“This is a glass cave,” observed Margaret. “It’s like a cavern but with smooth, glass-like surfaces.”
“It’s glowing. There aren’t any light sources, the rocks, glass or whatever they are, are making the light.”
“This is not a natural formation. Certainly not for the moon.”
“And, unlike the bubble we were trapped in, here we have an atmosphere. Earthlike, comfortable temperature.” Joseph cracked open the hatch. There was no pressure differential. He opened the hatch fully.
“Wow! This is actually…nice.”
Joseph had almost jumped out of the PSV.
“It’s lunar gravity. Jumping is…easy.”
“Don’t get carried away.”
Margaret was now outside but holding onto a handhold on the PSV exterior. “The ground…floor…here is kind of slippery.”
The cavern was vast. They could see far into the reaches of the giant chamber, which was uniformly lit with hues of pale pink and light green.
“It looks like watermelon tourmaline,” said Margaret, as she admired the hues emanating from deep within the glassine structures and surfaces.
“Watermelon light!” proclaimed Joseph. “It’s…amazing.”
They walked on until they reached a pool of water. Its waters sparkled and flowed past them, seeming to come from a narrow fissure but with no visible means of escape despite the flowing highlights.
StarTat appeared. “You must go through the fissure. Don’t worry. You won’t get wet. It will take you to your personal space.”
Margaret and Joseph stepped gingerly into the sparking waters. It flowed over their heads and yet they could breath.
“This is most…unnatural,” said Margaret. Joseph tried to speak, but his voice was stuck in his throat.
They emerged, dry as promised, onto a broad beach of glistening sand. Waves pounded rocks with a sound like thunder. In places where pebbles and sea shells covered the sand, the lapping water made crackling noises.
“It sounds like…cereal and milk.” Joseph kicked at some pebbles and they rose high into the air in the light gravity.
The light changed. A cloud had uncovered a bright, full moon. A moon on the moon, Joseph thought.
And then they saw the ship.
“It looks like the ship we were on before. Now it’s beached here. But there’s a ramp into a door.”
“Will it have the same time asynchrony as the other one?” Margaret asked without expecting an answer.
“It is your ship. Your personal ship. You must enter.” StarTat was insistent.
Joseph and Margaret climbed the ramp into the great ship inhabited only by them. Not trusting the elevator, they climbed stairs and steps until they reached the main deck.
“We’re moving!” Joseph ran toward the bow. It was no longer buried in the shiny sand and stones.
“The ship is turning.” Indeed it was as the bow was now pointing into the moonlit water that shimmered like snow.
They walked the length of the main deck to the stern. The wake was phosphorescent, blueish-green flowing sparkles that danced as they were disturbed.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
A New Voyage
The cliff receded in the distance, the cliff with its fissure that StarTat had called their personal space. Now the space had widened into a moonlit sea and their vehicle had become a great cruise ship, modern and ancient at the same time. The ship churned onward toward a horizon, leaving its phosphorescent wake behind it.
Joseph’s and Margaret’s accommodations were now spacious, and more. They had an entire ship at their disposal. They found the most spacious suite to call home. It had multiple rooms, a private kitchen and dining area, even a game room with a pool table and pinball.
“There’s no viewscreen,” complained Joseph.
“What could you watch here?” Margaret asked. “Remember where we are.”
“Oh? Where are we? There’s no cave leading to a sea on the moon. A sea with a sky with its own full moon. There’s no such thing. So we can’t be anywhere.”
“We’re sailing under the stars.”
“Under stars?” They both realized what Margaret had said.
“This is impossible. Out of all the things we have seen, this is the most impossible.”
“Impossibility is an absolute. Nothing can be more impossible than another. It’s either impossible or not.”
“Well, it’s more unbelievable then. This is all out of control. There’s no action we can take to make things better.”
“Maybe there is no better. Are you missing your home? I know I’m not. Not yet anyway.”
Joseph sighed. “No. I only miss flying my PSV.”
“Perhaps we should go to the bridge then. There must be some controls there.”
“Even if there is what would we navigate to?”
∆∆∆
Joseph lay on the deck near the bow of the ship. He stared at the stars that seemed to roll with the waves. The moon, or whatever made the larger light in the sky, was already waning, as time, undifferentiated into day and night, evaporated into the unfamiliar cosmos.
Above was an eternal night sky. The same unfamiliar constellations never moved, only the apparent moon with its phases. A forlorn sun never greeted them. Twenty-four hours repeated on the clock, but they were twenty-four hours of night.
Still, life was not unpleasant despite its uniformity. The ship had enough food and water stores to last the two of them for years and much of it was delicious when thawed and prepared. The engines droned on and on without any need for operation, maintenance, repair, or fuel.
Joseph encountered games and videos on a recreation deck. The library was extensive, and Margaret availed herself of its resources to journal their adventures, research some history, and learn a new language to add to the four in which she was already fluent.
Joseph was learning some of the controls on the bridge, but although they reacted to his inputs, nothing seemed to affect the ship itself. It continued forward on its inexorable heading to nowhere, leaving waves and wake behind, and encountering waves and moonlight ahead.
The moonlight vanished and only the unflinching stars remained. There was no twinkle to their starkness in this unreal and quite possibly imagined sky.
And then the rocking stopped. The waves vanished. Joseph ran to the rear of the ship. Margaret was there already.
There was no wake. There was no water.
There was nothing to reflect the starlight. And there was no moon.
And slowly coming into view, gradually brightening in the darkness, as Joseph and Margaret peered out into what had been a vast dark ocean, was a continuation of the sky. It was below as above, the stark, unflinching lights of countless stars.
∆∆∆
“It’s space. All around us. We’re traveling in…space.” Margaret grasped a railing. Her knuckles were white in the starlight.
Joseph hurried back to the bridge. The navigation equipment was running, but it was meaningless. The screens meant nothing when they were in the sea, and they meant even less now.
Margaret had joined him as he tried some of the controls. Once again, they reacted but the ship did nothing. It seemed to continue as before except that the course was now a three dimensional one. Still, there were no controls for pitch or roll. It was a ship built only for direction and speed.
“I…I don’t know what to do. I can’t control anything. Even in space. But why do we have gravity? Why do we have air?”
“I’m glad we can still breathe.”
They both sat down in the bridge chairs and dimmed the lights to watch the unmoving, silent stars outside. Imperceptibly at first, but very, very gradually, the stars began to move.
“There! Are the stars moving? Why should they be moving now?”
“It’s very slight, but now I see it just a little. I don’t think it’s my imagination.”
“No. They’re moving a little faster now. We must be moving at a tremend
ous speed though to see the stars move.”
∆∆∆
The cruise ship sailed onward among the now streaking stars, carrying its two human travelers in their own personal bubble that allowed their lives to continue. Joseph and Margaret by now had accepted their condition. They eked out a routine that was not all that unusual within the not very limiting confines of a huge cruise ship.
The atmosphere within their unseen bubble was pleasant. The air was very slightly fragrant, slightly tropical, with warm breezes that played the decks and made them feel as if they were outdoors on earth. The gravity was light, a little heavier than the moon but less than earth. Movement was easy. Meals were delicious. Even entertainment was familiar and comfortable.
They could live like this for a long time with very little effort except for what they wanted to expend in a well-equipped gym. A variety of apparel was available to them in the shops although at times they found no need for it.
“I’m glad for this artificial sunroom. A little vitamin D doesn’t hurt, and I’m not sure of the effect of endless starlight.”
“It’s like life in a submarine, I suppose,” said Joseph. “Weeks of diminished light. The sunrooms at the moon and Mars bases are important. Otherwise, your circadian cycles get all messed up.”
“All my cycles are all messed up. Our lives have not been very natural in a long time.”
“No,” his voice trailed. “No, they haven’t.”
“I don’t understand. Who or why? How? We are supposed to rebuild the garden. How can we do that here? I wish someone would show up to answer some questions.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Shore
Most of the material in the library was available by viewscreen, although there were a few actual printed books. One of them, in hardcover, looked old. The cover was worn. The pages were discolored and in places torn.
I haven’t seen this one before. Margaret was suddenly quite curious. She turned quickly to a passage.
There were glaciers on the mountains. Giant white and blue masses of ice, eons forming, creeping ever so slowly toward the valleys they would never reach. The valleys were filled with flowers, wild and abandoned, twisting, reaching like tallest trees far above my head. Fairies twirled and skimmed. Fairies. Beings that proclaimed that life was fair in this perfect world, and fair was the life, all beautiful, all bountiful, none attacking any other.
Of course there were unicorns. How could there not be? It was perfect after all.
Margaret was amazed. “I know these words,” Margaret said aloud. Nearby, Joseph was fingering a keyboard and displaying a video showing new developments in personal space vehicles.
“Huh?”
“I was just talking to myself. This book. It’s old. This passage is from Henson’s book. Identical, I think, but there’s no attribution. It’s just included along with a lot of other stuff. I just happened to find it.”
“Oh, yeah…that’s an old one. What’s the name?”
Margaret returned to the title page. “Personal Space, it says. But there’s no author. Wait…what? This says, ‘You have to build the garden.’ Right here, like it’s speaking to us.”
“Let me see that. That’s weird. Well, we already knew we’re supposed to rebuild a garden, but how?”
“On this ship maybe?”
“How can we rebuild a garden on this ship? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“This book says the materials we need are…here."
“Okay. This is no more weird than anything else, I guess.”
“We need to find a unicorn.”
“I know where there’s a unicorn.”
Joseph led Margaret to the bridge. The stars were still streaming past them at a rate that was slowly increasing.
“I found this when I was trying to operate these controls.”
Joseph pushed several keys on the main console. The screen blinked and flickered, and then it appeared. It was stylized and baroque, but it was unmistakably an image of a white horse with a long, twisting horn protruding from its forehead.
“This has to mean something.” Joseph jabbed at the screen. The unicorn swirled and vanished followed by the image of multihued lights that writhed around a dark center.
“It’s a quantum gate,” Margaret said. “I recognize it from the Henson book.”
The image on the screen was repeated ahead. Small but growing, it was dead ahead.
“What the…!”
They were speechless and confused. Joseph attempted to exit the image on the screen. He attempted to turn or slow the ship. Nothing he did made any difference.
∆∆∆
The energies were overwhelming. Great streamers rose and twisted around the darkness. They were the only light remaining on the powerless bridge.
“Do we need to seek shelter?” Margaret asked, but neither had the will to move.
Inside the darkness was a dim and distant light. Its glow was soft and warm, very unlike the immense energies through which they had passed.
The warm yellow light spread around them. It surrounded the ship and seemed to penetrate the dark edges. The light was uniform, from without and within. There were no shadows.
There were glaciers on the mountains in the distance. The glaciers flowed like rivers and cut deeply into the jagged peaks. The peaks smoothed and lowered. They became gentle. They grew life.
They were inside the bridge, but the ship was gone. Perhaps it was buried in the sand that surrounded them. The waves of still another sea lapped gently behind them.
And then they saw it. Galloping, its great white mane flying in the wind, its horn stabbing the sky as it tossed its head. It was larger than life, larger than any horse should be. It galloped past them in the surf and disappeared behind a huge rocky outcrop.
“That’s not what I expected.”
“It’s not like what Henson saw in the quantum gate at all,” Margaret replied. “He saw terrible visions of what could be, or what was to come, or according to Drake, what actually was, some place or time.”
Joseph cautiously opened a door and sniffed the air. It seemed normal, earth-like, humid. He dropped from some steps into the sand without giving up his grip on the railing.
“One giant step for the only man here, it seems.” He remembered the famous words from long ago.
“Is it sand, like, normal sand?”
“It feels like normal sand. It’s normal sand, unless it’s an illusion, which I guess is possible. Like everything else.”
“We lost the rest of our ship. Our supplies. How can we live on this empty beach? It’s all surrounded by rocks.”
“We need to climb.”
∆∆∆
The rocks were rugged, ragged, and steep. Joseph and Margaret climbed carefully. They could not afford an injury here.
The shore was a brief crescent wedged between vast fields of rock.
“All of this looks like lava fields,” Margaret observed. “As far as we can see. Nothing but lava fields except for the beach. There’s no sustenance here. And no water.”
“Nothing but lava fields from here. We can’t see the mountains anymore. We didn’t taste the ocean water. What if it’s not salty?”
“I didn’t think of that possibility. Even if it’s not salty, do you want to drink it? There could be anything in that water. What if it’s not even water? We can’t assume that anything is familiar or as it seems.”
“Well, that giant unicorn must live on something. Where did it go anyway? I don’t see any paths big enough for a horse that size. I wish I had my PSV. We need to fly.”
“I wouldn’t even complain.” Margaret thought about her place in the tiny cargo area of the PSV. Those travels now seemed long ago, and now she missed the perceived certainty of that past.
They descended, and Joseph cautiously tasted the water.
“Yuck! It’s salty all right. I don’t think we’ll be drinking this.”
“We have some bottles of water on the
bridge. And a little bit of food, some of which won’t spoil right away but the refrigerator there doesn’t work now that there’s no power. Is it going to get dark here? And what is the source of light anyway?”
Sure enough, the sky remained a blank, featureless yellow glow.
Joseph checked what few supplies were on the bridge, now the only part of the ship accessible or remaining. There was the refrigerator, now warming without power. It held some soda and sandwich meat. They had bread, bottled water, a coffee maker, a toaster, peanut butter and jelly.
Joseph made himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
“Do you want one?” he asked Margaret.
“Let me have half of yours. We need to ration this stuff.”
“Yeah. I guess. I hope we don’t have to eat a unicorn. Lots of meat on that beast.”
“Oh Joseph! We’d never be able to catch it. I don’t want to eat a unicorn anyway.”
“Well, not till we run out of this stuff.” The half-sandwich disappeared far too rapidly. So did half of a bottle of water.
∆∆∆
Several days passed as Margaret and Joseph slept on the floor of the bridge and continued to ration the food and water. The floor was harder than the sand, but it was more familiar.
They climbed through the lava field once again. It was slow going. The rocks were sharp and dangerous. The paths they took did not lead them to anything different.
None of the doors in the bridge would open except for the one door to the outside, its drop to the sand, and the strained return. They found a small shovel on the bridge and tried to dig into the sand beneath. The hole immediately filled with sea water, and they could see nothing.
They were hungry and dehydrated.
“We’ve been hopeless before. And something always happens to keep us alive. We’re supposed to build the garden after all.” Margaret was trying to remain strong and hopeful. Her attempts were not working very well.
“We can’t just stay here.”
“It’s our only source of sustenance.”
“And quickly running out. I’m going to swim out beyond those rocks. Maybe there’s something different on the other side.”
Personal Space- Return to the Garden Page 13