[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people is coincidental.]

The Gathering

 

Dmitri Yaroslav made sure to be in the field of welcome before the great gates of the New Jerusalem when Lt. Golanich arrived, lest the poor fellow feel out of place. Golanich recognized him right off.

“I don’t know whether to cuss you out or thank you, sir. And I’m sure President Alexiev doesn’t know, either.” He shook his glowing head. “What a horrible future those left behind face, at least in the near term.”

“I quite agree, Yuri. And I apologize for putting you in the position of being the bearer of bad news. I take it the president shot the messenger?”

Golanich snorted. “Only because I asked him to—and perhaps it was out of gratitude for the tiny bit of hope I gave him that he made it quick, right between the eyes.”

The lieutenant looked around. “So this is Heaven?”

“A tiny part of it, yes. The city behind me is the New Jerusalem, but it is only the beginning of wonder to be found here. Will you join me?”

The younger man hesitated, then shrugged. “Why not? I’m sure I don’t belong here, but as long as I am here, I’d love to see more.”

“You’d be surprised who belongs here—and who thought they did and aren’t here.” Yaroslav led the lieutenant toward the great gate on which that of Kiev must have been modeled.

“Most of the cabinet, I assume, since only the minister of defense accompanied the president. And Alexiev mentioned something about several cathedrals collapsing, which means a lot of the parishioners must have come.”

“Yes, but not the archbishop. He was trying to keep us out. I’m afraid we all pretty much ignored him. The last I saw of him, he was stalking away from the cathedral in a high dudgeon.” Yaroslav snorted at the memory.

“If he was closer than a mile or so when the event occurred, he probably received a lethal dose of gamma radiation. His demise is not likely to be very pleasant.”

Yaroslav looked at his junior. “Interesting. None of the material I received from General Tavistock in the U.S. mentioned anything about gamma radiation resulting from the Harpazo.”

“I can only hypothesize, based on what the multi-spectral scans showed, that everyone taken out was converted instantly from mass to energy—and most of the energy went someplace else, possibly through a wormhole, leaving only the tiniest blowback, otherwise the conversion of somewhere around a billion people should have blown Earth apart.”

“Ah, that would explain a lot, since I am told we are on what the physicists who are here call the Tachyon Side of Reality. The Earth that seemed so large to us in human form is as a single sub atomic particle is to one of us here.”

Golanich blinked. “So that’s what dark energy is—and probably dark matter as well. Us and everything we see around us here. And since I see no darkness here, I can only say they were vastly misnamed.”

“I won’t argue that point. Come. Some few of us have gathered to share our stories, the better to understand how it is that we are here, even though many of us never expected to be able to come.”

They passed through the great gate and into the glorious city. Though they were afoot, many folk passed by on everything from horses and donkeys to camels to majestic African elephants. A stunned expression settled on the lieutenant’s face.

“Where did all the animals come from? I wouldn’t have thought they’d have a place in Heaven.”

“I have no idea. Perhaps they are here through the love of their human companions. Though I haven’t been here much longer than you have, I have seen a very large number of domesticated animals, and many house pets. Perhaps we can learn more at the gathering.” Yaroslav tagged the lieutenant’s elbow. “It’s just through here.”

Together they passed through an archway into a cooler, quieter building that reminded Yaroslav of an ancient Grecian-style villa he’d once had occasion to visit. Like everything else here, it had been constructed of light and sound, but both seemed subdued compared to the public spaces outside. Even so, it had been decorated with exquisite taste.

Though the living room appeared unoccupied, Yaroslav could hear the sound of many conversations within the Heavenly Song. He led Golanich through the living room and into a courtyard of some size, filled with the scent of roses, pine, and a multitude of fruit trees. Here they found the gathering to which he’d been invited.

General Tavistock, resplendent in something that resembled a dress uniform, though it glittered with a tapestry of stars telling his life story for any with eyes to read it, came over to welcome them.

“Dmitri. I’m so glad you could make it.”

“Thank you for inviting me. This is Lt. Golanich, who stayed long enough to provide a report on the event to President Alexiev. I think we might all find his report on the Harpazo worth viewing.”

“I look forward to it.” The American General nodded at Golanich. “In the meantime, why don’t you both join us for tea? While it’s true we don’t need food or drink for the nourishment of our bodies anymore, there’s no reason we can’t enjoy both just as a feast for the senses—especially since our senses are so much more complete than they ever were on Earth.”

He ushered them over to a buffet set to one side of a patio area filled with small tables at which the other guests sat and conversed over plates of biscotti, scones, and other delicacies, as well as cups of sweetly scented tea. Here General Tavistock introduced them to Harry, once the head cook for the American White House. Yaroslav thought he might have been of African descent in his human form, but here he glowed just as brightly as everyone else.

“Welcome, gentlemen. What’s your pleasure?”

A samovar appeared on the table beside what Yaroslav recognized as a commercial grade coffee pot, though far more elegant. Next to that, a similar vessel contained hot water for use with a variety of flavored teas. Harry prepared a cup of Russian-style tea in a cut crystal glass for the lieutenant, followed by another for Yaroslav. It smelled every bit as good as he remembered of his mother’s tea from childhood—and tasted even better. He joined Golanich in a sigh of pleasure for the perfection.

Harry smiled. “Care for some pastries?”

A plateful of petit fours appeared, big enough for the two of them to share. How he had missed those little dainties, last partaken of at a long forgotten party at NATO Headquarters in Brussels. He snapped a crisp bow and thanked Harry as Golanich picked up the plate and several napkins. A moment later they had found a small table of their own at which to enjoy their tea.

“Imagine!” Golanich snorted between sips. “The first place I get to go in Heaven is a welcome party. I thought we were all supposed to be angels sitting on clouds playing harps. Instead we’re sitting here in a gorgeous courtyard, drinking the perfect glass of tea and nibbling on petit fours like nothing I’ve ever tasted. And we’re surrounded by the most beautiful music, and the sweetest smells… This is ever so much better than the tales my great grandmother whispered when I was a child.”

“Of course, my friend. How could we ever have hoped to envision such wonder and beauty in our poor, limited vessels of clay?”

The lieutenant considered that for a long moment. “There is that… I wonder what I am to do here, though, if I’m not to sit on a cloud and play a harp. Thank goodness for that! I’d make a terrible harpist!”

Yaroslav laughed with him. “I as well. Like you, I also wonder what I am to do here—but given that we have all eternity to explore all infinity, I don’t doubt we will eventually discover what we most enjoy doing. Of one thing I am sure, and that is that we will no longer be required to defend the Motherland.”

“No? I seem to recall reading something in the Bible about a great battle between the forces of Heaven and those of Satan, and that the forces of Satan were thrown down to Earth.”

Yaroslav became aware of another guest standing beside him, a young man he felt he ought to know, but did not.

“Mind if I join you?”

“Be our guest.” Yaroslav waved at the empty chair between him and Golanich.

“I couldn’t help overhearing your question about the great battle with Satan, Yuri.” The familiar stranger took the seat and a sip of his rose wine. “If I might answer that?”

Golanich started to nod, then hesitated. His eyes widened, as if he’d recognized the young man. A tiny smile tugged at one end of the stranger’s mouth.

“Yes, you may call Me Y’shua.”

Yaroslav gulped hard at the thought of sitting in the presence of the Son of God. Y’shua looked from one Russian to the other. “My dear Yuri and Dmitri, would you be here had I not invited you? Trust Me when I say you are both forgiven forever, because you have both accepted Me and your places within Me.”

He touched their hands lightly, and in that gentle warmth, Yaroslav recognized the truth of what He had said.

“As to your question, Yuri, much as it pains Me to admit it, Satan is best described as My mirror image. Real though he may appear to those still cloaked within the clay of an earthly body, he remains only an image. This great battle you mention is only a story your distant ancestors devised in hopes of understanding why they feared and hated themselves. For many of them, Satan is their projection onto Me of the madness that arose when they named Me and believed I was therefore not-them. If I were not-them, then they must be not-Me, therefore I must hate them as they hated Me for their apparent abandonment.” He shook his head in sorrow. “Every world and every people I grow to self-awareness seems to go through the same process, but it must be necessary, otherwise they never grow to the point where I can bring home those able to ask questions of Me, and work with Me to learn the answers.”

Yaroslav blinked as he thought about this for a long moment. “So it really does come down to responsibility. Our ancestors, if we may believe the tale of Adam and Eve, blamed everyone else for their own choices—Eve’s choice to listen to the serpent, Adam’s choice to eat of the fruit she offered him. Have any Adams and Eves accepted responsibility for their choices on any of the worlds You have peopled?”

Y’shua shook His head again. “As I said, it must be a necessary part of your growth as My brothers and sisters. Without that sense of separation, we could not have this conversation, and I could not learn Whom I AM. I would be the Singular One, with no sense at all of Myself.”

“And the universe as we saw it in human form—and even as we see it now—would never have come into existence.” Golanich looked as if someone had just hit him over the head.

“Exactly. In one sense, All That Is remains mere potential within the Singular One just before the instant of Creation. In another, All That Is has been completely realized and has again become the Singular One, only in full and complete self-awareness. Within the infinite and eternal Here and Now between those two states, the Tardyon Side of Light, implicit in the Singular One, became the seed bed for you, My brothers and sisters. Through each and every one of you, I could explore Myself from points of view as close to truly Not-Me as is possible within Me as the Singular One. Those of you who have grown to accept Me and your places within Me, no matter the Name you gave Me, are here. Those of you who chose to deny Me and your places in Me are here as well, but as what you call black holes.”

“As if they’d tried to find the deepest hole to hide in and pulled it in after them?” asked Golanich.

“You have quite a way with words, my dear Yuri,” agreed Y’shua. “Of course, a black hole only looks black from the outside, because the light that falls into it can’t get out again. From the inside, it is brilliant white noise bearing in on one in crushing agony—yet those who deny Me seem to prefer that agony to accepting My forgiveness. Fortunately, only a small percentage of you actually go that far. Many more of you make it here, either after death, or as now, in the Harpazo. And those that never reach true self-awareness simply return to the life of the whole, as the seed which fails to germinate is returned to its constituent elements.”

Y’shua looked up as General Tavistock approached.

“We’re ready to present our stories as You wished, Y’shua.”

“Thank you, my dear Arliss.” He hesitated, then turned to Yuri. “Have I answered your question?”

Yuri gave him half a smile. “That one and several dozen more. I’ll be thinking about them for a long time to come.”

“Then let us share the stories of those present—including your own, of course.”

“As you wish, Y’shua.”

The courtyard seemed to darken as the Heavenly Song faded to a memory. Yaroslav joined the others in turning toward a small stage in the center of the space. On it stood Admiral Wickersram, an acquaintance from the days before the disastrous reign of President Everest.

This, thought Yaroslav, ought to be very good…

The End 

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people is coincidental.]

Abdul

 

What an awful week, thought Abdul, known to the kefir as The Man, Mayor of the District of Columbia. And things looked to get worse—much worse—before they got better—assuming they ever did get better. With an effort he repressed a shudder. Though he didn’t doubt the Grand Ayatollah, seated across from him in the Oval Office, felt the same, it wasn’t meet to admit he was terrified.

The memories, however, refused to submit to his stern admonition to vanish. Again he found himself swept back to the previous Saturday, when the first hint of the disaster now bearing down on them like a desert sandstorm had caught his attention.

Then, as now, he had sat here in the Oval Office between mid-morning prayer and noon prayer, giving his report on the state of the satrap under his command. He remembered the sour feeling in the pit of his stomach he felt every time he had to make that report to the old fanatic. No matter how he dressed it up, there was no escaping the fact that the United Islamic States of America was little more than a desiccated corpse of the once vibrant nation that had been the envy of the world hardly 20 years earlier. The last president had made sure of that, with her draconian efforts to destroy everything accomplished since the initial settlement of the continent by the Europeans. Thanks to her, the power grid had collapsed nationwide, and no one had ever been found who could rebuild it. With no electrical power, the technological civilization he had so admired as a student at Harvard around the turn of the century had collapsed into dust kicked up by horse and buggy or ox drawn wagons.

The kefirs had coped. Many—the more intelligent ones—had gathered into a network of small villages content to engage in subsistence farming. They had produced enough for their own needs plus a tithe to the network of ombudsmen and enforcers he’d cobbled together out of the less intelligent kefirs. He’d thought the people of this once great nation would rebel against the imposition of Shari’a law, but they’d simply hunkered down in silent compliance. For all intents and purposes, there had been almost no contact between him and his folk and them beyond the uncomplaining provision of the tithe—the dhimmi tax—every week for most of the last ten years.

There had been no evidence of any interest in trade between the dhimmi and his folk, and very little even between their villages. He had charged his ombudsmen to watch for any attempts to foment rebellion, but there had never been any reports of suspicious activities. Not that he really trusted his network of ombudsmen to tell him anything that might reflect badly on them. The imams he sent around as circuit riders to keep an eye on the ombudsmen confirmed the lack of questionable activity, however, so he’d eventually come to the conclusion that the hidden kefirs probably didn’t have armed rebellion in mind.

But then, why should they, when they’d managed by dint of offering the only way for pilgrims to reach Mecca or visit relatives in the Middle East—at outrageous prices payable in hard gold and silver—to relieve a large number of his fellow Muslims of most of the precious metals they’d recovered from the ruins of New York’s financial district and elsewhere? He’d done rather well at recovering his tenth of the loot, actually, though what good that would do in an economy reduced to subsistence on the gifts of the Hidden and the meager harvests of the work farms he had no idea.

He had not commented on the fact that the Star of Islam Cruise Line had stopped taking reservations a month earlier. The Grand Ayatollah already knew that as he’d tried to book a trip to Mecca only to be told that there were no openings available for Ramadan as the six vessels would be in dry-dock for repairs and upgrades. Abdul remembered struggling to hide a wince at the tantrum the old man had thrown. He would definitely not appreciate the latest on that score.

Abdul remembered being in the middle of his report about his visit to the offices of the Star of Islam Cruise Line the previous week when a muffled boom had shaken the windows and startled both of them. A suicide bomber? he’d wondered at first. But then he figured it must only be thunder as the sound had rumbled on for some time, until it had finally faded away. Though the sun had been shining brightly beyond the windows…

He’d returned his attention to his report, and had finished just before the chimes sounded and the muezzin called the faithful to mid day prayers from the top of the White House. Dutifully he’d joined the Grand Ayatollah in spreading his prayer rug and prostrating himself as the strictures of the faith demanded.

Duty to Allah completed, duty to stomach led him and the old man out of the office that had once been the apparent center of power in the world and through the candle lit corridors to the main dining room. Here they found the rest of the old man’s staff and family looking about in bewilderment at the tables and chairs. Where he normally saw the best china and silver and crystal ware, with snowy linen, the tables stood bare and empty. Worse, the silent servitors who usually seated them and provided them with the noon meal had unaccountably abandoned their rigid duty.

Ice water seemed to run down Abdul’s spine. That muffled boom. That odd knowing look on the hatchet face of the kefir running the cruise line—who he privately figured must have been a high-ranking member of the now disbanded US Navy. Something long-expected must have happened, and the silent servitors must have been part of it.

He tagged a couple of the ayatollah’s enforcers and urged them to accompany him. It took awhile to find the way down to the housekeeping level, and more time to find the kitchen.

The doors had been wrenched from their hinges—not outward, as one might expect of a bomb, but inward. Other than that, and the fact that only a pot of soup stood on the wood stove, nothing seemed seriously amiss.

The savory scent of the gently bubbling pot only added to the quivering terror in his stomach. No effort had been made even to prepare the noon meal—save for the soup. He grabbed his courage with both hands and stalked over to the large pot. Half-afraid of what he would find inside, he lifted the lid with a potholder and set it aside, then stirred the brown mixture with the ladle. He recognized the pinkish meat floating amid the beans as ham, and made a face.

“What’s wrong?” asked one of the guards.

Abdul looked at him. “The kefirs have played a very unpleasant joke on us. The only thing they have prepared for our noon meal is this soup of beans and ham. And they have vanished into thin air, quite literally. I doubt we shall ever find them.”

He put the lid back on the pot, then went to see if there might be anything else edible in the kitchen. He’d been wondering for the last week at some of the odd combinations of food at their meals, so he was not surprised to find nothing left in any of the storage areas. Indeed, they had been cleaned out as if the servitors had desired to leave no evidence they had ever existed. He checked the garbage bin, but found only a few dry rinds of onion and wilted leaves of lettuce or cabbage.

“You, go tell the ayatollah and the others that their choice is to eat forbidden food—this soup—or go hungry. I must find out just how far this joke extends.”

He swept out, leaving the guards to fend for themselves.

***

His investigations over the course of the weekend had revealed that fully half of the slaves on the work farms had vanished, leaving the other half severely injured by what looked uncomfortably like radiation poisoning. He’d barely managed to force down a late afternoon meal of thin vegetable soup at one camp. Even worse, the harems kept for the reward of the best workers and the overseers had lost even more of their residents. Those females remaining had also been severely burned and probably wouldn’t last out the week.

By Monday morning, his usual day for visiting the cruise line offices, the magnitude of the disaster had begun to sink in. He was no closer to learning where the missing kefirs had gone, though his initial image of them vanishing into thin air best described it as far as he could tell. His quivering terror seemed to have taken up permanent residence in his stomach. As he pulled his carriage to a stop beside the large gray building, he noted all six vessels had been moored side by side along the broad quay. Not only were they not in dry dock, there was no sign of activity anywhere about them.

A shudder ran down his back. It took all the courage he could muster to climb down from the carriage and make his way along the concrete walk to the main entrance.

Last time he’d been here, this whole side of the building had been paneled with fine wood and fieldstone, with plants of various kinds in large ceramic pots. Now all the finery had vanished, just like the kefirs. Even the entry door had disappeared, to be replaced with what must have been the original door. The depressing gray only fed his terror.

On the door, a poster had been attached. He moved closer, battling his reluctance with every step. What new piece of nastiness was he about to find?

The bottom half of the poster caught his attention first as he recognized the Shrine of the Qa’aba in Mecca, only the drapes had been drawn to reveal the Rock usually hidden inside. It bore a distinct resemblance to the most private part of a female—not that he’d ever cared to pay attention himself, only that as a young man at the madrasseh he’d shared quarters with several others who’d had an unholy fascination with such things, and the filthy magazines to feed it.

Above this disgusting profanation of the Holiest of Holies, he now noticed that what he’d at first taken for a representation of the sun was actually the head of a male lion bearing a golden crown and a stern expression. Rays streamed out in all directions.

His shudder began again as he finally noticed the words beneath the image of the shrine. “If you worship a deaf, dumb, and blind rock, you deserve what’s coming to you.” In both Arabic and English, these words had clearly been chosen to grind home the joke. Even worse, this excrescence had been created and signed by a female styling herself as Lt. Lydia Hargrave.

Only with the greatest of difficulty did Abdul manage to keep from punching or kicking the metal door—and risking grave injury to hand or foot. Instead, he tried the handle, but as he’d figured, it had been locked. No doubt he would find the inside looking quite as if no one had ever been there, just like the White House kitchen two days earlier.

The more he thought about what he’d seen and been through the last two days, the harder he shook. What force could cause people to vanish into thin air—specific people, not everyone by any stretch of the imagination—and leave everyone in their immediate vicinity with every evidence of severe radiation poisoning?

This poster suggested the Lion of Judah—the god of the Jews and Christians—had somehow done this. Moreover, this taunt about getting what was coming for worshipping a deaf, dumb, and blind rock only fed the growing terror inside concerning what might be coming.

He ran back to the carriage and threw himself into it, startling the horse. With the last shred of control he could manage, he refrained from whipping the horse into a gallop and guided it at a trot toward the gate through which he’d entered what had once been a Navy base. He still didn’t know how he had managed to make it back to the mayor’s manor.

Although he’d managed to regain a semblance of self-control by the next morning, the word trickling in from the outlying regions of the satrap threatened to unravel it again. For lack of any kind of communication faster than a horse, the headmen of the outlying districts had begun arriving at City Hall starting around dawn, wanting to know what to do about the suddenly emptied villages of the Hidden. He’d told the guards to let them into the council chamber, then had trembled on his prayer rug for nearly four hours before he could gather up the courage to find out if all the headmen for the entire satrap had arrived. He’d prayed as hard as he could for enlightenment about how to deal with this growing disaster—but the memory of that horrible poster kept getting in the way until he wanted to scream.

With a resolute effort he finally managed to shove the whole memory into a closet and lock the door on it. He could guess at what the headmen needed most—an air of confidence and a few crisp orders—and decided best to order them to occupy the now empty villages of the Hidden. They would have to manage the harvest, and spring planting—if they all survived that long. There would be no excuses for failure.

And so he had told them once he’d managed to calm himself to the point where he could function. He had refused to take questions, because he had no answers. They would have to find their own answers. Perhaps the Hidden had left a few clues about how to run a farm, along with the necessary equipment and seed. If not, there would be mass starvation. As he’d swept out of the chamber, he’d decided if it looked like starvation were imminent, he’d find a way out, even if it meant no virgins in Paradise. After all, what need had he for females of any kind?

Now he sat here with the Grand Ayatollah in the Oval Office lit only by the sunlight streaming through the curtained windows. Words still seemed so unnecessary—even if either of them could have found words to describe the disaster looming over them like the biggest sandstorm anyone had ever seen.

True, they still had food to eat, though not much of that, and what little they had was either burnt or raw because the toadies pressed into service as cooks had no idea what to do with it. But for how much longer? The traveling imams reported that the kefirs who had moved onto the abandoned farms clearly had no idea how to do anything related to farming, and that the stock animals had also disappeared. Worse, the original residents had made no effort to provision even themselves for the coming winter, as if they had known they wouldn’t be here. Even when the missing villagers had still been here, they had only provided the tithe of what little they had bothered to grow. There had never been enough left over to put any in storage, even if there’d been any storage space capable of keeping the food from spoiling.

It looked to be a long, hungry winter. Abdul looked at the old man seated across from him and saw the same thought in his dark eyes. Together they rose and Abdul bowed to the ayatollah.

Then he turned and walked out for what he knew would be the last time.

 

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people is coincidental.]

Jamal

 

Jamal hated his job. Yeah, he had a fancy title—Ombudsman for the Patuxent District—but all that meant was he had to spend five days a week on the road picking up the trash for the District Headman. He hated horses and wagons full of bushel baskets of corn, beans, and squash—whatever the villagers saw fit to give him—and especially he hated the villagers. Snotty a**-wipes who pretended he didn’t exist, and certainly wouldn’t give him the time of day. They left their wares out by the road for him to heave into the wagon by himself, if you could believe it. And he couldn’t just throw it in any which way because the Headman would have his head on a platter if any of it got spoiled. After all, the Headman and his gang had to eat—and they had to send their tenth into the County Headman—and so on up the line.

He liked eating, but he hated working for it, especially when he got so little for what he put into it. Worse, whoever did the cooking didn’t seem to care how well it turned out. Half the food he got was burnt, and the other half raw. And the villagers never gave anything except vegetables. They kept the meat for themselves. Though come to think of it, he didn’t recall seeing a lot of meat animals, just horses and oxen. Not that he’d ever been allowed into any of the villages to see what they might be hiding.

He’d tried, once, during his first year on the job. Even now a shudder shook him at the memory of the three big dudes on horse back blocking the drive and waving their hands at him in some mumbo-jumbo as if they’d all been deaf. They’d never looked like they were threatening him—but they obviously weren’t going to let him in, either.

With a sour grumble, he realized he’d nearly reached his first stop on his Monday route, that same village full of deaf mutes he detested so much. They actually had a kind of stand by the road, with the bushel baskets usually neatly lined up on the shelves. Today, however, the shelves were bare, and the gate, usually closed, stood wide open. Jamal frowned. What was this all about?

He pulled the horse to a stop, then climbed down and checked the borrow ditch just to make sure the weather hadn’t removed his take into the weeds. Nothing. His skin tightened in spite of himself. If he didn’t bring in his take, there’d be hell to pay. He looked at the empty stand, then at the open gate. Finally he climbed back up onto the wagon seat and urged the horse onto the drive and through the gate. He noticed it had been neatly tied back, so it wasn’t open by accident.

As he drove the wagon along the gently curving graveled drive, he looked around for any sign of people or animals. All he saw were birds flitting from tree to tree. No horses grazing in the pastures. No people in the fields. No nothing.

The drive soon brought him to a collection of houses forming the actual village. Most of them were mobile homes of various sizes flanking the original farm house. Each of them had a small yard with a vegetable garden. Some had fruit trees and little patios. The drive took him between the original farm house and one of the mobile homes into a common area of some size, with an old-fashioned bandstand in the middle. All the mobile homes actually opened onto this common area. What he’d seen earlier were their back doors.

Each of the houses had been lovingly kept up, with still more flowers and trees in the door yards facing the grassy commons. He followed the graveled drive on around the commons toward the barns and other outbuildings arranged behind the village. Only the birds going about their daily lives broke the eerie silence. No cats, no dogs, no farm animals, and especially no people.

He pulled to a stop in the barnyard and climbed down again to look through all the outbuildings. All the stalls stood empty, the tack had been neatly hung, the milk buckets washed and stacked. The only sound that reached his ears was the squeaking of the mice in the haymow. The chicken coop sat empty as well, its door open. The pond for the ducks and geese rippled lightly in the gentle breeze, its residents no longer home.

No answers here. Jamal decided he’d have to risk entering one of the houses. He took a deep breath, then stepped up onto the small porch and knocked. No answer. He tried the door knob, to find it unlocked.

“Yoo hoo, anybody home?” He felt stupid, but better to be at least a little polite when faced with something this weird. Still no answer. One foot after the other, he crept into the house to find it as empty as the barn. Neatly kept, nothing out of place, just empty, as if its owners had merely stepped out for awhile. The dishes had all been done and put away. The beds had all been made. Even the clothes had all been washed and put away. There weren’t even any dirty clothes in the hamper.

A shudder started somewhere deep inside. The owners of this place hadn’t just stepped out for awhile. Only people who were going away for a long time left things this neat. Jamal found he couldn’t stand being in this house any longer and left as quickly as he could. Outside, he shuddered even harder, because the door had been unlocked. Only people who were going away forever and didn’t care what happened to the belongings they left behind would leave the door unlocked.

Where had they gone? And how had they gone? The horses and oxen were missing, but all the wagons and tack were still in the barn. He didn’t think there’d been nearly enough horses or oxen to carry all the villagers and whatever supplies they might have taken, and he hadn’t heard of any groups of people passing through the check points.

He climbed back up to his seat and clucked to the patient horse. A few minutes later found him out on the road again, headed toward the next village on the list for today. Maybe he was just imagining things. Maybe the folk in that village had just up and left to move to a different village. He tried not to think about what he’d tell the Headman if all his villages were as mysteriously empty as the first.

Unfortunately, the second village was just as empty as the first. Jamal did, however, have the presence of mind left to fill some of his empty bushel baskets with corn and beans and squash from the gardens left untended. At least, he thought, he wouldn’t go back completely empty handed, even if it took him three times as long. What he would do next week, he had no idea—but he’d leave that for the Headman to figure out.

Still, it was well after dark by the time he returned to the torch lit compound in Bowie presided over by the Headman.

“You late, bro!” growled one of the guards.

“I gotta see the Headman. Something seriously bad is goin’ on and he needs t’ know about it.”

The guard might have protested but his buddy shushed him. “Jamal’s right, bro. You ain’t the first t’ say that, Jamal. Headman wants to know what you know. Go right on up.”

One of the younger boys came over to take the reins from Jamal as he climbed down, then led the tired horse one way while Jamal stretched his long legs toward the Headman’s house. He had to detour around piles of trash no one cared to clean up, and the contrast with the neatness he’d seen in the empty villages only added to the terror quaking his insides.

The door guard took one look at his face and let him in without a word. Down the narrow hall, lit only by candles on brackets nailed to the walls, he paced, avoiding the little piles of puddled wax beneath them. He found the Headman in his office, once the living room of this old house. The other ombudsmen looked around at him, the same look on their faces as he knew must be on his.

“Your villages also empty?” asked the Headman.

Jamal nodded. “I picked a wagon load o’ veggies, but they ain’t no people and no animals bigger’n a crow out there. It’s like they all just vanished into thin air.”

The other men shared a look that told Jamal they’d reached the same conclusion.

The Headman rubbed a hand over the worried look on his stubbled face. “That’s fifty villages—that we know of—that’ve just up an’ vanished. At least Jamal has his head screwed on tight enough t’ remember we gotta have food, an’ it’s still there for the pickin’. Tomorrow, I want the rest of you to go out to your villages with your empty baskets like usual, but you each take a couple o’ kids to help you pick. Jamal, you’re comin’ with me to see the Man in DC tomorrow. He probably knows about this already ‘cause I’d be mighty surprised if it was just our villages that disappeared. We’re gonna have t’ make some other arrangements ‘cause winter’s just around the corner.”

A collective shudder shook everyone. Winters were hard enough as it was. Without the food from the villages, winter would be impossible this year.

“Go get you some dinner, then hit the sack. We got our work cut out for us tomorrow.”

***

Next morning, after a breakfast of lumpy oatmeal with no milk or sugar—far cry from what Jamal remembered his mamma cooking up when he was a kid back before the world really fell apart—Jamal joined the Headman in the ancient two wheeled carriage the Headman used for business trips like this one. Jamal wasn’t sure he wanted to go anywhere with the Headman, let alone Washington, DC to see the Man. But it wasn’t like he had any choice—and for once the Headman didn’t seem angry, just very worried.

Under other circumstances, perhaps Jamal would have enjoyed watching the quiet countryside roll by. Unfortunately, their road took them past one of his five silent villages, its gate tied open instead of shut, before it reached the freeway. The quaking terror grabbed his guts again as he remembered their mysterious emptiness, the sense that their inhabitants had gone away forever, with no intention of returning. Yet they’d wanted to leave their homes neat as a pin lest anyone think the less of them. Kind of like his mamma had always insisted he make his bed and put his toys away before going to school. He still made his bed, and his space in the dorm he shared with the other ombudsmen was still neat as a pin compared to theirs.

The Headman drove on at a trot, the steel shod wheels of the carriage hissing softly on the concrete of the expressway. Once upon a time, Jamal remembered, cars had been backed up for miles in both directions at rush hour, but the cars had all gone away by the time he’d turned 10.

He pushed away the painful memories of the constant hunger and the struggle his mamma had gone through to make ends meet during the horrible years of President Everest’s rule, and how she’d died in the food riots of 2013. He’d nearly starved to death before the Headman had gathered him up along with a lot of other starving kids and brought them to the house in Bowie. Somehow they’d all managed to survive for the last ten years, mostly on the food provided by the villagers, he had to admit now, because none of them had a clue about how to grow any of it themselves, not even the Headman.

The countryside suddenly gave way to abandoned buildings as they crossed the line into DC, at least on his side. A stone wall on the other side set off the National Arboretum and a vague memory of visiting it with his mother as a child, when they’d still lived here.

Eventually the freeway turned into New York Avenue and the Headman slowed the carriage to a walk in order to thread his way past the debris left by the long ago riots that had depopulated a lot of the city, and made worse by wind and weather ever since. It had taken two hours to get this far from Bowie. It took another hour to reach City Hall, where the Man had his offices.

Here they found carriages of all kinds lined up around the block. The Headman muttered a curse, then found a place for their carriage. Jamal tied the reins to a post that had once held up a parking meter, then slid a nosebag with grain over the horse’s head since it looked like they’d be awhile. He followed the Headman around to the stone steps leading up to the once grand entrance. The Headman flashed the greeting sign, to be answered by the two guards, one of whom opened the door.

“Council Chambers.” The other guard jerked his head toward the door.

Jamal followed the Headman down the wide hall to the council chambers, marked by two more guards. Once inside, they found the large room jam packed with people like them, all with a common expression of worry as they murmured among themselves. The Headman seemed to know a fair number of his fellow headmen, for he nodded and flashed greeting signs with them. Jamal stuck close to him, uncomfortable among these older men. Most of them, like his own headman, looked like football linebackers who’d gone to fat. Although his headman usually wore wrinkled and stained khaki pants and a muscle t-shirt in the summer, today he’d shaved and dressed in the robe and kaffiyeh he usually wore only on those Fridays when the Imam serving the county came by for prayers. He’d made Jamal put on his best tunic and trousers as well. The other headmen had likewise dressed for prayers. It occurred to Jamal to wonder if perhaps the situation didn’t call for some serious praying—and who would answer those prayers.

The door guards came in and rapped their spear-tipped staffs hard on the marble tiles to get everyone’s attention. The headmen scurried to take seats behind the balustrade separating the space for the audience from the space for the city council. Jamal found himself squished between his headman and a stranger in the front row, apparently the least desired spot, given the rush toward the back.

The door to the right of the long, curved bank once reserved for the Mayor and City Council members opened to admit the Man and his favorites. Unlike him and most of the headmen around him, the Man looked like an Arab. Haughty contempt sat on his long, hooked nose as his toadies helped him into the Mayor’s chair, then took seats on either side of him. Beneath that haughty look, though, Jamal thought he saw the same worried look his headman had now carefully hidden.

He found himself wishing he were anywhere but here.

 

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people is coincidental.]

Yuri Golanich

 

Lt. Yuri Golanich, senior satellite imaging technician, read the print out of the email from General Yaroslav for the fifth time in the last ten minutes. He’d already sent the commands to all the spy satellites currently active to go to live feed to this control center for recording, beginning at 19:20 Moscow time. The recording had started five minutes earlier. As he scanned the displays showing the fields of view for each satellite, Golanich wondered again what this was all about. And why had the general insisted he be alone in the building during the recording, much less that he make sure the president saw the recordings—but only when the president specifically asked for them? What did the general know that he wasn’t telling anyone else?

Not his to question orders, the lieutenant reminded himself. No doubt everything would be made clear eventually. He leaned back in the beat up old captain’s chair, the better to enjoy a drag on his cigarette while he waited for whatever the general thought would happen.

In the screens, Earth turned beneath the eyes in the sky. He looked up at the main screen showing the composite image as a modified Mercator projection centered on the Prime Meridian. This meant, of course, that the far eastern end of Russia appeared highly distorted, as did the state of Alaska, but most of the civilized and semi-civilized world appeared reasonably undistorted.

The fields of view for each satellite appeared as a large oval centered on a dotted curve representing its orbit. All of the land masses fell within one or more of the ovals moving slowly along the orbital track for its satellite. As far as he could tell, nothing seemed amiss. The left half of the world faced the sun, with the terminator, tracking as a nearly vertical line at this time of year, just a little to the left of Jerusalem.

Golanich made a face. How could one tiny country bear such a big shadow that it had cowed most of the world? One would think the nuking of Damascus would have had the Muslims up in arms to smash once and for all the thorn in their side. Yet there’d been nary a peep out of them since that day three years earlier. The only thing Golanich could think would make the Muslims shut up was a hidden threat to nuke Mecca and Medina if they tried anything else.

What was it with the Israelis and the Americans that made everyone treat them with respect? Well, once the Americans had been worth treating with respect, but since that female had taken the reins and driven the once mighty nation back to the Stone Age, and the Muslims had then forced her out of office, the U.S. had become a national laughingstock.

Now that he thought about it, though, General Yaroslav had never shown any interest in laughing at that humbled nation. What did he know that no one else did?

Before Golanich could speculate on possible answers to that question, a ripple of light flared across the main screen, centered on Jerusalem and flowing east and west so fast the flash might as well have been simultaneous at all points. The lieutenant sat up with a start. Almost as quickly as it had appeared, the flash faded and the world looked as it had before.

“What the hell was that!” Golanich couldn’t quite keep his voice down. Then he remembered that everyone else had gone home long before—those that were scheduled to come in on the weekend.

This must be what the general had been expecting to happen. Golanich hesitated, then decided to let the recording go on for another ten minutes. Then he would cut it off and start the multispectral analysis program centered on that flash.

The rumble of distant thunder reached his ears through the thick walls of the building. He frowned as the sound faded slowly. The day had been clear and cold earlier. Too cold to allow thunderstorms to build up. Was it possible the sound he heard might be related in any way to the flash he’d just recorded?

Icy fingers grabbed his guts and squeezed. If it were, the flash must have been at ground level, and for him to be able to hear it at all suggested that it must have been quite loud at ground zero. But what kind of phenomenon could cause something visible across the globe from space yet mild enough to produce the sound of distant thunder without making the ground tremble noticeably?

The ten minutes up, he stopped the recording and called up the multispectral analysis program to examine the flash more thoroughly. By the time he finished and appended the collection of charts and graphs to the recording, his puzzlement had turned into bewilderment verging on terror. At all frequencies monitored by the satellites, the energy levels had spiked well beyond the ability of the instruments to measure, and had vanished just as quickly. For all intents and purposes, the flash had been the purest of whites. It had lasted less than a second.

He reran the recording to the moment of the flash. Not only had it been simultaneous, the ripple effect merely evidence of light lag for the signals from the satellites, it looked like an elegant amoeba, with some areas more concentrated than others, and some areas completely untouched.

One eyebrow lofted, Golanich called up an overlay showing the world political divisions. Interesting that the density levels should be distributed the way they were. Many of the high density areas matched heavily populated areas—while other heavily populated areas showed either very small, but very high density flashes, or no flashes at all. On the other hand, the U.S. showed a large number of medium level flashes, almost all of them in the hinterlands.

The icy fingers twisted a little harder. He wasn’t an expert on atomic theory, but he’d learned enough to understand E=MC². The only question he had no answer for now was just what had been converted into energy—and why was he still here? Hell, why was Earth still here?

Did he dare try to reach the general? He picked up the phone at the end of the curving counter, hesitated, then dialed the number in Yaroslav’s signature on the email. He let it ring eight times before he decided Yaroslav wasn’t going to answer it. Of course, why should he if this were his office number? He’d probably be at home, or possibly at his dacha for the weekend. He hung up the phone.

On a hunch, he pulled up an image from one of the very high resolution satellites, this one covering a swath that included Washington, DC. He replaced the worldview on the main screen with an image taken just before the flash, then zoomed in until he could make out one of the work farms and the dots representing the workers. He’d watched these workers before at their tasks. In this image, they appeared to be harvesting wheat. He counted ten in the row, and one behind them—the overseer, no doubt.

Golanich pulled up the next frame in the sequence, then the next. On the third frame, he hit pay dirt. Three of the dots had become pinpoints of light so bright the entire frame looked washed out. His breath escaped in a grunt, as if he’d been punched in the stomach. With an effort, he advanced the recording one frame at a time until the pinpoints vanished, leaving the line of workers minus three.

He returned to the original frame he’d started from, then recorded each one separately. The president would have to see them in order to understand what had happened. Golanich returned to the composite image of the flash world wide and studied the distribution of the flashes for a long moment. If he were forced to hazard a guess, he’d have to say somewhere around a billion human beings had just vanished. Furthermore, that number most likely did not include very many Muslims, as their nations showed few or no flashes. It probably didn’t include a lot of Chinese or Indians, either, for those nations also showed relatively few flashes. It did apparently include a very large number of those hailing from one or another of the divisions of Christianity, given the high density of the flashes in those nations, including Russia, with strong Christian roots, particularly in the hinterlands.

The icy fingers squeezed even harder as he began to realize the primary food producers had largely vanished, save in India and China, and in the Muslim world. A shudder ran down his back. Bad enough that President Everest, in her determined effort to take the U.S. back to the Stone Age, had plunged the rest of the world into a deepening depression that had led to episodes of mass starvation around the world, particularly in Mother Russia, China, and India already. Now, just as some hopeful signs of recovery had begun to appear, at least in Europe and Asia, this had to happen. He decided he wouldn’t be surprised if most of Eastern Europe, including Russia west of the Urals, had lost half to three-quarters of its population, given the rise of the Greco-Russian Orthodox Church over the last few years.

No, President Alexiev would not like this report at all. As for why General Yaroslav had detailed him to compile it and make the presentation, the only reason Golanich could think of was that Yaroslav had expected to be one of those flashes of light, and that he’d figured Golanich, a thorough-going agnostic with no use for the opiate of the masses, would be left behind.

“Thanks a lot, Tovarishche!” he grumbled as he stubbed his cigarette out in the ash tray beside the phone.

He jumped as it rang with an ominous tone. It took him three rings to gather his courage enough to pick it up.

“Golanich.”

“I have President Alexiev on the line.”

“Da!”

He jerked the phone away from his ear at the bull roar of the ruler of all Russia, lest it break his eardrum.

“What the hell is going on! Where’s General Yaroslav?! Why do I have an email from him that tells me to call this number at 20:00 hours on a Saturday night? Half the cathedrals have collapsed! The people are in hysterics! I’ve called out the guard to put down riots all over Moscow—and half the guard is missing! The other half is too sick to function! I’ve got troops on the way from the army base—but how many of them will be any good, I have no idea. I want answers, and I want them now!”

“Yessir!” Golanich barked. “I have your answers, but you must come to the satellite control center so that I can show you what has happened. You may wish to bring your remaining advisors so you can all see it at the same time. As for General Yaroslav, he has gone and will never return.”

“What?!”

Golanich hung up. No point in wasting any more time on the president. He had a report to put together, and about fifteen minutes to do it. He lit another cigarette, ignored the jangle of the phone, and thought how best to tell the horrible story. Perhaps, just perhaps, Alexiev would be kind enough to shoot him when he’d finished. It was probably too late to hope he could join Yaroslav wherever he might be now, but the last thing he wanted was to live through the hell he foresaw bearing down on the world.

***

President Alexiev cursed under his breath as the clunky old limousine pulled up before the non-descript windowless building housing the satellite control center within the compound reserved for handling intelligence from all sources. Only the forest of radio dishes on the roof told him he was in the right place. Perhaps because it was late evening on a Saturday the compound seemed completely deserted.

As the driver pulled to a stop before the short stairway leading up to the unadorned door, it opened and a middle-aged man came out on the porch. While his uniform had lost the sharpness of knife creases, he had at least made sure his shirt tails had been tucked into his pants and his jacket had been buttoned properly.

The president climbed out of the passenger compartment, followed by the Minister of Defense, the only advisor he’d been able to reach. He hoped the rest of them had simply gone to their dachas for the weekend.

The officer—a lieutenant by the tabs on his collar—ushered him and the defense minister inside with a slight bow. Alexiev reminded himself that he was a civilian, not an army officer, so this was proper behavior.

“Lt. Golanich, senior satellite technician. General Yaroslav requested that I record live all the observations of our spy satellites from 19:20 to 19:40 hours, our time. I have done so, and have performed a multi-spectral analysis, as well as examined a number of high-resolution images of the event.”

As the tall, thin lieutenant spoke, he led his guests down a short hall, then through a plain door at the end. Here the president found himself in what must be the control center for the spy satellite network. The main screen showed a map of the world at the moment of the event.

His mouth dropped open as the enormity of the disaster slugged him in the stomach. Beside him, the defense minister look just as horrified.

“How many…?” He couldn’t get the rest of the words out.

Golanich looked at him with an expression almost of pity. “I can only hazard a guess, sir. But my guess is that somewhere around a billion people have vanished into thin air. The flash appears to represent their conversion from matter into energy, but must only be the tiniest back-splash of radiation, otherwise the entire planet would have blown apart. The rumbling thunder we heard most likely resulted from the inrushing of air to fill their places. This is probably also what caused the cathedrals to implode. Anyone—left behind—who stood in the vicinity of those who vanished most likely received a lethal blast of gamma radiation, while those at a greater distance would have received sub-lethal doses. Again, this is only a guess, but over the next two weeks, we will probably lose up to 100,000,000 more people world wide from radiation poisoning. It’s impossible to say what all this means in the way of economic damage.”

The two men stared at him, then at the screen.

“And General Yaroslav left you to record the worst disaster in human history? I suppose he was one of those flashes—along with nearly all of my cabinet?”

Golanich nodded. “I expect he figured I was sufficiently agnostic not to be taken out in the twinkling of an eye. I also expect he would want this information made public. Those left behind have a right to know what happened—and what to expect over the next few years.”

Alexiev shuddered in spite of himself at the lieutenant’s incredibly calm tone. Golanich handed over a set of DVDs in plastic cases.

“Everything is there for distribution as you see fit. As for me, I’ve done my duty. I would greatly appreciate it if one of you would kill me. Otherwise I’ll have to go home and take poison, and that’s so inconvenient.” He hesitated, then added, “And no, your tasks are by no means finished. If what will be IS, then you can only do what you are supposed to do, whether you want to or not. I think you will both find yourselves longing for death and finding it nowhere until you’ve completed your purposes here. I also think that if you study the Book of the Revelation in particular, and the rest of the Bible in general, you will find the answers you seek, and perhaps a little hope as well.”

The president and the minister of defense shared a look. What an odd little speech. Alexiev looked back at the screen, its patterns blurring as tears welled up at the thought of the long, dark night that lay ahead—and that tiniest glimpse of hope at the end.

He took out his pistol and shot the good and faithful servant between the eyes.

 

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people is coincidental.]

Alexander Broz

 

Alexander Broz repressed the urge to growl in disgust at the aide struggling to help him into his tie and tails for the state dinner to commence at sunset on the piazza of the presidential palace of Macedonia. He wasn’t president yet, only vice president, but he still had to be there.

Patience at an end, he shrugged off the aide and finished pulling on the jacket. After twitching it into place, he went to work on the bow tie. A handsome man in his middle forties, Alexander had good reason to believe himself descended from Phillip of Macedonia, if not from his namesake. If he had anything to say about it, he would soon outdo his namesake for territory under his command. Not, of course, that he had said anything about it. One thing he had learned as a child in the bad old days of Yugoslavia was that a secret shared with anyone lost all hope of remaining a secret. Though he allied himself with others as needed to advance, he shared no secrets with them, and had no qualms about abandoning his allies when they ceased to have value to him. They understood, after all; they’d had no qualms about abandoning him. He had made that mistake only once. Fortunately he’d been able to recover quickly by making a better alliance before word got out.

Finished with his tie, Alexander took his top hat from the aide and set it carefully atop his wavy black hair with its wings of silver at the temples. He schooled himself to the expression of gravity that attracted men and women alike to his side. He cared nothing for the women; they served merely as sometime useful decorations. He cared little for the men save those few elders who remained to be swayed to his way of thinking. He would be president of Macedonia before the end of the year. After that, it was only a matter of time before his carefully crafted and executed plan led him to larger domains.

He put those thoughts out of his mind. One thing at a time, he reminded himself as he fastened his opera cloak about his neck beneath the tie, then took his walking stick from the aide. One last look in the mirror to assure himself that he’d forgotten nothing and it was time to leave. With no more attention to the aide than he might have given to a hat rack, Alexander swept out.

In the limousine taking him to the presidential palace from his residence, Alexander perched his top hat on one knee and considered his current situation. The Muslims had, for all intents and purposes, gained control of the European Union, even over the strenuous objections of Spain, Italy, and the Eastern European nations, including Macedonia. He hated Islam and its lazy adherents. But let them think they’d won for awhile longer. He had a bigger problem called the Greco-Russian Orthodox Church. In response to the resurgence of the Muslim tide into Europe and their takeover of the nation once called the United States—and now renamed the United Islamic States of America—the Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox Churches had put aside their differences and united to battle back against the Muslims on the spiritual plane. They fought their battle village church by village church. As long as they kept their parishioners’ eyes on God, those parishioners wouldn’t put their eyes where they belonged, on him. How could he possibly persuade people who believed the end of the age was at hand and they would soon go to heaven that he was their natural ruler and they should pay attention to him?

With an effort he resisted the urge to let his disgust replace the expression of gravity on his face. He couldn’t trust the driver not to see it and start wondering. He must never allow cracks to appear in his armor lest others see the utter contempt he felt for them. In time, perhaps, when he ruled the world—but not now.

The limousine pulled into the line of others disgorging their passengers. Alexander’s gray eyes catalogued the glitterati as they paced the red carpet to the gilded entry, with its pair of footmen in elegant livery of ancient cut. Again he repressed the bitter gall that he must smile and flatter these toads. Unlike his namesake, he knew that power did not come at the edge of the sword. His weapon of choice was his voice, carefully cultivated and exquisitely tuned over the decades of his rise to power. Not for nothing had he studied the speeches of Hitler and many others. How that man could talk! How he could shape the needs and wants of the ravening beast into a unity he could ride to power.

Not that there would be any need for that tonight, of course. Others would speak. He would listen. Now and again, it might be that he could use the stiletto to achieve his ends rather than the scimitar. The one thing Hitler had never really understood was that the stiletto could be just as effective as the scimitar, and that details mattered. His rise to power must be seen as the will of the people, not the result of boots in the street. He had no army. He had no advisors, close or not. He would not make the mistakes Hitler had made.

As a doorman bent to open the door so he could make his grand entrance, Alexander tugged his expression of gravity back into place and with studied grace removed himself from the limousine to strike a subtle pose as he placed his top hat on his head. As always seemed to happen, a sigh went up from the crowd behind the velvet ropes bordering the red carpet. He ignored the people. They didn’t want a politician, they wanted a prince among men. No, actually they wanted a king, but for now they would settle for a prince. Princes did not acknowledge the hopes and dreams of the peasants. Peasants existed only to serve the needs and desires of the king. And they knew it deep down inside.

He felt his expression of gravity about to slip and tugged it back into place as the footmen opened the doors before him. Another footman escorted him at a solemn pace through the glittering palace to the entrance onto the piazza, aglow in the late afternoon sun. As the footmen here opened the French doors, Alexander again struck his subtle pose until all eyes had turned to him. Though these people were anything but peasants, he still heard that soft sigh, mainly from the women, this time. As he had before, he ignored it as he handed his top hat and walking stick to the footman who had accompanied him, followed by his opera cloak. An obsequious servitor approached to escort him to his seat at the head table. Since some long forgotten rule of protocol demanded that there be equal numbers of men and women, and that they must alternate, he found himself seated between the president’s ugly, overdressed wife and his younger daughter, Beatrice, who echoed her disgusting mother in every particular.

Again Alexander caught his expression of gravity before it could transform into the disgust he really felt. He must maintain his self-control. There would be time later to cement alliances. For now he must engage in small talk with this stupid female as if she meant something to him. At least dinner would soon be served, and that would distract her to some degree. Not only that but he’d long ago learned that all he really needed to do was ask a simple question about how her day had gone and she would think him the most brilliant conversationalist ever as she told him in excruciatingly boring detail about every minute of the day. The occasional agreeable noise and a look of rapt interest were generally all he needed to get through dinner.

As it had before so his little trick worked again. Indeed, he made it all the way through dessert without having to say another word. Then, perhaps it was because the servitor distracted him from his pose of interest and Beatrice noticed something about his expression, she laid a gloved hand on his arm and leaned a little closer.

“Have you heard anything about the Feast of Trumpets? I overheard my maids talking about going to the Cathedral for a special mass this evening.”

He blinked at her. The expression on her face suggested this was more important than it might seem. He allowed a thoughtful frown to crease his expression of gravity.

“The term sounds vaguely familiar, but I haven’t heard of it in connection with the usual feast days. It seems more like something Jewish.”

The dance band sounded the tuning note before he could continue the thought. Beatrice excused herself and rose to join the younger set near the band. Alexander waited a moment longer, then excused himself to the president’s wife, who barely nodded. He made his way to the balustrade overlooked the city below. The sun had just set beyond the west end of the piazza and the city lights had begun to make themselves visible.

The distant sound of church bells drifted up to his ears. Idly he let his gaze follow the sound to the cathedral almost directly below the palace and halfway down to the lake. A moment later, the dance band began a waltz and drowned out the bells. He glanced at his watch. 6:29 p.m. In spite of himself, he looked up at the blue bowl of early dusk to see if any stars were yet visible. They might be in Jerusalem where the priests must be making ready to blow the long blast on the shofar signaling the end of the first day of Rosh Hashanah.

Almost, he thought he could hear it, though common sense told him it was only the trumpets in the band. Almost he turned away from the view—just as a flare of brilliant white light tore the cathedral apart. Alexander stared. Rather than exploding outward, as one might expect of a bomb, the ancient stones of the cathedral imploded, as if something had sucked all the air out of it. By the time the deep rumble of thousands of tons of stone collapsing reached his ears, the rubble had disappeared behind a veil of dust.

How many people lay beneath the pile of rock, he wondered.

“What’s going on?”

He looked up to find the president standing beside him.

“I have no idea, but it appears that the cathedral has just collapsed. I was enjoying the view when I saw a brilliant flash of light from the cathedral. Then it just—fell in on itself. Your daughter asked me about something called the Feast of Trumpets and mentioned that her maids had planned to attend a special mass there this evening. If that’s true…”

The president turned and started issuing commands to his aides before Alexander could finish the thought. He turned back to the slowly dispersing cloud of dust and wondered how many hundreds of peasants lay buried beneath the ruins. Then he wondered if this was an isolated instance—or if it might be part of a larger collection of similar events. If it were what he was beginning to think it might be, it appeared that perhaps the Greco-Russian Orthodox Church might have just been removed from his path to power.

His presence at this party was no longer needed. With care, he eased his way through the crowd, half of whom seemed determined to party on while the other half wasted breath asking each other what was going on.

Not until he closed his office door behind him twenty minutes later did he breathe a sigh of relief. As he turned on the news and took a seat on his couch, he mulled over the half-forgotten scraps of religious history he’d picked up during his travels and his research on the Internet. He listened with half an ear as the news team babbled about the collapse of the cathedral, and decided he wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that none of the worshipers had been left behind in the rubble. If this really were what the American Evangelicals called the Rapture, then wherever the worshipers were, it wasn’t here on Earth.

Perhaps he could turn the inevitable panic to his advantage. Now that the peasants with their eyes on God had left this mortal coil, those that had been left behind would be looking for leadership in what they feared would be dark days ahead. But he would still have to move very carefully lest he inadvertently focus that fear on himself. For now, that meant staying out of the president’s way and letting him have all the glory. After all, his own role was to serve as a replacement, therefore to stay out of danger and out of the public eye.

The camera focused on a peasant whose face had turned bright red and who appeared to have been blinded by the flash. He babbled incoherently. Alexander tilted his head to one side as he wondered what kind of readings a scintillation counter would get. If he didn’t know better, he’d think the peasant had a bad case of radiation poisoning.

A shudder trickled down his back as his schooling in physics came back to haunt him. How badly has he been exposed? He rose and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. So far his face seemed unchanged, and certainly he hadn’t been blinded. Still, if the flash had been a full spectrum flash from radio waves all the way up to gamma rays, that must represent a tremendous amount of energy. How was it the whole city hadn’t been flattened? And if this were only one instance of many, how was it Earth itself hadn’t been blown apart?

Might God really exist after all? Might He have had mercy on those left behind, at least to the extent of mitigating the effects of what could only be the complete conversion of the matter composing each of the worshipers into pure energy?

A second shudder shook him as he stared at his image in the mirror. He had long ago decided that the question of whether God existed or not was beyond his answering one way or the other. As far as he was concerned the only thing that mattered was the power to rule the world—to order it as he saw fit.

For now, he chose to believe that the universe had done him a favor by removing all those peasants who had turned their eyes to God instead of to him. God could have them and welcome to them.

He would take all the rest.

 

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people is coincidental.]

Stan Remelick

 

What a come down for a preacher who had once headlined a mega-church to stand here alone on the deck of a house on the cliff overlooking the village of Orick, California. Stan Remelick watched the play of sun and shadow on the ocean with an expression compounded of sour and bitter. Oh, the view was pretty enough, with the ocean framed by redwoods, and the house comfortable enough for a wilderness retreat. But almost ten years in the wilderness, struggling to makes ends meet while the Muslims ran what was left of the country galled him. Worse, the small remnant of his flock which had dragged him here insisted that he get his hands just as dirty as theirs in the daily grind to survive. That was degrading for a preacher called by God to shepherd his people to perfection.

True, they still let him preach on Sunday, but he kept getting the feeling they were laughing at him. Or perhaps indulging him, as they might a spoiled child. Where had he gone wrong? He knew the Bible forward and backward, inside and out. He was supposed to bring the word of God to the heathen—the Muslims in this case—but the elders of his own congregation had literally kidnapped him just before the newly elected mayor and city council of Los Angeles, Muslims all, had taken office in 2014. He’d gone to bed in the mansion belonging to the church and waked up here, two days later, with no idea how he’d been brought here.

For a few months longer, they’d been able to get news over the internet—enough to convince him he really didn’t want to go near any large cities lest he be captured, tortured, and either beheaded or sentenced to a reeducation camp. But that didn’t mean he was happy here, either. His talent for drawing people to the Lord really wasn’t needed here, since his congregation had long ago come to the Lord. What did they need him for, except to help hoe, and plant, and weed the vegetable gardens, or feed and water the sheep, goats, dairy cows, and horses, or help take care of the chickens, ducks and geese?

No matter how many times he’d asked why they’d dragged him here to the end of the world to hide his light under a bushel, no one had ever answered him straight out. Instead, they simply included him in everything they did, whether he wanted to be included or not, and they refused to let him leave the village. He’d tried once or twice, back in the early days, until news came of the trial and execution of Rev. Welland, a well-known fellow evangelist and friend of his. After that, he’d given up trying to escape, though he’d never quite given up hope of being able to return to his wonderful old life where he was known and loved by the masses. If he was loved by his congregation, they sure had a funny way of showing it.

He remembered getting hints in the early years that they were in hiding against a time when the people would rise up against their Muslim lords and masters and take back the country. But sometime around 2016, Angelo Masterson, once the president of the vestry and still acknowledged as leader of the congregation and, indeed, the village onto which it had grafted itself, had returned from a trip with a package. Stan had no idea what might have been in the package, but over the next six months Angelo had shared it with nearly everyone else in the congregation and the village. Whatever they had learned had completely changed their attitude from one of waiting to take back the country to just waiting.

For what? He wondered, not for the first time. The end of the age? The Rapture? Like it or not, no one could know the day or the time for that. Perhaps, though, he should at least have accepted one of Angelo’s invitations to discuss the future. Why hadn’t he?

A sour expression crossed his face. Because he’d felt a towering resentment toward his congregation—toward life in general. Be honest, he told himself now. He’d felt a towering resentment toward God Himself for turning his life upside down and forcing him to spend the last ten years in this god-forsaken hole, doing things only peasants did to earn their daily bread. How many times had he thought—even said aloud when he’d walked the beach late at night—“I’m a preacher for God’s sake! I’m supposed to be bringing in the sheaves—the harvest—of souls to the Lord! Who’s ever going to hear me out here? Who’s ever going to know I existed? I was so close!”

Yeah, he thought now. So close to what? Having it all, like his hero Billy Graham? A bitter snort escaped him. His hero had died, wise and full of years, not long before President Everest had taken office.

Now there was a piece of work! Just thinking of her made the bile rise in his throat. As if her husband back in the 90’s hadn’t been bad enough as president, she’d been ten times worse. He’d gotten a lot of rousing sermons out of her evil actions—not that any of them had done any good. She and her communistic cronies had gone right on trashing the Constitution and the economy as they’d done their level best to turn the country into their socialist utopia. Worse, they’d taken away the tax exempt status of every congregation calling itself Christian and had threatened to confiscate their property if they didn’t stop calling for national repentance. That had happened just before he’d been dragged here.

He couldn’t decide which was worse, President Everest or the Muslim lords and masters. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe Billy Graham had done what he was supposed to do in bringing in the sheaves, and when he’d done, he’d been called home.

“But what am I supposed to do? I always thought I was supposed to be a preacher like him. So why am I here? What is the point of my life?”

“You really want to know?”

He turned sharply to find Angelo standing in the doorway, a sheaf of papers under one arm.

With a deep sigh, Stan threw his hands out. “Yeah, I guess I do. I’ve—been an idiot, and I’m sorry.”

Angelo gave him a lop-sided grin. “We’re all like that sometimes, bro. Come, we haven’t much time.”

Stan let the older man take his elbow and lead him inside to the study where he’d spent so little time throwing together his sermons. Angelo laid the sheaf of papers on the blotter, then led the way out. A few minutes later they clattered down the steps to the flagstones of the wide plaza below the deck. Circled and shaded by towering redwoods, as often as not it had served as their worship center as well as played host to their feasts and celebrations.

The rest of the congregation, which now included all the villagers, to say nothing of a surprising number of animals, from the children’s cats and dogs to the farm animals they’d all cared for over the years, now waited for him and Angelo. A cheer went up as Angelo drew him into the throng. A multitude of hands clapped him on the back—and a multitude of noses nudged him in welcome.

Was he the only one who heard the soft words beneath the joyful noise. “Behold, that which was lost is now found…”

A moment later, as he greeted Maybelle, the Guernsey cow he’d learned to milk with so much difficulty, the distant sound of a shofar horn drifted their way between the trees. Stan looked up with a start to catch the edge of a knowing smile on Angelo’s face. In a flash of insight as everything changed, Stan understood exactly what must have been in that package Angelo had brought home so long ago.

He didn’t deserve to be here on the other side of the twinkling of an eye—but here he stood nevertheless, along with everyone else—and all the animals—who had welcomed him into the congregation at long last. As the liquid fire of Life completed its work, he looked around. Everything glowed, and gleamed, and glittered in a symphony of light in colors he’d never seen before and sounds and scents and sensations he’d never experienced. Maybelle nudged him, her eyes aglow with adoration. His fellow parishioners radiated light. He could still recognize them, but only because enough remained of whom they had been on Earth in the shape of their faces and the sense of their personalities.

The redwood trees seemed still to tower over the plaza on which he and the others stood, but like everything else, they glittered. He could see no darkness in anything around him. He turned to Angelo.

“I guess you were right all along… But what did you all see in me that you’d save me from my idiocy back in L.A.—and put up with my moaning, groaning, bitching, and complaining ever since?”

“You were a great preacher, bro. Most of the folks here with us now wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t brought them to realize there was more to life than the material world. But the harvest ended when the Muslims took power. It was time for us to hide, and to go back to our roots. It just took you a bit longer to grow up, is all.”

A great laugh at the irony welled up and burst free. “I guess!”

When it had run its course, he looked around to find himself alone with Angelo. He could sense the others, and guessed that if he ever felt the need to interact with any of them, he had only to ask. He turned back to Angelo. “So what’s happening on Earth right now.”

He thought about that for a moment, then added, “Let me rephrase that. What happened on Earth at the instant of the Rapture? How many of us came here?”

“Somewhere around a billion from all over the world.” Angelo shrugged, then waved a glowing hand as if rubbing a clear spot on a pane of glass.

A window framed in bright glow appeared before them. The view from the deck as he’d seen it not long before painted itself beyond the glass, only now the plaza had filled with people and animals, all welcoming him. Again he heard that shofar horn, still soft, but multiplied into a song of exquisite joy. He saw himself look up. A flare of brilliant light filled the plaza for an instant, then vanished with a crack as of lightning too close for comfort. Nothing remained to indicate anyone or thing had stood there.

The view changed as the plaza fell away until they hovered several tens of miles above Northern California. Stan wondered what had happened to L.A., and obligingly the view shifted till they seemed to hover above the great basin filled with millions, all ruled by the Muslim lords and masters and their gangs of enforcers and overseers. They drifted lower as Stan sought landmarks.

The Santa Ana Mountains backing the south bay area, and the San Gabriel Mountains to the north made better landmarks than anything man-made, for it appeared large areas had been cleared by fire, then turned into the work farms he’d heard of. He focused on one of these and drifted still lower, until he could make out the rows of dormitories along one long fence with guard towers, and the fields of grains and vegetables laid out like a checkerboard. The slave laborers seemed frozen in time, until Stan realized they really were frozen in time. He went close enough to be able to make out a field of grain, wheat, he thought, with a row of gaunt men of indeterminate age using sickles to sweep the kernels into their woven baskets. He let time begin again for them from just before the last trumpet.

Even though he could guess what would happen, the sound of the horn and the flare of light still caught him by surprise. Only one of the harvesters in this field actually vanished. The crack of inrushing air to replace him startled everyone else, though not for long as the overseer’s whip crack reminded them they had work to do. Stan soon noticed that the two men on either side of the missing man had begun to turn red, as if badly sunburned.

“What happened to the rest of the harvesters—to anyone near the flashes?”

“They die of radiation poisoning. Even the overseer will—and none of them will know why.” Angelo sounded sad. “As for what happens then, that depends on how they choose. The harvesters may follow their brother. The overseer probably will not.”

Stan looked at Angelo to see a single tear glittering on his radiant cheek, then back at the image, frozen once more. “That could’ve been me, too, right?”

“It could’ve been. Fortunately it wasn’t.”

“What really happens to the folks that don’t choose Heaven? Is Hell really as horrible as I painted it sometimes?”

Angelo didn’t answer right away. Stan looked at him again. “It’s worse?”

“If you hated being who you were stuck being—I mean really hated it, like President Everest must have—and wanted only to die and be NOT, how would you perceive all of this?” Angelo waved his hand around at the glory singing about them. “Especially knowing that life here is infinite and eternal?”

“So what is the glory of Heaven to us must be the flames of Hell to those who choose to go on hating God for making them as they are? And the greater their hatred, the greater the pain? But why don’t we hear the screams of the damned in the music around us? Can they change their minds after they come here?”

“Many do—those not so far gone in self-hatred that they simply can’t break loose from the shell of misery they’ve built around themselves. But those who’ve gone furthest into the darkness of denial—too far to be able to admit their misunderstanding—take one look around, panic, and dive into the darkest blackness of their own self-denial. I suppose, to a physicist—and many of them made it here, much to their surprise—it would be as if such a person had become a black hole. Their screams of agony would be locked into the singularity with them.” Angelo thought for a moment. “G.K. Chesterson once said Satan fell through force of gravity, by which he meant both gravity in the sense known by the physicists and gravity in the sense of lack of humor or perspective. Without levity—the ability to recognize one’s folly and laugh at it—how could such a person as Hitler, or Stalin, or even President Everest do anything but collapse into a black hole in his—or her—effort to ‘curl up and die’?”

Stan shuddered in spite of himself. That had almost been him. Angelo put a glittering hand on his shoulder. “But it wasn’t. Come, bro. You can’t reach the truly Lost, but there are many here who could use your help to grow in wonder.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Those of us called out in the Rapture have the advantage of perceiving reality from what might be called the perspective of the Cherubim and Seraphim. These structures we think of as trees are actually super clusters of galaxies. Every point that glitters is a galaxy. But most who come here after death remain barely larger than they were in life, especially those who never grew beyond the effort to satisfy the physical needs in life. They become parts of the Life of the Whole, as drops of rain become at one with the ocean. In that instant before they dissolve into the whole, some of them need a little help accepting the reality that they are, in fact, forgiven forever. Then they will be able to sleep in peace.”

Stan looked at the image of the harvesters and the overseer, then at Angelo. Even as Angelo had provided him with comfort, could he do any less for the poor souls about to be afflicted by the trials of the Tribulation on Earth?

With that thought and the certain knowledge that he could never lose the sound and sight, the touch, taste, and scent of Heaven, Stan stepped through the frame and into the picture to hover above the Earth with a multitude of others like himself, ready to provide such comfort as he could to those poor souls who had none in life.

 

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people is coincidental.]

Mike Dewitt

 

As he often did on a Saturday morning, Mike Dewitt rode over to the silent radio telescopes of the National Radio Astronomy Very Large Array east of Agustin, New Mexico to remember the days when he and his fellows had studied the heavens in hopes of answering the great questions. That had all ended when the Muslims had taken over in 2014, not by force but through election to public office.

It wasn’t so much that they hated science as that it simply wasn’t important to them. They felt they had all the answers in the Quran and related books. Not only that, but the home-grown Muslims were mainly city folk and had no interest in the wide open spaces of the nation. There weren’t enough people to lord it over out here in the boonies, especially when the only means of long distance travel was by horseback, wagon, or stage coach if one had the gold for it.

That state of affairs could be laid right at the feet of President Everest and her socialist cronies who had decreed Big Oil to be the worst of evils and had taxed it out of existence, at least in the U.S. Since President Everest hadn’t had any use for science either, Mike had seen the handwriting on the wall as early as 2010, though he hadn’t done anything about it till the National Science Foundation had been disbanded in 2012, right after the election.

Well, that wasn’t quite true, he reminded himself. The 2^nd Great Depression had forced him and his fellow scientists to work together with the other residents of Agustin just to survive by finding ways to become self sufficient in food and water. He’d been surprised at how good it felt to become part of a community. He supposed, all things considered, that he had needed that experience to help him get his feet back on the ground. It was all very well to ask the great questions and try to find answers, but what was the point if those answers couldn’t be communicated to ordinary folks with ordinary needs?

If anything, he had learned more from these ordinary folks, many of them descendents of the Conquistadors and the Native Americans, about what was important than they had ever learned from him. They understood that life was all of a piece, even the distant reaches of the heavens he and his fellows had probed for so long. And they knew that the highest good was to help each other when asked. It wasn’t that the great questions weren’t important. It was that they already knew—and lived—the answers. Still, he lived to satisfy his abiding curiosity, and there must be a reason for that, too.

He pulled his mount to a stop beneath the silent dish at the end of one of the arms of the Y-shaped track. The rails had disappeared beneath the overgrowth of weeds and grass. He looked up at the mesh, quiet all these years, and wondered if it would ever be resurrected or if it would simply rust away, along with all the rest of humankind’s aspirations. A sigh escaped him. Humankind had set foot on the Moon, even sent probes out into the Solar System and beyond—and now had given it all up in favor of petty power struggles. Was there any hope for a better future?

As if reaching out of the distant past—or perhaps the distant future—the sound of the shofar he remembered from his childhood touched his ears. Oh, right, he thought. It’s the first day of Rosh Hashanah. But why would it matter now when it hadn’t mattered since he’d turned eight and his parents had divorced?

Before he could think of an answer, liquid fire poured over him and Sterling and everything changed. He blinked several times in befuddlement. He still sat on his horse, but his saddle and reins had vanished. The form of the great dish looming overhead now glowed in colors he couldn’t name against a brilliant white sky. Sterling looked around at him and whickered. To his surprise, Mike understood him.

“Thank you for bringing me home with you, good friend.”

“Home?” Mike looked around. “Where are we? This doesn’t look like any place I’ve ever called home.”

Somehow his words seemed to blend into the glorious sound of music and song like nothing he’d ever heard that now surrounded him.

“We’re on the other side of the Light. What we see and hear and feel is what you have struggled all your life to imagine. We were in what you have called the Tardyon universe. Now we are in the Tachyon universe.”

That made an odd sort of sense, but—to have his horse tell him this? He shook his head hard. “This can’t be happening to me.”

Sterling cocked his ears, then shook his mane. “Ah, but it has. You just weren’t expecting to find yourself among the Elect.”

Mike frowned. “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation, either.”

His horse heaved a sigh, then shifted himself into the form of a man standing before Mike. “Is this any better?”

The astronomer blinked. “Albert Einstein? But—!”

“Yes—and no, I wasn’t actually incarnated as Sterling.” Albert sighed again. “This is going to be very hard to explain.”

“That’s putting it mildly—but, I think I’m starting to get the idea. You said this is the Tachyon universe, and that I’m one of the Elect. And I heard what sounded like a shofar just before I found myself here. I’m not much for eschatology, but aren’t the Elect supposed to be Christians caught up with Jesus in the clouds at the end of the age?”

Albert nodded. “And neither of us was ever a practicing Christian, or very observant as Jews, so it’s not surprising we wouldn’t expect to enter into Heaven. It appears that the definition of the Elect is no more nor less than one who treated others with respect and never feared to ask questions and seek the answers. You certainly have done both, and your friends in Agustin requested that you be allowed to come here as well.”

“Then they’re here, too?” A sense of relief washed over him to know he wasn’t alone in this very strange place. “And Sterling?”

“Oh, he’s gone to greet his herd, but should you wish his company in your explorations, you have but to ask him.” Albert tilted his head to one side. “You have questions?”

A snort escaped Mike. “An infinite number, of course—but it appears I’ll have an eternity to find the answers, right? I won’t ever have to go back to life on Earth?”

“Yes to your first question, no to your second. When the Christians say we’re all children of God, they mean each one of us is a part of God. Our lives on Earth as individuals were to enable God to explore the implications of the specific set of parameters that was each of us. As a species, we were developed specifically to explore the nature of Reality from the adversary position. That’s why we developed language and named all the creatures. In naming them, we declared them to be not-us, and therefore separate. In naming God, we declared Reality to be not-us, and therefore separate from us. Since our lower brains knew this was not true, we drove ourselves insane. Our whole history as a species was one of attempting to come to grips with the impossible—to try to understand what Reality looks like from the Tardyon side. Our whole purpose was to find a way to reconcile our internal dissonance.”

“So that’s what the Christians meant when they said Y’shua came to save us—to be the last, perfect sacrifice—so we wouldn’t feel guilty for abandoning God. It doesn’t seem to have worked very well.”

Albert smiled. “Actually, it worked very well, all things considered. Without Y’shua’s atoning sacrifice, we as a species might never have realized that we had mistaken the illusion of separation from Reality for the reality itself. Over the millennia since that time, many people have returned here on death, even if they didn’t necessarily expect to do so. Their experiences have greatly enriched the understanding God has of Himself as He appears from the Tardyon side. So, for that matter, have the experiences of all those who have chosen not to come here.”

For a long moment Mike considered all this. “So the Tardyon side would be what we thought of as the first three dimensions, and this, the Tachyon side, would be everything above the fourth dimension?”

“Close. The Tachyon side is actually all of the dimensions, perceived properly. Our earthly bodies were developed specifically to be able only to perceive the first three dimensions and move in the fourth. It was apparently the closest God could come to viewing himself from the outside. You and I are here, along with many of our colleagues across the centuries of Earthly time, precisely because we did everything we could to make sense of Reality as a whole, and to help our fellow humans do likewise.”

“So it really was okay to ask the deep questions, even though the answers we came up with were all wrong because we didn’t realize our worldviews were woefully inadequate.”

“Exactly.”

Silence within the glorious song fell for a moment before another question came to mind. “Was Earth the only abode of marginally intelligent life?”

“Of course not. It was merely one of many planets created to serve as one small stage for us to look at Reality from, using a specific set of parameters. We happen to have called it home for our brief parts in the play, but it is by no means the only abode of intelligent life.”

For a long moment, Mike let his mind wander through all the implications of that statement and back again. “Okay… Given that Reality must be the Singular One and synergetic total of all of its illusorily separate parts, it would seem that in some sense the animists were right, everything is infused with the spirit of God, from the lowliest rock to the largest super cluster—which would also probably explain why Sterling came with me.”

Albert nodded. “While the rock may not be self-aware—that is, aware of being aware, like we are—it is a part of Earth, and shares in the awareness of the whole, like the cells in our earthly bodies shared in some sense in our awareness. Animals are generally at least conscious, and those that interact with humans often come here after death because they are so much a part of the lives of those humans. Likewise, many folks like you and me who wouldn’t expect to make it into Heaven as defined by the Christians, come here because either we have been walking on the bright side of the Golden Rule because it has made more sense to us than walking on the dark side, or because someone who cared a great deal about us asked that we be allowed to come. I think the Christians called that sanctification by association. Of course, all this is from the Earthly point of view. From the point of view of Reality, those of us who are here are simply supposed to be here, and those who are not aren’t here because they chose not to be.”

Mike frowned at him. “Hunh? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I’m sorry, I put it badly. I suppose you could call it a mismatch between frames of reference. Given that Reality IS, the only choice anyone on the Tardyon side has is whether to accept Reality and his or her place in it, or to deny Reality and his or her place in it. In the first case, that person is who he is supposed to be and does what he is supposed to do. In the second case, the person refuses to be who he is supposed to be and refuses to do what he is supposed to do—or at least, he tries to. I suppose from his point of view it would be more a case of him hating who he is and wanting to be someone else, and hating what he thinks he’s stuck doing.”

With a grunt, Mike considered this. “I can remember a lot of times when I hated being who I was and wished I was someone else, doing anything else, especially when I was a kid after my folks got divorced. But then I got turned on to science, especially astronomy, in 5^th Grade… Maybe I have Mrs. Kelly to thank for my being here. She helped with the Young Astronauts Club. She even managed to arrange for us to talk to a real shuttle astronaut… I always wanted to be an astronaut, but settled for radio astronomy instead… I suppose it could be said I am an astronaut now, though.”

With a chuckle, Albert laid a glowing hand on Mike’s shoulder and invited him to walk away from the glittering lattice of rainbow light that reminded him of a radio dish but which must be a super cluster like the ones he’d studied all his life.

“So, what happens on Earth now that we’ve all come here? How many of us have come, anyway?”

“Somewhere around a billion people. Those left behind have all chosen to deny Reality and their places in it, and will now act out the remainder of the play so that God may examine the consequences of the life of denial. Oh, many will come to accept Reality and their places in it, and will join us here. Others, including our cousins in Israel, will learn the hard way that they really have misunderstood their whole reason for existence, and in time will also come to accept Reality and their places in it.”

“And will Y’shua really return and usher in the thousand years of peace that the Christians speak of?”

Albert nodded. “Of course, to us, that’s a mere blink of the eye—but we can always take a look any time we choose, since time is whenever we want it to be.”

Mike gave him a quizzical look. After a moment, he understood. “Yes, I suppose it would be. Which reminds me. If Reality IS, why do I still feel like time is passing—and we are walking through an ancient forest filled with wonderful trees and beautiful music?”

“Because, for now, we choose to go on being ourselves as if we were separate from Reality. We know we’re not, but we choose to live within the illusion, the better to explore the Reality of which we are a part. We couldn’t do that if we lost ourselves in the Singular One. In fact, we are supposed to go on exploring Reality as if we were separate from it. That’s why we are who we are. We can always experience the Singular One, but our curiosity—His curiosity if you will—will always drive us to find answers. I suppose you could call us the embodiment of God’s questions and the tools by which He learns the answers.”

“Ah, then we must be the dark energy—and maybe the dark matter as well—that we caught the barest hints of from the other side.”

Albert nodded. “You’ll do very well here.”

A sense of relief washed over Mike. If this were true, then no longer need he worry about whether he was doing the right thing in pursuing answers to his many questions. Truly he was on a mission from God, with all Eternity and Infinity in which to pursue it.

He went over to a nearby tree—what he would have believed a super cluster on the Tardyon side—and began to study it in all its wonder and glory.

 

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people is coincidental.]

Anna Lynn Barnes

 

Anna Lynn Barnes woke to the needle sharp claws of her kitten, Silver, kneading her arm in a futile attempt to get a breakfast of milk. With a sigh, she stroked the soft, silky fur and moved the paws away from her bare skin. Silver meowed through her purr and wiggled around to try Anna’s other arm. Anna repeated the process of moving the claws to where they would dig into her flannel nightgown instead of her skin.

Oh, sure, she could push Silver away until the cat decided it wasn’t worth pursuing phantom milk, but she loved the sound of that soft purr, that rusty little meow, the feel of the silky fur, the warm body snuggled next to hers. Silver would leave soon enough, now that Anna was awake. Then she would be too busy playing and eating and doing all her other cat things.

As she cuddled the kitten, Anna remembered that today was special. That woke her up enough to look at the clock on the nightstand. 6:30 a.m. Three hours to D-moment. There was a lot to do before 9:30. She knew she should get moving—but this time with Silver struck her as all the more precious because it might well be the last. Who knew if pets could go beyond the Light with her and the rest of her family and friends when the last trumpet sounded?

Over the course of her life, Anna had loved and lost many animals to death. Was there any hope she would see any of them beyond the Light? Tears welled up unbidden as Silver kneaded and Anna remembered.

Eventually Silver decided enough was enough and she wasn’t going to make milk magically appear this morning either. As she nuzzled Anna’s nose and meowed once to remind Anna it was time for a real breakfast, Anna hugged her, then sat up.

“You silly little clunch. I’ll be right along as soon as I get dressed.”

In spite of herself, Anna glanced at the other side of the bed. As always, Ralph had gotten up a couple of hours earlier to milk the cows and see to the needs of the rest of the animals. What did he think about this being their last day on Earth?

Urged on by Silver’s imperious meows, Anna rose and dressed, then made the bed. What difference did it make, she wondered. But who knew, maybe the tax collectors—make that graft collectors—out of Colorado Springs would drop by on Monday for their weekly take, like they usually did. She wouldn’t want them to see a messy house, would she?

In the kitchen a moment later, she went to work on the usual Saturday morning feast for Ralph, even as she guessed her fellow residents of the village must be doing. As her fingers flew, she remembered how, years before, she and Ralph had first met General Samuelson, retired Air Force. He’d been running for Congress from the 5^th District of Colorado. They’d attended the El Paso County Assembly as Precinct Committee people and had crossed paths with him there. She recalled being surprised that a general would be interested in getting to know her and Ralph, much less that he would be interested in visiting their ranch near Yoder. But she and Ralph hadn’t said no.

For an instant, Anna wondered what would have happened if she or Ralph had said no, then pushed the thought out of mind as she remembered how that one chance meeting—if there was such a thing as chance—had led to the development of their small village and saved her and Ralph from losing the ranch in the turmoil of the 2^nd Great Depression a few years later. Ralph might not be one to express his gratitude in words, but he’d proven it by helping his fellow villagers learn how to care for the land and all the creatures that called it home. They, in turn, had been happy, even eager, to learn what he had to teach them, even General Samuelson. And they had helped Ralph make improvements to the point where the village had become essentially self-sufficient by the time President Everest had been reelected in a landslide.

Though no one had actually come out and said so, Anna had long believed the original reason for the general’s interest in creating their little village was to prepare a network of such villages from which a revolution could be launched should President Everest and her fellow socialists succeed in their quest to turn the nation into a nightmare. But somewhere along the line, that had all changed. She rather thought Mrs. Kelly might have had something to do with it, back around 2010, during the depths of the 2^nd Great Depression.

Anna and Ralph had always been Bible-believing folks, but not until they’d met Mrs. Kelly and begun studying “Yada Yahweh,” as well as “Future History,” had they begun to understand what God really wanted of them. The funny thing was, Mrs. Kelly had never told them they had to believe anything, only that it was not only okay to ask questions, but that God wanted His children to ask questions and find answers. What wasn’t okay was to fear God and try to lock oneself into a set of rules and regulations in hopes of being perfect in His sight, then try to make everyone else do the same. Or, on the other hand, to go wild and crazy and say there was no God, therefore it was okay to hurt everyone else in order to help oneself to the best of everything.

Back in those days, the Internet had still been available, so the villagers had followed Mrs. Kelly’s lead to many other sites of interest, including one called non-normie.com, where the author had carefully explained the difference between normal people, who knew how to grieve their losses and setbacks, then move on, and non-normal people, who had gotten stuck on anger as children and couldn’t move on. Anna had learned a lot from that site, not only about her family and herself, but also about how the non-normies were taking over the world—and why. In light of “Yada Yahweh” and “Future History,” everything that had happened since the founding of their little village made sense.

Would they actually pass into the Light today? No one really knew—but Mrs. Kelly had, along with the authors of “Yada Yahweh” and “Future History,” made a good case for it. No doubt they would find out in a couple more hours.

Ralph came in through the back door after removing his Wellingtons and slipping back into his work boots so the manure stayed outside. A little smile tugged at one end of his mouth as he took in the sight of bacon, sausage, and pancakes, the smell of the perfectly cooked meal.

“Why don’t we take all that good food out to the pavilion and add it to the collection? Nothing like a breakfast party on our last day on Earth.”

Anna blinked. She hadn’t even looked out the window. With Ralph’s help, she gathered everything up and joined the parade of couples and families bringing goodies to the buffet table in the large pavilion that served as town square. Though a communal dinner once a week had been their habit since the Founding, this was the first communal breakfast she could remember.

A few minutes later, she and Ralph set loaded plates on one of the round tables and sat down. General Samuelson and his wife joined them a moment later, followed by Mrs. Kelly. As had long been habit as well, they all joined in a moment of silence to let their cares and concerns slip away so they could enjoy the food properly. Anna, as she always did, thought the grace she’d loved so much as a child. It seemed most appropriate on this day of days.

As always, silence reigned as they ate, that they might do honor to the cooks, and therefore to God, who had provided everything they needed. But, while no one rushed through breakfast, everyone ate at perhaps a faster pace than they would have any other day, and no one lingered over coffee. Instead, once even the smallest child had finished, everyone rose, gathered their plates and silver, and hurried them into their houses for a quick cleaning. Those not hauling dinnerware broke down the tables just as quickly and stored them in the shed to one side of the pavilion.

Within fifteen minutes everyone had returned to the now empty pavilion. Anna’s watch said 9 a.m. Half an hour, give or take.

General Samuelson gathered everyone’s attention. “Let us take a final tour and say good bye to all we have loved here, including our animals, and leave them free.”

“Can we take our kitties?” asked Melanie, all of five years old.

The general shared a glance with Mrs. Kelly.

“If your kitty wants to come, I don’t see why not. We won’t know for sure until we see the Other Side.”

Anna joined Melanie and several others in heaving a sigh. Would Silver want to come with her? What was likely to happen at that moment in time? As they all followed the general on the grand tour, she fell in beside Mrs. Kelly and asked.

The elderly woman thought about it for a moment. “I have a theory, of course, but I don’t know for certain. I suspect we will vanish from here in a flash of light as each of us is converted from matter to energy. I suppose it might be akin to passing through a black hole, only instantaneous, with most of our energy being manifested on the other side of the hole. Otherwise, Earth wouldn’t survive the amount of energy being released—and all the evidence is that it will. If our pets are in our arms, they should pass through with us. Certainly I hope so, as I would love to see my own pets on the Other Side.”

As they reached the llama pen, the long-necked woolies came over to find out what was happening. Oddly, as Ralph opened the gate, they came straight through to nuzzle those who had cared for them, almost as if they knew what was about to happen and wanted to join in the exodus. Anna petted Lindsay, the female she’d raised from baby hood—followed by Missy, Lindsay’s latest baby.

The tour moved on to the horse barn and paddock, and the same thing happened.

“Hmm,” murmured Mrs. Kelly as Calico, the elderly mare she sometimes rode came over to nudge her. “It appears my supposition that our animals can go with us might be right, otherwise there’s no explaining this.”

By the time they returned to the pavilion after opening the doors to their houses to let the cats and dogs out to join them, the village square looked like an ark as all the animals, and even the geese and chickens, crowded around. Anna picked up Silver and hugged her lightly. The kitten purred loudly.

“I think what we need to do is make a circle around our beloved pets, then ask God to grant their wish to join us on the Other Side.” Mrs. Kelly set word to deed and a moment later all the animals had crowded into the circle of villagers. The larger animals remained standing to make room for the smaller ones beneath them. All of them stood quite still, their eyes filled with their hope and longing. “Now, let us all join hands and let God know we are ready to come home. Let us also ask, for the sake of all our beloved here within our circle, that they be allowed to come home with us.”

Anna took Ralph’s gnarled hand in her left, and Mrs. Kelly’s hand in her right, as Silver draped herself over Anna’s right shoulder and purred.

Save for that beloved sound and the soft susurration of breath by waiting humans and animals, silence reigned as all bent their heads and closed their eyes as they made their requests. Anna let herself remember all the joy she’d experienced while caring for her animals, not just Lindsay and Missy and Silver, but all of them, even the chickens whose eggs had been breakfast just a little while ago.

And how many other animals on how many other farms and ranches would join their humans in passing through the Light? she wondered. Would she ever find out? After all, she’d known very few of the other members of the Hidden. On the other hand, she would have all eternity to ask her questions and find her answers…

The distant sound of a ram’s horn—the shofar of Rosh Hashanah—the last trumpet—touched Anna’s waiting ears. A rush as of liquid fire tingled down every nerve—not painful at all, but enlivening, as if she were waking from a dream. Silver’s purr grew into a chorus—a song of joy like nothing she’d ever heard before.

She looked up to find everything both the same, and yet vastly different. All of their beloved animals still stood within the circle of their hands, yet each glowed with all the colors she’d never been able to see before. Their love, simple yet unconditional, filled the circle with gratitude that sang within her and her fellow humans.

Ralph, now that she looked at him, glowed with life, his hand no longer gnarled, his face that of the handsome youth she’d first fallen in love with so many years ago. Mrs. Kelly had also regained her youth, so Anna figured she must now look like the girl Ralph had married so long ago.

Interesting, she thought as she looked around. All the grownups had returned to their youth, and all the children now looked grown up. Perhaps it was true, then, that life on Earth had been a play or a dream in which they had chosen to live for a time and a season. But now they were home.

Anna turned to Silver’s glowing face so close to hers and murmured, “I’m so happy you could come, too.”

Silver meowed through her purr, and Anna understood her.

“I am, too. Can we go play?”

With a laugh, Anna let go of Mrs. Kelly’s hand and reached up to stroke the soft fur.

“I don’t see why not. Coming, Ralph?”

He slipped his arm about her waist as the circle began to break up, the animals within moving to join their most beloved humans.

“I’d love to, honey.”

Anna looked at Mrs. Kelly. “Will we ever see each other again?”

The older woman smiled. “Any time you want to, Anna. Time and distance mean nothing here. Just think of me and I’ll be there. Meanwhile, have fun. Calico and I have places to go and things to do.”

With that, Mrs. Kelly leaped lightly onto Calico’s gleaming back, leaned forward, and whispered into the mare’s ear. As they leaped into flight, it seemed almost as though great wings reached out from Calico’s shoulders—and from those of her rider.

And then they vanished into the Heavenly Song.

 

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people is coincidental.]

William Starrett

 

As he did every morning these days, Bill Starrett repressed the urge to groan on waking to the morning call to prayer as it echoed down the corridor of the rickety dormitory housing him and his fellow slaves. What point complaining when all it got you was a whip slash across the back, or a fist in the face from an overseer who liked nothing better than to punish whitey for all of his own bad choices?

With the rest of the men, he scrambled to his knees, unrolled his prayer mat from its place as his pillow, and prostrated himself on it to mouth the empty words of the alien prayer. No point in letting the snitches go running to the overseer with word of his refusal to submit to the iron will of Allah, either.

Once a geologist of some note within academic circles, he’d never had any use for religions of any brand. As far as he was concerned, they were little more than superstitious fairy tales intended to enforce control of the many by the few. Certainly, as he knew from ten years’ experience, that was the case with Islam.

Unfortunately, he’d had to find out the hard way that President Everest’s brand of religion—if it could be called that—had been just as bad. He had spent the last fifteen years regretting that he’d ever voted for her the first time, let alone the second.

He really had only himself to blame for his predicament, he admitted, for what must be the millionth time.

Prayer to a deaf and dumb god finished at last, he again rolled up his prayer rug and returned it to the top of his sleeping mat, made sure everything was as neat and straight as it could be, then joined the rest of the men in forming the latrine line, from which they would go to the food line, and then out to the work line, just as they had every day for the last ten years.

The only good thing about the unending routine of his life now was that he had a lot of time to think, as long as he kept those thoughts from reaching his face. The hard labor had toughened him up to the point where he was probably healthier than when he’d been a professor of geology at the University of Minnesota back before President Everest had deliberately ruined the economy, and the country—and probably the world as well, though only time would tell.

Most of the time, he contented himself with trying to imagine what Earth had been like during different eras. Sometimes he revisited the Archean era of the Precambrian when things got really bad, just to remind himself how much better things were now than they had been 3.7 billion years ago, with no life on land, no oxygen in the atmosphere, and only the simplest of life evident anywhere in the sea. Other times, he went no further back than the depths of the latest advance of the ice, when Minneapolis had been buried under the Superior Lobe, or the Wadena Lobe. Occasionally he pretended he was a paleo-Indian at the southern edge of the tundra looking north at the wall of dirt dumped by the slowly retreating ice.

Today he decided to envision life during the Cretaceous, when Minnesota had lain on the eastern shore of the mid-continental sea. Perhaps he would see some of the dinosaurs whose bones had never been preserved here.

This thought carried him all the way through breakfast, the usual thin gruel of peas, beans, and lentils, the first field of barley, harvested with ancient sickles dug up from who knew where, and mid-morning prayers, sans prayer mats in the middle of the field.

Apparently his fervor left something to be desired as far as the overseer was concerned—or perhaps the big man with the little mind just wanted to make sure he knew who was boss. The slash of the whip hard across his bare back startled a grunt out of him.

“Say it like you mean it, whitey!” The snarl in his ear reminded him of the whine of mosquitoes on field trips to the Border Lakes as a student.

He couldn’t slap this mosquito, so he pretended the prayer was a Gophers fight chant and finished it with more than enough fervor to keep the whip from his back. The words meant nothing, after all, and the overseer didn’t need to know what he really thought. Still, as he rose with the rest of the work crew to begin the harvest again, he decided he’d better return to the Archean era in order to regain his perspective.

As he got back into the rhythm of slicing the heads of the barley free of the stalks and into his bushel basket, he let his imagination paint again the view from above the low-lying volcanic island arc bounded by shallow seas and roofed by hellish clouds with little water in them, only ash, sulfuric acid, and who knew what other unpleasantness. Yet in the tidal pools, stromatolites of blue-green algae made their living on the sunlight breaking through in patches here and there. Not the hot, bright sun on his back, but a weaker sun, though one not blocked by the ozone layer.

If he thought life was hard now, he reminded himself, think how very much harder it must have been for the lowly blue green alga cell that must have been his very distant ancestor. Yet it had persevered, and so must he, because that was what life did.

Out of nowhere, the distant sound of the shofar horn tugged him out of his distant dreamscape as the blazing sun of then and now poured enlivening flame down every nerve and sinew. He looked up with a start to find himself alone, somewhere impossible.

His sickle fell from his nerveless hand, along with his half-filled basket of grain, to vanish, forgotten in the instant.

“What the—?!”

As he looked around in befuddled wonder, he realized he must be seeing the entire electromagnetic spectrum instead of the tiny portion that had been his lot before. He couldn’t even begin to name all the new colors dazzling his eyes. Nor could he hope to name all the tones in the ever-shifting chord that filled him with wondrous song.

He looked down at himself. His near nakedness had been cloaked in a robe of dazzling white that seemed somehow to be part of him. And his hands had regained their youth, so far as he could tell through the radiance. Certainly the aches and pains of age, and the searing hurt of the whip slash had vanished.

Wherever he was, it clearly wasn’t the work farm in Minneapolis. By the same token, it wasn’t the Archean—or anywhere else on Earth. With beauty filling every portion of his being, it certainly couldn’t be Hell, so that left Heaven. But he’d been so far from being religious he might as well have been an atheist. What was he doing here?

“A few answers would be helpful…” His voice blended into the Heavenly Song as if it belonged—because he belonged.

A berobed figure like himself appeared out of the beauty. As it came closer, he recognized his mentor, Professor Richardson.

“Bill! You made it after all! Welcome to the Tachyon Side of Reality!”

“This isn’t Heaven?” Bill felt even more confused.

“Of course it is, for the Christians and Jews. But Heaven’s just a word for the whole of Reality, as opposed to the tiny sliver we were able to perceive during our time on Earth.”

Bill frowned. “Okay… but I thought you had to believe in Jesus or go to Hell. To be honest, as far as I was concerned, all religions were fairy tales intended to keep the peasants in line.”

“In all too many cases, you’re right. But that doesn’t matter. You’re here because you never gave in to those who demanded you give up your curiosity and imagination and will to find answers to the questions posed by Reality. Remember what you were doing when the last trump sounded?”

“Yeah. I was trying to imagine life in the Archean—to remind myself our most ancient ancestors had it much harder than I did after that overseer nailed me for not praying enthusiastically enough for his tastes. Better that than feel sorry for myself because I’m being mistreated by a cretin drunk on his power over whitey. It wasn’t as if I could do anything about my situation, especially since I only had myself to blame for getting stuck in it.”

“Exactly. You were willing to accept responsibility for your choices and actions—and the consequences—even if you didn’t like them. You walked on the Bright Side of the Golden Rule as often as you could. That was all that was necessary. Believe me, there are a fair number of folks who called themselves Christians but didn’t walk the walk who got left behind. Some of them may learn the hard way that they’ve missed the point. Others may not.”

Bill considered this for a moment. “Okay. So I’m here on the Tachyon Side of Reality. Life on Earth must’ve been on the Tardyon Side, right?”

His mentor nodded. “Shakespeare had it right when he said all the world’s a stage and we were actors on it. You could say all the many planets capable of growing biological life to the point of intelligence are stages on which that intelligence practices the primary choice and experiences the consequences, over and over and over until enough individuals learn how to accept Reality and their places in it, no matter how counter-intuitive it may seem, or how painful the consequences. Then those who have learned that lesson are harvested—as you were—to begin the next stage of existence, asking and answering their questions about the nature of the Reality of which they are parts.”

“So that’s why we never heard from any advanced civilizations—they don’t get much beyond where we were when President Everest took over before they’re ‘harvested.’ And on the Tardyon side…” Bill stopped.

“Exactly.”

“What’s going to happen to the poor souls left behind?”

“Well, the next ten years, Earth time, will be miserable for most of them. But then, when things look like they couldn’t get any worse, dawn will break on the last perfect day, which will last a thousand years Earth time. Then the stage will be cleared of humankind. Our prophecies didn’t say what would happen after that, so I don’t know. Earth may be destroyed, or left to heal, with or without our help as gardeners, or another species may rise to self-awareness and go through the same process of learning to accept Reality and their places in it that we did. I haven’t been here long enough myself to do more than begin to get a handle on all the possibilities.”

Bill eyed him. “How long have you been here? You died ten years ago—in Earth years, at least.”

“Forever—and no time at all. It takes getting used to. The only reason time seems to pass for us here is because we’re still only parts of Reality. On the other hand, on this side of the Light, we can look at any point in the life of an object on the other side—such as Earth—that we choose. For instance, if you want to, we can see what Earth really looked like in the Archean, instead of trying to imagine it—and we can look at it to any level of detail we like.”

The professor waved a hand at the rainbow of color beside them and a large screen or window framed in deep glow appeared out of nowhere. “We can even watch the life of the solar system from birth to death if we like—for real instead of the fabric of guesswork we had to weave.”

He waved a hand again and two comfy recliners appeared. “Shall we? It’s what we’re here for. Who knows, perhaps when we understand the process we’ll be granted the opportunity to execute it ourselves, perhaps as part of a team with some paleontologists of our acquaintance.”

Bill looked at him, then took a seat in one of the recliners. “Reality would trust us with that kind of responsibility?”

His mentor sat in the other recliner. “Not yet, of course, since we just got here. But perhaps eventually, once we’ve grown to understand the process. I have the sense that is what we were born to do.”

With a snort, Bill threw his hands out. “Maybe the Mormons were right after all, and we’re destined to become gods of other worlds.”

The professor looked at him. “There’s a grain of truth in every fairy tale, Bill. The problem, of course, was figuring out what that grain of truth was—and what it really meant. When Paul said we saw through a glass darkly, he meant really darkly. For all intents and purposes, we really were deaf, dumb, and blind—but as I said, it was so we could concentrate on learning the only lesson that’s important at that level of existence—whether we’ll choose to accept or deny Reality and our places in it.”

In the giant screen, a starscape appeared in the idiom of his Earthly self—black space filled with galaxies, globular clusters, and the pin points of individual stars. That made sense for now, since he hadn’t been here long enough to know how to see clearly by the light of the entire spectrum. That would come in time, he decided, much as a baby learns to see through pattern recognition.

He guessed the galaxy in the center must be the Milky Way as they seemed to move closer. In the lower right corner, the time showed 5 billion years before translation. Eventually they reached the vicinity of a massive molecular cloud about to become a stellar nursery.

As the clock in the lower right corner began to count down, the hundreds of millennia blurring with the speed of their passing, the cloud began to move, almost like an immense amoeba, as the density wave of the spiral arm passed through it, and shockwaves from supernovae in the neighborhood shook it up. Here and there, bits of the cloud grew dense enough to begin the long collapse into proto systems.

Fascinating, he thought as he watched the real story of the solar system beginning to unfold. Our perspective really was far too limited in corporeal life. The wonder was that we managed to envision this story as well as we did.

But now he had all eternity and infinity to learn the real story down to the tiniest detail. He found himself looking forward to it.

 

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people is coincidental.]

Ellen McGregor

 

Ellen McGregor moved from candle sconce to candle sconce along the main hall of the White House with her step stool and bag of fresh candles. As she climbed the steps to remove the burnt out stub and the puddle of wax, she resisted the urge to shake her head. Time was when all these had been electric bulbs, needing to be changed only once in awhile.

But once President Everest had been sworn in, everything had gone downhill. Not like falling off a cliff, more like rolling down a mountainside in the middle of an avalanche—in slow motion. By the time the Muslims had taken over, they’d been back to candles and wood-burning stoves in the kitchen, to say nothing of wood fireplaces. And no air conditioning during the hot and humid summers.

The new candle in place and lit, Ellen climbed down to the faded carpet and shook out her black burqa in hopes of getting a little cooling air underneath before moving on to the next sconce. Though her mother had long ago taught her that if she couldn’t say anything nice about someone or something, she shouldn’t say anything at all, just pray to God for the strength and patience to endure, it was very hard to find anything nice to say about her new lords and masters. Fortunately, they showed absolutely no interest in her thoughts. In fact, as long as the candles provided light, she might as well not exist. Since she and her staff knew their jobs a lot better than the imams and their toadies, there was no need to talk.

She did find it interesting that her lords and masters never seemed to wonder where the candles, and the wood for the stoves and fireplaces, to say nothing of the food they stuffed into their fat bellies everyday came from. What would they say when it all ended, as it might yet today?

Only two more sconces in this hall and she could return to the kitchen to join the rest of the staff for their special prayer circle at 11:30. Could it truly be the great day, as Captain Bartlett, her contact among the Hidden, had told her six months ago during one of his visits to resupply her and the staff? Oh, she hoped so. She was so tired of hiding her faith from her lords and masters—not that she’d ever made a big deal of it even before President Everest moved in.

Five minutes later, this task finished, Ellen took herself and her tools back to the housekeeping level and put them away, then hurried to the small room she called her own to divest herself of the burqa and dress in her Sunday best, kept hidden in her closet all these years. With one last glance in the mirror at her graying hair, pulled back into a bun as always, she swept out to return to the kitchen.

Here she found Harry, the chief cook, stirring a large soup pot from which the delicious scent of ham and beans wafted about the kitchen.

“You didn’t.” Ellen couldn’t repress a chuckle.

“I most certainly did.” He grinned back. “We can always eat it ourselves if we’re still here for lunch.”

“Can’t argue with that.”

Left unsaid was their hilarity at the thought of how their lords and masters would react to finding the only thing to eat for lunch was something they were forbidden to eat.

The rest of the staff slipped into the large room. When the last had appeared, Harry and Michael, the doorman, went about and locked the doors so that they couldn’t be interrupted. Ellen glanced at the clock. Five minutes.

“Gather around, dear friends. Let’s hold hands and pray for our dear brothers and sisters who may not yet know of the love and mercy of our Father God through His Son, Jesus Christ.”

They all held hands around the long work table, spotless in its emptiness where it would normally have been filled with food in various stages of preparation. Silence fell as each bent his or her head to meditate on the moment. Ellen found herself considering the fate of her lords and masters, and hoping they would soon wake up to their folly. Now they would be dependent on the tithes of the work farms alone—and who knew how many of their slaves on the work farms would vanish. She hoped many, not so much for the chastisement of their lords and masters as because they had endured for the sake of their Lord and Savior, even as she and her friends here had done.

The half hour chime of Harry’s old-fashioned mantel clock startled her. Blended in with it, she seemed to hear a distant shofar horn sounding the last long blast of the Feast of Trumpets. Enlivening fire swept over her and her friends. By the time she lifted her head and opened her eyes, she stood somewhere else—like but not like the White House kitchen.

Her sense of radiant happiness echoed by the glowing faces of her long time friends, Ellen looked around. The muted colors had been left behind, to be replaced by beauty and wonder in brilliant hues far beyond naming, accompanied by the Heavenly Song of which she and the others seemed integral parts. Everything struck her as fresh and new—and perfect.

“We made it.” Harry looked around. “All of us. Guess our lords and masters are gonna have to break down the doors to find our little present.”

“That won’t hurt my feelings any.” Ellen returned his grin. “And I surely won’t miss that burqa one bit. Now I’m really invisible to them.”

She shook her head. “Shall we check this place out? Find out who our real Lord is?”

As the circle broke, Ellen found herself paired with Harry, as the good friend he’d always been. She noted that he looked much younger now, perhaps in his mid-twenties, and guessed she must also. Certainly she felt younger, all the aches and pains of middle age having vanished in the twinkling of an eye that had brought them here.

Together they moved toward what had been the main door from the kitchen into rest of the housekeeping level. Beyond it, they found a gorgeously decorated hall filled with people all dressed in glowing white. Ellen decided those looking around in wonder, like her and Harry, must be newcomers. Those waiting patiently to be noticed must be residents who had gone ahead—relatives of the newcomers, perhaps. Would she find her mother here?

As if the question had been enough to summon her, one of the patient residents came toward Ellen, becoming recognizable in the instant Ellen noticed her.

“Mama!” Ellen hugged her. “You’ve no idea how much I’ve missed you!”

“’Course I do, honey. I’ve looked in on you from time to time. And I’m so glad you an’ Harry, an’ everyone else on the staff made it here.” Mrs. McGregor nodded at Harry. “By the by, son, your Mama’s here, too, just waitin’ for you to ask.”

“Not my papa?”

A sad tone flitted across the Heavenly Song, echoed in the expression on Mrs. McGregor’s face.
Harry sighed. “Didn’t think so. He surely didn’t belong here, what with his hard drinkin’ an’ beatin’ Ma and me till Ma got tired of it and kicked him out.”

As if his thought had summoned her, another woman drew near and caught his attention. Ellen and her mother watched their reunion.

“So when do we pay our respects to Jesus?” Harry asked after a long moment.

“Any time you like, son. He’s all around us, after all, as well as in your heart. That’s why you’re here and not locked up in a black hole like your daddy, yellin’ an’ screamin’ forever at his daddy for beatin’ him an’ his ma.”

“Did Jesus put him in there?”

Harry’s mother shook her head. “No, dear. Danny put himself in there. He could come out any time he likes, but it looks like he’d rather spend eternity screamin’ at his daddy, as if that would ever do either of them any good.”

With a sigh, Harry set the matter aside as beyond anyone’s ability to do anything about. “So, what is this place—besides bein’ part of Heaven—an’ what are we s’posed to do here?”

“This is the Greeting Hall, part of the New Jerusalem, and we can do whatever we most like to do.”

Ellen and Harry walked with their mothers across the gleaming marble floor. At least, it looked like marble, though Ellen had a suspicion it did so only because she wanted it to. Heaven would definitely take getting used to, she decided.

“So what do you most like to do, honey?” her mother asked.

“I don’t know yet, Mama. I never had much of a chance to find out after you got me on the staff at the White House. I was too busy doin’ my job.”

“Well, there’s plenty to do and all eternity in which to learn it. Perhaps I should ask what you would most like to learn how to do. I remember when you were little, you liked to draw, and you loved learnin’ how to do embroidery.”

Ellen thought about it for a moment. “Don’t they need servants in Heaven? I at least know how to do that.”

“Why would any of us need servants, honey? We can all provide anything we need just by thinking about it.” Mrs. McGregor waved a glowing hand and a table spread with tea things appeared in the middle of the marble floor, with four ladder back chairs to match.

“We don’t need to eat or drink to stay alive—but we can still enjoy food and drink and the pleasure of each other’s company. Join us?” Mrs. McGregor nodded at Harry and his mother.

As the four of them took seats about the tea table, Ellen relaxed enough to enjoy the sweet scent of mint tea wafting through the Heavenly Song. After a moment of shared gratitude, they settled down to enjoy their tea and scones, so like Harry had used to prepare for mid-afternoon break, only infinitely tastier. Not, Ellen thought, to disparage Harry’s cooking. It seemed merely that this new body was far better suited to enjoying the symphony of tastes and smells that were the keynote of this little festival.

“I think I know one thing I’d like to learn how to do better.” Harry looked up from his scone. “I couldn’t tell you how many scones like this I’ve baked in all my years in the White House—but this is what I wanted them to taste like. I’d love to take everything I learned about cooking on Earth and apply it to cooking here in Heaven for those as would enjoy it properly.”

His mother smiled at him. “Then surely that’s what you can do, for as long as you like. The wonderful thing is that you don’t need to do the hard work like you did on Earth. You can use your imagination, like Ellen’s Mama just did.”

“Then I could imagine a beautiful dress, like I used to when I was a little girl, and there it would be?” Ellen set down her cup of tea.

“Exactly.”

Ellen rose and pulled forth the memory of the wedding dress she’d never worn and always dreamed of. In an instant her dazzling but plain white robe became the perfect wedding dress, not just dazzling, but glittering with all the diamonds she’d never have been able to afford in her life on Earth.

“Oh, honey! How beautiful!”

“Wow!” breathed Harry.

With a mischievous expression touching her face, Ellen imagined him in a brilliant white tie and tails, then projected the image at him. He looked down at himself with a start.

“Now we’re a matched set.”

He stood up before her and held out one glowing hand. “That we are. Don’t know why it is I never got up the nerve to get to know you better back on Earth, but I’d surely like to make up for that now.”

A blush warmed Ellen’s cheeks as she laid her glittering gloved hand on his. “So would I.”

For a long moment, they looked into each other’s eyes to share the possibilities in a way never available to them in their earthly forms.

Perhaps marriage in the Earthly sense, as a precursor for producing the next generation, wasn’t needed here in Heaven, but Ellen had no sense that the sharing partnership of soul mates was forbidden, or that there were any limits on how much or how little they chose to make of it. A smile brightened her face, to be reflected in Harry’s.

“There’s nothing I’d like better than to spend all eternity with you, Harry, exploring all the things we can do together and sharing all the beauty we create with everyone else.”

He bowed over her hand and bestowed a gentle kiss upon it that sent tingles down every nerve. “I would be honored, my dear Ellen.”

As he seated her at the table with their mothers once more, he looked around. To Ellen’s surprise, their surroundings changed until it seemed their tea table was one of several in a little shop of perfect dimensions and neatness.

“How about we call this Ellen’s Place? Come in for tea, go out in beauty. I’ll do the cooking and you do the dressing. What do you say?”

“I think it sounds wonderful, especially since we’ll never need to worry about money, or supplies, or profits and losses, or any of that stuff.” Ellen shook her head at the memory of how hard it had been to live on Earth, at the mercy of the elements, the harsh facts of the economy, and the even harder fact that all too many folks had made demands they had no right to make. All of that had been left behind. Here in Eternity, infinite energy awaited the shaping touch of her imagination to create beauty to share with those who could appreciate it—and their appreciation and gratitude would be payment enough.

As Harry had looked around once to shape this little shop, Ellen looked around once to add her touches of beauty here and there, as well as a place where she could share her visions of beautiful robes with their guests when they’d finished their tea. When she’d finished, she turned to her mother and Harry’s mother.

“Would you like me to help you turn your visions of beauty into robes worth wearing?”

“We’d be delighted, my dear.” Harry’s mother rose, followed by Ellen’s mother. “Meanwhile, son, it looks like you have some new guests to serve.”

With joy in their hearts, Ellen and Harry began the living of their dreams.

 

[The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people is coincidental (sort of).]

Rachel Everest

 

Rachel Everest looked out over the view of Geneva spread like a tapestry below the terrace of this mansion high on the side of the mountain with bitter discontent as she had every afternoon for nearly 10 years.

Men! she thought. They’d all laughed at her—the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff—when the Speaker of the House had demanded she step down as president or be relieved of office as unfit for duty because she was a woman and an infidel.

She couldn’t say she hadn’t seen it coming, otherwise she wouldn’t have bought this mansion with the money she’d appropriated from her last campaign fund—but she had been hoping it wouldn’t be needed quite so soon, if ever. Still, it had been a case of take the easy way out or face impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors—and with the Muslims controlling her own party, all panting to see her gone, there’d been no hope of avoiding total embarrassment. Bad enough Bobby had gone through the same thing during his presidency for even less cause.

Worse than being laughed at by the Joint Chiefs had been their mass resignation and almost instantaneous disappearance from Washington. Left high and dry, she’d had no choice but to resign, especially with Russia and China rattling sabers and her with no sabers left to rattle in turn.

She’d managed to wring one concession from the Speaker of the House, that in return for her silence, she would be allowed to leave the country. He’d acted as if that were a very small price to pay. The memory of the expression of utter contempt on his face evoked a growl of helpless fury.

At least she’d left him a ruined and helpless country with no military strength, its economy in absolute chaos. Let the Muslims rule a nation with sheep for subjects, no transportation beyond ox drawn wagon or horse drawn carriage, no power, no telecommunications, no technology later than the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. She’d accomplished that much of her purpose at least—to show the rest of the world how to save the planet by undoing the damage caused by the harnessing of technology. That millions had died of starvation and violence during the riots after her landslide second election had struck her as a good thing because there were simply too many people for an agrarian society anyway. The institution of feudalism had been a good thing, and it had been her intention to bring it back, with her as the queen.

Unfortunately she hadn’t counted on the Muslims getting smart and taking advantage of the national weakness for elections as the means of transferring power. They had been very quiet, their candidates posing as garden variety Democrats and saying nothing at all about their religious affiliation, much less their real allegiance to the Imams of Saudi Arabia.

What really galled her was that she’d done their work for them—taken the nation back to the 7^th Century—and what thanks did she get? Her life handed to her with the implication that it was worth nothing. Nothing, because women were worthless pieces of scum good only for producing sons. It was really the other way around. Men were worthless, good for nothing, not even producing children of either sex. If they hadn’t blindsided her, as queen she’d have had every man in the country castrated and made a slave, and that procedure to enable parthenogenesis established as the sole means necessary for women to produce their own daughters. She’d been so close! Another year or two and she’d have had her amazons in place to take over the military and enforce her decrees properly. And within a generation, there would have been no men left in the country.

Instead she stood here, driven out of her own country by men of the worst sort. At least the Chinese and the Russians had given up the saber rattling on realizing there wasn’t anything left worth the effort to take over the nation. Not that they didn’t have enough problems of their own once she’d destroyed the US as a market for them, especially the Chinese. The whole idea of market economics had to be stamped out, because it gave men the belief that they could control their own lives, and therefore the lives of their women and children.

She might have destroyed the economy of the US, and come close to destroying the economies of Russia and China, but unfortunately she hadn’t been able to come close to destroying the world economy, or even gaining control of it. Her years in this city had galled her all the more because she’d had to keep her mouth shut and stay walled up in her mansion at the request of the city fathers, who had made their distaste for her almost as plain as had the Speaker of the House before her departure. The lives of the sheep beyond her walls had continued quite as if she didn’t exist.

So why was she still here? she asked herself. What was the point of living any longer when she spent almost all of her time in solitude save when her servants provided her with food and drink? She’d considered suicide a few times, but had always decided it was too much trouble, and besides, the longer she lived, the longer she could annoy the city fathers with her requests for new servants to replace the spies she’s sent packing, or for new books or writing supplies for her autobiography.
Imagine, having to write in long hand, with a fountain pen, because computers were almost impossible to come by any more. At least the telephone system still worked—most of the time—and she usually had electricity. Creature comforts she’d taken away from the sheeple in the US.

A bitter laugh escaped her. Well, maybe she couldn’t be Queen of the World, but she’d sure made a lot of people—especially men—pay for refusing to do what she told them to do. May they all rot in Hell, she thought, starting with Bobby, that a**hole. Meanwhile, it would be her great pleasure to watch the rest of the world go to hell as the Muslim idiots took over and turned it into their vaunted Caliphate—for however long that lasted. Eventually the women of the world would get sick and tired of being exploited and would rise up and kill the exploiters—like she’d killed Bobby once she’d no longer had any need for him following her second election. Oh, everyone else thought he’d died of a heart attack, with good reason. No one had thought to check his ankle for a needle stick, much less guess at the real cause of death, an air embolus. He’d been asleep, and had never known what hit him.

Good riddance, she thought, as she did every time she remembered her determination to do the job right, and her relief to see the last of him at the state funeral. She’d pretended to a stoic display of grief just to spite the few remaining right wing bloggers the FBI hadn’t managed to catch, and to really rub it in, she’d ignored their snide catcalls about being a lesbian or having lesbian affairs with an assortment of aides, or the Secretary of Commerce. What did she need another woman for at her age? She was quite content to drop the whole idea of sexual intercourse with anyone into a deep hole and bury it. Not everyone had any use for it, after all. In fact, as far as she was concerned, that was why the peasants were peasants; sex was all they could think about, especially the men. And that was why they needed to be done away with.

Too bad she couldn’t watch them all die, as she’d watched Bobby die. At that, he’d been useful, so she’d given him a quick and easy death—quite apart from the fact that she didn’t want awkward questions asked. But she still hoped he rotted in hell along with every other man she’d ever known, including those assholes who’d laughed in her face and resigned instead of defending her like they were sworn to do.

“Madam.”

Rachel turned sharply and bit off a retort as she realized the butler had been trying to get her attention for several minutes. He held a silver salver with an envelope and a letter opener on it. Since she’d ripped his long-gone predecessor up one side and down the other for opening her mail years ago, no one had dared touch her mail since. A glance at the sender made her grit her teeth. Another official communication from the city fathers. She snatched it and the paper knife off the salver and stalked away from the butler to read it in private.

Hardly had she inserted the knife into the envelope than several things happened at once. The grandfather clock just inside, echoed by the electronic carillons of many of the churches in the city below, began the half hour chime for 5:30 p.m. She’d heard it a million times and would have paid little attention this time save that mixed in with the sound of bells, she seemed to hear the shofar horn. With a start of puzzlement, she looked up.

Where the butler stood at the edge of her field of view, brilliant light flared as if lightning struck too close, followed instantly by a sharp crack as of thunder as the air rushed in to fill the void. She stared at the spot where the man had stood. Not even the silver salver remained of him.

Horror washed over her. What on Earth had just happened? Where had he gone? Why had she been spared—if spared was the right word…

Stories from her childhood welled up in spite of her. Bible stories of the end of days, and how the Church would be removed from the world in the twinkling of an eye to usher in the Great Tribulation. She hadn’t believed them. She hadn’t wanted to believe them once God had refused to answer her prayers and save her from the misery of life with a father who lived two lives—a fine, upstanding citizen on the outside and a mean, vicious drunk on the inside. How—and why—her mother had put up with his constant verbal abuse, she’d never understood. She’d chosen to hide her own anger and do everything she could to get out from under—and she had done it without God’s help.

After all, if God had seen fit to take her father to heaven, like the preacher had said at the funeral, why would she ever want to go there and be subject to Him? A rational person knew death was just the end of life and of consciousness, and that nothing existed beyond it.

And yet, the butler had vanished just as she’d heard the shofar horn that was supposed to announce the catching up of the godly into Heaven. No doubt she’d find she had no servants left—and even the city fathers had probably disappeared as well, along with a goodly portion of the rest of the population of the city, if the rumbling thunder still reaching her ears was anything to go by.

A shudder started somewhere deep inside at the thought of how alone she was. Not because she was the last person on Earth, but because the good citizens—those willing to serve her—had now vanished, leaving only the bad citizens—the ones filled with the rage she knew all too well—and she had no defense against them.

With an effort, she clamped down on her panic. As she did so, she noticed the skin of her right arm had reddened noticeably and a stinging tingle all up and down her back now made itself felt. No benign flash of light that, she thought—and nearly lost her grip as horror at the thought of the physical agony she faced from radiation poisoning fed her panic over being helpless and defenseless.

She took a deep breath, then paced into the mansion. If she must die, then it was time to do it now rather than wait for the agony she knew would come. The fastest way to do the job would be with the syringe she’d used on Bobby and had kept all these years as a trophy. The momentary agony would be a minor inconvenience compared to the drawn out agony she faced if she didn’t act immediately.

A few minutes later, an overdose of sleeping pills gulped down with water as a backup, she arranged herself on her neatly made bed and looked at the syringe, filled once more with 10 ccs of air.

“Well, Bobby, here I come, ready or not.”

With an effort, she pushed back the edges of dizziness from the pills, the nausea from the radiation, and took a deep breath as she worked the needle into the vein on the back of her left hand, then plunged the air into her blood in one steady motion.

As the embolus reached her heart, to be punched into a thousand bubbles in her pulmonary arteries, agonizing fire radiated outward. Only a few minutes longer. She’d endured worse than this under her father’s belt. Please let darkness fall and take it all away. Quickly. Quickly!

But darkness did not fall, even though she felt herself drifting free of the moorings of mind to body. The pain grew into a sense of intense all over pressure squeezing her, but the light grew as if she were passing through the needle she’d just used on herself.

It’s not supposed to be like this! she protested. It’s supposed to be like going to sleep and never waking up! That’s all I want!

Brilliant light exploded around her. It hurt far worse than the momentary agony of physical death. It burned down every nonexistent nerve with every evidence of planning to do so forever. She screamed but nothing came out because she had no mouth—no vocal cords. The light was as much a blast of raw sound as it was brilliant flame in colors for which she had no names. She shuddered away from it, tried to curl up into the tiniest ball she could, tried to make it all go away, to be NOT. But the light and sound and sensation bore in on her with heartless implacability. Worse, now she saw faces in it—faces of all the people she hated the most, because they’d treated her so hatefully.

Her father. Bobby. The Speaker of the House. They all seemed to be sneering at her, though for the brilliance of the screaming noise she couldn’t understand them. She tried to turn her back on them—but she had no back anymore.

Well, then, if this was Hell and they were all in it, fine! She’d spend her eternity sneering back at these fools and idiots, starting with her father. After all, they couldn’t hurt her any worse than she already hurt. Of course, they probably couldn’t hear her any more than she could hear them either, but what did that matter?

She focused all her attention on her father’s flaming face and began detailing all the things she hated most about him, just as she’d longed to do all her life. Somehow the grim satisfaction of payback seemed to offset a little of the excruciating pain of the eternal flaming blast. She let herself imagine inflicting on him all the punishment he’d inflicted on her, amplified ten-fold—a hundred fold—a thousand fold. He writhed in the flames as all her hate and fury bore in on him. Sure, it increased her agony—but so what? She was already getting used to that. After all, it was really no worse than the acid fury she’d kept hidden in life. The great thing was that she didn’t have to hide it anymore. She could torment all the men she’d hated for all eternity, and pay them back properly. She might burn, but here she ruled. It was her hell and she could do whatever she wanted to the other people stuck in it with her. And they couldn’t fight back.

At last she truly understood what Alexander Pope had meant when he’d had Satan insist ‘twas better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

 

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people is coincidental.}

Itzaak Mayer

 

Premier Itzaak Mayer of Israel stood on the balcony of his residence outside Jerusalem and watched the sun go down to his right. In the streets below on this, the first day of Tisre, the people had been blowing the shofar all day long to drive the devil nuts so that he couldn’t collect the souls of the newly dead. Certainly it had been driving him nuts.

He glanced in at the bundle of documents on his desk, brought in earlier that week by General Ingerman, along with the news that the super secret resupply mission cooked up by the hidden military leadership of what had been the United States of America had delivered its last batch of war materiel.

That news had been bad enough. What the documents in the bundle told him—if he chose to believe them—was that the final long blast of the shofar at dusk this evening would herald the vanishment of millions upon millions of people in the Harpazo, and the beginning of the Troubles of Jacob.

A shudder rippled down his back like ice water as he remembered the chill descriptions of what that meant. The only bit of good fortune that he saw was that his term in office was nearly done, so he would not be the poor sucker who let the Anti-Christ in the door. In fact, if he were lucky enough, he’d be gathered to his ancestors long before that happened. He was old enough that a stroke or heart attack could carry him off at any time. There was, of course, no hope that he’d be among those taken out at the last trump. He was not, after all, a Christian or a Messianic Jew. He was just a poor mensch struggling to keep his people alive for a little longer against the threat posed by the sea of hatred lapping around his tiny land.

All that held the Muslims at bay now was his quiet threat to destroy Mecca and Medina with nuclear fire, along with Qom, the holy place of the Shi’ites in Iran, as he had already destroyed Damascus when the Syrians had tried to take back the Golan Heights and southern Lebenon.

He had far too many deaths on his conscience to be allowed to rest in the arms of Abraham, as it had been on his orders that the war materiel left as gifts on the beach north of Haifa had been used to crush Hezbollah and Hamas, and drive the Palestinians into Egypt and Jordan, Syria and northern Lebenon. Israel had again regained her original boundaries. Never again would he or his people trade land for peace, no matter how hard the world tried to persuade them otherwise. He was stiff-necked and proud of it. He had no place in the Christian Heaven—and no reason to believe those documents on his desk.

Still…

It was tempting to want out, especially if those documents proved true. Israel might come through in one piece 10 years from now, but the horrors his people faced between now and then had made General Ingerman blanch, and made him shudder at the thought. Of course, it really wasn’t up to him, was it? Once the shofar sounded for the last time, he would either find himself still here or in the arms of Abraham, as God chose. If the latter, he wished his successor all the luck left in the world in dealing with the disasters about to fall upon his people.

If the former, he would do all in his power to prepare his people for the horror to come, even though it seemed unlikely they’d pay him any mind. They were already beginning to ignore him as the race heated up to elect his replacement.

A snort escaped him as he considered the nature of the men vying for his position. The two front runners ran neck and neck, and would probably have to work with each other to form a government—which would be difficult in the extreme given the amount of vitriol they’d been heaping on each other. The one man insisted that if elected he would expand the boundaries of Israel to Turkey in the north and the Suez Canal in the south—and east to Amman and Damascus. And he would destroy the Dome of the Rock, along with Mecca and Medina and all the other holy sites of Islam. The other insisted that if elected, he would find a way to reach an accommodation with their neighbors that didn’t include giving up any of the land they’d already gained.

Of the two, Mayer preferred the second, although not by much. But again, he didn’t have any choice. He could see that now. There never had been any real choice beyond whether to accept or deny reality and his place in it. What was and will be had always been, and they’d all misunderstood everything God had ever told them.

A sense of abiding sorrow touched him for all the poor souls who had yet to figure that out. He realized he’d made his choice, just as the shofar blew that long last haunting blast that signaled the end of the day.

Always before, the echoes had faded quickly. This time they grew into a veritable chorus, louder and closer until they surrounded him with their exquisite harmony filled with all the sorrow and all the joy life had ever held. Enlivening flame coursed down every nerve, filled every cell. The Jerusalem he’d known all his life vanished into the Jerusalem that had always been, and always would be, filled with light and beauty and the Heavenly Song.

Where he had stood on a balcony, now he stood on a golden street amid a throng of people radiating light in colors beyond naming. He recognized none of them, but it didn’t matter as he joined them in singing one of the ancient songs of ascent as they moved up the street toward the high, wide gate that stood open before them.

Would he meet his beloved Sarah, gone these last four years? At this thought, he found her beside him, her arm tucked into the crook of his elbow as had long been her habit during their time on Earth. Together they passed through the gate with the rest of the throng, their voices lifted in joyful praise.

As this song ended, Sarah drew him free of the crowd and through the entrance into an elegant home of ancient design. It, too, had been built of light, though it felt cooler and less blinding than the street outside. Beyond the front room, dressed for company, Sarah led him into a quiet courtyard filled with the sweetest smelling roses and fruit trees he’d ever experienced. The glorious light and song still surrounded them, but with a more intimate tone, as if meant just for the two of them here and now. Together they sat down on a bench of stone beneath the sheltering branches of an ancient apple tree he remembered from childhood. This one, however, glittered and glowed with life, of which the other had been the merest shadow.

A sigh eased out of him for the perfection of his surroundings, and his gratitude for being allowed to come here after all.

“You have questions, my love?”

“A few, yes.” He thought about it for a long moment. “I guess the first one is why am I here, when I’m responsible for at least a million deaths, between crushing Hezbollah and Hamas and nuking Damascus?”

“Self-defense has always been allowed, my love. You didn’t want to do it, but given the threats to your people, did you feel you had any choice?”

He shook his head. “Especially not after my predecessor left us in such a jam and the Muslims took over the US. But then those presents from the Hidden in the US started arriving on the beach… I still don’t know how they managed to pull that off for almost ten years without their lords and masters ever becoming the wiser.”

“Would you like to hear the tale from General Tavistock? He’s here, too.”

Mayer thought about it, then shook his head again. “I’m glad he’s here, but I’m sure he has his own joys to share. I’d rather just share mine with you for now. You have no idea how much I missed you after you had to leave.”

Sarah smiled at him. “Time is much different here, beloved, as you’ll soon see. Have you other questions?”

“How is it that I’m here instead of stuck on Earth facing the horrors of the Time of Jacob’s Troubles? I remember thinking something about how we’ve misunderstood absolutely everything Yahweh ever tried to tell us, and feeling sorry for all the poor folks who’ll never understand that. But isn’t this something the Christians were supposed to be the only ones allowed into?”

Again his beloved smiled at him. “Not at all, love. Just because our holy books didn’t include what the Christians called the New Testament doesn’t mean that Y’shua and his followers weren’t also prophets, able to see what IS. Y’shua was talking to our people, and so was Saul, whom the Christians know as Paul. And you’re right, we all misunderstood our beloved Yahweh. How could we not when we were so very limited in our senses and capabilities that all this was essentially invisible to us?”

“But the Time of Jacob’s Troubles is still going to afflict those of our people left behind, right?”

Sarah nodded, a hint of sadness in her glowing face. “Our people—and many, many others. Perhaps it will help to remember what William Shakespeare said through the words of Hamlet, that all the world’s a stage and we were but players in it. Your part in the play is finished. And in the face of Eternity, the ten years of Jacob’s Troubles are less than the blink of an eye. Even the Thousand Year Sabbath following the return of Y’shua, the Messiah, will seem as no time at all. Indeed, we can see any moment in time—on Earth or anywhere else—that we may choose. Or none at all. It’s our choice. Now that we’ve chosen to accept Reality and our places in it for the last time—for once and always—our realm of choices has expanded to include all of Reality.”

For a timeless moment, Mayer mulled this over. “Then the only reason for our lives on Earth was to decide whether we would, as individuals and as peoples, accept Reality and our places in it or deny both?”

“Exactly—as well as to experience the consequences of both choices.”

“But—why? Given our extreme limitations, how could we do anything other than misunderstand, and choose denial and the consequences attendant on it?”

“My dearly beloved, just because our limitations led us to misunderstand Reality and our places in it doesn’t mean we were required to choose denial, much less the consequences thereof. Many people over the millennia of our existence as a self-aware species did choose to accept Reality and their places in it, regardless of how counterintuitive such a choice must have seemed. It could be said that we were created so extremely limited precisely to focus our attention on that one choice.”

Mayer shook his head in bewilderment. “I still don’t understand why. Why would Yahweh do this?”

Sarah took his radiant hands in hers. “My dear Itzaak. He simply IS, and therefore has no way of making choices and experiencing the consequences in order to learn from them. Without us, His Children, created to examine the consequences of choosing to accept Him or deny Him, He has no way to examine Who and What He IS. That’s why, even now, we maintain the illusion of separation from Him, and thereby our sense of self. We can, of course, choose to become fully at one with Him, to experience the Singular One. But we were created to explore Him in all His infinite and eternal possibilities.”

“And what of those who chose denial?”

“It depends on how deeply they chose to go into darkness during their lives on Earth. Many will simply dissolve into the Life of the Whole, as if going to sleep and never waking up, for they never truly moved beyond the simple tasks of life. They never developed enough self-awareness to recognize the choice, much like those animals which have little or no contact with humans. Others, however, those who have chosen to hate Yahweh because they perceive Him to have failed them in some way, when they die and find themselves here, they can’t bear to admit they were wrong—that Yahweh IS Who He IS, and so were they. What we take for beauty and wonder, they take for agony and noise. Where we now have infinite choices available for things to do and places to explore, they choose to remain frozen for all eternity in their hatred and fury, and to rail forever against Yahweh for making them as they are. After all, they learned the original sin from their parents, that everything that goes wrong in life is always someone else’s fault. Always.”

“And that is why the Imams of Islam face a truly horrible end—along with many other world leaders. They have always held themselves blameless for the consequences of their choices, and those they have forced upon their peoples in the name of their god.”

Sarah nodded. “That is also why you are without guilt in the deaths for which you are responsible—because you accepted that responsibility, and the consequences thereof. You gave them what they ultimately wanted, release from a life that was unbearable for them. Of course, they now get to experience the ultimate consequences of an even more unbearable eternity—but that’s not your fault.”

“I suppose not. Is there any chance one lost in Hell could ever choose otherwise?”

“I have no idea, my love. Eternity is both a long time and no time at all. I suppose those who choose Hell do so because their rage against Yahweh is far too great—and far too satisfying in some perverse sense—for them to be willing to let go of it. At least in Hell they can vent it as in all too many cases they couldn’t in life. Perhaps they may realize they’re being childish and silly, and it isn’t really necessary for them to remain in Hell, but at the same time, perhaps it becomes too embarrassing ever to admit they’ve been fools. So they remain locked in Hell by their own choices.”

“So they burn forever because they want to burn forever, not because they have to.” Again Mayer shook his head. “Instead of Yahweh condemning them to Hell for being evil, they simply condemned themselves to Hell by choosing to be evil and blaming that choice on Yahweh.”

“Exactly. Does it all begin to make sense now?”

Mayer gave it another moment’s thought, then looked up at his beloved and nodded. Time to put away childhood and begin to explore the nature of true adulthood.

“Where shall we go, and what shall we do there?”

Sarah gave him a knowing smile, then rose with him and drew him into her arms.

“Wherever and whatever you like, beloved.”

 

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people is coincidental.]

General Tavistock

 

General Arliss Tavistock savored his Jack Daniels and pondered again the documents that had reached him ten years earlier and set him on the path that might—or might not—lead him out of the world and into the heavens at exactly 11:30 a.m. tomorrow morning. Though long enough to be a book, the main paper was actually a print out of a document that had been available online until the Muslims had taken over and banished the Internet. He had studied it extensively, along with a large number of references provided in a second document written by the mysterious woman who had sent him the package by way of an old friend of his.

What intrigued him most about the package was that neither the woman or his old friend had told him he had to believe it, only that they could understand if he didn’t. They had trouble believing it, too.

While the primary document could stand some editing, its author had nevertheless made his case in a way Tavistock couldn’t argue with, much as he had often wished he could. Although his first impulse after the election of President Everest had been to go into hiding and work to prepare for a second American Revolution should things really get as bad as he’d feared at the time, this document had persuaded him to try a different tack. With the help of his good buddy, Admiral Wickersram, he’d put into motion a plan to transfer substantial quantities of war materiel to Israel right under the noses of the Muslim Imams who’d moved in at the invitation of the Muslim controlled Congress to take the place of the President. Dave had had a ball fixing up an old tramp steamer and founding his very own cruise line to haul rich Muslims to Mecca by way of the Suez Canal—and leave presents on the beach north of Haifa. So great had been the demand for his services that he’d fixed up five more tramp steamers and run them on a once a week schedule. As far as anyone knew, their lords and masters had no idea where the diesel came from to power them, let alone the crews to man them. And he wasn’t about to tell them.

Now that most of the war materiel had been shipped to Israel, along with a large stock of precious metals on the assumption that the Hidden wouldn’t need either after tomorrow and there was no point in leaving them for the heathen, Tavistock could only hope this document was really right. Still, there were hints that the Anti-Christ was on the move in Macedonia, according to his old friend Dmitri Alexandreivitch Yaroslav, now a general in the Russian Army. It wasn’t easy to keep in touch, but the Russian embassy managed somehow. After all, some shipping still passed through the Port of New York, and it was still possible for Ambassadors and other high-ranking diplomats to go from Washington to New York by stage coach. The Russian Ambassador had actually traveled all the way out here to Tavistock Farms to deliver the latest batch of dispatches and take away with him a copy of this mysterious document to deliver to Dmitri. That had been two months ago. Tavistock wondered if it had reached Dmitri yet—and what his friend would do with it when it arrived.

The general rose and went to the window overlooking the lawn that swept down to the country road behind the white board fence. As far as the Muslim lords and masters knew, this was merely a horse farm. He focused on breeding Arabians now, though his forebears had preferred racing thoroughbreds. But he’d slowly cut back on breeding stock over the last year and hinted to his customers that he was retiring. He could still change his mind if this document was wrong, after all.

What wasn’t visible from this window was the village hidden from the road by the main house. Not only did his family live here but as many of his friends, fellow officers, and enlisted men and women as he’d been able to persuade to move here. For the last ten years or so, Tavistock Farms had been essentially self-sufficient, serving as a trade hub of sorts for the village network in the area. As former chair of the Joint Chiefs, he’d found himself something of a leader among the Hidden. That meant he received all the reports sent by other leaders around the country who also served as hubs of trade networks. At last tally, as nearly as he could tell, somewhere between fifty and a hundred million citizens had vanished from the control of the Muslim lords and masters. Given that the Muslims who had come over from the Middle East were largely city folks and lazy to boot, Tavistock had long ago ceased to be surprised that they had contented themselves with governing the major cities with the help of their home-grown gangs and leaving the rest of the country alone. Oh, they had made a half-assed effort to conduct a census back in 2020, but as far as they’d been concerned nothing beyond the boundaries of their little fiefdoms mattered.

“Dinner’s ready, dear.”

Tavistock turned to find his beloved wife May standing in the doorway. He set down the document and his glass, then escorted her into the grand dining room. Rather than a sit down formal meal, which would have required servitors, May had arranged for a buffet so that all the villagers could partake of the work of their hands and hearts on this, their last night on Earth—or so they might all hope.

“Would you care to lead us in prayer, Father Andrews?” he asked of the Catholic chaplain he’d invited to join them so long ago.

“I would be delighted, Arliss. My dear friends and family, let us all join hands, that our dearly beloved Yahshua may be in our midst. Let us all remember that we are truly Yahweh’s beloved children, brothers and sisters together with Yahshua. Let us enjoy this feast at the beginning of the Last Day. And let us not be afraid to share our doubts and fears, for we are but human, and may see through the glass only darkly until we return home, as it may be tomorrow morning. In the name of our Father, our Brother, and the Holy Spirit who binds us in one, amen.”

The word whispered around the circle once before it broke up into a line past the buffet. The chaplain joined Tavistock and his wife, a troubled look on his face.

“I can’t believe I said that. I can’t even believe the Rapture is tomorrow.”

“I know. I’m having trouble believing it myself. But sometimes it makes more sense just to act as if it were true, so you won’t be caught off guard if it is.”

“There is that…” Father Andrews considered this for a moment. “This all goes against my training, you know. But I simply can’t find any arguments with either the exegesis or the explanation by Mrs. Kelly of what Jesus—Yahshua—was really trying to tell us.”

Silence fell as they reached the buffet and began to fill their plates. When they had found places at one of the round patio tables out on the wide deck, Tavistock applied himself to the feast and waited patiently for the chaplain to find words for his doubts and fears. He’d made sure everyone living here had a copy of the documents in question, and had led weekly discussions about it ever since he’d decided he had to follow its guidance himself. Communication with his fellow leaders suggested they had been doing likewise—with about the same results. He didn’t doubt May had seen the same thing.

“I’m sorry, I just can’t believe it.” Father Andrews threw his hands up in disgust and almost lost his fork. “I can’t believe I’m going to be here one instant and standing before God the next. It’s just not possible!”

Tavistock decided there wasn’t any point in answering. After all, when it came right down to it, he couldn’t believe it either. He could only take it on faith that he would be here, then there in the twinkling of an eye.

“Does that mean I’ll be left behind because I can’t believe it?”

“I doubt it. After all, you have chosen to accept Reality and your place in it, right?”

Father Andrews made a face at this quote from Mrs. Kelly’s document. “Well, I try. I don’t think I’m doing a very good job of being consistent about it, though.”

The general tilted his head to one side. “You’re human, just like the rest of us, Bill. You have a brain, and you’re supposed to use it to ask questions and try to find answers.”

He thought about it for a moment, then added, “You know, I think that’s what convinced me Mrs. Kelly knew what she was talking about—that we have brains and we are supposed to ask questions. That and her explanation about why we as a species are functionally insane.”

Father Andrews grunted. “That’s the part I have the hardest time with, especially what she said about how naming things led us to believe we were separated from them—and naming God—okay, Reality—led us to believe we were separated from Him—even though our Lizard and Monkey brains knew better. It makes sense—too much sense—don’t get me wrong. But if it’s true, then everything I grew up believing is totally wrong. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit I worshipped all my life were merely projections onto Reality of my own triune nature, so I was worshiping myself—and that’s evil.”

“You’re hardly the first person to say that, you know. But look at it this way. Reality is, as far as we know, infinite and eternal. We have no way to comprehend it except to project onto it our internal triune nature—which was developed specifically so we could look at Reality and try to understand it. We are, after all, part of Reality, no matter how separate we may think we are. So we’re not worshiping ourselves instead of Reality; we’re worshiping Reality of which we are parts. Perhaps that’s really what ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ means. Since we’re all part of Reality, our only real choice is to love ourselves, our neighbors, and Reality—or to hate them all, starting with ourselves.”

The chaplain heaved a sigh. “You realize that’s exactly what the Catholic Church has done almost since the beginning, don’t you? It’s taught us we’re all evil and deserving only of death and destruction but for the atoning sacrifice of our Lord and Savior.”

“Don’t feel bad, dear,” murmured May. “All the Christian Churches fell into the same error. The important thing is to remember you really are forgiven forever, because you really are part of Reality—a true Child of God, if that makes it any easier.”

“But that implies that everyone is. If that’s the case, why are we allowed to believe we will be transformed in the twinkling of an eye but that most people won’t?”

“We’re all Children of God, Bill, but we don’t all want to be. It’s hard work to be responsible. It’s hard work to care about how your choices and actions will affect those around you. It’s hard work to care about the suffering of others, especially when you can do something to help them deal with it. But you’ve been doing all of that since I first met you—because service to others is the one thing the Christian Churches did get right. How could they help it when it’s right there in plain sight all the way through the gospels, especially in the Sermon on the Mount?”

“The evangelicals—including the author of Future History—keep insisting we aren’t saved by works but by faith.”

“True—but also ‘by their fruits ye shall know them.’ Those truly saved by faith will do the hard works demanded by that faith. Those not saved by faith will find all kinds of excuses to avoid the hard works. You can see that with our Muslim lords and masters all too well.” Tavistock made a face. “At the top of the pyramid, you see the powerful who use the form of the religion as a means of control. I seriously doubt any of them really believe what they profess to believe. You don’t see true believers until you get down to the level of the new recruit who desperately wants to belong—and they don’t stay true believers once it becomes painfully obvious to them that it’s all a big power struggle. The strong rule, the weak are enslaved. It’s a religion built on pain and hatred, not comfort and love. That’s why they can’t understand us, and why they can’t go where we’re about to go. They have chosen to deny Reality and their places in it because their reality is one of excruciating pain. Always has been, always will be, and there is no way they will ever let anyone persuade them otherwise.”

Silence fell as the chaplain picked at his pecan pie. Tavistock shared a look with his wife.

“I should have tried harder.”

“To do what? Convert your Muslim brothers?”

“Yeah, I guess, even though Army rules said no proselytizing.”

“You did exactly what you were supposed to do, Bill. You can’t go back and change it now. Remember, each of us is ultimately only responsible for our own choices, not those of anyone else. Sometimes trying to persuade someone else he’s made the wrong choice as we see it only makes matters worse. Reverse psychology, you know.”

“I guess I feel sorry for them, because after tomorrow it’ll be far too late for them to change their minds.”

“Actually, dear, it won’t be. It’s never too late until the moment of death. They just won’t be able to go home before they die—and they will probably have to suffer a great deal before any of them decide it might be worth it to change their minds. Should they still refuse to change their minds and accept Reality instead of denying it, then they deserve what they get. They really have no excuses, after all. It’s not that hard. You only have to decide it isn’t worth feeling sorry for yourself because Reality isn’t the way you want it to be. It simply IS, and you are exactly who you are supposed to be, doing exactly what you’re supposed to do.”

Father Andrews looked at May as if she’d skewered him—or at least punctured his balloon.

“I have been feeling sorry for myself, haven’t I?”

May nodded. “We all do—frequently. It’s all part of the learning process. After all, banging your head against a brick wall hurts, and you need time to heal before you go back to trying to figure out how to get past it. You have done so much to comfort all of us over the years. Let us return the favor.” She held out her right hand to him, even as she took Tavistock’s hand in her left.

The general joined her in offering his hand to the chaplain. Father Andrew looked at them, then sighed and reached out to accept their comfort.

 

[The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people is strictly coincidental.]

Admiral Wickersram

 

Admiral David Wickersram looked around the warehouse at the Washington Navy Yard. It looked just as it had ten years ago when he and his team had first conceived of the scam of the century, nothing more than a run down building that might have served almost any purpose.

The purpose he and his team had put it to had required a lot of time, energy, gold, and silver, but the gold and silver had belonged to the Muslim high mucky-mucks who thought they ran the country. They had never apparently cottoned on to the fact that their gold and silver, to say nothing of a large amount of war materiel, had found its way to their most hated enemy, Israel, under the cover of luxury cruises for them to their own holy places. He made a rude noise at the thought of their stupidity, and the ten years he’d had to keep his mouth shut in the face of their greed and contempt. It was almost over now. Tomorrow would be the last of it.

All the fancy furniture had disappeared into storage. Even the fine wood paneling had been pulled down and hidden. The Star of Islam and her sister cruise ships, once tramp freighters he and his teams had fixed up, sat at anchor just outside, never again to be used. After all, the rag-heads didn’t have the training to run them, and anyone who did had long ago disappeared into the wilderness like him.

Ens. Berthold cleared his throat. The admiral turned and gave him a smile. Even after ten years, it was hard to resist the urge to salute. But the armed forces of what had once been the United States of America had long since been disbanded by the last president—not long before the Muslims controlling Congress had made it clear to her that her services were no longer wanted and that she’d best be gone or they’d parade all of her dirty laundry for the world to see. He didn’t know what had become of her, and he didn’t care. He’d already disappeared into the wilderness with as many of his fellow officers and enlisted as he’d been able to persuade to join him.

“Yes, Randy?”

“We’re done here, sir. Mike’s ready to put up the poster for Abdul’s viewing pleasure when he makes his next visit on Monday.”

“Great! Let’s clear out of here while our lords and masters are at prayer.” He followed the ensign out of the empty, echoing building through the front door.

The elegant entry had been dismantled and replaced with the original banged up metal door. On the peeling paint, Machinist’s Mate Michael Gideon now slathered glue from a bucket at his feet. With the help of his buddies, he positioned the poster crafted with care by Lt. Lydia Hargrave, an excellent artist in addition to all her other talents and skills. When the men were satisfied that the artwork hung straight and would stick properly, they backed up so everyone could admire it.

The upper half showed the head of a lion with a stern expression and a crown on his head. Rays of light radiated in a half circle around him.

The lower half showed the shrine of Qa’aba with the drapes pulled back and the rock exposed. Its resemblance to a woman’s vulva had been enhanced to the point where, it might be hoped, the stupidest raghead would get the joke—that for all the centuries Islam had proclaimed men to be vastly superior to women, its sacred rock had been shaped in the essence of womanhood.

Lt. Hargrave had added, in English and Arabic, the words, “If you worship a deaf, dumb, and blind rock, you deserve what’s coming to you,” and had signed her full name so Abdul and his toadies would know who was insulting them.

The admiral nodded. “That’ll work.”

His men grinned, then Mike put the bucket of glue just inside the door and locked it. With glad hearts, they all climbed into the cutter moored at the foot of the dock, cast loose the lines and unshipped the oars long enough to work their way out into the quiet estuary of the Anacostia.

As he sat at the tiller, Wickersram shook his head at the thought of having had to return to pre-industrial methods of transportation. At least he and his men had transportation. Most poor souls had only their feet—assuming they were allowed to go anywhere beyond their work farms. Even the wealthiest ragheads had been reduced to horse-drawn carriages. It wasn’t really their fault, though.

The men raised the sail to catch the wind running upriver, then shipped oars and concentrated on navigating the estuary. As the overgrown banks slid past on either side, the admiral remembered the day almost 15 years earlier, when the Democrats had finally achieved their dream of controlling the House, Senate, and White House with unbeatable majorities. He’d seen the handwriting on the wall then, but hadn’t wanted to believe it. Still, prudence suggested acting as if he had, so he and Linda had gone house hunting and had found a decent little farm near Patuxent, hidden in plain sight between DC and Baltimore—and not far from Anapolis, where he’d been teaching at the time.

Over the next two or three years, they’d added to the property, which bordered on the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, and had developed a village of like-minded souls. He’d discovered quite early in the process that he wasn’t the only military mind doing the same thing, and setting up an Old Boys’ network had been the result. Linda, meanwhile, had created her own Old Girls’ network to share information about how to do just about anything her not so distant ancestors had done on their farms back in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

By the time the Democrats had managed to turn the recession of 2008 into the depression of 2010, he and Linda had nearly completed the process of turning their property into a working farm that was largely self-sufficient. They’d even sold their gas guzzlers and replaced them with horses and assorted wagons and carriages. There must be a lot of gas guzzlers moldering in junkyards around the country, he thought. What else could one expect when Congress had passed laws that made it impossible to own a car, even if they hadn’t driven the oil companies out of the country with their draconian windfall tax schemes.

As the cutter approached the southern tip of the long island set aside as part of Anacostia River Park, Wickersram bent his attention to guiding the cutter along the east channel of the river, then under the East Capitol Street bridge, empty of traffic now. A little further along, they passed beneath the Benning Rd. bridge. Only a couple more miles to where they’d left the horses and wagons with Melanie and Roger, his daughter and her husband. No doubt they had spent their day gathering berries and apples for dinner. Hard to believe tonight would be the last night they would spend on Earth, at least, if the prophecies were, in fact, true. If not, well, there was always plan B, take back the country from the ragheads.

The wind died as they passed into the National Arboretum and the trees along the banks cut it off. The men took down the sail and broke out the oars again, but since the tide was still going their way as it neared full, they had a little help. Besides, it never hurt to get a little more practice and exercise in.

Now that they had passed beyond the confines of the district, and easy reach of any of the enforcers that might be of a mind to demand a bribe, the admiral breathed a soft sigh of relief. Bad enough that his little village had to play host to the local ombudsman from time to time. At least Jamal didn’t ask for bribes because he wasn’t allowed to. A Muslim convert with a bad attitude, he did everything he could to provoke the residents of the village—so they did nothing to provoke him, except communicate in sign language, as if they were all deaf and dumb. Since they had no need of his services, they generally ignored him.

As the cutter finally approached the beach, Wickersram turned the craft head-on so his men could run it up onto the shingle. A moment later, they all climbed out, pulled the boat into the shelter they’d made for it long ago, then zipped it up for safe keeping. Melanie and Roger had backed up the wagon to the grassy verge just above the beach. Half the men climbed in to join the bushel baskets of fruits and berries while Wickersram and the other half of his team untethered their horses and mounted up for the long ride home.

“Any problems?” he asked his daughter in sign language.

She shook her head and responded in the same manner. “Quiet as usual. Our lords and masters aren’t interested in gathering fruits and berries.”

How very true, he thought. They’d rather live it up in the houses of the rich that they’d appropriated once the rich had seen which way the wind was blowing and had taken themselves and their wealth elsewhere—be it Nicaragua, Switzerland, or even Patagonia. Of course, now that the power grid had deteriorated past problematic to useless, the lords and masters had to use candles and oil lamps since they had no clue—or interest—in dealing with electricity. But with legions of the poor to serve as slaves, they had their pick of the work farm residents.

Wickersram ground his teeth. The stories he’d heard from the ragheads taking advantage of his cruise line could make his blood boil if he let them. The ragheads, of course, had no idea how much he’d heard and recorded, for they’d never bothered to inspect their luxurious staterooms for bugs. That, of course, had been in the early days, when there’d still been some hope of being able to take the country back from them.

He couldn’t say when he’d first heard the whispers that tomorrow would be the great day when those abiding in faith would be taken home. The word had come from a man he would trust with his life. General Tavistock had served as the last Chair of the Joint Chiefs, and had founded his own village in the hinterlands of Virginia near Shenandoah National Park. Initially he had hinted at building a coalition of patriots, but once he and his fellow Chiefs of Staff had laughed in the President’s face and resigned so as to leave her hanging out to dry in the face of the demands of the Muslims controlling Congress, something had changed. Wickersram figured Tavistock must have learned something too compelling to disbelieve. True, he had said that if he was wrong, they would move to plan B and take back the nation. But he hadn’t looked as if he thought he was wrong.

As he looked both ways on reaching the deserted intersection of highways 201 and 202, the admiral shook off his doubt. He would know soon enough. He led his team onto 201 headed north past the silent shops that had once belonged to people who had wanted only to live the American Dream. Ten years and more of abandonment to wind and weather had left the awnings in tatters, the windows in splinters, and the sidewalks in weeds. Even the pavement over which they rode or drove had buckled and cracked here and there, where the potholes hadn’t taken over.

Where were the shoppers and shop keepers? Many had died in the food riots of the early teens that the President had so brutally put down. Many others had abandoned the urban and suburban areas in search of places where they might survive. Some few had joined his village or started villages of their own with his and Linda’s help out in the ruburbs. The rest had largely been rounded up by the raghead mafia and dragged into the work camps within Washington, DC, to grow the food and make the supplies demanded by their lords and masters. They had all been warned, but too few of them had bothered to listen, much less believe and act on that belief.

How many of them might have found faith in the camps? How many of them might join him and his family and friends in the great day? He had no way to know except wait and see.

As they approached the intersection with highway 401 in Riverdale Park, they found it as deserted as the last intersection. The admiral and his team picked their way around the shattered traffic lights and other debris, then rode on toward Good Luck Rd. where they turned east along the edge of Greenbelt Park. The pavement here had long ago crumbled back into gravel, so the going became smoother. Wickersram nudged his gray into a trot, followed by the rest of his team. They still had miles to go, and the sun wouldn’t be up for much longer.

Soon they crossed beneath the Baltimore Washington Parkway, then under the Beltway. Past the ruins of Doctors Community Hospital, the road improved enough to allow a rolling canter. They made good time to highway 193. The admiral sighed as they passed the Goddard Spaceflight Center, just visible beyond the nearby ruins of the commercial strip. How close they had come to moving beyond this world, only to have those dreams smashed to the ground by a president who couldn’t bear the thought that anyone might escape her control. Backed by a Congress in full agreement with her, NASA had been disbanded and private space had been forbidden. After all, the sheeple were far too stupid to be allowed to make their own decisions about anything, let alone to risk their lives for the useless pleasure of seeing the world from space. Now there was no hope for mankind to reach the stars.

At least, the admiral reminded himself, not in human form. If, indeed, tomorrow was the day when the last trump sounded, and he and his were among the elect, perhaps indeed he would not only reach the stars but travel so far beyond them that they would nevermore have meaning.

Not for the first time, he wondered what the trip would be like.

 

Gee, has it really been five months since my last post?

I've not really been missing in action, just swamped at work, and too tired and sad on my time off to find the energy to post. But I have been reading Townhall at work on my breaks and lunch, etc., so I've more or less kept up.

Why have I been sad? Several reasons, the first being a death in my house back in June, and the need for dealing with all the emotional reactions attendant on that. But you doubtless don't want to hear the gory details, so I won't bother you with them here.
 
The second reason is the horrible prospect of Shrillary becoming our next POTUS. That was so depressing in August and September that I started reworking a story I'd begun the previous year. It's now called "In the Twinkling of an Eye," and consists of a number of short stories all related to each other that, when taken together, touch on my nightmarish worst case scenario of what she would do to the country--and the world--and why.

The third reason has been a lot of turmoil at work, none of which any of you would be interested in.

But things are slowly looking up. Things are easing up a little at work, I'm a little less worried about Shrillary, and we're managing to recover from the death in the family.

I don't know how often I'll be able to post, but it's my hope to post a comment here and there (as I did earlier this evening), and a longer essay here now and then.

One of the most amusing things I've been watching is the battle between GunnyG, Anne, Hockey Mom, USMC LT, and others on the one side and Hal D and Robert on the other side. I'm not interested in taking sides, but I did tell Hal D and Robert tonight that the supercilious tone they use on the threads is really quite offensive, and I'm not at all surprised they've made as many enemies as they have in the TH community. I have to deal with enough people like them on the phone at work--but at least I get paid for doing that.

I think if they could just admit that there are other points of view than their own, and that no matter what anyone may want, none of us can go back and change anything in the past, they wouldn't be so offensive, and I wouldn't have to skim over their comments. The occasional bits and pieces I do read indicate a bit of sense, once you get past the "you're all so stupid!" tone in which they're written. If Robert and Hal D are so very much smarter than the rest of us, why aren't they running for president and vice-president since they can do the job so much better than the current occupants of those offices?

And speaking of running for president, my husband managed to watch part of the last debate before it got too sickening even for him (I just watched a teeny bit of Shrillary's comments about the poisoned imports from China before I had to leave). Last night over dinner, he provided me with his idea of how a manly man Democratic Presidential Candidate would stomp the real candidates on Universal Health Insurance (as opposed to socialized health care). It made me wish there really was a presidential candidate on either side willing to tell it like it is--specifically that the president can propose, but it is Congress who disposes. We should all, therefore, be working hard in our congressional districts and states to support the most reasonable conservative candidates we can find. If we present Shrillary (assuming she doesn't trip over her own feet) with a solidly conservative (preferrably Republican) House and Senate, we might be able to pull her fangs.

Another interesting point came out of our discussion over dinner, and that is that Richardson might actually surprise everyone should the three front runners succeed in creaming each other and exposing their total ineptitude to their real base in the primaries. Unlike the others, he has been a governor and is one now. I'm not terribly impressed with him except for the fact that he has supported private space development in New Mexico, and has some experience with the people involved (unlike Shrillary and the others).

As for the Republican candidates, about all I can say is yuck. The front runners get a double yuck. Hunter is a question mark. Paul is likewise. So far I'm really not seeing anyone I feel very comfortable with. I've got time, though, as Colorado has a relatively late presidential primary, so my choice will probably be made for me, like it or not.

Be that as it may, I just keep trying to remind myself that what will be IS, and my part in it is simply to execute as best I can the tasks that are presented to me.

Ad Astra per Levitas Nostra!