Cabin Fever I
Julia: Valentine's Day, Part 2
by Jayel
I couldn't believe how beautiful everything was--the black of the trees against the glistening white snow and the incredible blue of the sky. I have absolutely no talent for poetry, but even I wanted to compose a sonnet on the spot, or a song, or a painting--something that would make me always remember that quiet and that beauty and the way I felt, the pure joy of being free and alone in the sunlight with the only person I really wanted to see.
The best part was how completely we left everyone else behind as soon as Alonzo started the 'rail. I had thought I would tell him all about Devon and Tara's fight and how worried I was about Tara using the VR so much and how I wanted to just strangle her for putting herself in danger and making things so hard on everybody, and I would ask him what if anything Danziger had said about the situation while they were alone and what he thought would come of it. But once the lodge was out of sight behind us, I no longer felt the need to discuss anything of the kind--it was like the problems just disappeared. "Out of sight, out of mind," I sighed happily, leaning back in the seat and settling my scarf more comfortably around my neck. Even the bitter cold was almost a relief after the warm stuffiness of that lodge.
"What?" Alonzo asked with a grin. "Hey, you look better already." "I am better already," I agreed, smiling back. "Thanks, fly-boy." "Don't mention it." He shifted down and eased over a particularly soggy patch, then speeded up again, the 'rails textured tires digging into the hard crust of the frozen snow. "I'm just sorry it took me so long to find a way to get away for a while."
"Which brings up an interesting question," I said, turning in my seat to face him. "Where are we going exactly?"
He glanced over and grinned again. "Don't you want to be surprised?" he asked
innocently.
I leaned my head against the back of my seat and closed my eyes, the motion of the rail suddenly no more jarring than the rocking of a cradle. "Why not?" I murmured, reaching out one hand, incredibly gratified to feel him take it and squeeze it before laying it on his lap. "Wake me when we get there, okay?"
He gave my hand another gentle squeeze. "You got it, doc."
***
I woke up to the sound of moaning wind and the smell of fir trees. Looking up, I saw we'd stopped in the middle of a small, apparently deserted glade, surrounded on all sides by firs so tall that the only way I could see the tops was to lean all the way back into the other seat. The wind had swirled the snow into a bowl shape around the rim of the trees until it made an almost perfect circle of drifts, broken only by the 'rail's tracks and a cluster of moss-covered rocks. "Alonzo?" I called, climbing out, more curious than worried--by now I knew he wouldn't leave me alone for long.
"Hey, Sleeping Beauty woke up," he said, his smiling head emerging as if by magic from the pile of rocks. "I wanted to get everything set up before I woke you."
"How long have we been here?" I asked, walking clumsily over the slippery crust as the feeling came back into my legs. "Have I been asleep for long?"
"Almost four hours," he admitted. "Which means you should be hungry." I paused, mentally checking my internal machinery for nausea or emptiness--a strange process that had become something of a habit of late. "Not really," I said with a sigh. "But if it's time, I suppose I should eat."
He kissed the top of my head. "Come on inside," he said, taking my arm. "Maybe if you smell food you'll feel more like eating some."
"Doubtful," I warned, letting him lead me. "But we'll see." The rocks disguised the opening to a narrow cave with thick veins of Morganite running along the walls and over the ceiling and floor. "Wow," I said. "Look at all this stuff."
"I know," Alonzo agreed, holding my hand and helping me maintain my footing on the uneven surface as we walked down in what felt like a spiral. "John and I figure we can probably find enough just lying around to warm the individual tents--or maybe we can build smaller log shelters."
"Assuming we can talk Devon into letting us use it," I pointed out. The warmth was lovely, but I was beginning to feel a little claustrophobic. "So how far are we going?"
"Not much further now," he promised. All of a sudden, I realized I *could* smell food cooking--Bess' vegetarian stew. "You built a fire in here?" I asked. "Do you think--"
"Trust me, please?" he teased, kissing my cheek. "There . . . " The cave suddenly opened up in front of us into a chamber roughly the same size and shape as the clearing above--when I looked up, I could see the roots of what could of been the same fir trees poking through the edges of the rounded ceiling. And standing against seemingly every inch of wall were Terrians, a circle broken only by the archway where we stood. "Oh my . . . Alonzo, are they sleeping?" I asked.
"Hibernating I think would be closer," he said, leading me deeper into the room where the stew was bubbling over a pile of glowing Morganite. "Remember the Terrians that lived in the caves with the Elder's tribe?"
"Of course . . . " I walked over to one of the statue-like figures and put my hand close to its chest, almost touching. "Do they know we're here?"
"Not the way we do," he said, stirring the stew. "They're dreaming, doc--unless we touch them, we don't seem any closer to them here than we do back at camp." He ladled out a bowlful and set it on the ground near a cushion. "Come eat, all right?"
I was amazed as always at how easily he talked about this, like the Terrians' behavior was the most natural thing in the world, something he understood as completely as he understood flying. Did he even realize how profoundly they had changed him, how much a part of this planet he had become? "Have you talked to them?" I asked, joining him, my hands automatically closing around the bowl he placed in them.
"They've been dreaming to me for a couple of weeks now," he admitted, squatting near me, apparently as comfortable in that position as I was on my cushion. "Very benign, very curious--I didn't want to say anything, because things were already so tense. Besides, I wanted a chance to get to know them first--I think it took them a while to decide whether or not we could be trusted." He handed me a spoon. "Eat, doc--you know, chew? Swallow?"
"Have they seen other humans?" I asked around a mouthful, too interested to argue.
He smiled rather strangely, not his usual fly-boy grin. "No, I think we're a completely new thing to this group," he said, taking a bowl for himself. "Although I get the impression they've heard rumors--impressions on the dream plane from other tribes we've encountered, other tribes who may have seen other humans. They're very interested in us." He smiled again. "You especially."
I frowned. "Me? Why would they be interested in me?" The fractured memory of my experiments with Uly's spinal fluid made a whirlwind appearance in my mind, making me lose what little appetite I had--that was the only time I could remember Terrians taking a particular interest in me, and it wasn't a happy one.
"They think you're a really strange creature, doc," Alonzo said seriously, but I detected a mischievous gleam in his eye that was sublimely comforting. "You look like one of us, a thing with the most backward consciousness they've ever encountered, but you're a double-think."
"Excuse me?" I asked. "A what?"
"That's the closest word I can think of to the idea they keep trying to communicate to me," he explained, chewing thoughtfully. "At first I wasn't sure what they meant--I thought maybe they had picked up on the fact that you're so much smarter than the average human."
"Thank you very much, fly-boy, but that's a matter of opinion," I pointed out. "Genetic engineering has nothing to do with smart per se--"
"Whatever," he interrupted with a grin. "But then I realized what they really meant was that you have two minds." He leaned over and gave my stomach a pat. "Your physical processes are supporting two different awarenesses."
"The baby," I breathed, smiling back. "Exactly." He leaned over and frowned into my bowl, checking my progress. "Valentine has completely destroyed their perception of what we call the human race."
"Yeah, mine too," I mumbled, going back to my stew. "They're very aware of her presence as a separate being on the metaphysical level," he went on, sitting back again. "But they can't figure out why she's not a separate physical being and why her dreaming is so under-developed. Actually, they think she's a separate dream-part of you--sort of a second-string consciousness."
"Don't they realize she's just an immature human, a fetus?" I asked. "Words like immature apparently don't mean anything to them," he explained. "The concept of that kind of growth is completely foreign--believe me, we've been over and over the definition of baby, but they just don't get it. from what I can gather, they tried to dream to her first, because hers is the most pliable awareness, more hungry for input--"
"The same reasons the first tribe picked you," I interrupted, getting caught up in the idea. "You didn't dream; therefore, your dream-self was the closest thing to a blank slate in the group at that point. And you were so unhappy, so unfocused--your mind was searching for a purpose."
"I think so, yeah," he agreed, giving me a look that made my heart perform a short but sincere gymnastic routine. "And I picked up on what they wanted almost immediately, even though I didn't want to, because of their connection to Uly, someone I already knew something about. But Valentine frustrated the hell out of these guys--as much as Terrians can be frustrated--because she's still part of you. She has no context yet outside of your body--when she dreams, she dreams of you. Her whole world is physical, even her abstract thoughts."
"So they asked you to interpret," I said. "Alonzo, do they realize that Valentine is connected to you, too?"
He grinned. "That's the neatest part," he said. "Yeah, they do--they see patterns in her dream-images that match mine--on the dream plane, she and I speak the same language."
"So to the Terrians, I'm Valentine's physical support system and you're her metaphysical one," I said, smiling back, love for him filling me up far more efficiently than any stew. "That is astoundingly neat." I took another bite, thinking. "And you know, when you think about it, this confusion they're having about birth, it makes perfect sense."
"I was hoping you'd say that," he teased. "No, really, think about it," I went on, undaunted. "We know from our experiences with Mary and Gaal and moon cross that the Terrians don't see time the way we do, that they don't see death the way we do--To them, the universe is literally cyclic, a genuine circle, just like this cave. They don't have a cause-and-effect progression to their lives--things either exist as part of the
great organism of the planet or they don't." I polished off the last of the stew. "Remember that ancient Terrian we dug up?"
"As if I could forget," he grumbled. "I'd be willing to bet that's the closest thing to the kind of death we experience they know," I said. "A kind of stasis, outside the natural cycles of the planet. And remember the outcasts? Their punishment was to be denied access to the earth, to so-called 'going-in'--the very same process we interpreted as a death sentence on Yale."
"That would explain the dream plane," he mused. "What do you mean?" I asked, confused. "No death, no heaven, no hell," he said as if this would explain everything. Seeing my look of obvious bewilderment, he smiled. "We think--or some of us think--that when we die, our spirits, the non-physical or metaphysical part of selves, pass on to another level of consciousness, another plane--heaven or hell. If the Terrians don't die; if their bodies don't make that kind of change, then maybe their access to what we consider heaven or hell is constant."
"Genuine pantheism," I said, mulling this over. "God is simply the force that makes the system continue, an inherent part of the earth, accessible through dreaming."
Alonzo grinned. "Now do you see why I'm having so much trouble explaining where
babies come from?" he said.
"Yeah," I agreed. "I guess that angels from heaven story is out . . . " I looked back at the wall of living beings all around us, wondering how much if anything of what we were saying penetrated their dreams. "I suppose you've already given them the purely biological explanation."
"Oh yeah," he answered with an exaggerated sigh. "Apparently they know all about sort of thing from the other creatures on the planet, Grendlers included."
"Now there's a picture," I muttered, making him laugh. "But none of those creature have a dreaming soul, at least not as the Terrians see it," he went on. "And they can't understand how such a process--which to them, by the way, is extremely icky--can produce a spirit as well as a body."
"So they understand that I'm pregnant; they just don't understand why," I finished.
"Exactly." He came over and squatted close to me, close enough to touch. "Are you angry with me?"
"Angry?" I asked, mystified. "Why would I be angry?" "For bringing you here," he explained, obviously surprised I didn't understand. "For dragging you out here so they could find out for themselves what I was talking about."
I just looked at him for a moment. "Wait a second," I began. "You mean you want me to have the baby out here? Is that what we're talking about?"
He made a sheepish face. "You are angry," he said. "No," I said quickly. "I just didn't realize . . . " I looked around at the Terrians again, so still and silent--if I hadn't known better, I would have just thought they were really ugly art carved into the cave wall to keep out evil spirits. "Is this the whole tribe?"
"Yeah, I think so," he admitted. "I know you're tired of crowds--but you have to admit, this one is a lot quieter."
"And a lot less prone to conflict," I agreed. "But I don't know . . . 'Lonzo, I thought you just brought me out here to get away for a while."
"I did," he promised, picking up my hand and kissing it. "To get away and be alone with you, to talk about things we've never had a chance to talk about before--Do you realize we've never really been alone for more than a couple of hours, and then there was always somebody at least ten feet away?"
"Except for that night when I thought you were flying away to die," I answered, the memory making me reach for him and sink into his arms.
"We can go back to camp whenever you're ready," he promised, stroking my hair with such tenderness I wanted to melt. "But I know how worried you are about having to have the baby in the middle of that lodge with everybody watching, and I know how much easier it would be to make these guys understand us if they could see . . . " He laughed. "Hell, I didn't really understand it until I saw Bess."
"But will they see?" I asked, pulling back to look into his eyes. "I mean, they're hibernating."
"I can make them see," he explained. "But not if you don't want them to--" "No, you're right," I interrupted, touching his mouth. "The more the Terrians understand our life cycle, the easier it's going to be to communicate with them in the long run." I smiled. "And I have to admit the prospect of giving birth here with just you, even with a Terrian audience, is a little more appealing than doing it at the lodge."
He gave me a kiss on the lips. "Look, you're not in labor right this minute, are you?"
"No, I don't think so," I said with a grin. "So we don't have to decide anything absolutely," he continued. "For the time being, let's just enjoy the quiet, okay?"
I turned around and leaned back against his chest, the most comfortable chair in the universe. "I think that's more than okay," I said with a sigh. "I think that's just terrific."
End of Part 2
Author's Chapter Notes:
Thanks to Maxine McBrinn for her help on the metaphysics here--most if not all of the ideas about the Terrian life cycle came out of an extremely entertaining and enlightening conversation with her.--Jayel