Gaia Dreams (Gaiaverse Book 1) (56 page)

"Stole, Sam, you would say she stole the car,"
her mom corrected. "But Alex didn't steal the car--Uncle Nathan was joking.
However, we will be taking things from empty stores and houses. That won't be
stealing, Sam. We call that salvage--we'll be salvaging supplies. That means
nobody owns them anymore and we want to get those supplies before they get
destroyed by weather or something. We want to save things we can use in the
future."

John explained, "You know how Mr. Johnson was so
crazy when he had Harmony tied up? That's the kind of people we need to know
about. People who might hurt us, or people who would destroy things--like we don't
want anyone to damage the power station. Sometimes people are mean and they
want to hurt people, and sometimes people are crazy like Mr. Johnson. Do you
understand, honey?"

"You don't have to worry about Mr. Johnson
anymore, Daddy. He crashed his car into a tree when a bunch of animals ran
across the road in front of his car last night. He died."

John was taken aback. "Uh, well, thanks for
telling me, Sam. That's good to know. So do you understand what I mean now?
About what kinds of people we need to know about?"

Sam nodded. Daddy wanted to know if there were
any bad guys coming here. Sometimes Mom and Dad used a lot of words for things.
But she was glad to understand the difference between stealing and salvaging.
That had been bugging her.

"Okay, I get it," she told them. "There's only
that one road into town, but some people might come over the land or something.
They might sneak in. But I'd probably know about them. And I think White, the
owl, has been talking to the birds and they're going to be on the lookout too. 'Course,
some of the birds are kinda dumb, but they should notice people. Anyways, there
are some people coming, but they aren't gonna get here today. They're mostly
good people, I think."

"Oh!" her father replied. "Oh, well good, that's
good to know." He paused and looked at Sam thoughtfully. "Honey, I thought it
would take you longer to, well, to
know
if there were people on the way."

Sam giggled. "I already looked, Daddy. When Cap'n
Joe came, I looked to see if any little kids were coming here. But there weren't
any more people for today," she said sadly.

"Sam, are you lonely for other kids?" her mother
asked.

"Wel-l-l-l, I'm not lonely, Mom. I just want to
have other kids to play with and....and maybe...to see if there are any other
kids like me, that's all."

Jessica looked stricken and then leaned over and
gave Sam a big hug.

The Farm, Cape Fair

Harmony bounced into the kitchen where Gracie
was sitting staring at drawings of the available land and plans for planting as
she ate a salad for a late lunch. Harmony had volunteered to help plant the
very large garden after John suggested perhaps she'd be more suited for
gardening than the power station.

She announced, "I did it! I planted it all for
you. It took me a while, but it's all done."

Gracie frowned in puzzlement. "You planted all
what, Harmony?"

"The corn! You left it sitting there in that
bucket and I just decided to help you out and get it done." She scowled and
continued, "But I'll tell you that keeping the row straight was not easy."

Gracie started to smile, and then her face
froze. "Harmony," she said carefully, "you say keeping the row straight was
hard? Don't you mean rows? More than one row?"

"No, no, it's just one really long row. I knew
you'd want them all in one row and not scattered all over the garden, Gracie. I'm
not a total airhead!"

Gracie kept herself from muttering the oath that
came to mind and stood up. "Why don't you show me what you did," she suggested.

Looking out on the very straight, long single
row, Gracie tried to explain to Harmony why she wasn't jumping for joy. "Sweet
corn is what we call 'wind-pollinated,' which means you have to plant it in
several rows together. If we leave it in this one long row, we won't get any
corn, Harmony."

"Oh," said Harmony. "Well, you didn't tell me
that before."

"I didn't think you'd finish with the peppers so
quickly," Gracie replied.

"I didn't finish with the peppers."

"You didn't?" Gracie asked, perplexed.

"Well, I was doing them, but then I remembered I'd
brought some flower seed packets, and I was thinking how nice it would be for
you to have flowers this summer. Everyone needs flowers, don't you think? They
lift your spirits so much. And then when I finished with the flowers, I saw the
corn just sitting there and I thought I'd surprise you and get it all planted."

"Oh," Gracie said, resigned. John really should
have warned her about Harmony. "Did you, by any chance, put up any of those
little markers I made to stick in the ground to tell us what was planted where?"

"No, I wondered what those were for. But wouldn't
it be more fun to wait and see what comes up where? It would be a big mystery!"

"Not really, dear," Gracie replied. "Farmers are
not fond of mysteries in the garden. Tell you what, why don't you show me where
the things are that you planted, then we'll work on re-planting that corn."

Harmony smiled sunnily at her. "Sure, no
problem!"

Gracie had to smile back. Harmony was just so
damn cheerful, you couldn't help but respond. Now if she could just keep her on
track--she realized Harmony was speaking.

"--so I was thinking we should just make one big
flower garden, and you know, get Mrs. Philpott to give us some of her roses,
and we'd have fresh flowers in every house and--"

"Harmony," Gracie said sternly, "we need to
plant food first. Then we can deal with the flower situation. Food first, that's
our motto. Try and remember that, okay?"

"Sure, Gracie, no problem. You look a little
tense. Maybe I should bring you over some of my healing crystals. And we could
burn some sage. Clear your aura right up." Then she skipped off ahead of
Gracie, barefoot on the dark earth.

Gracie groaned and mumbled to herself, "I'm
going to have to kill my son. That's all there is to it. I'll just say 'John, I'm
sorry, but this is how it has to be'--healing crystals, sage, good lord!"

The Library, Cape Fair

Alexandra and Dr. Shapiro sat on the library's
front steps, drinking coke in the afternoon sun. "If you had any idea how much
I missed this in the desert in Africa, Dr. Shapiro," Alex was saying to him,
waving her coke in the air.

"Call me Mark," he replied. "Sorry they aren't
ice cold, but the refrigeration in that little café by my office has only been
back on since morning."

"They're plenty cold enough to drink, and I love
it when you can find coke in these small green bottles. I can't believe your
office is only a block away from here. This morning it was feeling pretty
isolated in town."

"I don't imagine I'll be spending loads of time
at my office, but I wanted to make sure everything came through the shaking
from the quake. I also had to lock up some of the medicines." He peered out on
the empty street. He'd never heard such silence in the small town before.

Alex asked, "What are you going to do about
that? I heard Black talking to John and you about being worried people might
come through looking for drugs. Have you decided yet whether to move your
office nearer to where everyone is living?"

"I'm seriously considering it. There's a house
on the other side of John's property which would be close to a lot of us. The
power people are the furthest away, but Harmony's cabins are very near to
everyone else, and it makes sense to be near where the people are. I'm not that
far away from where people are living--heck, in this town, nothing is very far
from anything else! However, being right there in the midst of folks when they
are injured or sick would be better. But it will be a big job to get everything
moved. My little clinic here is pretty well-equipped. In fact, we'd have to
leave some really large items there. The house is quite roomy and is already
furnished. I guess the people who lived there just packed up their clothes and
left." He paused for a moment.

"It's so weird, Alex! All these people just up
and leaving. I'm just glad there weren't any nursing homes in the area, or we'd
be dealing with caring for elderly patients without enough doctors and nurses.
And it was pure luck that our small hospital was essentially empty when all
this happened." He stopped talking and stared at his black loafers.

"What is it, Mark?" Alex inquired. "You look
disturbed."

"I guess I'm feeling guilty. That I didn't go to
Branson or Springfield to try and save some people. And now we can't even get
to Branson or Springfield. And from what I've heard, St. Louis is pretty much
gone. Mrs. Philpott said Perceval told her to keep anyone from going out of
town, even to Branson. I guess the earthquake hit them wrong. While we sit
here, coming through the earthquake fine, getting ourselves all set up, people
are dying in the flooding, the hurricane, and the aftershocks--people only
thirty miles east of us are dead. My mind shies away from thinking about it,
that I don't even try to calculate how many people must have died already and
how many more are going to die in the coming days."

Alex listened as he talked, watching the concern
fill his light green eyes. He seemed so earnest and guilt-ridden and she
understood. "You want to know what I was thinking this morning as I sorted
through some books?"

He nodded.

"I was thinking that I was feeling happy. The
end of the world as we know it...and I'm happy! Until later when the guilt came
for feeling good when people are dying all around the country. I'm not sure
what the best way is to deal with the guilt. Except I think we have to try and
turn it into thankfulness. To be thankful we survived, that we made it here--in
my case at least--and in your case, to be thankful you didn't get that weird
dream that made everyone leave town. You and I and all of us have to do
everything we can to make this a place of safety, for ourselves and for other
survivors. And we have to turn that survivor guilt into motivation, so we can
work hard on setting up a better future. We have a chance here, Mark, a
wonderful chance to not just stay alive, but to flourish. We don't know where
or when the disasters will end, but I think that if Cape Fair has stayed safe
thus far, we have a good chance to make it. We can't get lost in the guilt. We
have to acknowledge the feeling, but then be thankful and move on with our
lives. And deep down, you know as well as I do that we couldn't have saved very
many people. Being here, we have a chance to save the future."

Mark sat back, resting on his elbows, and
contemplated the young woman sitting a few steps below him. She was not
beautiful in a classic sense, but more in an outdoorsy, healthy way. With those
long athletic legs stretched out before her, idly twisting her waist-length
braid of rich brown hair around her hand, hazel eyes crinkling up at the
corners as the sun shone down on her face--she looked like she'd be more
comfortable out hiking on a mountain than working in the library.

"That was good--a good speech," Mark offered. "How
long did it take you to think that up?"

She laughed, a low infectious laugh. "Okay, so I
worked on it a bit. I figured I'd end up needing to tell it to someone besides
myself before too long. You're just the lucky guy who got to hear it first."

"What are you anyway, a psychologist? Because
the speech is good, very good, to tell you the truth."

"An anthropologist. We study humans. In my case,
human cultures. So I'm naturally thinking about what kind of culture we'll
develop here, we Gaians," Alex said, grinning up at him. "And I want it to be a
healthy one, not one riddled with guilt-laden people moping around."

"Ah, so you're no longer observing cultures...you're
trying to create one."

With a serious look on her face, she explained, "Not
just me. All of us. The Gaians will create a new culture for themselves, and it
may resemble what was here before, but I think it will end up being quite
different in significant ways. The isolation from the rest of the world will
have an impact, as will the low population numbers at the beginning. And the
development of the dreaming ability and the amazing animal communication skills
will create something we've never seen before in any culture. Sure, there were
the aboriginal tribes in Australia who depended on their dreams, and the
various Native American cultures who felt connections to animals in different
ways, but to actually communicate directly with animals? To dream in ways that
accurately foretell future events? This is something new in the human
experience. And the culture will reflect those changes, you can be sure."

Mark was impressed. What she was saying sparked
a feeling of excitement within him. A desire to see what would happen next. But
he was still curious.

"What about the books? What is it with you and
the library?" he asked.

"Oh, well, you have to have books to preserve
the knowledge of the culture from one generation to the next. We could go with
an oral tradition for passing down what we know, but books are in many ways an
improvement over memory. And computers are even better, in terms of storing
knowledge." Her brow furrowed as she continued, "There is something I'm not
sure of yet about the learning process and the animals. I have to talk to Sam
at some point." Then she grinned sheepishly and said, "Plus, I just love books!"

"Well that's as good a reason as any," Mark
replied. "Why do you love books so much? Did you start reading at a young age?"

Alex reflected for a moment about whether or not
she wanted to discuss her life from before with this man she'd only known for a
couple of days. Her gut instinct told her he was a good man, a decent guy. Her
gut instinct was usually right, which was strange, since it had been developed
growing up in a crazy family. When you grow up with crazy people, you end up
with instincts that are skewed, usually. Alex wondered for a moment, as she had
often before, just how she'd managed to avoid that pitfall. A thought was
edging into her mind, something about the dreams, the planet--then she noticed
Mark watching her curiously.