Personal Space- Return to the Garden

by William David Hannah

  Margaret felt herself lift into the sky. The town of Grover receded rapidly beneath her.

  She was surprised that she did not feel more surprised. She had learned to expect the unexpected and to let go of what seemed real. Reality had become indistinguishable from a dream. Her dreams had gone beyond that.

  “My name is StarTat. It’s not my real name, but I like it.” The figure floating nearby, clad only in stars, spoke with a voice like music, each syllable a note of varying timbres.

  “Where am I? Is this a quantum gate?”

  “This is home. I’m glad you’ve come to visit. You are welcome here.”

  StarTat was accompanied by a group of revelers, all dancing around a large, red sphere. The sphere was covered with tongues and filaments that writhed and danced toward the revelers, almost touching them but not quite.

  “We are of the garden, dear Margaret. The one you came to build once again. The garden is our home, just as is the sky. We’ve been here a long while, just as you have. It is your home too.”

  “It is perfect,” said one of the revelers. With his hands he played with a smaller sphere that was blue and white.

  “You have traversed reaches, dear Margaret. Dimensions are not limiting.”

  “We have seen some…vast dimensions…large and small. But we have not understood.”

  “Your understanding is not required. Only your belief,” said The Reveler.

  “I am a scientist,” said Margaret. “I believe evidence.”

  “And if you are beyond evidence, what do you believe?”

  “I believe what I can see. But that seems to be evidence known only to myself.”

  “It is not all there is. Your belief must accept what you cannot see. But your beliefs should not replace.”

  “Should not replace what?”

  “The More. Look around you. And there is… More.”

  “I am confused. I should not be able to be here like this.”

  “Not you. But the part of you in the More. Of it you are part. And within it you are home. It is perfect. There is no meaning to where you have been.”

  “Save to bring you here,” said StarTat. “I am your guide.”

  “Are you…extraterrestrials?” Margaret asked meekly.

  Everyone laughed.

  ∆∆∆

  “I can’t believe I said that.” Margaret addressed Joseph who was awake and up but stumbling around in his underwear.

  “Said what?” Joseph replied.

  “In the dream? Or whatever it was. Did you see it too?”

  “I saw something. I don’t know if it was a dream or not.”

  “I asked them if they were extraterrestrials. What a stupid question! They all laughed at me. They thought I was stupid.”

  “I don’t think whatever they thought was very important. Whoever they are.”

  “What did you see, Joseph? We often…”

  “See the same. Or near it. I was in…the sky…space…somewhere. StarTat was there. I can’t figure out what she was wearing, if anything.”

  “She wore stars.”

  “How could she wear stars? Was it a costume, shiny tattoos? I couldn’t tell. The stars kept changing. Five, six points, bursts, points of light, very…sparkly.”

  “She is our guide, she said.”

  “Guide to where? We’re already here. The others were having a good time in their…garden?”

  “The star, the planet, like earth. But the star was red.”

  “All this believing stuff. And I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know what out of all this is real.”

  “Maybe it’s all real.”

  “I’m sleepy. And hungry. And that’s real.”

  “Yes, we need food.”

  ∆∆∆

  A tiny restaurant had three other customers for breakfast.

  “First of all coffee, and toast.”

  “Where ya’ll from?”

  “I’m from the coast. Margaret is from…where are you from?”

  “The former British Isles. I work at the Cartwright Institute.”

  “I was sure you’re not from here. What are you doing here anyway? We don’t get many outsiders. Not anymore.”

  “When did you stop getting…outsiders?”

  The waitress was pouring coffee. “It’s been a long time now. People used to come from miles around to see that silly garden. Nobody there but them hippies now.”

  “So we have heard. We are interested in the history of the Henson property.”

  “History? You need to talk to old man Drake. He knows all about that place.”

  “Drake?” Margaret and Joseph said in unison.

  “We know of a Drake. Used to be an Air Force guy.” Joseph wondered if he was being cautious enough.

  “Oh, that’s him. Used to be a Colonel. Lives down a dirt road from that old Henson house. Used to be gravel. Now it’s just mud.”

  “How do we get there?”

  “Turn left right before you get to that Henson house. You can barely see the road, but it’s there.”

  “Check please.”

  “You don’t want no breakfast?”

  ∆∆∆

  The autocar protested. “This is not a propa road,” a female voice announced with a faintly exotic accent.

  “Proceed,” said Joseph. Margaret looked nervously at the ruts and vegetation.

  “How can this be Drake’s place?” Margaret was incredulous. “It looks like the place described in Henson’s book. It should be scraps by now. I mean there’s almost nothing left of the Henson house.”

  “None of this is right. How do they know about Drake? We don’t even know if he’s real or not, him standing on the moon without a space suit in that Air Force get up.”

  “The town itself isn’t right, Joseph. Those people acted like contemporaries of the Hensons. The accents and vocabulary. And even for an old dilapidated town, it was too…new. Old but new old. The anachronisms were bizarre.”

  “Okay, let’s see what we find here.”

  Joseph knocked on the cabin door. It swung open without further effort.

  “Wow! It’s nicer in here than on the outside. It’s so neat, so…clean.”

  “And organized. It doesn’t look lived-in at all.”

  “There’s food on the shelves. Drake! Drake! Anybody!” Joseph was shouting.

  After finding the cabin empty, they proceeded down steps into a basement. Its concrete walls did not seem fitting for the rough logs above.

  Another door was ajar and they stepped into a room with walls of acoustic panels.

  “Look at this! All these electronics! But old.”

  “They are late twentieth century. They should be old and dusty, but they’re not. Amazing. Some of them antedate solid state electronics. They use vacuum tubes.”

  “Vacuum tubes?” Joseph reached for a knob, but Margaret grabbed his hand.

  “Don’t touch anything. Not until we know more.”

  “To know more we need to find Drake. If there is a Drake to be found.”

  “Oh, but there is. Welcome to my cabin.”

  “Drake! But…but you look like you’re made of…glass!”

  “All the better to see me with.”

  “We can see you all right. Your inner workings too. Couldn’t you at least wear clothes? I mean…your digestive parts are not pleasant.”

  “Very well.” Drake’s glassine form altered into a glass body wearing glass coveralls. The coveralls were green. His face was light green and vaguely translucent.

  “Follow me.” Drake gestured to Joseph and Margaret, and they all began a descent down a glowing glass staircase.

  “Hold on.”

  “You bet we’ll hold on,” Joseph said. “This is glass…and it’s slippery! If I’d known I’d be walking on glass today…. Ooops! Margaret are you all right?”

  “I’m fine Joseph. It’s a little tricky but I’m holding onto this glass bannister.”

  Glass Drake seemed to h
ave no problem at all. In fact, he seemed to flow down the steps as if his feet were liquid. There was a long glass tunnel at the bottom. Like the stairway, the walls glowed softly with a color that became momentarily the same green as Drake’s coveralls before returning to a paler cream.

  The tunnel gently curved in varying directions.

  “You are entering the living glass cave that once existed in a different place on Henson’s property.”

  “It's been living here ever since?” Margaret asked.

  “Only parts of it are living, as you would think of life. The rest of it is quite content remaining relics. Fossils, if you will.” Drake had now become human in appearance, a man in green coveralls. “Beyond here remains a singularity generator, for making the transportation singularities such as the one you witnessed, or of which you’ve read, Margaret. You’re going for a ride.”

  Margaret was perplexed. “Excuse me? The book said Henson couldn’t travel in such a way. Not safely….”

  “We’ve made improvements. I hope you enjoy the trip.”

  The glass walls became complex swirling layers of white and green. They mixed and separated until becoming a uniform yellow stream of growing brightness. Joseph and Margaret now traveled along this bright yellow stream, and through its substance they saw themselves erupt from a lunar rile and flow onward past stars and nebulae. After what seemed a short time, they found themselves in a cavern, in a canyon, or perhaps, it was a mine.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Clementine

  Margaret was dazed. She tried to reason, tried to bring logic to her thoughts that might explain what she had endured. She had slipped a bright yellow trail beyond anything she had known or had prepared herself to know. There had been no simulations, no amount of training, nothing that could have prepared her for these events, so alien in every sense of the word.

  Now she was living a song on another world. A song from the past, earth’s past, her past. She had studied twentieth century music, and she remembered. Somewhere in a memory’s deep recess had been a song about a cavern, or the mine in which she now crouched like a threatened animal. She wondered which of these variables had first existed, or if they existed at all.

  Her job had been to uncover and try to understand. But right now she wanted to return to a museum, to any or all the museums she had ever known. They were places where real objects had been kept, preserved, identified, cataloged, ordered, purposefully displayed, with meaning and with reason.

  Now she was Clementine, lost and maybe gone forever. Just like an ancient song.

  ∆∆∆

  “Mine. This is a mine.” Margaret’s soft voice sounded hollow.

  “What makes you think this is a mine?” It was all Joseph could think of to say. He had no words for anything else.

  “I don’t know. It reminded me of a song. An old twentieth-century folk song. I don’t even know why I thought of it. It’s quite obscure by now.”

  “It’s just a cave. I think. What would they mine here? Who’d be doing the mining?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Joseph. It was all I could think of. I thought I heard a melody. Vaguely, inside my head. Like when we heard the song about the yellow river in our headsets.”

  “I didn’t hear anything. I just saw colors and…yellow. And sensed movement. And then this planet appeared down below us. And now we’re in a cave. It was all so fast. Did we travel to another world?”

  “That is the impression I got.” Margaret was still gathering thoughts and trying to make sense of the song and the place and how they arrived.

  “Well, what is this? Here’s an artifact for you.” Joseph was holding a shiny polyhedron. It did not glow, but it slowly changed color in his hand. “How can we see in here anyway? What is the light source?”

  “This cave is evenly illuminated. It’s dim but we can see. I have no idea what you are holding. It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen.”

  Joseph returned the polyhedron to its previous position on a small rock shelf. Its base almost seemed to conform to the rock. “We need to find a way out of here. But I don’t know what direction to go. I don’t see any other passages though, so, I guess, to begin with, our chances are fifty-fifty.”

  They chose a direction arbitrarily and together started along the path. Even without saying they did not consider splitting up.

  The passage was unremarkable. It was rock, but it did have a strikingly even floor.

  “This walk is too easy, Joseph. It doesn’t seem quite natural. And there are more polyhedrons.”

  “I see them. Are they markers? Guides for the trail?”

  “They seem placed at random. And I can’t estimate a distance between them. They can be anywhere.”

  Suddenly the pathway ended. Before them was only more rock, this time darker than the rock before.

  “I guess it’s time to turn around.”

  “A time to every purpose….”

  “What, Margaret?”

  “Sorry. Just another old song.”

  ∆∆∆

  The other direction was much more interesting.

  “Look, the hallway is getting lighter. The path is getting smoother and wider.”

  “We should have come this way in the first place,” Joseph said with mild disgust.

  “And the polyhedrons are more plentiful and colorful…and more varied. Look at all the faces on this one!” Margaret had plucked it from its rock shelf. Its multi-hued faces were so plentiful that it was beginning to resemble a dimpled sphere. “And now, I think this one is glowing, just a little. It’s hard to tell since the tunnel itself is getting lighter.”

  And then there was light. Bright, almost blinding light entered the cave from an opening in the distance. Joseph and Margaret broke into a run as if afraid a door would close, or the tunnel would collapse.

  They found themselves in a narrow canyon surrounded on all sides by cliffs of great height. After their eyes adjusted to the brightness and the grandeur, they saw the open gate ahead.

  “The door is so intricate. What are all these shapes and patterns? Is this burnished metal?”

  “It looks like bronze, with a bas-relief pattern. The variety of textures in the metal are amazing.” Under more ordinary conditions, Margaret would have spent a great deal of time studying this door which clearly seemed a work of art.

  A pathway from the gate led into what might have been a garden, except that in this garden Margaret and Joseph were the ants.

  “Everything is huge! And it’s getting bigger, or we’re getting smaller.”

  “These plants, these flowers, are astonishing. How can this be?” Margaret looked at her feet as if to assure herself that she was still there, standing on solid soil, and not detached from her own body. A blossom two meters in diameter did not mesh with any of her memories of any sort of reality.

  “If this is a petunia, I wonder what a redwood looks like.”

  “It would tower above the cliff, I suppose.”

  “Speaking of towering, what is that?”

  Gigantic stems with blueish flowers loomed before a giant stone monument. Giant letters in English had been cut into the stone, but they were difficult to read.

  “They’re backward.”

  “Not just ordered backward but reversed, like a mirror-image. I can read them though. ‘The girl with the star tattoos’? StarTat? Like the character we’ve seen all covered with stars, or tattoos of stars?”

  “She was more important….” Joseph mouthed slowly but his voice trailed. “This is a monument from Henson’s garden. We saw this, but it was dilapidated. And many times smaller of course.”

  “We’re in a giant version of Henson’s garden, on another world. Is this how we’re supposed to rebuild the garden? I thought it would mean in our time and on earth.”

  “It’s built, or re-built, here, on a grand scale. Look over there. The unicorn.” The unicorn was some distance away, but it was titanic. “It must be fifty meters high.”
/>   “Well, there’s a park bench. But you’d need to be a rock climber to get to the seat.”

  “And underneath that fern…why…it’s my PSV!” Joseph was very happy to see it, even if it might be entirely useless in this environment. “Thank heavens at least it hasn’t been super-sized! And the fuel tank is full! Amazing! We can go!”

  “Go where?”

  “That’s a good question. But we can at least see where we are.”

  “Okay, back to the backseat. I’m your luggage once again.”

  “But the ride is free.” Joseph’s taciturn quip did not betray his immense excitement as his personal space vehicle rose above the giants of the canyon garden.

  Margaret, now collapsed into her familiar accommodation strained to see the sights outside.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Above, and Beyond

  “This just looks like somewhere in North America. I’m going to go higher. I want a look at this planet.”

  Margaret did not have much a view of the ground down below. Unfortunately for her she mostly just saw a blue sky with puffy clouds. It could be a sky on earth, but it was clearing and darkening as the personal space vehicle climbed above the atmosphere.

  “Look at this!” Joseph rolled the craft into a head down position. Margaret looked up at what lay below.

  “It looks like…North America. It can’t be. I see the Mississippi River. And there’s the Gulf of Mexico and the Florida Peninsula. Where in the world have we gone?”

  “I think we’ve gone to the world, Margaret. This is earth. We haven’t gone anywhere.”

  “This is an impossibility. All right, can you take us to someplace we know?”

  “Sure. I’ve set the heading to Henson’s farm. Grover here we come.”

  It didn’t take long to land in front of the Hensons’ formerly dilapidated house, which now looked pristine and new.

  ∆∆∆

  “Okay, okay. The house is new. What about the garden?” Joseph bounded along the path to the garden, and Margaret followed close behind.

  “Slow down! You weren’t in that cramped compartment in your PSV. It takes me a moment to recover.”