Thirst No. 5 (43 page)

Hitler and his inner circle created the concentration camps to have a place where they felt at home. Let’s call a spade a spade. The Third Reich was a demonic organization.

To my surprise Cia appears undecided. Perhaps fearful.

“I never thought it’d come for you,” she mutters.

“It must be because of the purity of my heart,” I mock. Suddenly I realize the
vimana
has not come for her. It has come for me, and there is no way she will be able to enter it. I am certain that this is true.

Cia turns to her partner. “I’ll investigate. Keep the box handy. Kill them all if Sita steps out of line.”

“Hey, I’ve done what you ordered,” I protest.

“Now I’m ordering you to follow me,” Cia says.

Leaving the red
vimana
behind, we trek back across the top of the hill. The golden apparition doesn’t waver and I have to remind myself it was the tree that was the illusion. Matt and Mr. Grey are excited. Seymour and Sarah look confused. I motion for them to remain where they are.

The sun begins to rise at our backs as we near Vishnu’s
Vimana
. The ship greets the dawn by sending forth a radiance of its own. A shower of golden light begins to rain down ten yards beyond the perimeter of the ship. A circular door opens and I hasten toward it, passing beneath the delicious shower. Every pleasure center in my body awakens. I want to run toward the door. It’s so wonderful. Nothing can stop me. . . .

“Stop!” Cia snaps at my back. I turn to find her standing outside the shower of light, although from the prints at her feet it looks as if she stepped over the boundary before hastily retreating. Cocking her pistol, she speaks in a deadly tone. “You tricked me.”

“Gimme a break. You wanted the door to the
vimana
open, now it’s open. You’re never satisfied.”

“I can’t enter through this door,” Cia says.

“Well, I don’t think there’s another one.”

Cia looks past me to the ship. “You won’t take this ship to hyper-speed velocities. I won’t allow it. You won’t stop us from re-creating the future.”

“Whatever. I’d be happy to just visit the moon and bring home some cheese.”

Cia raises her gun. “A pity it has to end like this. So sudden, so painless. It’s not what I had planned for you at all.” She stops. “Look at me, Sita.”

I don’t want to but I look. I have to.

Her eyes invade my own. Even beneath the canopy of golden light, when she focuses her gaze on me, I feel my control over my body shudder.

“Be still. Be very still,” she says.

Her words, her will—she’s trying to make me an easy target.

“Good-bye, Sita,” she says, and pulls the trigger.

I see the bullet approach. I want to move, I try to move, it’s heading straight for my chest. But her witch’s spell is potent. All I manage to do is bounce on my toes, which does nothing to stop the bullet. It strikes an inch beneath my sternum and I feel a large vein shred inside.

I fall to my knees, trying to breathe, not having much luck. I know how rapidly I can heal, and at the same time I know this wound is fatal. It is all right, I tell myself. Everything will be fine.

Cia rushes back to the red
vimana
with her partner and they disappear inside. Actually, the
vimana
itself vanishes and the two-armed Joshua tree returns. As I topple to the ground, my friends run to me. Mr. Grey is above my head, Matt on my left, Seymour on my right. Sarah drapes the veil over me; she has absolute faith in it. I hate that my blood might ruin the image of Christ. On the other hand, I like the idea that the blood on the veil actually belongs to Veronica and that mine is mingling with hers.

I choke on a thick clump of blood.

“You’re going to be all right,” Seymour says. “I just called for an emergency medical helicopter. They’ll be here in thirty minutes.”

I have to spit out my blood to speak. “I’ll be dead before it’s fueled.”

“I’ll open a vein,” Matt says. “I’ll pour my blood over your—”

Sarah interrupts. “No. The veil will heal Sita. It healed her before.”

“All of you, shut up and listen,” Mr. Grey says. “Sita’s only hope is to enter the
vimana
and exit this timeline. Then she’ll have an eternity to heal.”

“How do we do that exactly?” Seymour asks.

Mr. Grey takes charge. “Matt, lift her up and carry her inside. The rest of you, keep a hand on her. It’s the only way we’ll be able to enter with her. Hurry.”

Matt swoops me off the ground and carries me inside. The others touch me in various places. I feel Matt could be more gentle considering the fact that I’m bleeding to death. Not that I haven’t been in this situation before. Once I caught a stake in the heart immediately after I blew up a house with Yaksha in it, but that didn’t count because . . . well, I lived to tell the tale, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to die now.

Inside the
vimana
, Matt lays me down beside a trickling pool. The floor is soft and comforting. Golden light surrounds
me on all sides. So many pleasing odors fill the air: camphor, sandalwood, roses, coconuts—I smell coconut milk. There’s also music; I hear it more with my head than my ears, and the sound invokes so many wonderful feelings.

None of this matters, though. I’m still dying.

Mr. Grey’s “eternity to heal” has yet to arrive.

I’m rapidly bleeding out.

Matt and Seymour kneel beside me. The other two have gone off to try to fire up the warp engines. The interior of the
vimana
is warm but I shiver. Excess blood loss—it can bring a deathly chill. Seymour’s eyes burn with tears.

“You have to hang on,” he pleads.

“Why won’t you accept my blood?” Matt asks.

I find it too much of a strain to keep my eyes open; I close them.

“This is Mr. Grey’s moment,” I say. “It’s why he came to us.”

“How do you know?” Seymour asks.

“I was terrified to enter their ship. I knew where it would take me. I could never have actually done it without him. And all he did was tell me the end of Veronica’s story, and my fear left.” I pause. “Seymour, Cia would have shot you if I’d hesitated for a second.”

“What miracle are you expecting from him next?” Matt asks.

“What miracle are you expecting?” I whisper.

Matt puts his head next to mine. “Have you guessed?”

“You want to say good-bye to your father,” I say.

I can feel Seymour shift in confusion. “What does Yaksha have to do with right now?” he demands.

“Tell . . . ,” I mumble, losing the ability to talk.

Matt speaks to Seymour. “If Mr. Grey can get this ship afloat, it can transcend relative velocities. Which will allow it to step outside time. Five thousand years ago my father was aboard this ship. But once we pass light speed, there will be no was. There will only be the eternal now.”

“And you expect to meet your father here?” Seymour asks.

“I hope. It’s something I’ve hoped for a long time.”

The floor of the ship shakes. I feel as if I am rising. It could be the ship shooting into space or else my soul leaving my body. It may be the two events are related. Matt and Seymour fall silent as a gentle but powerful hum vibrates the vessel.

“Sita! There are stars outside!” Seymour exclaims suddenly.

That’s nice,
I think. I want to say it but the words feel like such an effort. I can’t complain, though. I feel little pain. After all the crap I’ve been through, I couldn’t have hoped for a better death.

“We are leaving earth orbit,” I hear Matt say from far away.

“Hell, we’re leaving the solar system,” Seymour says.

Sarah and Mr. Grey reappear. I don’t see them but I hear them.

“How is she?” Mr. Grey asks.

“She’s out cold,” Seymour says.

Yeah, right,
I think. I feel someone touch my wrist.

“Her pulse is getting stronger,” Mr. Grey says.

I don’t know about that. I still feel as if I’m dying.

“Will she live? Don’t bullshit me,” Seymour says.

“She can heal herself. She just needs time,” Mr. Grey says.

“Has time stopped yet?” Matt asks.

Mr. Grey speaks. “Yet? That word has no meaning aboard this ship. Time has begun to turn back on itself. On earth you experience time as linear, as a sequence of moments, one second followed by the next second, all in a straight line. But time is much more dynamic than you realize. In a sense it’s alive. If life is a play that takes place on a stage, then time is the director. He—or it—says when the curtains are to be raised and when they are to fall. There can be no life without time, and life itself creates time. Do you understand?”

“Gimme a break,” Seymour says. “Of course we don’t understand.”

Matt speaks up. “I heard what you and Sita said. Are you really from another time?”

“Yes and no. The Mr. Grey you see before you was born in your time and hopefully will die there. But the mind that currently occupies this body is a projection from the future.”

“From how far in the future?” Matt asks.

“Ten thousand years,” Mr. Grey says.

“How did you come back? Why?” Seymour asks.

Mr. Grey answers. “In our time we’re capable of building ships that can travel faster than light. And we discovered, as
you’ll soon discover, that once we transcended that barrier, time no longer held us bound. I am a distant descendant of the Mr. Grey you see standing before you. Ten thousand years from now, I entered a ship such as this and sent my mind back through my genetic line to his body. I took over his body.”

“Why?” Seymour repeats.

“To fix what was broken. In our time—in our history books—the Nazis won World War Two. All the mistakes that you saw Hitler make were negated by a powerful force working through the Third Reich. That force did so to create the template of a purely materialistic society. A society where science is the only God. Where even the idea of something beyond the physical creation is seldom contemplated.”

“It sounds like a pretty sterile world,” Seymour says.

Mr. Grey sighs, a heavy sigh that holds much grief. “You have no idea. In my time there is no magic. There is no mythology. Our scientific achievements are beyond your wildest dreams, but our culture is stagnant, without purpose. We know there’s no God, no angels, no demons. We have proven it scientifically. It doesn’t matter where we travel in the galaxy, what other cultures we discover. They all see the universe as we do. You might say we have discovered the ultimate truth, and found that God doesn’t exist.”

“How can earth’s history affect other worlds?” Seymour asks.

“You can’t uncover what you know doesn’t exist. I come
from a reality that is black and white, colorless. Nobody experiences a flash of intuition or a sense of déjà vu. None of our children grow up believing in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. On our birthdays we don’t even blow out candles and make a wish. No one even bothers to write fantasy stories. Why should they? No one would read them. The word ‘mystical’ cannot be found in our dictionary. I have never met a person who has ever stopped to pray to God. The Third Reich did not form the seed of a cruel and barbaric world. It did something much worse. It formed a society that has forgotten the meaning of the word ‘hope.’ ”

“Where do you fit into this black-and-white picture?” Matt asks.

“I’m a historian. In the midst of our search to absolutely prove there was nothing left for us to uncover, I was given permission to use a technique our scientists have discovered that allows us to view the past. How the technique works is beyond your understanding, but suffice to say it can only be used aboard a ship that is traveling faster than light. While scanning our past I came across a remarkable fork in the road of our evolution. It was as if someone had seen it before me and had already adjusted it—without our knowledge. I studied this fork for years, trying to understand what caused it, why it was created, who was behind it. After decades of research it finally became clear to me that Sita stood at the center of the fork in the road.”

“Are you saying she caused it?” Seymour demands.

“No. I was never able to define who caused it. But I saw that Sita could fix it. Fix our past.”

“Why Sita?” Matt asked.

“Stop and imagine what it was like for me to stumble onto her. Here was a young woman who was five thousand years old. She wasn’t even human, she was a vampire, and everyone in my world knew there was no such thing as vampires. Not only that, she had met gods and fought with demons—beings that didn’t exist in our universe.”

“You must have thought you were hallucinating when you found her,” Matt says.

“That’s not far from the truth. I spent years just trying to confirm that she really existed. Then I discovered something equally strange. I saw that Sita herself—like our entire society—had been manipulated several times in her life. In the Middle Ages, when she fought Landulf of Capua and Dante. In World War Two, when she was taken captive by the Nazis. Worst of all were the events of this morning, when she allowed Frau Cia and her partner to take control of the red
vimana
and fly unchallenged into the sky.”