "Anyway, I didn't see a cat anywhere in that bedroom, did you?"
"No, no, I didn't," Zack said thoughtfully.
Maria's brow furrowed in thought. "I just don't get it. Cleo would never have left Mama's side. She was always around during the other earthquakes they've had out here. When we get time, I want to go back there and call for her around the neighborhood. Maybe she made it."
"We still have some time now and we're not that far away," Zack said. "If you want to go back--"
"No. Hand me the phone. I have a job to do. I'm calling New York. We're going live in half an hour from wherever the van is then located. If Cleo's still alive, she'll fend for hersel
f until I can come back. She's very independent."
Cleo's not the only one, Zack thought as he handed her the phone, swerving through the maze of downed trees and utility poles.
Chapter 2
Cape Fair, Missouri
White lace curtains fluttered in the cool evening breeze as Mrs. Philpott sat down to dinner in the sunroom. She called it the sunroom because it had eight windows that let in brilliant sunshine every morning to nourish the jungle of plants lining the walls. The room was mainly used as a dining room. Mrs. Philpott loved the feel of the old oak table under her fingertips. Tonight the bare wood expanse was unadorned by tablecloth and held Mrs. Philpott's china dinner plate, cloth napkin, and a silver fork. The china had been her mother's and had tiny blue flowers etched on the rim that were covered up now by a slab of lasagna, salad and garlic bread. Mrs. Philpott made terrific lasagna. However, she wasn't concentrating on the taste of her dinner.
As she watched the gathering shadows outside the windows, she thought about her dreams. Lately, her dreams seemed more vivid than at any time in her life. They also seemed connected. Every night for the past month, Mrs. Philpott felt she had been seeing a story unfold in her dreams. Except for one night a week ago, when she had dreamed about an earthquake in California. She hadn't thought much about the dream until two days later when the morning news was interrupted with the story of the "big one" hitting California. An earthquake of 9.8 magnitude at least, the geologists were now saying, but essentially an earthquake of immeasurable force.
Mrs. Philpott had always been a practical woman, not given to flights of fancy. She read constantly; usually she had three books going at once. As a scientist, she believed there were things that could not be explained in this world, but generally felt that was only because we had not learned enough to figure them out. She was brought up as a Methodist, but decided around age forty that most religion was based on myth and legend. The supernatural might be fun to read about in a Stephen King novel, but it never entered into her daily reality.
She put down her fork, straightened her shoulders, and took a deep breath. "All right, Virginia," she said to herself, "go ahead and say it out loud. You are having an inexplicable experience. It wasn't a coincidence you dreamed about the earthquake. It was a dream of precognition. Something fantastic is happening in your dreams. The dreams of the past month are a story--and not one you made up. I think...I think someone or something is communicating to me through my dreams, crazy as that sounds."
Sonoran Desert, Arizona
At first she did not believe the shaman when she talked about shape-shifting. To become a wolf, bear, or eagle was not possible, thought Margaret. But from what the shaman said, it sounded like she'd be in the mind of the animal. A mind-meld type of thing, where she would be able to see what the animal saw, know things from its perspective. The whole idea scared her. What would it be like to lose the sense of her body entirely? She remembered dissociating to cope with the abuse in childhood, remembered how it felt to be less and less there. It had taken a lot of work to not feel that mind and body were separate. Would this bring up the old responses? Was it a form of dissociating? Could her mind get stuck in the animal's mind? That shaman had better have some good answers.
Cape Fair, Missouri
I can't believe it took her two weeks to figure out what was going on. She's not a stupid woman, but she is human. Sometimes it's difficult to depend on their obviously weak powers of observation. Thank goodness the California earthquake made the news, or else she might never have put it together with her dream that predicted the quake. I wonder how she will interpret all this. Mrs. Philpott is a fairly pragmatic woman, and I am sure she is not going to be happy about the planet talking to her in her dreams.
It wasn't such a shock to me since I've heard that voice my whole life. Well, maybe not so directly and loudly as recently (a planet with attitude can be pretty loud), but it was familiar to me. Still, she should be able to understand what is happening. She's read the same books I have--actually they were her books--that discussed the problem: human culture.
I never read any books until I moved in with Mrs. Philpott. My life was a miserable, yet sadly normal, experience. In my first year of life, my previous owner, Carolyn, decided she wanted a calm cat, one that wouldn't scratch her or her furniture. Without any consideration of my feelings in the matter, she had my front paws de-clawed one day. Carolyn wanted a designer cat, designed to her specifications, to fit in with her designer life. She saw me as a live exhibit in her cult-of-decoration lifestyle. When I refused to conform to her rules of captivity, running off into the woods behind her house every chance I got, climbing trees she thought were impossible for me to climb without claws, and generally not meeting her every whim as the perfectly precious Siamese that fit in so well with her oriental-theme living room furniture, she refused to feed me.
I subsisted on lovely little sparrows and rodent kills until she forgot why she was angry at me. The final straw that led to the turning point in my life came when I arrived at the front door wounded from the previous night's fight with a stray determined to take over my territory. Picking me up, unaware of the various puncture wounds and scratches covering my body, Carolyn proceeded to fly into a rage when drops of my blood soaked into her white linen suit. Muttering about how she should have had me "fixed," she drove me directly to an animal shelter to be "put to sleep."
Mrs. Philpott happened to be in the shelter that day looking for a cat. Her fifteen-year-old feline had died a month before, and she was ready to share her life with a cat again. Rescuing me from the clutches of the overly-perfumed, overly-coifed Carolyn, Mrs. Philpott took me directly to her veterinarian, and then to her home in Cape Fair. The past four years spent here have been idyllic for me, and I think I have filled a void in Mrs. Philpott's life as well.
Tonight, however, will be another turning point. I wonder if she will see what the dreams are telling her. I've been aware my entire life that humans were the biggest problem the planet faces. They've wanted to run the world, or better yet, the entire universe. What silly, dangerous creatures they are! A culture that produces the Carolyns of the world is not a healthy one. Humans have played out their fantasy of domination, believing they were royalty, the end product of evolution, determined to control anything that is nonhuman. In the process they have exterminated species, fouled the air and water, and molded the very earth to fit their designer specifications. What humans never seem to realize is that the planet herself might eventually have something to say about her destruction.
When I first began to perceive Gaia's plan, I have to confess I was in awe of its scope and depth. As any cat knows, training humans can be a frustrating and exhausting business. To hear of a plan to not just train, but drastically alter the behavior of millions of humans was overwhelming. It wasn't until I realized to what lengths Gaia was willing to go that I believed it could work. The loss of human life will probably be massive, but then the loss of nonhuman life has already reached astronomical proportions. And it must be done.
I've wondered if some will see Gaia's actions as murderous. Is it possible that Gaia is responding in a human way? Has she been infected by the human culture story and is now going to take over the role of conqueror? Living in close proximity to humans affects us. Plant, animal, or planet, we have been changed to some extent by human culture. I see Gaia's response to humans as natural. It is a survival response. Human behavior must change or the planet will die. It is that simple. The only question is, how long will it take, how many humans will die, before they understand and change their ways?
Will Mrs. Philpott understand that human life has become unnatural, that the need to re-make the world in an unnatural format has put the freedom of all life at risk? As I look at her writing furiously on yellow legal pads, I imagine that she will. The changes in our relationship could be drastic. Even though she has always treated me well, she has never truly seen me as an equal. How will she react when she discovers t
hat I do, in fact, have a language--and that I can read and understand her language? When the coming disasters cause interruptions in food supply, will she learn how to hunt with me?
Well, I think I've spent enough time ruminating here in my favorite chintz-covered chair. I wonder how long it will take me to get Mrs. Philpott into the computer room so I can really talk to her? I know she will be surprised to see me talking to her through the use of her keyboard, but after all, humans really should have expected this development. What cat could stay away from a machine with a mouse attached?
On a plane over the Atlantic Ocean
"Have you noticed anything strange in the past few days, Alex?" Nathan asked tentatively.
"What do you mean, strange? I've been running from one mode of transportation to another, not sleeping, eating junk food, just about everything looks strange to me right now," Alex responded testily.
"Well, like the weather seems screwed up. I keep thinking about what the old woman said. I think she was serious that something bad is going to happen. She said the earthquake was 'the beginning'--remember?"
"The beginning of what?" Alex said, begrudgingly curious.
"If I knew that I'd feel a lot better right about now," Nathan said grimly. "Look at these newspapers I picked up in the airport. It's one disaster after another! I'm telling you something is going on--something weird. And that old woman knew about it."
"Nathan, you're seeing mysticism and psychic phenomena where there is none. There is always something awful happening somewhere in the world. A flood, a tornado, a hurricane, a typhoon, an earthquake, something. It's not weird, it's just nature," said Alex, leaning back in her seat and closing her eyes, ending the conversation.
"Yeah, nature." Nathan frowned, talking to himself.
Cape Fair, Missouri
Listening to one of her favorite symphonies, "The Planets" by Holst, Jessica wondered how and when the earth had become such a dangerous place to live. "We've done it to ourselves," Jessica thought. "We let our technology get ahead of our morality and ethics, using our planet as a plaything and testing ground, all under the seeming assumption that if we screwed it up we could always find another planet to live on."