Land Of The Gods

by Abhishek .

  Before we walked away, a person walked through the large twin doors. I wanted it to be my father but it was someone else, someone younger. He was shrouded in shadows, though his springy gait seemed vaguely familiar.

  “I would like to meet my nephew. Ram Shanbhag?”

  Mrs Dawson stopped in her tracks. “Right now?”

  “Oh no, no. Later in the day, of course. I’ll call you to tell you the time. I thought that it’d be good to tell you beforehand since I was passing by the orphanage.” I could sense a smile but the accent seemed different... perhaps middle-eastern.

  Suddenly, everything was ripped apart and all I was left with was darkness. I floated in darkness, soaked the darkness and breathed the darkness. Yet, I seemed to be aware and in control of myself.

  Out of the inkiness, there emerged a large sphere that appeared to have a life of its own. As it rushed towards me, the darkness made it impossible to figure whether it was coming at me or I at it.

  As the sphere came closer, I remembered an illustration from one of my Advanced Math textbooks, about higher dimensions. This sphere looked most definitely like a four-dimensional sphere.

  The sphere decelerated, slowed as it came closer and then came to a full halt in front of me. It was as big as a small orange meteorite but it looked like a three-dimensional cross-section of a hypersphere—a four-dimensional sphere.

  The hypersphere appeared to have a sphere within itself. As the object rotated slowly, the inner sphere stretched into a tube, flattened out, pulled and distorted with a pattern that seemed random. I couldn’t make head or tail of it, obviously because I was meant to perceive only three dimensions, but here in my dream something amazing happened.

  As I seemed to be self-aware, many shapes started coming up in front of me. I realised that an entire universe appeared before my eyes. Many a complex shape appeared out of the darkness and the sphere itself contorted into something more intricate.

  Everything vibrated and moved like I wanted them to. It seemed as if I was in control of each object in this four- dimensional universe: the stars, the galaxies and time itself. I let out a puerile giggle, as I felt unique in the entire reality I lived in.

  However, the slight shortness of breath which generally accompanied such a wave of exhilaration was absent. I turned around and absorbed the four-dimensional universe. A line does not know where to look when you tell it to look sideways. A square does not know up or down but I, although in a three- dimensional body, knew where to look. I felt the energy of the universe and beheld the celestial bodies like they actually look and not their three-dimensional cross-sections. In this moment of enlightenment, my amulet glowed so bright that the brilliant blue light quite literally pulsated inside my body, such that my vision turned bluer and brighter. The light seemed to faintly glow through every orifice in my body, coursing through my blood and consciousness.

  And then something changed. Immediately, I felt something move me. No longer did I feel the control I had felt earlier. Something moved me again and harder than before. The universe rushed away from me and so did the beautiful higher dimensional objects. I was dragged away and moved helplessly out of the dream and into reality.

  Kapittel 45

  Mathias’s story

  Airborne somewhere over the Mediterranean

  March 15, 2017, Wednesday, 0550 hours EET

  I slowly opened my eyes to Mrs Dawson’s diary lying on my stomach. Before I could blink away my delirium, Vivek shook me wildly. “Mathias! Wake up! She’s coming this way!” He urged me and pulled me up. Vivek was wearing the same clothes that he had worn yesterday: a brown T-shirt which still looked like it needed to dry, a pair of jeans and a thin Swatch wristwatch which never seemed to leave his left wrist. His hair had matted over probably because of the dreadful capsule ride that took us to Hatay from Derinkuyu.

  I was hauled up by Vivek and through the windshield, I could see that we were flying just above the clouds. The early morning sun bathed the clouds in a numinous glow of yellow and orange. At times, they would thin out and the sea would be visible. During dawn, the ocean was still dark but the thin streaks of glimmering sunlight made some parts look like sheets of crinkled gold.

  I wanted to absorb the warmth and mull over the wonderful physics at play when the woman walked into the cockpit.

  “Go on. Talk to her. Tell her that we are friends and try explaining how she appeared through the womb of that machine,” Vivek tapped me on my back.

  “You’re the person who does the talking.”

  “Well, I would if she could speak English,” Vivek said, raising his hands and smiling a tight smile. He got up and walked to the control desk, evading the attention of the woman but keeping her on the edge of his eye.

  After the woman had appeared out of the teleporting device, I had scarcely got any time to pay any attention to her. The woman had fair skin with the slightest tint of bronze and hair like undulating wires of brass. Her eyes were bright blue and the morning light accentuated her delicate cheekbones. She rubbed her chiseled face and seemed to be almost as old as Vivek.

  The white robe, or rather tunic, that she had worn was embroidered with silver. It looked normal except for the fact that the off-white trousers and the tunic, both seemed to shift and adjust themselves around her body as she moved, much like Baldr’s attire.

  “Vhat hetr þú? Vhaðn kemo þí?” She asked me, “Who are you? Where am I?” From her speech, it sounded similar to Old Norse but I was sure it was Asurian. Remarkably, I was able to pick it up from my knowledge of Norse and Old Norse. I had learnt some new phrases whilst reading Noah’s diary as well. So the alien language was no longer as alien to me anymore. Being an Asurian intrinsically, my mind was hardwired to discern the language quite easily.

  Her brows were furled and before I could answer she continued haughtily in Asurian. “Is this a joke? Have you kidnapped me? You are going to be in trouble! Take me back to Valhalla right now...!”

  “Please-listen-me,” I replied in broken Asurian. “My-friend- teleported-accidentally. You-came-that’s-why.”

  Silence hung in the air for some time.

  “This friend of yours. Did he get teleported to another dimension?” She asked me.

  “I-mind. If-you-from-Asr-Gawa, I-guessing-he-been-hammered

  -to-your-dimension. Mass-energy-conservation.” I struggled to speak in Asurian but managed to convey my point. I remembered how Ram disappeared down the dark hole and instantly, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. There was absolutely no way of contacting him except being satisfied about the fact that he had safely travelled to the other side, to Asr-Gawa.

  I could see that the woman’s harshness mellowed ever so slightly. She shifted her weight from one foot to another. “I am from Asr-Gawa but if you are from another dimension, how do you know Asurian, even if it is broken? And what dimension is this?” She held her head in her hands. “My head aches. I am... confused. Everything happened so suddenly.”

  “This-dimension-is-you-call-Mandagaar,” I answered.

  “This is Mandagaar? But how do you speak Asurian?” The woman was on the verge of yelling in frustration.

  “Mathias. Alexandria is just around the horizon. We need to discuss the verse once again. Remember?” Vivek barged in.

  I turned back to the woman who seemed like she wanted to say something but I spoke before she could. “It-is-very-long- story. But-don’t-sweat. I-am-sure-we-will-understand-each- other-better-in-time.” I was about to walk over to Vivek when the woman grabbed my shoulder.

  “But I need to go back. Neither was I ready to come to Mandagaar nor should the teleportation be authorised. My colleagues will be dead worried about me. Take me back now!”

  “We-searching-for-teleporter. Patience-please.” I held her hand but she wrenched it free.

  “Well, I should have come here through one! There is a teleporter in this...” she gesticulated wildly with her hands, while staring at the sun-bathed clouds beneath
us “...flying craft of yours, isn’t there?”

  Her piercing blue eyes pried into my very flesh and I was wondering whether to tell her the truth or not. However, they reminded me of Ram’s green eyes. His eyes stood out as something different among his quintessential Indian features. They openly displayed his life, strength and light, the very things that had disappeared into the wormhole with him.

  “This-one-broke-when-you-came,” I replied.

  “How can it simply break? We can surely fix the teleporter.” She ran her fingers through her untied and kempt hair, distressfully. “We have to fix it,” she announced and started walking purposefully to the lower deck.

  “Um...,” I tried saying but my mind felt devoid of any Asurian word at that instant. I followed her brisk pace hesitantly. She was a stranger and I didn’t know how to deal with her.

  We had reached the lower deck when Vivek overtook me and grabbed the lady by her shoulders. He gestured her to go back to the cockpit but her face contorted in rage. She broke free from his grip and cursed him in Asurian. She turned and followed the signs to the room where the broken teleporter was lying.

  Vivek didn’t move for a short while. “She is definitely non compos mentis.”

  “Seems like it. But I don’t think she will bring any trouble. I am just worried about her reaction when she sees Noah’s carcass. Anyway, I think we should try landing this aircraft on the water. It should float easily since it has to honour the myth behind it,” I said. “We don’t want to reach Alexandria before both of us are clear about the verse. I’ll catch up with the lady and try to get to know her better. She can give us some invaluable information and be extremely helpful to find Ram...,” I felt my eyes well up at the thought of Ram.

  Vivek embraced me like an elder brother and I pressed my face against his shoulder. “Don’t worry, Mathias. Ram is a sharp boy and will survive. And we will find him eventually. You know what we are after everything we have been through? Skilled mountain climbers. When the most jagged and steep mountain looms over an expert mountaineer, do you think he squirms in fear? Skilled climbers are not afraid of any mountain because they know they can scale it. We are the climbers. We are going to find Ram wherever he is and bring him back,” said Vivek, wiping away a tear from my cheek. He smiled warmly.

  “I suppose I am just very tired of all this running. Although boring, I can now understand how peaceful it used to be in our orphanage in Hounslow.”

  “What’s done is done! Remember, being in the present but living in the past is the worst thing you can do. Do not whine about your life in the orphanage. Just think about the places you have had a chance to visit, the amazing things we have done together and the fun we have had.”

  “You are right, Vivek.” I rubbed my weariness from my eyes.

  “Come on. Now see to it that the crazy woman doesn’t do anything stupid.”

  We smiled at each other and with that, I ran down the narrow corridors and chambers towards the teleporter while Vivek went back to the cockpit.

  I had reached the shaft of bright sunshine when the entire ship gave a violent lurch. I staggered and nearly fell down. The slight shift in gravity indicated that Vivek had started a descent.

  I carefully climbed up to the oculus in the roof and beheld the shining crystal. When in the cavern in Hatay, we believed the crystal was meant to catch the sunrays coming only from the borehole. By rotating and moving the intricate metallic arms on the pedestal, the crystal was able to capture the shifting beams of sunlight even if the ship was in motion, as it was now.

  The smooth movement of the delicate arms and the soft clinking sound of the pedestal had me arrested for a few moments before I made my way down the musty corridor. As I approached the resting place of Noah and the broken teleporter, I noticed the woman with her back pressed against the wall. She was standing on the threshold and couldn’t avert her gaze from the carcass which she had overlooked in her initial disturbed frame of mind.

  “I-told-you. Teleporter-broken,” I told her when I reached her.

  “Who is this man?” She looked at me. “You haven’t killed him, have you?”

  “He-die-long-back. Really-old-age,” I smiled. “You-know- him?”

  She stared at the body for a long while. “I... don’t reckon.”

  “You-should-know-him. He-Odin’s-father.”

  The woman looked at me and her transparent eyes could not conceal her bewilderment. “You mean to say that he is Bor-nu?”

  “Yes. All-written-in-diary.” I jerked my chin at the fat tome lying beside the carcass of the ultimate saviour of mankind.

  “And you are certain about it?” She asked me again, incredulously.

  “Yes. You-check.”

  “Nobody in Asr-Gawa knows about the last resting place of Odin-nu’s father. We had vague ideas of the death bed being in Mandagaar,” she looked at me like a police would look at a suspect, “How did you come about this?”

  “Again-very-long-story. Followed-signatures-left-by-parents- and-old-Asurians-clues.”

  She didn’t seem satisfied due to the lack in clarity and intended to dig further if it had not been for the gravity that shifted. I could make out that Vivek had pulled up the ship for landing and kneeled on the floor, holding the doorsill firmly. The woman, whose name I had yet to know, followed me and we were suitably braced for a jarring impact in the next few seconds.

  My hand slipped the instant the ship smashed against the surface of the water and I fell down on the floor awkwardly. So did the woman but we managed to grab hold of the doorsill to avoid getting thrown around while the ark took to the air momentarily and came crashing down on the water once again, almost like a skipping stone. Our entrails churned inside of us due to the weightlessness and slowly, the ark rolled to a stop. Everything was calm once again. The two of us stood up carefully.

  “When-you-travel-through... hole. What-is-it-called?” I asked the woman.

  “What hole?”

  “Hole-through-you-travel-from-one-dimension-to-other.”

  “Oh, we call that a bindpath,” the woman replied in a matter-of-fact tone.

  “When-you-travel-through-bindpath, is-even-bumpier-than -this?” I asked her, tongue in cheek.

  The woman pressed a smile. “It’s not bumpy.” She turned serious again. “You feel like getting stretched and torn and joined back again... without the pain. It doesn’t actually happen. This distortion is just an illusion while we travel through four-dimensional space. My senior will know better,” she answered.

  “Four-dimensional-space?” I remembered my queer dream. “How?” I asked her.

  “You don’t know?” She threw a surprised look at me. “Oh, you are from Mandagaar, that’s why. You see, this universe we live in, there isn’t just one reality. What we observe is the three-dimensional cross-section of the entire universe with multiple dimensions or... multiple realities which are jam packed and embedded into a four-dimensional universe, excluding the temporal dimension of time, of course.”

  “So-you-no-appear-from-our-universe-or... err... reality?” I asked her.

  “No, no. There are different tunnels for that. Those are easier to open as the fabric of the same reality is bent, much like an insect eating through a fruit,” she explained.

  “We-call-them-wormholes!” I exclaimed, utterly awe-struck. Wormholes are theoretical tunnels which bend the fabric of space-time, much like bending a sheet of paper with two distant points and puncturing a hole through them to create a short- cut.

  “Oh, an apt name for sure,” she chuckled.

  “They-very-theoretical-gardening-for-us-though.”

  The woman stood still for a moment, a slight grimace visible, perhaps due to some wrong word that I had uttered. “Asr-Gawa is hundreds of years ahead of Mandagaar. That’s precisely why it’s held to be ‘heaven’ here in this reality! But when I look at my civilisation now, it seems to have been stuck in a point back in the past. Asr-Gawa has stagnated and I fear, its demise
might be near.”

  “Why do you say so?”

  “It’s difficult to explain, especially to an extra-dimensional entity. I can just tell you that the people aren’t happy with the stern rule of the council and we are running low on fuel. The division between the rich and the poor is increasing and there is no scientific advancement after a pandemic that struck us a few revolutions back. I have no data but whatever picture has been painted in your mind should be quite representative of our city in the present.”

  A small pause ensued. The soft metallic clinks of the crystal and the mechanical drone of the ship had consumed us for a while. A few weeks ago, I had been safe and sound in the comfort of my dormitory in Hounslow and a few hours ago, this lady had been home in Asr-Gawa. It is amazing how suddenly and violently, one’s life can be changed forever. At that moment, I wondered how important a person’s fate was. Both of us were pulled into a complicated adventure and the way things had been for the past few days, there was no way of knowing where our fate would drag us next.

  “I-am-Mathias. What-is-your-name?” I asked her when the air between us lightened up a little.

  She considered the question for a second before answering. “My name is Lifana.”

  Suddenly, I heard hurried footsteps and noticed Vivek running towards us down the length of the corridor.

  “Are you guys okay? Noah’s ark might have been extremely advanced but it has no seatbelts. For a moment, I thought I had you guys killed.” He grinned.

  Before I could answer, Lifana spoke up in stilted English. “We are satisfactory. You could have maneuvered better, nevertheless.”

  Vivek and I were left gaping at her.

  Kapittel 46

  Asr-Gawa

  Earlywhen

  March 15, 2017, Wednesday, 0605 hours Earth EET

  Dawn was yet to break. The city of Asr-Gawa slept a disturbed sleep. Every window was black and every street was submerged in darkness since no lights were switched on at this time of the day. Through the dome of the city, twinkling stars blanketed the sky and that was light enough. However, the sky looked strangely different from what one saw on familiar Earth. Ram shifted his vision from the small glowing-polymer light on the table beside the bed to the spinning points of light in the area his father told him was the Scientific Department for Research and development (SDRD). This reminded Ram of the swirling black sphere he had fallen into and it sent a shiver down his neck. He thought about Vivek and Mathias and wondered what happened to them after he had gone. He remembered Mathias’s face above him as he distorted unimaginably and disappeared from view. Ram had no idea about what he had travelled through and how he had reached Asr-Gawa. He was aware of the fact that the twisting tunnel was a portal and yet, the experience had felt no less than a nightmare, one which had brought him to a mystical land in another dimension. A world that Ram had envisioned to be advanced and perfect but he kept wondering about something that seemed amiss.