Vostok (49 page)

And then a force of energy summoned me, its white light intoxicating. I floated toward it and was enveloped in the love of my birth parents, both of whom had been put to death by the last regime eight solar years ago. Bathing in their aura, I wished only to join them; however, they told me it wasn’t my time. They said the upper worlds had tasked my soul with a mission—to lead my people off of our dying world
.

Before I could inquire how I was expected to do this, I found my spirit moving over water, heading for a desolate coastal region known as the southern rift valley. Meteors had impacted the terrain eons ago, leaving the geology pockmarked with enormous craters. Some had formed lakes. Others remained dry beds. One of these had been outfitted with camouflaged netting, concealing a rebel camp
.

As my spirit toured the facility, I recognized physicists and engineers whom I had known from my adolescent years at the academy. As members of the twelve tribes who suffered as a subservient class under the Council’s autocratic rule, these scientists and their skilled laborers had been working together in secrecy to design and construct a fleet of saucer-shaped starships. Unlike the conventional transports now in orbit over Charon, these vessels were powered by an electrogravitic propulsion system, a generator that produced an anti-gravity vortex that would theoretically make interdimensional travel possible. The technology had threatened the Council’s carbon-based hold on the economy and had therefore been banned, and now the planet’s twelve tribes—Charon’s lowest rung society—were on the brink of using it to flee our star system in search of a habitable world suitable for colonization
.

It would have made for a delicious irony had the propulsion system actually worked
.

With a sudden wave of pain, I found myself back in my cell, once more imprisoned in a dying body
.

Pain is part of the physical condition; suffering is a choice we make.
Having been given a task, I decided that I would no longer suffer my fate. I would use it as a means to save my people
.

First, I needed to be free
.

Even lacking guards, escape was out of the question. The cell door was bolted from the outside, the open ceiling slats too high to reach. Physically, I barely possessed the strength to stand. Even if I could replicate my out-of-body experience, it offered no means of communicating my dilemma to others. And while I still maintained the ability to communicate with my past lives, there was nothing they could do to release me unless …

I had been raised and educated on the scientific, philosophical, and spiritual belief that life is interconnected through a single consciousness that pervades all existence. This universal mind is present everywhere at the same time. One must simply know it, believe in it, and apply it through meditative practice, and miracles can happen
.

The miracle I would seed was a visual message, a map that began in the rebel camp and led to my prison. At the culmination of this dream, the dreamer would witness a functioning electrogravitic propulsion system whirling away in my cell
.

My targeted viewers would be the scientists working on a means to escape Charon, half a continent away
.

Solitude and starvation made for intense meditation sessions that bordered on delirium
.

For weeks, I teetered on the brink of death until one late afternoon when my cell door was wrenched open on its rusted hinges
.

The rebel leader was tall and lanky, his youth and dark complexion revealing his lineage to be one of the eastern tribes. Three other males accompanied him, one of whom performed a quick physical examination on me before feeding me intravenously
.

I felt the warmth spreading through my blood vessels, easing my pain. Through heavy eyes I gazed up at the octagonal holes in the ceiling, watching with amusement as they started to spin
.

I must have slept for some time, because it was dark when I awoke. We were in the main cabin of an aerial transport, the leader immersed in reading my prophecies, which he had recovered from my cell, recorded in a series of word gusts on a transmitter scroll
.

He acknowledged that I was awake. “You are Avi Socha ben Amram.”

“And you are Zaphenath Paneah. I remember you from our days in the science academy.”

“And I remember your theories on soul searching that got you expelled.” He motioned to the scroll. “May I?”

I nodded, finding the strength to sit up for the first time in a month
.

He selected a recording I had made before weakness had replaced my anger
.

Beneath violet skies and silent screams,
and shadowed faces
fleeing burning streams;
whose shorelines danced with lifeless limbs
and hallowed halls
and hope turned grim
.

Scorched by greed.
Death laughs
.

Lies and smiles
and justice without trials,
wrapped in bundles of hope
and no one can cope
except we did
.

Who asked you to thicken
our air until it was rendered unbreathable,
to poison our food, to safeguard the inconceivable?

We did
.

In the end of times, when an uprising was needed, we ignored the call. The victim was its own executioner; the seed destroyed the soil; our hatred taught a child. The caldera was left to boil
.

In an epithet to an extinct race, only ignorance shall reign forever
.

For several silent moments he reflected upon my words. Then he walked over and sat on the floor before me, a gesture of humility. “The Miketz shall arrive in less than a month. Its eruption shall destroy all life remaining on this planet. A team of scientists from the twelve tribes have been laboring in secrecy for many years on a means to escape not just the Miketz but our star system altogether. For weeks now they have shared the harsh reality of their failure with a dream that appears to point to you as the one who holds the key to their success. You are responsible for this?”

“I am.”

“Translate the vision. Tell me what you think you know.”

“I know your scientists have created a propulsion system capable of travelling faster than light. I also know there is a flaw in the design that affects the electromagnetic field. As a result, the anti-gravity vortex isn’t strong enough to provide inertial shielding. Without it, your ships won’t be able to survive transdimensional flight. Like the Council’s fleet, you will be stuck in this star system until your supplies run out and you perish.”

“And you possess a solution to this challenge?”

“Not yet. But with your help I will seek an audience with one of my
soul’s future incarnations, who lives in an advanced society powered by these devices. What he knows I shall know.”

“Avi, I think imprisonment has affected your mind. How can one communicate with an individual who hasn’t even been born yet?”

“The soul is immortal. It belongs in the Upper Worlds, where time does not exist. In order to earn its way into the higher realms of existence, it must live out many lives in the physical world. Each incarnation of the flesh is judged, each judgment influencing the next incarnation. Inflict pain upon another in this life, and in the next you might suffer a disease. Treat others with love, and in the next life you may have bliss. Commit atrocities like the members of Council, and you might live out your next life as a slug. Each incarnation bears its own consciousness even though they share the same soul. By tapping into the soul’s energy stream, I am able to locate these incarnations and communicate with them using the universal consciousness. Because time has no bearing in the Upper Realms every inevitability has already happened, including the lives of every incarnate that will ever accompany each soul. As long as the future caretaker of my soul will one day exist, I can find the means to communicate with him.”

The leader shook his head, unsure. “Avi, I sent a transport to collect your family. Your senior wife, Lehanna, claims you soul searched for a future incarnate before you were arrested. She says you failed and that there are no future Charonian incarnates out there to connect with. This suggests our mission will also fail.”

“Things happen for a reason, Zaphenath. Even the Miketz serves a purpose, one we cannot see. Prison gave me time to reflect. Among the thousands of probabilities that will end in the death of our people, I believe I have found the means to set one alternate reality into motion, one that could alter our species’ fate. And the implications of our actions are incredible.”

“You don’t have to have a great faith or anything. The whole thing is so
simple—as though it’s too marvelous to be true. I don’t and never did imagine
God as one thing. But now I can see God as a power source, or as an energy.”

—John Lennon

At my request, our transport was diverted to Charon’s City of the Sciences, the place where I had been assigned to live and train two years after my birth
.

Every child born on Charon since the time of the Great Uprising was required to be submitted for G.A.T.—Genetic Aptitude Testing—within two solar years of conception. DNA and brain chemicals determined where each offspring would be raised and educated. Only the children of the Council were exempted, a ruling which virtually assured our militaristic rulers to be among the least educated populace inhabiting the planet
.

We landed in the Biological District, where the regent’s top exobiologist, Dr. Kabir Parker, had been summoned to his lab for our meeting. I had studied under Kabir until I’d had a near-death experience during my pre-pubescent years. Upon recovering from the drowning incident, my psyche had changed, my logical mind evolving into one that was more intuitive. When my studies faltered, my G.A.T. was retested, the results sending my education into a free fall
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There is no place in an autocratic society for a free thinker, especially one who claims he can communicate with the dead
.