TIME AND TIME AGAIN The sequel to 3037 (5 page)

He appeared to be finished with his story but no one said anything.  Joe and I looked at each other.  “I don’t know what to say,” Joe finally said.  “Since we have already rescued Abbott and his people and let the cave heal them
, and since we are still here,
we must still have another mission.”

“This group is not supposed to come with us,” Irene said.  “I don’t know how I know that but we’re somehow supposed to help the two groups live together.”

“They’ll never agree to it,” Abbott said.

“Let’s arrange a conference,” I said, “You and
Redena
.  We can all sit down and talk.  Some of us will act as mediators.  Who would you like?  Oh, and we can meet here.  It will act as a neutral place.”

“Will the cave protect us?”

“Yes it will.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

The delegation consisted of Joe, me, Marion, Rory, and Charlie (Charles Manson). 
Abbott took his wife and his brother Bulla. 
We left everyone else in the cave and started down the hill to talk to
Rodena
.

None of Abbott’s people knew how
Rodena
and her people had created the darkness, the bright light, and the fire, so we were all, understandably afraid.

No one was in the area where we had met her, but we heard laughter and voices coming from what Abbott called the main lake.

We all watched from behind some of the trees surrounding the lake and as I watched I felt such anger at these people for denying Abbott and his people this beauty.

The lake was huge.  It was the same emerald green of the first one we had seen.  The water was crystal clear with several waterfalls coming into it.  There was a large creek, almost a river, flowing over large rocks and into the lake.

I thought at first they were having a picnic but I saw no food.  No one was even sitti
ng down and only the young girl
we had seen on the first day was swimming.

I heard
Roden
call out to the young girl, “
Fina
, you’re risking your life staying out there so long. 
You need to come in now
.  You may need a major oil job.  Y
ou’ve been out so long.

Fina
said as she was coming out of the water, “I’m fine.  I don’t need oil.”

“You’re not going to last long if you keep getting in the water and we have no one to repair us anymore,”
Rodena
warned.

Fina
picked p a towel and I noticed something that I hadn’t noticed before.  She had no fingernails.  I looked at the others and no one had any fingernails.

I nudged Joe and pointed to my fingernail and pointed to them.  He looked and then nodded to me.  He then put his mouth against my ear and whispered, “I think they’re androids.”

I motioned for the others to stay down and whispered to Joe, “I’m going to talk to her by myself first.  What do you think?  I’m thinking maybe she might talk to me one-on-one.”

He nodded and I called out to her as I came from behind the tree, “
Rodena
, can I talk to you?”

She stood staring at me so long
I didn’t think she would answer.  Finally she said, “What are you doing here?  You’re one of the colored people.  You’re not supposed to be here.”

“
Rodena
, we just want to talk to you.  We’re interested in how and why you came here and why
you made the colored people live in the area you ruined.  Can you just give us a little bit of your time?”

“You said we.  Who do you have with you?”

I motioned the others fo
rward, “This is my husband, Joe.  T
his is Abbott and his wife,
Nime
and his brother, Bulla.  And these two people over here are Irene and Charlie.”

She nodded, “I will give you eight pens
i
ons but no longer.”

No one knew how long that was but we knew we didn’t have much time.  The others walked away and she led us to a group of boulders where we all sat, except her.

“Sit with us,” I said and she looked like she didn’t want to but finally eased herself onto one of the rocks.

Knowing there was a time limit, I suddenly didn’t know where to begin.  Joe spoke up, “Where did you folks come from?”  I almost laughed.  Joe had spent the last two years on earth in the south and he was beginning to sound like he was from the south.

“We are from Creighton,” she replied and I was afraid we would have to drag conversation out of her word by word, but she suddenly opened up
and talked for so long, I was sure it must be longer than eight pensions.  This is what she said:

We came into being only a sensing ago.  Our creators created us in their image but could not get the color right.  The sun on our planet was about to go supernova and the creators decided to find another planet.  They didn’t have enough room in all of their spaceships for us so they were going to leave us there.

They made us very strong and gave us the will to survive.  They had planned to inhabit our bodies so they would never die and they had been working on something they called pigmentation before they discovered they needed to leave.

They should never have given us the will to survive.  We overpowered them and took th
eir spaceships.  They had made us smart but were planning on disconnecting that part of our
neurosets
before they inhabited our bodies. 
Fina
heard them talking about this. 
They had used us
to
help build the spaceships but they were going to abandon us to die on
Creighten
.

We left them there to die instead.  When we landed on this planet, we saw some of the same species as our creators.
  They will not destroy us.  We were given the will to live, the will to live.

We sat there, not sure whether she was finished or not.  Finally Abbott spoke up, “We are not like those who wanted to abandon you.  We’re a very peaceful people.  This was our planet before you came and now you have made us live in that black burnt area.  We have done nothing to you.

“We didn’t create you and we would never try to destroy you.  We would like to share the beauty of this planet with you.  We have been very sick with the coughing disease and we deserve to live with clean air and water.  We were here first, after all.”

We waited for her to reply and she asked something I would never have expected, “
Can you teach us to swim and
do you know how to oil machinery?”

Everyone but Abbott laughed.  He was very serious as he said, “We can teach you how to swim and some of us knew how to work on that vehicle you’re using for a chair.  I imagine we can oil you as well.”

She looked at me, “Will you make me some garments like these you wear?”

“I would love to design clothes for everyone here.  It’s one of the thing
s
I love to do.”

Charlie hadn’t said anything but now got into the spir
it of what we were trying to do.  He said,
“Joe and I can teach you to play musical instruments.”

We staye
d on
Usauris
for several months.
  We found out that the fire was created by a huge laser gun on the spaceships.  When they showed us the ships, I noticed they were rusting and I doubted the guns worked any longer.

I designed clothes for the men and women.  There were no children.  I also designed clothes for Abbott and his people.

The androids and Abbotts people were learning a lot from each other
.
  I had
g
rown to love all these people and androids and was sad to leave the
m.  This was the first time
we had made friends and had to leave them behind.

CHAPTER NINE

Something else was different this time about our departure.  The cave had given us notice that we were leaving by becoming transparent before lifting off and before we were all in it.

We had been having a picnic with all of our new friends by the big lake.  Joe and some of the other men were teaching the androids to dive. 
Abbotts’s people had planted a beautiful garden and
we had taken the food for the picnic from there.  Besides a big variety of vegetables, we had fresh berries and nuts from the trees that were already growing there.

All of us
women were sitting on the grass talking about fashion.  I had designed clothes for everyone and Ginger had made them from the cloth that Sandra had woven.

We had had a real challenge designing and making clothes for
Rodena
.  She was not only almost seven feet tall, but she had big breast and a very small waist.

While we were talking, my daughter,
Josie
came running up and said, “Mommy, the cave has become clear.  You can see through to the inside just like when we travel.”

The androids didn’t have tear ducts but Abbott’s people cried, even the men, as they watched the cave become a living thing that resembled a giant jellyfish.

I felt sad but excited at the same time and wondered where and when we would end up.

CHAPTER 10

We moved through space with the swimming motion we always experienced
, living our lives inside the city within the cave and the cave, once again, gave us everything we needed.

We had births
and then were
saddened and surprised with a few deaths.  We didn’t realize that someone could die in such a healing place.
  I wondered if these folks would reincarnate somewhere else as babies or would they simply cease to exist.

Irene was the oldest of all of us and she was still alive and I had more questions than answers.  The cave wasn’t giving up any answers.

We didn’t worry about time or the passage of time but when we started floating like a feather downward
Josie
was 15 years old
.  She had been singing with Joe’s band and we discovered she had a beautiful singing voice.  Her singing added a whole new dimension to the band.  Her voice had a haunting
,
far away sound to it, if that makes any sense.

The jellyfish looking thing landed, once again,
where there was no one else around.  It became opaque once again so it looked like a cave.

Of course most everyone wanted to go explore but both Irene and I had a feeling that we needed to keep the group small.  So, the group consisted of Ina and Robert, Irene, Marion and Rory, and Joe and me.

We hiked down a one-lane blacktop road for a couple of miles and heard Jazz before we got to the mai
n street of a medium-sized city.  It was night time and the streets were live with music and dancing.  We walked down the sidewalk and saw block after block of nightclubs.

Above the nightclubs were balconies made of heavily d
ecorated wrought iron.  The cars didn’t look like any I had seen
before.  They looked older
than the cars did in 1973 where I had left when I had died and ended up on Joe’s planet.

The nightclubs all had their doors open and men were standing in the doorways telling everyone to come in.  I looked inside some of them and saw women on stages taking their clothes off.

“I’m glad we didn’t bring the kids,” I said to Joe and I noticed he was standing there looking inside one of the clubs with his mouth hanging open.

I elbowed him in the ribs and he grinned at me and winked, “Don’t worry, baby, I’m just looking.  I’ve never seen anything like this before.
  Some of
these women look like men made to look like women.
”

“I haven’t seen anything like this before either
,” I said, “I thought at first we were back on earth at another time, but I’m not so sure now.”

“You know what, Ashley?  I like this music.  I would really like for our band to try some of this.  I think I could write some good lyrics for this and
Josie
could sing like that woman in that club there.”

I listened as we stood in the doorway of the nightclub, “You’re right, Joe. 
Josie
’s voice is
sultry and low just like this woman
’s
.”

What happened next was so horrible it’s hard to put into words.  When I turned to look at Joe, I could only see the very middle of his face, everything else, the street, the clubs, the other people, were a blur.  Then the in focus part of his face got smaller and smaller until he was nothing but a blur like everything else and then there was nothing.

The next thing I knew, I was being laid out on a seat in a booth inside the very club we had been looking into.  A large man with thin
gray hair and wearing an apron
was wheezing as he laid me down.