EarthUnder (The Meteorite Chronicles Book 1) (12 page)

“Sadly, when we folded space and jumped to this new world, only living tissue could be transferred. As I told you before, this bone obelisk was stored inside a Paleogarck chamber. The Garck was never found, but somehow a large fragment of the brain bone of our oldest and wisest Drillian, Cunene, survived the millions of years drifting through the vacuum of space. It also endured the fiery fall at cosmic velocity through Earth’s atmosphere to come to rest where we found it many years later after many miles of searching deep in the desert above. Although this meteorite is only a symbol to our people, we now realize it holds great hope for us all. Just the structure of the matrix will convince your scientists to research further. If they can find a way to tap into our memories, even a few glimpses, then much of the process will complete itself long before we reveal our existence. This thing we are trying to do doesn’t need to take a great deal of time, but we know that it will take some time for your people to acclimate to what they are about to discover. There is far more for us to share, my star hunter, but first I feel compelled to ask if you need to rest.”

It was hard to choose. I was feeling pretty wiped out, but the excitement of this flood of information was so stimulating that I wanted more. Jasmina could see that I wanted more, but that my eyes were showing fatigue. She suggested that we find a piece of soft ground and take rest. This sounded decadently good to me. We came to a place that looked inviting and reclined for a time. What seemed like moments later, I woke from a deep, refreshing sleep. I couldn’t recall closing my eyes, nor falling off to sleep, but awakening, I felt renewed and energized.

We walked for a bit, stopping to watch strange little creatures darting across a shallow pool. As we strolled by patches of flowers resembling bulbs, they turned to follow our movement and changed color as we passed. I could make out tiny flying objects flitting from plant to plant. They appeared to be fairies. They weren’t birds and they weren’t insects. They appeared to be tiny humanoids with the wings of a dragonfly. I couldn’t tell for sure; my eyes were causing me to question. It might have been my still sleep-filled eyes, but as we moved through the area the lumens closest to us appeared to intensify. Mina explained that what I was seeing was an attraction between all living things in her world, and when a humanoid passes, the tension of that attraction intensifies, creating a passing illumination.

Mina continued with my orientation: “At a distance your eyes will soon notice a pulsing that is the flow of life in EarthUnder. There are many anomalies in our world that will seem different to you, for now, but in time you will grow to find them natural.”

She pointed and smiled at something slowly moving alongside our path. It was a huge, flat, segmented worm moving at the speed of a snail. It was mostly chartreuse in color with stemmed eyes and measured roughly three feet in width and maybe nine feet long when extended. It, too, seemed to notice us as we passed. I looked towards Mina and she nodded to my question about her ability to communicate with the worm.

There was life all around us and now that my eyes were acclimating to this new light source, I was beginning to see that this cavernous Void we were traversing truly was of unlimited dimension. I could not see an end, only a distant haze of the same tapered pillars identical to the one closest to our position. There were vines twisting up and down the pillars and all manner of plant life covering much of the pillar surface flowing out onto the forest floor of this massive cavern. I asked Mina how she was able to heal my body so well—not just the scars were gone but all of my old injuries and battle scars as well as the pain from them. She described it as a way of communicating with the cells in the body, getting them to continue with their unfinished work. She explained that in Earthling bodies the cells are on constant overload fighting the damaging effects of human life on Earth’s surface.

Mina went on to say that because of the rapid aging process and the damaging effects of the sun’s rays, our bodies are decaying at a surprisingly rapid rate compared to the body of a Teranian. Because of what the cells of a human must endure, they never quite finish the job of healing any one injury. A human body’s ability to heal becomes stretched too thin, and the cells never get back to healing any injury completely.

“While you slept, I took over for your body’s cells, allowed many of them to take full rest and encouraged others to finish their jobs mending all of your past injuries. It is not magic and not medicine; it is pure thought and mental energy which inspires the community of cells in one’s body to respond and comply. Basically, your body is now one hundred percent of the body you were born with.” Mina finished her comments with a gentle, caring, hand on my shoulder.

I asked her about being shot and could she have stopped that from happening. Her explanation did make sense. Jasmina did say she was watching this event unfold. But that sometimes even tragedy plays a role in which path destiny takes. She knew the gun shots would play an integral part in getting me to find my way here. She did say that the odd wound locations were her doing. As Mina spoke I was growing more familiar with her greater depth of understanding, her wisdom, and a strangely different scale of emotions. She immediately picked up on this and told me that Terans have a powerful range of emotions, far more intense than humans and at the same time more controlled. She went on to say that Terans cannot see the future, but they can see the present if they wish and they can predict the future based on present human behavior.

“In the case of your shooter, I simply made his elbow slip when he pulled the trigger. Yes, Bryce Monroe Sterling, I allowed this evil man to shoot at you, but I never would have allowed it to be more that a scratch.”

“Four scratches,” I replied sarcastically.

She smiled again, understanding my angst and forgiving my sarcasm. Her smiles were so alluring that I found myself doing and saying things just to get another one.

I was about to ask Mina to tell me more about aging. Questions were now firing away in my awakening brain. Just then Jasmina took my hand and led me soaring high into the air. We arrived at a random point where we came to an instant halt and she released our hands. We drifted there looking at each other. Mina grabbed my shoulders and gave me a spin. As I spun, she bumped my lower leg, which started me spinning in two directions. Then the spinning ceased as suddenly as it started. She told me that this was my freedom of movement. I could move with a thought and halt with a thought. She had stopped my movement with her brain and said that I would eventually be able to do the same. She told me that my body would absorb the abilities of the Teranians.

For now, it was time to begin our journey across the Void. Jasmina had heard me thinking about how large this cavernous subterranean world might be and decided to give me a sample view. She told me to stay with her and to think of forward motion and to simply relax my body and to mentally insist that my body remain with hers. She included that when it came time to stop, she would take care of that for now. Off we went soaring side by side at unimaginable velocity. I could see our speed by the blur of everything around us. There seemed to be no friction or feeling of cutting through the air. It was as if we were motionless and the world around us was moving. We halted abruptly, but with no feeling of slowing or inertia. Mina moved out in front of me as we floated there thousands of feet above the surface below. She told me that our travel had just traversed a continent and an ocean, approximately seven thousand surface miles. She went on to explain how the physics doctrine I was taught in school was not nearly complete or accurate, that I would want to open my mind to new standards. That this was going to be difficult for many in my culture to fathom and accept, but then again it might be exhilarating for some. I asked her where we were.

“We are directly below Montana,” was Mina’s reply. It struck me funny that I have good friends in Big Sky Country. Mina smiled and commented how much she enjoyed my ability to maintain a network of dear friends all over the planet. “This is one of your most endearing traits and has been in your line for many generations, that and your love for adventure and travel.”

Mina asked me to look around at the environment here. She pointed out that there were great waves of movement below. We were so high that I wasn’t able to make out what I was seeing, but I could see pulsing, brilliant waves of color change and rapid changes in direction. We slowly lowered closer to what appeared to be the bottom, but along the way Mina put her hands on me again and turned until the moving floor was now above us. Nothing changed, nothing felt different, and yet the moving floor was now the roof of the world. As we drew closer I recognized that the moving mass was an endless herd of bison. I felt puzzled, but then Jasmina said that the Terans had begun to preserve species that humans were driving into extinction, that it was a simple solution and easy for them to perform. Since they had brought these creatures here in the first place, they felt it was required that they preserve the species that had done well here for so long. Mina told me that there were preserves throughout EarthUnder where surface creatures were being held in repose. Eventually they would be returned to the surface to infuse with the population above. She explained that this effort applied to every creature big and small. Thoughts came to mind of wondrous creatures I had never seen such as mammoths or my favorite predator, saber-toothed cats.

The possibilities seemed limitless. This inspired a flurry of questions from my geology background. I wanted explanations for earthquakes, tsunami, volcanoes, plate tectonics, the truth about planet cores, and the origin of our moon. The questions were now pouring into my mind. I could see Jasmina acknowledging each word as they came to mind. Mina would continue to reveal the truth about these queries. But I felt the first place to start was to continue to learn about Teranian age. Mina told me that although Terans live for approximately three thousand human years, it would take a great deal of time to explain the complexities of everything that influences the difference between our span and theirs. As I began to ask the next question, she replied that her own life span would be nine hundred years. Her family line was genetically directed many years ago. Alterations to DNA were imposed in order for her family members to spend ample time on the surface living human lives. They were tasked with searching for ancient, treasured relics from her home world. Mina and her family line would eventually represent her race to humans as liaisons helping humans with the transition into a new age of awareness. Jasmina explained that there was a cost for her ability to survive under the sun. She went on to say that this was a great honor and that she had learned to admire the delicate nature of human life and the intricacies of each individual personality. She shared that in time she recognized that humans were limited in many traits compared to Terans. She revealed that human beings were as keenly emotional and often even more complicated in their emotional considerations than any Teran. She admitted that this one aspect had puzzled her for all of her time in life thus far.

Jasmina smiled as she expressed joy and amazement observing man- and womankind’s love and attachment to one another. She also shared how difficult it was for any of her kind to understand the irony among humans to love so deeply and yet to be able to exact such cruelty and hatred upon others. She had a forlorn expression in her eyes as she spoke of the broad spectrum of our emotional tendencies from the highest pinnacles of love and bliss to the lowest levels of deceit and abuse between humans. Her forehead wrinkled and her lovely emerald eyes watered to a cascade of tears as she spoke of all the killing through the centuries. No matter how much they had the capacity to understand, all Terans found it extremely difficult to witness human cruelty and killing. Jasmina recovered from the sadness of our conversation to lead me in one more direction. She wanted me to see one more feature of her environment. Jasmina told me that from here below the North America continent, we were going to move to a location below what humans refer to as Central America. Immediately we were flying again and the view was changing swiftly; colors, contour, movement, everything we could see as we passed appeared to change.

In what seemed like only a few minutes I could see ahead that we were approaching a brilliant glowing feature of light that from this great distance resembled a sunset streaming through the smoke of burning fall foliage. The closer we drew, the brighter and warmer the colors of this apparent sunset grew. Side by side we flew through Jasmina’s magical world. Soon we slowed to a drift as I glared up and down at a feature beyond comprehension. Welling up from one surface to the other stretched a column of molten rock: magma! Mina went to work helping me to understand what I was seeing.

“This is Colima,” she said, pointing to the column with her hand outstretched. “This is a volcano named by your people. It is one of many throughout the planet. Volcanoes are destructive and yet they are necessary for both our races. In addition to their participation in building continents and islands, they have helped produce the dusty atmosphere which blocks out deadly cosmic rays and protects living creatures on the surface of Earth. At the same time these columns of molten rock provide Terans with a waste disposal system. Our gravity and bio system forces inward pressure that creates this magma, so we must control its flow and guide the molten material to the surface where it can vent and cool. The Earth’s core is still molten and throughout time that magma finds new ways to break through to relieve itself. So when this begins, we guide it to the surface, which prevents magma from filling the Void we call home.”

As I listened to Mina’s voice I watched, entranced by the column of fire. In this area I could see literally millions of Terans busily coming and going. I couldn’t see what they were doing, but there was a symphony of motion around us as bodies flew by from every direction. Mina told me that these people were doing cleaning and maintenance and helping with the mind focus that kept this molten pillar restrained in place and prepared for the next eruption. This was all so new and strange and yet it made sense. We hovered here watching the movements and the undulating tornado of molten mantle outstretched from below us to above. Jasmina shared with me that when this planet was young there was only a single massive continent that Earthling scientists refer to as Pangaea. She said that her past home world was similar to Earth with only one continent and the remaining globe being covered with ocean. This continent was broken into smaller continents and those were enlarged in the process of continent building and developing this shell-planet underworld of New Tera. She smiled again as she said that the Earth is an ongoing work in progress which has taken many millions of years and will continue for many millions more. She said that the Earth is a living, breathing orb that requires constant maintenance.