The Last Story (6 page)

Another first. Dream tears. "Is it true?" I asked.

He was thoughtful. "Come see me soon. We will see what can be done."

I kissed his hand. "Thank you. Please let me recognize you for who you are."

He touched his flower near my ear. "The rose is soft. The fragrance is gentle. You can only feel my presence, my being between my words. Remember, Shari, when we meet, to listen inside. Keep the voice of the other at a distance."

My head snapped up. "Who is the other?"

My question put an end to the audience. Suddenly I was flying over the city, high above it. The moon blazed, yet my ghostly form cast no shadow on the ground. The yogi's last remark had left me in doubt. I had no clear course. Yet I was lying to myself. He had told me what I had needed to know.

I just didn't want to listen. But if a Master couldn't help me, who could? I thought of my brother, my oldest guide, and in the blink of an eye I was with him.

He slept on his back in his bedroom, Jo wrapped in his arms. They were naked but covered with a sheet, and I had to smile as I looked down on them.

Jimmy, I knew, was intensely private. Let him carry on his affair without my intruding. I felt no desire to touch him, to probe his dreams. As I turned to leave, Jo suddenly stirred and sat up

"Hello," she whispered.

"Jo." I sat beside her. She didn't seem to feel me, but sitting still, she strained to hear—what? Me? I didn't know. Leaning over, I whispered in her ear,

"I love you, old friend. I know I never tell you that but I do."

Maybe she heard me. A smile crossed her face.

"Shari," she said softly.

I sat back and also smiled. "Yes."

Then, in another blink of an eye, I was sitting on the bed in my old room. To my surprise, my mother was sleeping in my bed, or trying to. Clutching a childhood doll of mine, she cried quietly. Close by, on my bedstand, I saw a copy of Remember Me. My hand flew to my mouth.

"Oh God," I muttered. What had I done?

Quickly I sat down beside my mother and stroked her hair. Her tears began to subside and not long after that her breathing relaxed and she fell asleep. I drew my hands far back. I did not want to

probe her dreams, not after she had just finished the story of my death.

"What am I doing tonight?" I said aloud. "What am I looking for?"

I must have thought of him then, although I didn't do so on purpose. There was no movement through time and space. I was in my bedroom, then I was in Roger's bedroom. His place was opulent, more like an expensive hotel suite than personal quarters. He lay sleeping on his side, in his underwear.

Cast in the rays of moonlight, his near-naked physique was exquisite. A young David cut from Michelangelo's marble. My hands were on him before I knew what I was doing. I gripped his head, his heart.

Was he dreaming of me?

Then I was inside his dreams, in the realm of make-believe where he wandered during the dark hours. The setting was vast—the third arm of a galaxy known as the Milky Way. A thousand billion stars burned cold in the endless firmament. Green and blue planets shone overhead. Meteor-scarred moons revolved nearby. And into all of this moved the spaceships, long, sleek purple ones closing in on white ships. Blue and red beams erupted from the purple ships, striking the white ones. Soundless explosions splashed the vast black canvas with light.

Yet this was the light of death; for each of the white spheres was gigantic and filled with thousands of people.

The purple ships were not bent solely on destruc

tion, however. Even as I watched, they maneuvered to corral in the white fleet, to capture its millions of occupants, ultimately to force them into submission.

But for what purpose I didn't know, only that the invaders' ultimate goal was evil beyond words.

Better to die, I thought, than surrender to their will.

The will of the others.

CHAPTER

VI

U^/VENING MY EYES, I stared at the black ceiling.

For a moment I was surprised there were no stars embedded there. Yet I had no conscious remembrance of having dreamed. I sat up and looked out the window. The moon was a shade past full; its pitted surface, yellowed by the curve of the atmosphere, hung close to the sea. It was odd that I could see the marks of meteors on it without a telescope.

Yet as I blinked and rubbed my eyes, my supernormal vision fled, and I was left with Peter's soft breathing, a normal-size moon out our window, and fragments of dreams I couldn't quite piece together. I remembered the yogi flying in a white spaceship beside me. No, I remembered my mother clutching a rose and crying as she asked me to sign a book for her.

Shaking my head, I climbed out of bed and headed for the bathroom.

"It must have been the wine," I muttered.

After I peed, however, I didn't climb back into bed. My mind was alert. My headache was gone, as

well as my fatigue. A subtle power swept over me, as often happened when I did my best writing. Not entirely sure what I was doing, I went into my office and sat down in front of my computer. The screen glowed eerie blue white as I booted my hard disk.

For the first time in a long time, I found myself not working on a particular project. My efforts to get the movie going consumed all my energy. But I missed telling stories; there was nothing like it in the world. The strange thing about writing is that you never know when the magic will strike to let you tell the stories. In fact, you never know if the magic will ever come again.

I felt the magic then.

I opened a new file, thought for a moment, then began to type.

THE STARLIGHT CRYSTAL

Captain Sarteen smiled with satisfaction as her starship, the Crystal, materialized out of hyperspace far beyond the orbit of the tenth planet. The familiar yellow light of Sol glistened on the main screen, faint at this great distance but nonetheless welcome. Over a thousand years had elapsed since Sarteen had seen the sun of her birth. The travels of her starship had been vast, and the knowledge gained—invaluable. But now the journey was complete. Today was mankind's birthday.

Today they would be welcomed into the Galactic Confederation, and no longer be bound by the laws of the physical realm. The contact with the elder races had come only recently, while Sarteen and her crew had

been thousands of light-years away, searching for other intelligent races they feared they would never find. Now the doubt was past, the loneliness over. The call had gone out. All of mankind was returning home. Sarteen knew her starship was the last to reenter the solar system.

"Begin deceleration," Sarteen said from her command seat on the bridge of the starship.

The vessel was vast, over a mile in diameter, and carried a crew in excess of a hundred thousand.

It could jump in and out of hyperspace only at close to light speed; they would have to cancel out most of that great velocity before they reached the inner planets. In a split second, their last hyperspace jump had carried them over a hundred light-years. But now that they were in real space, the ship's great graviton engines would have to labor to keep them from flying past Earth.

As she gave her order, she heard a faint hum as the engines were brought to full power.

"Deceleration initiated," First Officer Pareen said.

"We should reach Earth inside ten hours."

Sarteen stood up from her chair and strode over to her first officer, noticing the excitement of her bridge crew as they stared at the sun and thought of the glorious destiny that awaited them. Sarteen could remember well her first and only brush with the collective consciousness of the Elders, as her people were now calling them. The feeling of coming home, of completeness, and of a love that transcended ail their ideas of what love could be. It was impossible to think that soon it would be their natural state. Never again would they have to struggle, to be afraid. They would enjoy the

limitless state of being of those other races that had gone before them and perfected themselves. Not only that, the Elders had assured them that their entry into the Confederation would greatly uplift them as well.

Mankind was special, they said. Mankind held the keys to the knowledge of the universe.

It was in their genes, they said. The twelve strands of their DNA. Mankind had been a glorious experiment and now the experiment was going to reach its conclusion.

Sarteen did not doubt the Elders for a moment. It would have been the same as doubting herself. When the Elders had linked with her mind, she realized that she was them, that she had come from them. And now she was going back to where she belonged.

Pareen gestured to the crew at her approach.

"They're excited."

Sarteen nodded. "Aren't we all? It's not every day that the heavens open up. I still can't believe this is happening for us, after our long search."

"But the whole time we searched," Pareen said, "we knew we would find what we were looking for."

"You did, perhaps. You always had faith. But I had begun to think we were wasting our time."

"Did you?" Pareen asked. "You never said."

She smiled. "I'm the captain. I can never show weakness."

She glanced at the screen. "At least I couldn't before."

Pareen shook his head. "I think your weaknesses are few. If it had not been for you, none of us would have survived to enjoy this day. How many times did your quick thinking save our mission from disaster?"

Sarteen was thoughtful. "But what was the useful

ness of our mission? To find what we sought, we have come home. Don't you find that ironic?"

"No. I find it appropriate." He paused. "Something bothers you, Captain?"

She shrugged. "It's nothing. It's just that I feel somehow our journey was cut short. That we came to our goal too soon." She touched her chest as she stared at the sun. "I felt in my heart that it would be longer before we reached paradise."

Pareen chuckled. "A thousand years was not long enough for you?"

She had to smile. "I agree. It should be long enough for anybody."

The hours passed slowly, as time was wont to do when the present moment was not as enjoyable as the promised tomorrow. The sun grew in brightness, the outer planets became visible, the gas giants shimmering in the glow of a star that had given life to a race that supposedly could tap into universal truths. Over the long distance from the galactic core, where the Elders resided, had come a partial explanation for the purpose of humanity, and why they had been isolated from the Elders the last million years.

Mankind was the creation of the creator gods, who had been directed to this part of the universe by the Prime Creator Itself, that glorious being that could only partially be comprehended even by the brilliant Elders.

The creator gods had been directed to build a biological creation in the physical realm that would be capable of manipulating matter and energy over the entire spectrum of frequencies.

From the pure inexhaustible white

light of the Prime Creator all the way down to the most inert matter. The secret to mankind's role was in its twelve chakras, or centers, which resonated with its twelve strands of DNA. Each center in each human being was able to tap into a different frequency. When they were "plugged" back into their power source, the rest of the Confederation, these centers would vibrate with incredible energy. The whole of the galaxy would shine, and stand as a beacon for the remainder of the universe. In a sense, being contacted by the Elders was the same as being contacted by their more subtle half.

At least that was what they said.

"They are me," Sarteen whispered to herself in her quarters. "But they are not me. I had forgotten them.

They did not forget me."

She was alone. Her room was dark, except for the glow of her viewing screen, which remained fixed on the distant sun, and the glimmer of her crystal column, which, by some strange alchemy, shone without an external power source. After linking with the Elders, she had been inspired to build a staff made up of different precious stones that she had collected from a dozen worlds. No one had told her to construct the thing and so far she had shown it to no one, not even her dear friend Pareen. The staff was roughly as tall as a human being. The first seven stones were set at equal distances along the top half of the gold rod; the remaining five were fixed in a silver wheel that crowned the pointed top. These last five were the unseen centers, Sarteen believed. The ones above and beyond the body. They were the cosmic centers that connected them directly to the Prime Creator.

Each of the jewels she had used had come to her as if by magic: one she had found in the cave of an asteroid that tumbled between the stars; another in the manytentacled arms of a giant insect that had crawled out of a burrow in a tree as tall as a mountain; and still another had fallen from a sweet fruit she had bitten into on a planet where there was only one tiny island, the rest water. When the jewels began to glow, as she set them in place, she leaped back in surprise. And since then she had been unable to stop staring at the staff. It was almost as if looking at it were like staring into a mirror and seeing a goddess.

"How did I forget?" she asked the crystal staff.

The communicator on her desk beeped. "Yes?" she said.

"Pareen here. Something is terribly wrong."

"Specify?"

"Our fleet is under attack. A large fleet of alien vessels, with incredible speed and power, has appeared close to Malanak. The fifth planet is under heavy bombardment.

What is your command?"

Sarteen stood. For some reason, the news did not surprise her.

"I will be on the bridge in a minute," she said. "For now, veer us away from Earth."

Pareen was shocked. "Turn away? But our people need our help."

"Do as I say. I am on my way."

How different the mood on the bridge was from when they had exited hyperspace. Rather than coming home to a wonderful party, they had returned to invasion.

Sarteen found it impossible to believe the Elders had anything to do with the attack, yet the coincidence was disturbing. Why today, when all sorrow was supposed to end?