“Look at this gate! There wasn’t even a gate before. I don’t think there was one. It’s the same gate we saw at the land of the giants. Such an intricate design."
The burnished metal gleamed in the sunlight. Light and shadow played across its patterns in bas-relief as the gate slowly swung open as they approached.
“How did that happen? A motion sensor I guess.”
“It’s inviting us,” said Margaret. She walked slowly ahead and entered the garden ahead of Joseph who now seemed frozen at the entrance.
“The flowers look normal at least. This garden has had some careful attention though.”
The garden had been carefully pruned, weeded, shaped and landscaped as if by a professional gardener. Groups of flowing plants had been carefully selected to complement each other. There was no evidence of any wilting or decay at all.
“The markers are all brand new. No darkening, no mold. The letters are all clear and legible.”
There was no sign of any person until they arrived at the monument to the “girl with the star tattoos”.
“This is my favorite spot.” The girl who was standing in front of the marker had turned to speak to Joseph and Margaret who, startled, could do no more than fumble a greeting.
“Pleased to meet you,” Margaret said. “Do you…come here often?”
“Oh no. This is my first time. But I have star tattoos too.”
The young woman’s bare arms and legs were covered with five-pointed stars of various sizes and orientations. Some overlapped into various patterns.
“And so you do. No wonder you…identify.”
“It says she was more important than anybody knew. I like that. Maybe she had a secret identity. A superhero.”
“According to a book she saved humanity by believing a story. I don’t know if that made her a superhero or not. May I ask you some questions you might think are a little strange?”
“Then my answers may be strange too,” she giggled. “But go ahead.”
“Where do you say we are? And when?”
“You don’t know? This is the Henson garden, of course. I’ve come a long way to be here. I’ve only heard of this place. Some of my friends told me that it’s a special place that can lead to a special kind of awareness.”
“An awareness of what?”
“The Universe! Don’t you feel it? Some things have taken place here. Mysterious things. There used to be rituals. This place had been abandoned for decades and then…well, supposedly it rebuilt itself. That’s what they say at least.”
“Did you come here by yourself?”
“Yes. I like to travel alone. Oh, I know it’s supposed to be risky, but then so are French fries!” The girl laughed and turned away leaving Margaret and Joseph dumbfounded and confused.
∆∆∆
Joseph and Margaret walked slowly back to the new house. Joseph noted that the only vehicle of any sort was his own PSV, securely locked up in a parking area.
The front door to the house was not locked, however. They walked into the foyer cautiously calling out for anyone, or any thing at any time.
No being greeted them. They were once again alone in a timeless home.
“We are not going to stay here this time,” Margaret said.
“No, I don’t intend to. We’ve got a fully functioning PSV, and we’ll go somewhere. First of all I’ll try my home base. Maybe then we’ll know if this is the present or…”
“Or a past. Or a future. Are we in our dimension? Are we…ourselves?”
“The house is familiar enough though. It’s just as it was when the Hensons’ lived here. When we stayed here.”
“I don’t want to steal, but I want one…artifact. Just one. I need it to convince myself that we were in a real place.” Margaret took a pen from a coffee table. “Surely no one will miss this too much.”
Outside an autocar had pulled up. The girl with the star tattoos approached it while conversing with someone using a star tattooed on the back of her right hand. She looked up when she saw Joseph and Margaret.
“Oh! You have a PSV! Oh, those are amazing! I’m so envious. I want one of those one day. What kind is it? Do you like it?”
“I love it,” said Joseph. “It’s an A-G-Eye-Super. It uses X-fuelon High. I make frequent trips to the moon. One time I took it to Mars.”
“Mars...Mars. I want to go there so bad. I’m saving credits, although I spent a few getting here.”
“I am Margaret, and this is Joseph. We don’t know your name.”
“I’m Janine. From Argo City.”
I’m from the coast too,” Joseph replied. “My flight base is in PTown though. I spend much of my time there. I’m really just a hobbyist these days.”
“Must be nice. I’m a robo-controller. What a headache. Those things are always breaking, and the clients hate me because of it. What about you, Margaret?”
“I’m an archeologist. I am employed through the Cartwright Institute in Dursley.”
“I thought I recognized your accent.”
“I thought I’ve lost most of it. We are all so standard these days. Only the oldsters are very evident about it.”
“Well, I’ve got to go. The autocar is racking up credits.”
“It was nice meeting you.”
“You too. Bye!”
The autocar sped away.
“She didn’t say where she’s going.”
“Does it matter?”
“Does anything matter?”
“This garden seems to matter to someone, or some thing.”
Margaret looked exasperated.
“I need to reach Cartwright. If I even have a job there anymore. I’ve got to contact them some way.”
Margaret tried but no one answered any of the transmission codes. “This can’t be. A lot of people work there. I know the hour is late, but I can only reach collective mail. Someone should be answering.”
“I suppose I need to take you there, Margaret. There’s nothing for me here. And there’s never anything back home in Argane. I’ll top off the PSV.”
“Oh my. I’ll be luggage across the water.”
“Can’t be as bad as luggage from the moon…or wherever we’ve been.”
“True. I guess I can stand it again, for a little while.”
CHAPTER FORTY
Personal Time
Margaret squeezed into the cargo hold, and Joseph launched the PSV above the Henson house and garden. He headed east, and soon, far below them, ocean waters churned. For a short time wave crests could still be seen, but suddenly the sky sparked and burst into shiny yellow, gold, and green. Iridescent streaks spread, surrounded the PSV, and gathered them into itself. Without pause, Joseph and his companion found themselves tossed into a Space made supremely personal, known only to them.
Margaret gasped at the lights and colors that now streamed brightly into her usually dark compartment.
Once again, Joseph no longer controlled the PSV. He watched as the changing colors held them in shocked fascination. Both riders had become passive and silent. The little ship had become silent. Silence, like the bubble in which they rode, enveloped their fragile lives and swept them far away. They no longer even asked to where.
∆∆∆
Motion ceased. Joseph and Margaret, still locked in the PSV, saw that the colors had coalesced around them into an apparently solid envelop of a uniformly yellow-green hue. It looked to them as if they were inside a glass bubble, but they could not determine if it was a very large bubble with walls at some distance from them, or a smaller bubble with walls very near.
Joseph pushed on some virtual buttons on one of his screens.
“I’m not detecting anything outside. No evidence of an atmosphere. No evidence of a vacuum either. These reading don’t make sense. No atmosphere, but the pressure matches the PSV…exactly. There’s no temperature since there’s no atmosphere to measure. And I can’t get a reading on the wall of this bubble. It absorbs everything. I can’t even measure the distan
ce to it. How can there be a pressure if there’s nothing there? That should mean a vacuum.”
“Are we trapped here? We can’t move at all?” Margaret noted that at least no inertial or gravitational forces were compacting her uncomfortably in her tight quarters. She was grateful for that at least.
“I have no control over the PSV. The thrusters don’t work. The main engine stopped when the bubble stopped.”
“What do we do now?”
“I could vent a little of our air. Holy…it doesn’t vent because there’s no pressure differential. Put on a helmet. I’ll switch on the O2. I’m going to crack the hatch a little.”
The hatch opened, almost imperceptibly. There was no intuitively expected whoosh.
“There is nothing outside, but we’re not losing our air inside.”
He opened the hatch further, further. Then fully and reached outside.
“There has to be something.”
He cautiously stuck his head outside. Nothing unusual. He unlocked his helmet. He could still breath. He removed his helmet.
“I can breathe.”
Margaret saw Joseph’s lips moving, but she couldn’t hear him. Not until he brought his head back into the cabin.
“I can hear you now. I couldn’t hear you before.”
Joseph repeated the experiment several times.
“Okay, okay. Sound inside. Silence outside. I couldn’t hear me either, except through my own head. There’s no sound because there’s no air outside. But I could still breath…something.”
By now Joseph was playing with communications. Of course, he could connect with nothing.
“We’re weightless. So I can stretch, just a little.”
Margaret floated forward, closer to Joseph who had released his straps to reach outside and now hovered slightly above his seat.
“Can we throw something at the wall?”
Margaret handed Joseph her pen from the Henson house.
“I guess I don’t get to keep this artifact after all.”
Joseph threw the pen outside. Once in motion always in motion. And there was nothing to stop it.
“It just keeps moving toward the wall.”
They watched as the pen floated toward the wall until it was completely out of sight.
“Apparently this bubble is a big one,” said Margaret.
“A really, really big one.” Joseph instinctively belted himself back into his seat. Margaret withdrew into her cubbyhole. They were silent again.
∆∆∆
Eventually, Joseph and Margaret took turns floating outside while tethered to their tiny spacecraft home. It was a way to stretch and move about without fear of floating into nothingness, especially since all the provisions needed to maintain their lives were stored in the PSV. This meant that their remaining water and food was in short supply.
“I don’t understand why the temperature outside matches the PSV when there is no air. This is beyond strange.”
“Is that any stranger than being able to breath when there is no air?” Margaret asked. “Ever since the beginning, we keep finding ourselves in situations that can’t be explained by physics as we know it. Our consciousness, it seems, has been called upon to exist outside the worlds we know. I just don’t understand why this is happening to us. And who or what is causing it to happen.”
“What if there is no cause?” asked Joseph.
“How can it not have a cause?”
“I don’t know. Years ago nobody would think a PSV had a cause. What could cause a PSV to fly? Subatoms hadn’t been invented yet.”
Margaret laughed. “Subatoms have existed since the Big Bang. Just because people didn’t know about them….”
“Maybe we’re before the Big Bang.”
“Nothing is before the Big Bang. Well, nothing we can know.”
“Maybe we’re before what we can know. Or after.”
“Or in-between. The Henson people, the cult, Cult Don, they used to say as part of their ritual that there is no meaning to where we are. It seems we may have found ourselves there in a literal sense. We are nowhere meaningful.”
“If we run out of provisions, it’ll have meaning to us. We’ll die.”
“And then what?”
“Hey, we don’t need to breath outside of here. Maybe we don’t need to eat or drink out there either.”
“You think we should just cast ourselves outside and see what happens?”
“If the only other choice is to starve in here.”
“That is a leap of faith I’m not sure I’m prepared for. Not yet. Not at this time. Time. It’s always about time, isn’t it? Personal space, personal time….”
∆∆∆
“We don’t have to breathe.” Margaret had inserted her un-helmeted head back into the air of the PSV so that Joseph could hear her.
“What do you mean? We don’t have to breathe?” Joseph was lethargic but suddenly perplexed.
“Out here. I can stop breathing, and I don’t feel any hunger for air. None at all.”
Joseph stuck his head outside while holding onto his seat. Sure enough, he could stop breathing, and it meant nothing. He had no desire to breath, but he could make no sound in this breathless world.
“Did you feel any hunger or thirst, there, outside?”
“No, I was eminently comfortable. No hunger for anything at all, not for air, not for food or water.”
“So we can live outside with no needs. We just can’t communicate.”
“Oh, I wish we knew sign language. I learned only a little.”
“If we live outside, most of the time, we can come inside to speak to each other.”
“Eventually our air inside will become toxic. We’d have to inhale toxic air in order to speak.”
“Oh, Joseph, these are impossible choices. This time. Will we float in an endless world? Would we grow old and die in silence? With nothing to do and no way to even communicate, as if we’d have anything to say. This would be a very cruel solitary confinement without confinement and only solitary in effect.”
“Maybe we’re already dead. A very peculiar hell this is.”
“If we’re dead, we can’t even die."
∆∆∆
The time had come. The air inside the PSV had become so laced with CO2 and so devoid of oxygen that it had become intolerable, even for momentary breathing.
Joseph and Margaret held each other as they with finality unfastened themselves from their no longer functioning lifeboat. This time the tethers only fastened them to each other.
It was important to stay together. They were developing a kind of personal language based on having their heads together as they mouthed words. They were mouthing without breaths as there was no air.
They floated together in this world that was silent except for their own imaginings. They slept and woke without schedule as the uniform, yellow-green light and the comfortable temperature never changed. And so they went on interminably with only Joseph’s wrist chronometer to tell them of the passing of time in a world where they no longer lived.
They had watched the personal space vehicle recede into the distance as they drifted slowly away. In time they were not quite sure if it could be seen or not. And then it was lost.
At long last, this personal world added a visitor. It looked like Jim Drake.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Bursting Bubbles
“What are ya’ll doing? Just hangin’ out here?”
“What the heck? I hear you. I haven’t heard anything in…a long time. Oh wow! I heard myself too.”
“And I heard you, Joseph. I can’t believe it. Where did the sound come from?”
“Why are you so surprised? I’m here. So why shouldn’t sound be here too?”
Joseph went from astounded to annoyed. “Where the hell is here? Do you know what we’ve been through? Is this some thing’s experiment with us…again?”
“I can’t explain that, Joseph. The best I can do is to get you out of here.�
�� Drake snapped his fingers like a cheap magician, and an AG!Super suddenly appeared, its engines idling with a very reassuring humming sound.
The PSV drifted toward its stranded passengers who cautiously crawled inside.
They were breathing again.
They helped themselves to water and food bars. Jim Drake, in his moonsuit without helmet, stuck his head in through the still open hatch.
“Where are we? Where do we go from here?”
“How do we get out of this bubble?”
“All you have to do is fly. In any direction. Any will take you where you want to go.”
“Where do we want to go? I don’t know anymore.”
“I need to get to Cartwright. That’s where we started to go a long time ago.”
“Not really so long,” said Drake.
“What do you mean ‘not so long’?”
“You’ve been here in your PSV for a short time.”
“I don’t understand,” said Margaret.
“Okay, well, yeah, to you it was a long time and you were floating around out here. No sound, no air, but you didn’t need to breathe. You were inside the PSV all along. With sound, and air, and food. Because only a short time has passed according to your usual existence.”
“What the hell! What are you telling us? Why are we here, being miserable without any means to escape? Who is doing this to us?”
“It’s a bit like life, isn’t it? ‘Being miserable without any means to escape'?”
“You are toying with us.”
“I wouldn’t say that you’re a toy. But you are being observed.”
“So this is a big goldfish bowl. Why us? And who is observing us?”
Drake conveniently, for him, disappeared, and so did the bubble. Joseph and Margaret were in an automatic descent to the lunar surface.
“So much for my return to Cartwright,” Margaret said.
“This beats all,” said Joseph, as the PSV descended below the lunar surface.
∆∆∆
The surroundings were beautiful. Margaret and Joseph, still inside the PSV, were surrounded by stalactites, stalagmites, columns, and other formations, all smooth and glistening, gleaming colors, iridescent, and changing.
Personal Space- Return to the Garden Page 12