Chapter Forty-Nine
THE VISIT
1
Life in Noosa was free and easy. For most people the year had four seasons, but for Thebe and Slater it only had two, the ‘on season’ and the ‘off season’. The on season meant endless surfing days in their favourite bay. The clean, east swells began in February, peaked in April-May and lasted, in some years, well into July. They preferably went surfing by boat and occasionally strung together as many as ten or twelve days in a row in the peak of the season. Lucy happily looked after Kane during those times. She liked to play games with him. Their favourite amusement was playing the concentration game using telepathic distractions.
Kane was only two years old, however he already possessed an impressive spectrum of knowledge because he studied the Rama way, by telepathic trance transference. Knowledge was literally downloaded into his memory from others. When Thebe found someone who was an expert in his or her field she waited for an opportune moment and then pounced. Her favourite place for a knowledge transference was a café.
All telepaths could, if they wished, see the sum total of an individual’s knowledge, which was made up of their memories, fantasies, fears and amusements. Thebe could see images, of whatever the person was into, floating in space around the person’s head. For example, a cloud of mathematical formulae would typically surround a mathematician. The memories that were most strongly prominent in the person’s psyche were also most prominent in their visible memory cloud.
Noosa, being such a popular tourist destination, was the perfect place to ‘trawl for intelligence’, as it was constantly being visited by an endless stream of academics and connoisseurs of the arts.
Thebe and Kane would sit at an adjacent table in one of the fine cafes in Hastings Street. She would telepathically place the targeted ‘knowledge donor’ into a brief trance. Kane would slide into a corresponding receptive trance in the fashion his mother had taught him. Thebe would then download the carefully selected knowledge from the unsuspecting prey. The whole process was over in seconds without the donor having any idea of what had just happened to him.
2
It was early Autumn, 2016 and everyone was sitting around the kitchen bench having their breakfast when Thebe announced somewhat excitedly,
‘I have some big news. Ambriel contacted me from Rama and asked if she could visit us in May. Adam, their son, Ben, and their friend, Zeke, were hoping to come as well. Isn’t that exciting? May is the most perfect time of year, don’t you think?’
Everyone agreed. Thebe was excited about again seeing her best friend from childhood and Slater was excited about seeing his good old friend from the water.
‘We’ll finally be able to thank Adam for the house and all the money,’ said Lucy.
‘Brie is kind of like your Auntie, Kane,’ said Thebe. ‘She loves you very much and she told me how much she is looking forward to meeting you.’ Thebe turned to Lucy and said, a little cheekily, ‘Zeke is about your age, Lucy, and he is a Fish initiate like you … and he’s single.’
Lucy laughed, ‘Don’t you go gettin any ideas, Thebe.’
‘Who me? Ideas? Perish the thought.’
Lucy was surprised, however, at the subtle tinge of excitement she felt deep inside in anticipation of meeting this man called Zeke. It had been fifteen years since her beloved Timmy died in the car accident. Fifteen years without romance. Something within her said that maybe it was OK to let her heart free up a little and open itself up to new possibilities. Besides, she was now healed and was getting younger as the Mana performed its magic. Even though she was sixty-eight years old, she felt more like a teenager and looked like a lady in her early thirties. Her grey hair was disappearing and her wrinkles were smoothing out, and Thebe was telling her that her lifespan was already approaching three-hundred years. Everyone was noticing what an attractive lady she was becoming. She was tall and slim with long, light-brown hair and the prettiest face imaginable. She liked to dress like a hippy, wearing tie-dyed sarongs and Puka shell necklaces, and she could easily have been mistaken for someone straight out of the Woodstock movie. If anyone commented on her 70s look, she just smiled and declared, ‘It’s me, man.’
3
The hundred-foot diameter, family-sized ship silently descended into Noosa Waters, under the cover of darkness, in the early hours of Sunday, May 01, 2016. After its occupants alighted, the ship was remotely flown a couple of miles out into Laguna Bay and parked on the sea floor there, some two-hundred feet underwater.
It was all happy smiling faces as everyone introduced themselves to each other. Adam and Ambriel stayed in the spare upstairs bedroom. Ben and Zeke stayed in the spare room in the granny-flat section of the house, which was Lucy’s area, but she didn’t mind, ‘as long as nobody walks in on me while I’m having a shower.’ Kane moved into a small tent they pitched on the back veranda.
They all went to Elvis’s for lunch. The day was as perfect an autumn day as nature could possibly conjure up. There was not a cloud in the sky and a light south-wester blew crisp and clear making breathing deeply a delicious pleasure. They dragged a couple of tables together and sat around them and began a conversation that would not let up for a whole month.
‘You know, the longer I live here, the less inclined I feel like ever leaving.’
‘I know exactly what you mean, Thebe. I have felt like that for years,’ replied Lucy.
‘I’ve never lived anywhere else,’ said Slater.
‘She sure is a pretty river,’ commented Zeke keeping one eye on Lucy who smiled at him. He surprised himself when he added, ‘like some of the ladies around here.’
Lucy blushed while everyone exchanged glances and fought to keep the smirks off their faces.
‘God, I love these chips,’ exclaimed Adam. ‘They’re so hot and crunchy.’
‘Who forgot the napkins?’ said Ambriel as she rose to get some napkins from the counter.
‘Eat them, don’t wear them, sweetie,’ said Lucy to Kane as she picked up a French fry from his lap.
4
The Hand of God conducted its aquatic opus in Elysian perfection for the whole month of May. Ambriel, Adam, Thebe, Slater and Ben surfed almost every day. They decided to drive and walk because Slater’s boat wasn’t large enough to take them all. Adam commented,
‘I kind of like walking out to Granite again. It takes me back to my early days here, to before I bought my boat.’
‘Do you remember the first time we came here together, darling?’ asked Ambriel.
‘I do indeed. Those were the days I was in love with my Libby. I wonder whatever happened to her?’
They both had a chuckle as Ambriel replied,
‘She turned into an alien.’
Zeke stayed with Lucy and Kane during the surfing sessions. Zeke and Lucy weren’t interested in surfing and Kane was still too young.
Although Zeke was two years older than Lucy, having been born in Cronulla in 1946, he looked nothing like a man of his advanced years ought to look, due to his daily ingestion of Mana. He looked like he was at the peak of his energies, aged in his midthirties. He was tall, about 6’4”, and strong with broad shoulders and long, blond hair that waved around on breezy days. He wore a closely-cropped beard and looked altogether too handsome and manly to Lucy, especially when he spoke with his deep, baritone voice. Unbeknownst to her, his time on Rama had refined him substantially, although his choice of clothing still left something to be desired. Ultimately, the aspect of Zeke’s character that Lucy was attracted to the most was his free spirit. She felt like they belonged to the same kindred. And that may not have been too far from the truth because the most significant thing they both had in common were their fathers. They were both hybrid offspring from a union of an Earth mother and an alien father. Zeke turned out to be a part-telepathic schizophrenic who bravely learnt how to handle his bizarre inner reality, while Lucy was born a full-telepath who, due to a complete lack of training, had, until recently with Thebe’s guidance, never explored even the most rudimentary potential of her telepathic powers.
‘It’s almost like we’re brother and sister,’ Zeke suggested.
‘Perish the thought,’ she replied.
One of the favourite things they liked to do together, besides smoke marijuana, was fly, he with his lev-pack and she in her skin. They flew at night so no one could see them. One of their favourite destinations was Double Island Point, which was located exactly 33 miles to the north of Noosa. It was on one of those flights that he revealed to her that he had never had a girlfriend in all his life. When she heard that, her heart went out to him and she hugged him and tenderly kissed him on the mouth, and revealed her growing affection for him. A new romance was born that night, a blazing fire that was destined to burn across millions of light years for almost a millennium.
5
About a week later, Saturday, May 7, 2016, Ambriel and Thebe relaxed at Aromas in Hastings Street catching up on conversation. They spoke to each other telepathically.
‘We’ve become somewhat fans of Woody Allen movies,’ said Ambriel. ‘Have you seen many of them?’
Thebe laughed, ‘Are you kidding, we can’t get enough of them. We think he’s an absolute genius. Have you seen Midnight in Paris?’
‘Oh yes,’ Ambriel sighed, ‘those opening scenes of Paris, thirty seconds and I was putty, pass the Kleenex … and the tune, I looked it up, Si Tu Vois Ma Mere, by Sidney Bechet, perfect.’
‘I fell in love with Hemingway all over again,’ said Thebe.
‘Me too. To me he expressed the very essence of manliness, something that many women on this planet seem to have fallen out of love of.’
‘It defies understanding.’
‘Yes, I know. The emasculation of men seems to have become a female sport here.’
‘I think that Woody subtly touched on it in the movie when he explored the tension between Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. She hated Hemingway because he thought that she was bad for Scott; he thought that she emasculated him and distracted him from his work. Scott was torn between his love for her and the friend he admired.’
‘Whenever I think of Hemingway, the word Himalaya comes to mind. Isn’t that strange?’
‘I loved the cinematography,’ said Thebe. ‘I think it’s Woody’s best-looking movie. It truly expresses a passionate love for all the colours and textures of that city, born out of a rich history and culture. It really gives us a clearer picture of the inside of Woody’s mind.’
‘I thought it looked absolutely fractal.’
‘Without a doubt, and on many levels. The market scene with all the Persian rugs in the background comes to mind, and how about the time travel, you can’t get more fractal than that.’
‘No, and did you notice that Gil left his book with Gertrude Stein at one stage, back in the twenties, while he returned to the present, absolutely underlining the surrealist’s view that all time is happening at the same time.’
‘I don’t think that Woody Allen has much of an opinion of Picasso. He virtually portrayed him as an oafish mute.’ ‘Yeah.’
They both laughed.
‘Who knows, maybe Picasso was the greatest hoodwinker of all time?’
‘Maybe?’
‘Look at the painting Allen chose to feature in his movie, La Baigneuse, a complete absence of all truth, and what is left?’
‘Whatever one wants, I assume. That’s why the critics love it, why they love Picasso himself; it allows them and their verbose critiques to become the art. The parasite fools the organism it is feeding off into thinking that it is part of that organism itself. It’s the hoodwinking of a hoodwinker and I suspect that Gertrude Stein might have been a classic prototype of that genre.’
‘I must agree because I find that painting verging on the absurd, if I must be honest.’
As they sat there relaxing and people watching, they observed possibly the most attractive man they had ever seen walk past. He looked entirely out of place, even for a tourist. And to top it all off, they also sensed him in the mind plane. He suddenly turned his head and looked at them, through his dark wraparounds, with a beguiling stare. He then looked away again and kept walking up Hastings Street. The girls glanced at each other with an expression of astonishment on their faces. Ambriel thought to Thebe,
‘Oh my God, did you feel that? Let’s tag him.’
Tagging was a telepathic technique of marking an individual with a temporary mind thread. When effected by an expert, the person being tagged remained completely oblivious to the tag if he was non-telepathic. If the person being tagged was telepathic, he knew that something had just happened to him, but he wasn’t sure what it was and he was completely helpless to do anything about it. Once a person had been tagged by a telepath, their location and proximity were much more predominantly perceived.
Thebe replied, ‘Got him. Who was that? After a few moments she asked, ‘Another coffee?’
‘Why not? I am enjoying myself, are you?’
‘Very much.’
A little later,
‘Imagine if we could go back in time. The places we could go and the people we could meet.’
‘I know, but alas, it cannot be, at least not yet.’
‘Or ever, I suspect, because if there was reverse time travel, we would have had visitors from the future right through the whole of our history. I’m afraid time travel can only happen into the future and that is how it will always be.’
‘It seems so. … You know, I also loved Manhattan Murder Mystery.’
‘Oh yes, what a lark.’
‘The suspense had me biting my nails while Woody’s farce made me laugh at the same time. Who else could do that?’
‘Nobody.’
‘Remember the, I commands? I am your husband and I command you to sleep!’
Both of the girls laughed heartily.
’Weedy little Woody trying to be the bossy husband. So funny.’ ‘Yeah.’
6
On a warm evening, about a week later, the conversation turned to time travel. They were all together sitting around the big table under the gazebo in the central courtyard. The iPod was set to random play and the garden lights were dimmed to soft, and the wine flowed and the smoke of Zeke’s Rama-grown Illawarra Gold lingered in the calm air. Slater described his time shift experience once again.
‘You know, it completely blew my mind.’
‘Thebe and I discussed this not more than a week ago,’ said Ambriel. ‘We talked about the possibility of reverse time shifts and how it doesn’t appear that the technique will ever be discovered.’
Everyone became very interested in the topic, and alert. Thebe continued,
‘As far as anyone knows, there has never been a visit from a time traveller from the future, ever. If people discovered time travel into the past, sometime in the future, then our whole history would be punctuated with visits from future time travellers. There clearly is no reverse time travel and never will be.’
‘It is one of the most studied topics on Rama,’ said Ambriel.
‘Let’s play a game,’ Adam suggested. ‘Let’s pretend that there is reverse time travel, just for fun.’
Everyone looked at Adam and smiled. There was a momentary pause in the conversation as everyone thought about the implications.
‘I’d want proof,’ said Zeke.
‘Ezekiel is right,’ said Lucy. ‘The first thing the time traveller from the future would have to do is definitively prove who he was.’
‘He would have to accurately predict some soon-to-happen event,’ said Ben.
‘I’ve just had a thought,’ said Zeke. ‘The Bible is full of predictin the future, but I don’t think any of that has happened yet.’
‘I think those predictions come from outside our time-space, Zeke, from the mind plane. That is a whole different kettle of fish.’
‘Thebe is right, Zeke,’ said Ambriel, ‘even telepaths don’t understand where that type of prophesy comes from. But I think for the purpose of our game we ought to limit ourselves to actual physical time travel, don’t you think?’
Thebe looked at Kane who was sitting in his high chair and said,
‘I think it’s time for bed, little tyke.’
‘I’ll put him away,’ said Lucy, ‘you relax.’
‘Who wants to start?’ asked Adam.
‘Why don’t you start, darling,’ suggested Ambriel.
‘OK. If I could go back in time I would like to come back to Noosa in the late fifties, before Bob McTavish discovered the place, and surf the points completely uncrowded. I think that would be the ultimate.’
‘Interesting,’ said Thebe, ‘except don’t you think that other surfers would have the same idea?’
‘What, you mean even surfers from the future?’
‘Yes, the infinite future. Once you have two-way time travel, it’s open season. And the word would get around pretty quickly about which days were the good ones and the breaks would end up even more packed than they are now with drop-ins from the future.’ ‘That would destroy everything,’ said Adam.
‘Who wants to play next?’
Zeke said, ‘I’ll go next.’
‘Go the Zekester,’ said Adam.
‘I would go back to the crucifixion of Christ. I’d wanna see what really happened.’
‘I think you’d have to get in the back of a huge line there, Zeke,’ said Adam.
‘Yes, I imagine that that would be one of the most popular destinations into the past,’ added Ambriel.
Ben began to laugh, ‘I think, if there was reverse time travel, Jesus would have to be crucified in a huge stadium that could seat hundreds of thousands of people, there would be that many time travellers that would want to witness that event.’
‘I think the stadium would have to accommodate millions,’ added Ambriel.
‘It would be bigger than the Olympics,’ said Slater. ‘Maccas would probably want to sponsor the show.’
Lucy returned from putting Kane to bed. She sat down and asked,
‘So how is travelling back in time going?’
‘Not too good,’ replied Zeke. ‘It looks like all of history would get completely overcrowded. We worked out that Jesus would have to be crucified in a huge stadium.’
Lucy laughed, ‘What have you people been talking about? … and smoking?’
‘It’s amazing,’ said Liberty, ‘no one has even attempted to change anything and there is still chaos. Imagine if somebody tried to alter history …’
‘Yeah,’ said Adam, ‘like bump off Hitler when he was a little boy or something …’
‘Yeah, the chaos that could ensue is unimaginable.’
‘Everybody would try to make emselves rich by goin back to when … ah … say … gold was cheap an buy up heaps of it an bring it back into the future an make a motza. Lots of people would use reverse time travel for that.’
‘Nobody’d want to work,’ said Lucy.
‘I think that the verdict is pretty much in,’ said Thebe, ‘time travel into the past is, and will always be, an impossibility. In one way it is a good thing, but in another, it is a shame.’
‘How do you mean?’ asked Slater.
‘Well, we have the time chip, our most advanced technology. It allows us to skip time into the future, but virtually no one uses it because they can’t ever return. Iapetus, our most revered time traveller only does small hops. Whoever time shifts leaves their loved ones behind and can never return to them. Also, a time shift into the future means a shift into the unknown. No one has ever come back from there to tell us what it was like. If one time shifts into a bad future, their only option from there is to time shift further into another future, which could be just as bad, or even worse. Very few people use the time shift.’
‘The 100-year shift that we are doing is the biggest one that has ever been attempted,’ added Ambriel. ‘Iapetus came up with the original idea. We think that it is the most perfect use of the technology. By the way, we’re not going.’ ‘What do you mean?’ asked Slater.
‘Adam, Zeke, Ben and I are not doing the time shift. We will spend the 100 years on Rama. You, Thebe and Lucy will shift into the future. I think Kane will be ten at that time so he might have to be with his teacher. We will all be there when you arrive, though. At least that is the plan, however nothing is set in stone.’
Lucy and Zeke looked at each other. Although everyone pretty much guessed that there was something afoot, Lucy and Zeke had not yet officially announced their newfound, amorous entanglement. Lucy spoke up first.
‘I don’t know if I want to be apart from Ezekiel for a hundred years.’
Zeke hugged her and said,
‘We need to talk about this.’
…….