The Alejandra Variations (28 page)

Then came another blast. And another.

"Allies," he breathed, for he was suddenly giddy. The flashes were causing him surprising jolts of pleasure.

"Yes, Qui?"

"Some of the sentinels are around me. What do they report is happening?"

There was a pause. A crimson blast surrounded him suddenly, followed by two more in short sequence. Then a longer blast.

Qui found himself standing upright, away from the ruins. He felt like a miniature thunderstorm, lightning and all. Except in this case, each bolt brought him unaccountable joy.

"Allies? Have the sentinels anything to say?"

The sentinels buzzed around him.

Another burst. Then another.

"I have never felt this way before," he said. He looked at his bracelet.

His allies spoke. "There isn't anything wrong with the bracelet, or among us. One of the sentinels, though, has recommended that you take note of the order and duration of the blasts."

"Order and duration? What are you talking about?"

Three more blasts, right in a row. Qui was almost blinded by the sheer pleasure of the jolts. He was now sitting on the gentle grasses of the ruin.

"This is incredible," he said.

Among the ruins at his back were feathertrees, mindlessly singing in the slight wind. The breeze and the reedy song of the feathertrees seemed to synchronize with the whisperings of his allies as they debated among themselves. If they didn't know what was going on, then he was in big trouble.

Suddenly he was nearly pulverized by the euphoria of several quick bursts of reddish light.

"Qui, we believe that you are receiving messages of some kind," the allies told him. He was lying underneath a wonderful feathertree.

"Messages?" If someone was trying to communicate with him, they were certainly getting his attention.

"The sentinel believes that the bursts are in an ancient code," they reported.

"This is absurd."

"Be that as it may, you are receiving a message in Morse code."

He laughed. His neurons were tingling. The notion was preposterous. Why communicate with a method so primitive—albeit so orgasmic—when the allies knew a dozen more advanced forms of communication? Morse code?

"Will you people quit fooling around?" he demanded.

The next thing he knew, he was hanging over a marble bench, with his sentinels trying to catch up. He'd received over seventeen quick jolts. Some long. Some short. Each one, though, made him insensible with pleasure.

"Translate the message," Qui commanded. "Quick!" He didn't know how much more he could take, though the allies seemed to be enjoying it.

"Well?"
he screamed.

The bursts returned, and he found himself leaning against a white stucco wall. The feathertrees hummed.

"It's incomplete," the allies said in their combined voices.

"Incomplete? How long does it take, anyway?"

"Each word has to be spelled out—"

"Each
word?
"

More blasts, and each seemed to hold within it all the physical pleasures he'd known in each of his incarnations. Pleasures mounted upon pleasures. His heart was nearly bursting, his circuits overloading.

"We've deciphered it," they suddenly announced. The sentinel allies swarmed about him happily.

"It says, and we quote:
Prepare for withdrawal. Alejandra to be stopped soon. Don't worry. Pleasure not real. Enjoy it while you can.
"

"Pleasure not real? What's going on here?" he demanded. "Look, people, I realize this business of being away from the Migration Shields has upset you, but that's no reason to pull a hoax on me. This is my life, and it's only fair that I live it as I see fit."

"This is no hoax, Qui," the allies told him. "Some of the message had begun coming through when you were fighting with Elena. There may be more."

"Wonderful," he groaned. He didn't know if he could take any more information like this. Then he said, "All right. Assuming that this data transmission system isn't a dysfunction of the bracelet, who then is sending the messages? And who is this Alejandra person?"

Nothing of the transmission made any sense. Like the name
Nemosten,
the name
Alejandra
did not belong to his era. This was madness.

"We have no idea what is going on, Qui. Stop yelling at us."

Qui sat in silence, watching the spectacular sky slowly twist toward dawn. Several more blasts flattened him before the allies spoke up.

"There's another message coming through," they reported. "Wait for it."

"Wait for it?" he shivered. "Is it someone on the Shields trying this, or what?"

"We don't believe so," they said. "Please stand by."

He groaned, tingling all over.

A dozen more crimson flashes surrounded him in rapid order, illuminating the ruins where he lay.

"We've translated it," they swiftly returned. Even the sentinel allies in the air seemed poised for the information.

"Well, what is it?"

The allies seemed hesitant this time, shifting their rainbow colors within the jewel with a profound uneasiness.

"Well?"

"This message wasn't sent by the same agency as the first one, Qui."

"I don't care who sent it, just tell me what it says!" Once this little episode was over, he was going to look into whether or not this sort of thing had happened to anyone before.

His allies spoke. "The message simply says:
I love you, Nick.
"

Qui stood up slowly. He stumbled away from the ruined wall and the ancient carved stones. He tapped his bracelet. "All right. I want to know what is going on. I want someone in there to tell me what that last message meant."

The wind chime voices of the allies responded. "We can't explain it any better than you can, Qui. The Elders and the Engineers do not send messages this way, but we registered two different sources."

"This is ridiculous," he muttered.

He found a fallen stone pillar on which to sit. He looked up at the great Migration Shields. Dawn was not too far away, and he knew that from their great height the sunrise could already be seen. Was this a prank Elena had persuaded a willing Engineer to undertake for spite? Or might this be some sort of advance warning for the Final Day?

Still, what about the content of the messages themselves? Who was this Nick? Nemosten had called him Nickie. Could one thing have anything to do with the other?

"Allies," he commanded once again, now that the crimson messages seemed to have ceased—if only temporarily.

"Yes, Qui."

"What about these names, Nick and Nickie? I assume they are derivative of one another, and that there is a gathering of former incarnations among you by that name."

"Correct," they quickly said. "It is a name universally derivative of 'Nicholas' and was common to the time of earth's middle life. Shall we enumerate and describe them all for you?"

"Are you kidding?" he retorted. "We'd be here all night."

To enumerate and describe only a fraction of the lives of his eight hundred million incarnations would take them well past the Final Day.

"Just tell me how many incarnations come from the name Nicholas alone," he said.

"Of the name Nicholas your
atma
drew about it six hundred four thousand thirty-seven incarnations. There are numerous other variations, such as Claus, Colin, Nicol, Niccolo, Nickolaus, Nicholai, Nikita, Nikki, Nikolos, and so on. The Colins alone run upward of three thousand. You are correct. We would be here all night."

Qui stood up in the brilliant starlight at the world's end. "Allies, is it possible that someone is trying to communicate with one of the Nicholases among my former lives?"

The allies were quiet. They hadn't thought of that.

"It's possible," they said. "But who'd want to dig so deep into the past? What could they possibly have to tell him?"

What, indeed, Qui wondered.

He walked away from the ancient wall to where a long avenue of flat marble divided the dead city's eloquent ruins. A small, lazy stream trickled down the center of the street. The water was clean and clear, and in the starlight Qui could make out tiny fishes flitting around the water lilies that grew on the edges of the broken marble avenue. How simple their lives were! When the Final Day burst the bubble of the sun's helium shell, the earth would sizzle and pop in a breath's instant—and the little fish would know nothing of what had happened. One minute they would be fish, and the next their atmas would be wandering the universe, looking for the next higher step in their spiritual evolution. But it wouldn't be on the earth. Like human beings, or
homo interstellaris
, they would have to incarnate elsewhere.

He stared down into the waters to see if he could make out his reflection. The light from the Milky Way was bright enough—but the surface of the stream was too distorted. Nothing seemed clear—everything in his world shifted and shimmered.

"Qui," his allies sang out.

"Yes?"

"Someone is nearby. We can feel it."

Qui turned around in the darkness. Elena? So soon? No. His allies would have seen her approach.

But someone was indeed standing not too far away in the fragile doorway to a half-buried, moss-inflicted ruin. The apparition put a hand above its head and gently parted the curtain of moss. The figure stepped out almost stealthily.

"Allies," Qui whispered. His allies, he recalled suddenly, had not known of Nemosten's presence in the ruins down the coast, although now they were perceiving someone. "Is this Nemosten?" he quickly whispered, crouching beside the stream.

"No," they answered.

"Is there any perceived danger here?"

"None."

"Identify the individual," he commanded.

"Impossible," they said. "The individual is not wearing an ally bracelet."

"What?"

This was impossible. Every human being alive possessed an ally bracelet, because every human being alive possessed former selves. Some had many more than others, but everyone had them. The bracelets had been handed down long ago by the First Engineers. These same Engineers had moved the earth out beyond the orbit of Mars when the sun first started expanding. The jeweled bracelets allowed an atma, whether currently male or female, to have at its disposal all of its former incarnations. War, strife, competition, and petty jealousy vanished because the knowledge of the misery they brought was ever-present.

There
was
one person on the planet without an ally bracelet—Elena. But Elena was hundreds of miles away.

A slight breeze came up at his back as Qui watched the figure step across the grass of the ruins.

It was a woman.

She came into view hesitantly, looking around as if the world—despite its solitude and emptiness—was a world newly filled with wonders. Qui watched her, not knowing if she had seen him standing beside the broken avenue and the creek.

The woman's apparel was strange. She wore a kind of pant-and-blouse arrangement that hadn't adorned the female figure in millions of years. And
shoes.

This, he suddenly concluded, was a woman out of the far distant past. What she was doing here, he did not know. She certainly didn't live among these ruins.

She saw him.

"Oh!" she gasped.

Her hair was dark brown, and her eyes sparkled in the stellar light. She seemed to be about his own age—relatively speaking.

"I didn't mean to startle you," Qui said.

The allies in his bracelet shimmered. The sentinel allies fluctuated in a maze of color. The woman's eyes followed their racing, dodging, and weaving with a childlike fascination.

"It's like a dream!" she whispered excitedly. She looked about her. "They didn't say it'd be anything like this at all!"

Qui stepped away from the creek. He pointed to her wrist. "Where is your ally bracelet?" he asked.

His own allies fluoresced with uneasiness, but he knew they were able to surround him instantly if he should be threatened. "Watch out, Qui. Be careful!"

"Quiet," he told them.

The woman looked harmless, but a million allies waited within the shimmering jewel to tell him just how "harmless" certain women had been with his atma over the aeons. And some men as well.

The girl glanced down at her wrist and touched it self-consciously with her right hand. "They told me that I wouldn't need one."

She looked around at the ruins, the singing feathertrees, and the laughing creek. Qui had never before seen a woman who dressed or acted this way. Most peculiar!

"What a wonderful place," she uttered, her eyes glittering in the light from the heart of the galaxy. The sight of the orbiting Migration Shields dazzled her, and she gasped, mouth open in astonishment.

"Then you don't live here," Qui stated. He walked up to her. "Where do you come from?"

She looked at him. "My home," she began haltingly, as if she were trying to place the words together with their accustomed meanings. "My home is in Sierra Vista. Yes, Sierra Vista."

Qui had never heard of such a place.

"You'll have to forgive me," she said. "I'm not used to this. They told me to look for Nicholas. Nicholas Tejada. Do you know him? They said he'd be nearby. I didn't mean to interrupt you like this, but they thought I might be able to help."

Nicholas. That name again.

His allies desperately wanted to be set free of their jewel.

"I'd like to find this Nicholas person myself. Apparently, he's very popular. But who are you?"

What kind of human being would dare go about without her ally bracelet?

She looked around, nervous, acting as if she had just been caught trespassing. "My name is Rhoanna Martín," she said. "They told me I would home in on him. I guess they were wrong. You haven't seen him, have you?"

"I don't know anyone by the name of Nicholas, but I would like to know who is looking for him."

"His friends are looking for him," she said, stepping closer. "They wanted me to locate him and tell him they were going to trigger the Final Day to get him out."

"I don't understand," Qui said. "Get him out of what?" Surely they didn't mean to take a single ally from within his bracelet?