EarthUnder (The Meteorite Chronicles Book 1) (17 page)

The Elder gazed intensely into Mina’s deep green eyes, which returned a sullen glare. Their eyes appeared to illuminate for a time, after which Mina stepped back, slumping into my arms. He glanced at me and said that now she knew all things. She leaned into me as though she had lost her strength, then stood erect and walked back towards the Vug, leaving me behind feeling almost abandoned. I had no idea what to think of her actions, but I could see a distant look in her eyes as if she was out of her body.

Jasmina walked to a nearby tree where she turned and leaned against the trunk, staring off into the Void, deep in thought. I stood there helpless to do anything. She recovered from her daze and came over to me. Jasmina grabbed my arm and led me back to the Vug. Soon we were on our way apparently to the surface, but in an indirect path at an odd angle. When we came to a halt and walked out of the Gray, we were in a spectacular, lush, boreal forest of aspen, jack pine and spruce trees. We stood in front of a beautiful, rustic, moss-covered log cabin with a bench out front next to a stone-rimmed fire pit. Mina settled on the bench, and I sat next to her and put a foot up on one of the rocks. It was obvious that nobody had been here in a long time. The cabin was intact, but it was showing the years. A few aspen and pine trees had died and fallen onto the open ground around the cabin, but had not been touched or cleared. There was a small creek gurgling in the woods just beyond the tree line. From where we sat I could see there was a light opening in the distant trees that seemed to be better illuminated than the rest of the forest around us. We sat there for a time and then Mina spoke. “I feel violated,” she started; “it is hard to know what to believe. I don’t understand how or why all of this information was kept from me. It feels like the foundations of my world have been taken away.”

In my limited wisdom I gave her a sober glance and asked her to think of how I felt having learned that my life was a blended slurry of lies and reality, that there were many other versions of me, that I was planned generations ago, that I was led to this point in my life. “So, welcome to the club,” I retorted. “It must be hard to learn that your husband is gone forever.”

Mina looked at me and said, “Please, he wasn’t a husband; he was a figurehead with title who gave me position here on the surface. That is why we are in this place, my Bryce Monroe. You and I spent a great amount of time here in your past lives on Earth. We spent many hours looking into the fires here in this sanctuary. Out through that illuminated cleft in the forest screen of trees is a rock pinnacle where you and I spent the best parts of our days watching sunrises and sunsets. My thinking was that by bringing you here we could dispel any questions you might have about my so-called husband or how I feel about you. We used to dream of making this our home.”

We walked through the meadow, out of the woods, following the light to the edge of the trees where the rocks extended far out beyond the tree line. I remember this place; it was in many of my dreams, and there, in those dreams, was Mina, her lovely eyes smiling back at me. The memory of this place enveloped my senses. Over the years the smell of campfire smoke had always brought the ghostly images of this place to mind. It wasn’t a dream—it was a distant memory. While we were zoned out on our island paradise, this was the place I was seeing in the memories brought back by the fire and the sunset.

In the sunrise all I could see was Jasmina’s glowing aura. I turned to Mina, pulled her into my arms, and melted into her embrace. The love I felt for her filled every cell in my body. Holding her in my arms felt like I had lost the most important love of my life and found her again. It was a reunion of all the senses, and it was a feeling of such overwhelming importance that I felt my entire being struggling with concern over ever losing her again. Mina gazed at me with sadness in her eyes as she listened to my thoughts and memories of our time together. I understood that she was feeling the sadness of the same loss, but for her it was a clear memory from a prior time.

We were here, together again, working through the confusion of memory and emotion, a mixture of sadness and joy that blended into tears of agony and ecstasy. There was pain and pleasure in this time of ours together as we worked through what was past and what was yet to come. There was a palpable energy between us above strength and beyond time. Our connection was somehow timeless. Mina revealed that she had known me and loved me for generations, and that every version of my prior self was evident in the man before her now. I couldn’t get my head around this. Many of the new revelations were hard to accept, and the concept of actually being “born again” was beyond difficult. On top of that, this gorgeous woman has stood by and watched me come and go for many lives. It must be dreadful to know that she must live through this cycle again and again. How can she and her people be so tenacious as to wait for this time, my time to save the world and their own kind? Mina put her hand on my shoulder as she assured me that the result would be worth the wait. While we gathered wood for a fire, she talked about living each day to the best of one’s ability rather than dwelling on the long-term goal.

I cleared out the fire pit and built a small structure of kindling in the pit. Jasmina went to the cabin for tinder, a flint and strike plate stashed by the powder-blue paint–peeled front door. As we both moved about our duties I could see this as a memory image from the past. We had done the same thing many times before this day. It felt uncommonly safe here with Mina in our idyllic hideout. The fire grew; we sat on the bench and stared into the flames.

Mina could feel my sense of security and she explained that she had maintained a shroud around this refuge for countless years in order to protect it from any approach. She told me that because of the energy she had always devoted to protecting this preserve, that for any human, Teran, or Teranor, this place did not exist and could never be detected. She detailed that even her Elders had no idea of the existence of this safe house. This comment stopped everything. Jasmina felt my heart race and saw the flash of concern in my eyes. She was telling me that not all things were shared communally with all Terans. We were both frozen in motion for a moment when she gave me a reassuring expression and explained that this was one of the genetic gifts given to her family line. “This is a protection mechanism that the Elders felt would benefit their surface guardians,” Mina explained. Her brief explanation helped bring my heart rate back to normal. Talleyrand had explained to Jasmina that this was an ability shared by the Elders as well to protect their kind from worry or panic. He had told her that some things are better left unknown or unspoken. I could feel myself relaxing as I realized that this trait makes the Terans seem even more human.

We picked a few handfuls of chamomile from the ground around us and made some tea in an iron pot over the fire. Mina brought a chest from the cabin that held food pods for us to enjoy. Either these pods tasted better with age or I was getting more accustomed to their flavor. I had no idea of how old these pods were, but the chest had a thick coating of dust on the hand-hewn hinged lid. She explained that the small food cache box is lined with metal charged with Tesla energy that can preserve biological material endlessly. Jasmina told me that all things have a characteristic energy. Tesla discovered that this logarithm of energy in cells can be aligned to strengthen and protect cells. Using his process of charging certain metals, he learned how to protect cells from decay.

Mina described our longtime friend, “He was an exceptionally clever human who was deeply tuned to the power of Earth’s inherent life forces. Had his theories been more widely accepted and studied, humankind would have taken quantum leaps forward in technology and intellectual evolution. You knew and admired him in your last time here. He made this chest as a gift for us. He was your dearest friend. The two of you spent many of your days together discussing his ideas and puzzling over how to turn the perpetual movement of water on Earth into the energy needed to power his inventions. The movement of water was your idea. In all of your lives, water has always been at the center of your focus and passion. Your influence in our choosing this place was the sound of the stream bubbling nearby and our view at the cliff from the top of the waterfall.”

Jasmina continued, “The waterfall has always been your favorite place of meditation. When I can’t find you, I always know to look for you at the top of the falls. It is there that you always travel the globe in your mind’s eye. It is as though the falling water carries you out of body. You were emotionally crushed when Nikola passed and after that, it seemed that the two of you kept in contact during your time at the falls. For me this was a powerful lesson in how attached humans can become. This bond between friends is something that Terans have lost or possibly never possessed. We feel love deeply, but friendships seem to escape our societal structure. I have watched you enjoy countless close friendships throughout your many lives and I have learned from them. But parts of the friendship dynamic escape my comprehension and understanding. It is an exciting and endearing aspect of humans, and it is a facet of life that I feel Terans would benefit from.”

Woven together in conversation, comfort, and reflection, we sat by the fire enjoying our hot, relaxing tea. Chewing bits of our pods, we both stared into the flickering yellow flames of burning branches gathered nearby. My mind turned to the simple subject of how accelerating atoms created the flames that consumed the wood and produced radiant heat that comforted us as the sun set in the silent stand of trembling aspens near the falls. The last rays of the sun sailed through our opening and illuminated the mist that rose from the crest of the falls in the lone break of the tree line. Everything around us seemed to dance a symphony of movement in cosmic, melodic synchronicity with the passing of time. The long late-day shadows reached our fire pit as I sat there leaning against Jasmina. I peered into the glowing embers of our diminishing heat source, pondering all of the new information that had flooded my brain in recent days.

Jasmina put her hand on my knee and her arm around my shoulder and stopped my thoughts for a moment to say, “This is not a dream, your memories and all you have learned recently are real. It will take time for you to adjust to all the new information, but with time you will adapt to this new age. I am here to help you accept even that which you don’t understand. I will do all I can to help you trust what is real. Often it is difficult to distinguish a dream from a memory.”

My eyes widened as the flame’s hypnotic dance put me in the place between wake and sleep. I watched myself standing next to Tesla alongside the stream behind the cabin. We talked endlessly about the perpetual motion of water as Tesla argued his idea of harnessing a river to produce power enough to light cities and suggested his idea of powering towers that might allow us to communicate wirelessly across oceans. I remember that my stand was all about the power of the oceans and the pull of the moon and the sun. I countered his idea with my own concerns over changing the course of a stream and how that would affect fish migrations and water temperatures. My idea was that rather than putting water wheels in the rivers and under glorious waterfalls such as our own here in the glen, we should use the ocean tides to power massive turbines to produce an inexhaustible power source. As the fire crackled, I came out of my waking dream. Mina was there to assure me that this was a memory of a real, past time.

While we sat there on the bench I recalled the memory just like it was yesterday. Nikola and I stood there throwing blades of grass onto the water and watching them gently float away to the falls. In that moment we were both inspired by the relentless power of flowing water. His thoughts were always about how he could tap into that resource of power before it emptied out into the sea. My thoughts were always more about the wonder of how through the cycle of life this supply of clear, cool, flowing beverage was eternally gurgling past our little cabin in the wood. In my mind, this was a gift to all living things. I was not concerned with where the water was going, but rather where it was coming from. Nikola saw it as a challenge to be controlled and used for a greater good. Now he is not here to see the cost of his conviction. Nikola Tesla was the only friend ever allowed into our sanctuary. We found him wandering in the woods after he had gone through a rough time in his life. He was bitter and emotionally lost. We had taken him in only to save his life, but those days grew into a lifelong friendship like no other, and as we spent more time together he became more and more inspired. Our times at the sanctuary were good for all of us. Jasmina was there and I can remember her face in the memories as if it were right now. She has not changed at all. I remember now a common thread in recent and distant memory. She was always there, the same lovely, strong, wise, confident, beautiful woman.

This time by the fire was a powerful awakening. Now, in this age, I felt it would have crushed Nikola to know what his creations have done to change the world he knew. If he could see the many thousands of power transformers that lay at the bottom of rivers below his dams, leaching toxins into the rivers, rendering the fish deadly for consumption, he might never have built a dam. If he could see the rivers filling with silt and the water temperatures and mercury levels rising, he might have stopped. If he could see the reservoirs filling with weeds and the salmon runs cut off from their spawning grounds, he might have agreed with me. If he could see now that we are finally building windmills and solar panels and turbines underwater in the oceans, then he might never have built his first hydro plant at Niagara Falls.

Jasmina leaned over to bump her shoulder into mine. I smiled while looking up from the fire to see her there beside me quietly waiting while I reflected on fireside thoughts. There was something magical about the thoughts and ideas that came out of time spent peering into the glow of firelight. The sunlight was almost gone now and dark would soon take its place in the air. The birds and bugs were racing to their evening resting places, so the air in the glen was filled with a flurry of motion in the smoky sunlight. Mina suggested that we go inside while there was still some light to prepare the cabin for the night.

As we walked into the main room, I could see flames glimmering through the bubbly, uneven glass plates of the front window. There were candles in every room that had stood there for years waiting for our return. The bedding was folded and sealed in a sea chest at the foot of the hand-hewn log bed. The books in a cabinet were all old classics from the 1800s to early 1900s. The kitchen had cast iron cookery and the water system was a “one of a kind” unit that looked familiar. It was a hand-carved gutter that ran along a trestle from the stream to and through the cabin out the front wall and then back into the kitchen and back to the stream. There was a coffer gate near the stream to allow the flow to the house. Over the sink and at another sink in front of the cabin were spigots where the water could be turned on to drink, or to wash or cook with. I remember that we had kept a fish bowl on the window sill above the kitchen sink and whenever either of us noticed a small fish or aquatic insect drifting through our water line, we would catch it and keep it for a time in our aquarium. We would name them as part of our little woodland family.

I turned to Mina with surprise in my face. She noticed my expression and asked what was up. “Caesar,” I said as Mina’s curious expression crinkled into a tearful smile. I remembered that I had named my favorite fish Caesar and Mina’s was named Cleopatra! The fish bowl was still there, turned upside down on the shelf above the window, where it had remained empty for nearly 100 years. The inside of our cabin after dark was like a scrapbook of memories and a three-dimensional photo journal of the past lives lived here in our paradisiacal refuge. Every turn produced shocking, awakening flashes of past memory.

As Mina started a small fire in the rock and mortar fireplace, she watched me move through the maze of memorabilia from our past lives. Over the mantel was a rough-framed, charcoal drawing of Mina and me. Jasmina had drawn this portrait of us together in another lifetime many years ago. The drawing was nearly the quality of a photograph. As I touched some items and looked at others, a flood of images poured into my mind. It came to mind that this vestige of solitude was located well north of Lake Superior. There were details I began to anticipate. I ran my hand across the mantelpiece over the fireplace. I knew that my hand would reach a notch in the wood where I used to lean my bamboo fly-fishing rod on days when I wanted to wax the line or tie up a new leader for the next morning. There were figures we had burned into the wood with a glowing fire iron. Some were messages we left for the other to figure out, and I could remember what each of them meant.

I stood behind the wooden chairs in front of the fireplace and closed my eyes for a moment to see if I could recall what the attic looked like. Climbing the ladder and peering in, everything was just as I remembered it from past lives. While looking around I wondered if the memories could be sorted out, or were the years and lives a blurred blend with little or no chronology. Then again, what did it matter? I was happy to be here, now, with this lovely woman who seemed to have loved me eternally. I wondered if I had made any of those mistakes that tend to drive people off, any that might have driven Jasmina away. As I returned to the main floor, Mina was standing there facing me with her hands fisted at her sides, and she instantly answered my pondering thought. “Oh yes, you have made plenty of mistakes! I have always found it easy to forgive you your silly shortcomings. In your own curt words, ‘you have stepped in it more than your fair share,’” she said with a kind but sarcastic smile. “In fact, you have a gift for blowing it and for getting yourself into troublesome situations that are often not necessary. But these things are part of who you are and I can never get enough of the man you have always been.”

So now it was time to rest for the night; tomorrow we would need to head out on our next leg of the journey. I wondered if Jasmina needed the rest; I certainly did. I needed time to shut down and allow all of this to soak into my mind for a night. Both of us would rather stay here in safety and solitude. But there were important things that had to be done and we had to remain on task in order to stay ahead of our pursuers. Things seemed easier when I thought we were just up against human hunters, but the Teranor have really added a new twist that seems ridiculously beyond my control. How is it that wherever we go they are there waiting for our arrival? I’d like to hear more from Mina about the safety and secrecy of this hideout. I am wondering if whatever she is doing to shield our refuge can be applied to our final destination. As I fell off to sleep my dreams were intensely vibrant and colorful, filled with images of the past and plans for the immediate future. For the first time my dreams seemed to build a road map and make contingency plans for nearly any scenario that might transpire. When we woke it was as if I had been programmed with everything that ran through my dreams last night. I awakened with firm confidence in our ability to complete the task ahead. Fear had faded off into the distance, and determination had taken over my forward thought.

Mina was already up and moving about in the kitchen. She was making lemon grass tea from nature’s garden with a touch of honey from an earthenware pot. It was delicious as ever and gave us a kick of quick energy for the morning. Beyond the meadow the rising sun was slicing through the tree line with golden sheets of brilliant, dawning daylight. All things flying were hard at it, flashing through the veils of diffused glow over the grass and flowers of the clearing. The morning mist lay like a blanket in the still, dawn air. The drizzle of heat streamed upward from the fire pit, punching a shaft of rising tepid air through the beads of mist hanging over last night’s outdoor fire. Two deer were feeding along the tree line near the opening by the falls. There had always been a game trail just inside the trees that crossed the stream near the falls, and whitetail deer often came out into the opening during the early morning and late evening hours to feed and sometimes bed down in the grass. As always they would take turns feeding and watching for danger. The image of the deer was like a photograph in my mind. Jasmina stood next to me with her hand hanging from my shoulder as we watched the morning movement of a new day beginning. We had done this before.

Today we would journey to the U.S. National Museum in D.C. We both knew this would be a very quick stop to make a brief appearance and then we would move on to Vienna. We stopped the Vug in the walls of the Library of Congress and caught a cab to the museum. We walked in the front door, signed in at the visitor registry desk, called down to the curator’s office, where we left a message, and then we immediately left the building and caught another cab back to the library. We clasped hands as we climbed out of the taxicab and walked back into the library. Once inside the entry foyer we walked up to the mezzanine, made our way around to the side, and stepped into the heavy stone wall and into our waiting Vug. We had agreed that based on our past close calls with pursuers that this should be enough of an appearance to draw attention.