"Or were they real?" she asks. "Maybe they were a little of both."
I look at her. "Are you from the Pleiades?"
"It is a place I know." She shrugs. "We are eachfrom God."
I listen to the silence. "It's time, isn't it?"
"Yes. In a few minutes, we will make what you might call a hyperjump. At that time, as I explained before, it is important that you focus your entire being to a time just before you traveled toL andulf s castle."
"It was Dante who led me to the castle," I say, stepping toward her. "Should I think of him?"
Alanda pauses. "The moment you reappear is entirely up to you."
I force a smile, although the dread weighs on me like a stone in my heart.
"It will be good to see Dante again," I say. "A little comic relief before I descend into hell." I gesture to the center of the floor. "Should I sit down and close my eyes?"
Alanda takes my hand. "Lie down and close them, Sita."
I do as she says, but she continues to hold my hand. I open my eyes and smile at her. "Don't worry," I say. "It is just my mind that is going back in time."
She shakes her head slightly. "But if you die back then."
I understand. "I won't exist today?"
She sighs. "There is something else. These fifth density negative beingsthey can imprison you."
"I'm pretty good at breaking out of most prisons."
"They can imprison your soul, in their realm. Make you one of them."
Somehow that doesn't sound fair. "For long?"
"Billions of years. You would only be set free whentheyare set free ."
"Negative beings attainfreedom?"I ask.
"Yes. Far up the ladder of evolution, the negative path meets the positive. In the end, all find God." She squeezes my hand. "But you could be lost for the life of this universe."
I cannot conceive of anything worse.
"How can he trap me?" I ask.
"He is subtle, and we cannot penetrate his mind. But he acts much as a mirror does. He stands before you. He shows you what you are. But only the parts of you that can be used to destroy you."
"He can cause me to destroy myself?"
"Exactly. Be wary. He can kill you without your permission. But he can only pervert you to his cause if you enter into an agreement with him out of free will."
"But I would never do that."
Alanda seems unsure. Her expression is anxious.
She leans over and kisses my cheek. There is a tear on her face and I reach up to wipe it away but she grabs my other hand.
"You are loved," she whispers. "Don't forget that."
"I know. I know you." I close my eyes. "Goodbye, Alanda."
"Sita. My Sita."
She lets go of me. The ship darkens.
I hear the strange hum again, a shift inside.
But inside, outsidethey have lost their meaning.
We are beyond space and time, and I am falling.
Into horror unspeakable, yes, and maybe hope unimagined.
7
The collage of colors and shapes that I now see is my life. Yet the different scenes from it are not arranged in a linear fashion, more in the form of a hologram, a pictorial dimension of time that encircles me like a living sphere. I have only to focus my attention on a particular event and I am there. But perhaps because my mind is used to dealing with sequential events, I take myself back in order. This is my deliberate choice, not the choice of the creation. To the creation, I realize, everything is happening in the same eternal moment.
I am with my daughter, Kalika, holding her as she bleeds from devastating chest wounds. Her smile is gentle and I am crying. She tells me she loves me. Then I cry over Seymour, beside his funeral pyre,because Kalika has killed him. Yet a few drops of the divine child's blood and he is alive again. Then I am laughing. Tears are connected to laughter in my life. One seems to bring the other, and that in itself is a great mystery to me. Blood, also, is everywhere. I see the night my daughter was born, in pain and love. The opposites of all life fly before my expanded vision, yet they now seem to be in harmony with one another.
Arturo and Joel are beside me. They tell me they love me. There is a flash of blinding light. They die, their love kills them, I destroy them. But a moment later I am saving Joel by making him a vampire, and a moment before that I am reviving Ray by the same process. Then I take a leap and I am sitting beside Ray's father as he dies from a ferocious blow I have struck to his chest. He perishes with the fear that I will harm his son, the son I love. Again and again, my love brings danger and death.
The hologram of my life seems to spin. In quick succession I see Hitler screaming at his troops, Lincoln ordering General Grant to take up the Union's moral cause. Then I am in a castle in the highlands of Scotland, defending it from an evil duke. Once more my lover dies, and in the next instant I stand before the Inquisition, condemning Arturo to death. Arturo, who has meant more to me than practically anyone I have ever known. I see his eyes as I curse him, but I do not see his heart, do not know that he has already tricked me. I ensure his death but he does not die.
Finally I am walking in the dry hills of Sicily outside Messina, eating a bunch of purple grapes and wondering where I am heading. It is the ninth century and even the evening air is hot. This is my first visit to Sicily; the previous day I took a sailboat across the straits from Italy. Something about the land has drawn me to this spot in particular, but as of yet I don't know what. My long blond hair is pulled up under a cap, and I wear gray hose and a short linen tunic. I could be a pretty young boy, with my baggy white shirt and long steel knife tucked in my belt. The sun is in the sky, but it bothers me just a little.
Then I am not watching this other self.
I am her, and it isn't easy for either of us.
There is a moment of duality. She does not know me.
I feel as if I bump heads with a shadow, and yet my shadow thinks she is the real one, and that I am the ghost. It takes me a moment to explain, and the moment almost cracks open into an insane fissure of delusion. This Sita does not have a volume of my memories, and certainly does not know about flying saucers and the possibility of mental time travel. I am forced to impress these possibilities on her through a wall of internal resistance that threatens to explode both our minds. Then I realize it is hopeless, that I cannot force myself on myself. I relax, and back off, and then suddenly she is curious about me. She knows me even when she doesn't know all of me. I was always one for a new experience, and meeting myself along an empty road is about as weird an experience as I have ever had. My younger self calls to me.