Jumping (12 page)

What we heard stunned us. Not only did our leaders think the experiment had not been a success, they believed it should be terminated, the current generation of slaves liquidated, including their children. Measures were already being taken to ensure future generations were without the fatal flaw that doomed the current slaves.

They said our earlier efforts were to be commended but now our cooperation was needed—it would require the best efforts of all of us—to begin to remove the slave populations from each of the major cities. Step one would be their emigration to the uninhabited territory in the east, avoiding any resistance or insurrection.

“What has happened?” one of our co-workers asked in alarm. “We're stunned by this news!”

“In our zeal to make sure they were educable, for the more complex technical tasks, we unknowingly encouraged chemical reactions within the endocrine system that led to a greater freedom of thought than we had intended.” They paused, looking at each other as if deciding how much to say. “They've discovered joy.”

An audible gasp went through the audience. The worst case scenario.

“We asked ourselves, what should be the solution to this terrible problem? There will be no containing it. They are intoxicated by it and want to experience it every day. They will want it for their children and grandchildren. We must put an end to it or it will put an end to us. It will inspire them to want to manage their own joy and we will be in their way.

“We are not monsters. We know many of you have come to depend on your slaves, have even grown fond of them, as of your own children. But we ask that you don't waste your sympathy on them. Save it for our own blood. That will keep us strong. Don't ever waste it on anyone else in the world.”

“What will happen to them?” someone called out.

“Do you imagine there can be settlement villages for them? Where they could plan and make trouble for us? There is nothing we can do with them. Maybe the strongest can live on in the east, helping to cultivate the swamps, if we keep them isolated from each other. The majority must be eliminated.”

“Eliminated?” a man called out. “Do you mean killed?”

Another gasp.

“Women and children, too?” There is a general unrest in the audience, a rumbling.

“We are letting you know our thinking! It is not an easy solution, but we can retain our decency as we toughen our resolve. We have the moral right, the duty to future generations, to eliminate those who would eliminate us.”

“But they've done nothing!” another woman cries out.

“Might the discovery of joy not be a problem?” shouts a man.

“The scientific evidence is clear. There is no doubt where this leads. We have seen it develop on other planets, leading to revolutions and coups. We must be proactive so we are not doomed to reaction, which is much bloodier and much harder to recover from. We will look back on this as a page of glory in our history of genetic progression. It is to be celebrated that we discovered this flaw that could have been fatal.”

“But why women and children? They could be sterilized!”

The leaders look at each other, and I thought this would not bode well for the woman who keeps asking this question.

“First, we have to wipe out all trace of the defective genes. Second, our first loyalty must be to our own blood. That is what interests us. We cannot allow any possibility of plotting, rebellion, or sabotage, which they are knowledgeable enough to commit. The slaves interest us only in so far as we can use them. That is what they are for. Otherwise, they are of no interest. There is no place for sentiment. This is a natural necessity, of the highest order.”

Those of us in the audience began talking to each other, mentioning specific slaves who have become essential to us, who should be exceptions. Some people are crying. Their slaves have become surrogate families and children to them. We know that some have had children with slaves, though it's against the law. We feel we do not have a concept of decency to encompass what is being asked of us. We are not machines. Just as I was wondering if the leaders had an insurrection on their hands with us that night, one of them spoke quite severely to us.

“We are the ruling class! We cannot be weak on this. Our responsibility follows us through history into the future. We would be judged weaklings and criminals to our children if we allowed their children to grow up. There is no retreat from this. It is important we resolve it in our time. Future generations might not have the courage.”

We are quiet for a moment, having interpreted correctly that more resistance should not be expressed there, that night, or we would be seen as siding with the slaves and perhaps suffer their fate.

The most senior leader speaks again. “Humane methods of elimination are under discussion. We will convene another session to finalize these with you. The solution will occur in stages and will require your complete cooperation. Know that this solution is the final solution. There will be no further questions on it. There will be no further discussion on it, either here or amongst yourselves.”

They leave the stage, our cue to leave the auditorium as well. We file out quietly, not looking at each other. We believe we have no option but to do as they say.

We complied with their directives, right down to being part of the extermination teams in the east. You and I both heard of other's resistance, of people who hid their favored slaves until they could move them out to the far wilderness areas, of people who attempted to marry or adopt them, of people who set up underground settlements. Many of these people were caught and disappeared. We dared not ask about them.

We left that life knowing two things, even before death. You cannot live without speaking out, even upon pain of death. You cannot live following someone else's directives for your life, even upon pain of death. Our lives lost meaning and purpose, and we lived without interest or joy. Those lessons are of utmost importance for all. Perhaps you can see why?”

He looks at me, one eyebrow raised. I look back at him as something slowly climbs out of the murky depths of memory and a chill creeps like a snake up my body.

“Hitler.”

“You hear his language in the council's words. Many of those words appeared verbatim in Hitler's and Himmler's speeches, though they thought they were their own. Those words were the heritage of Atlantis, caught forever in the collective unconscious. Hitler attracted them like a magnet because he had the same intent—to remove an entire people by murder.

“Atlantis' leadership council had as heritage the warmongering of their parent planet Mars, and their laws reflect that. The concept of slaves began with the garnering of many captives as the spoils of war. Atlantis profited from the large number of captives by engaging in medical experimentation to make them less trouble and more useful—a master slave race—enabling the Atlantean ruling class to create industries of slave labor. Then, when the slaves betrayed their masters by growing and developing abilities of their own, they were annihilated. Atlantis provided the universal model for successive tribes to initiate the same kind of genocide or ethnic cleansing. As even Hitler noted, it's a monumental task to eradicate a whole people. It takes the complicit cooperation of everyone to succeed. Support has to be handed over. And we handed it over.

“We didn't question anything, and we didn't step up in aid of anything. We let it all happen. And that was our lesson. We didn't do there what we all had done as monks. It led to the downfall of Atlantis, and we were there when Atlantis sank. Many people died, much was lost, and all unnecessarily. I've never forgotten it. Maybe you haven't either.

“Maybe we couldn't have done much on our own to change the situation. But anything we had done would have changed
us
, for the better. And that's our first responsibility, while on Earth. Stepping up is where inspiration begins, for all. We, and others, paid the price for not having done so.” He looks at me for a moment, and I look back, grateful for his telling of this story. I've always felt I had a connection to Atlantis.

Everyone pauses a moment, staring into the fire. “But you called it one of your favorite lives,” I say.

“Yes, I did,” Uche says, “and I meant it. I learned more about myself in that life than in several other lives combined. What I'll do to belong, to be liked, to succeed according to others' standards, to feel I have power and control; what I'll put first to achieve those things and what I'll put last. We were created from good. We go against our good nature at a great cost, to ourselves and others. We create ourselves and our lives down there through interwoven lifelines—by what we do and don't do, say and don't say. If we're not there for each other, other baser influences can take hold of us, determining our course. Atlanteans achieved what the wildest dreams of science could not have predicted, but they could not keep themselves, their communities, or their future safe and whole.”

He laughs ruefully and says, “There were lessons enough for everyone there!” “Lessons?” I ask. “Is that what it's all about?”

“Yes. It's what we want a life to do—teach us. This is about advancing—it's everyone's goal. There's no growth in maintaining the status quo, just a kind of slow death for all.” He looks at me, and I look back, intently.

“I thank you for the story,” I tell him. “The story of Atlantis has always haunted me.”

“I hope to provide you peace,” he says, smiling.

I bow to him and he bows back to me from across the fire. I mull over what he said about the cost of maintaining the status quo, thinking of my life now.

We've come full circle to Guy, on my right. I look at him, and he dips his head at me in acknowledgment.

“Are you wearing a spacesuit for any reason?” I ask him, looking at the white multi-zippered, baggy but belted jumpsuit.

“I am,” he grins. “I just stepped out of a life for a moment, as you've done with your life. I'll step back in at the moment I left it, as you will. In that life, I'm part of a group traveling from Sirius to Camelius X, an Earth-like planet in a different galaxy. We'll face some of the same challenges the extraterrestrial groups who settled Earth did. Can we partner with the beings there rather than dominate? We've been so eager with our planetary experiments that we don't like waiting for a more democratic process with beings seemingly less advanced than we are.”

“Why that life?”

“Because I've killed people who got in my way. Oh, not in a while, but I wanted to be sure. Camelius X will be a test.”

I look at the strength rippling in his hands as he stirs the fire. He seems formidable, and I'm a little afraid of him now. “And if you fail?”

“I'll start again.” He looks at me and laughs, his teeth flashing brightly. “Do you wonder if I will kill you?” He laughs again. “Already did.”

The others laugh, too.

“Me, too!” Lynette calls.

“You murdered me!” Khahil says.

“I don't have a particular story. I've been in most of your lives, in major and minor roles. Monk, yes. I was Lucy's dad in the Lucy story, not wanting to return the land I got in your marriage deal. Yeah, sorry. Good lessons there for me, too, in having a strong daughter. Helped me begin to appreciate the value of women, after a string of male lives. Let's see. We were guards in a Russian prisoner camp. Gay, too. I think that life wasn't too bad. No, we didn't torture anyone in that life, though we did in others—we were baby killers, even.”

He looks directly at me for a moment, seeing how I'm taking it, judging if he's gone too far. “You can't be a warmongering planet, as Earth is, without having lived lives in which war ran it's natural course, going from bad to worse. Many lives are spent balancing that.

“We sailed ship together more than once. Drowned together, too, though we didn't know it at the time. We started together and have always counted on each other—a bond stronger than life.

“But you've guessed we don't share many of the ‘downers’ with you, the lives in which we achieved less than success, and of course there were some. Those are for another time. These stories were for ‘getting to know you,’ as the song says, and to re-acquaint you with us. I always loved Rogers and Hammerstein,” he says in an aside, as he hums the tune. “Getting to like you, getting to hope you like me,” he sings, glancing at me.

“Songs have their purpose, too,” he remarks. “But back to business. I mean, you're the one who called us together, after all.”

This startles me. “Yeah, but I didn't know. Had no idea,” I say as I look around our little circle, seeing the owl grooming himself.

“Well, yes and no,” he says. “The veil
is
thinning. I mean, you jumped because you knew, or believed, in something like this. Right? You felt it enough to be able to jump. Right? At least fifty-fifty?” He goes on, not waiting for my response. “We've done some of our best work with you to help you put it all together!” He laughs. “And had fun doing it! I mean, dreams, nudges, coincidences, ah-ha moments, arranged over and over, these are the tools of our trade. But the tools are limited. For example, you always say you don't remember your dreams, do you not? So, you challenge our creativity.

“You remember you had a friend whose dreams were so amazing you wrote them down and took them to work with you, to share? Like the one where everyone in it had a flaming sword through their heads? You still remember those dreams, and they weren't even
yours
. But we did our best to get to you, through her. You remember that recurring dream you have? The one where you are sitting at a table at the base of beautiful tree-lined hills, watching as groups of people dressed in multi-colored robes walk down from the hills toward you? You seem to be signing people in. That dream always feels profound, and very real to you—the sights, the sounds, the smells—and you remember it. It's the closest we could get to reminding you of our work together.

“And it was you and your mom who shared another dream on the same night, as revolutionaries being chased to your deaths by the military in Central America. Do you still remember that one? That dream felt real, too, as you crouched at the base of some basement stairs, nowhere left to run, waiting for them to come and kill you. You both still remember it. Through dreams, we aim to arrest and engage you, move you, change you—to bring you to yourselves—so that whatever you're doing is informed by these stories from your larger existence.