A Joyous Confluence

What might visitors to planet Earth come looking for?

 

“When are we, Janina?” asked Dal.  “What’s it all about?”  She’d just roused him from his yearlong sleep; his brain felt thick with cobwebs left over from his ever-expanding dream.  He shook them out, washed his face, and listened while she briefed him.

      “As for time, you may choose your season,” said Janina.  “It is about a beautiful planet down below, where abounding intellect has shaped the surface in its own image.  The vast seas remain largely untouched, however; perhaps the inhabitants do not understand how to employ them.  Or they might even be environmentalists conserving their resources.”

      “You really think they have evolved so far?”

      “Exploration of their inner mind is your province, love.  In my ignorance I can only speculate.”

      She passed him a hot snap.  The sharp taste braced him, setting his hair on end.  His mind focused and his face lit up with a smile suitable to his search for joy.  For nothing less did he search; for nothing less would he have undertaken such a voyage as this.

      A few strides put Dal at the sensory enhancement center; he attached himself to it and confronted the new world:  uncharted; remarkably rich in so many ways.  Had unknown others been by to gaze upon it, as he did now, or was his little band first to visit since intelligence had taken root here?  “Pretty flowers down below,” he mused.

      “There is even a rickety space station in orbit well below us, Dal,” informed Janina, “though what sensory equipment they have could never pick us up.  They have yet to penetrate the mystery of dark matter.  That much we gathered before involving you.”

      “Yes, it appears we are safe from their eyes and instruments.  But you do not want to remain in the dark, do you?  Shall we emerge and confront them?”

      “I thought you’d never ask.”

 

* * *

 

Peter Hillary peered trancelike out the window for maybe the millionth time since he’d taken up living aboard the International Space Station.  He never thought, twenty-two months ago, that this panoramic view of Earth from such lofty perch could bore him literally to tears.  But right now he was salivating for surf and turf, wondering whether he would ever stand on solid ground again, or hear the splash of waves, or feel the wind.

      Sharp fingers snapped behind his ear, irritating tremendously.  “Peter, don’t?  You must maintain your sanity, for my sake if not your own.”  Sergey Yasterzhembskiy, Peter’s only companion, was if anything the more disturbed of the two.  For it was fear—manifested as deep paranoia—more than mere longing, which the situation on the ground had instilled in him.

      They were the sole residents of this glorified telephone booth, and Peter still believed—but only just—that they might survive this slice of life so far removed from their fellows.  Sergey had just about used up all his hope.

      The space ferry was down again, a machine with millions of moving parts, the property of a people whose leadership lacked the daring to fly unless safety approached one-hundred percent.  The same bunch had let the Hubble telescope die of such fearsome conservatism less than a generation ago, and Peter suspected he and Sergey would suffer a similar fate, if rescue depended upon his compatriots.

      On the other hand their last supplies from Russia had nearly missed them, had barely survived in a pod irreparably damaged in docking; any attempt to reenter the atmosphere in it would result in their certain cremation.  Now a rift with China had plunged Sergey’s great nation into all-out war, and the Russian leadership had all but forgotten the space station.  “Resupply impossible; defense of the homeland requires every resource,” was the standard message the first months of the crisis.  Sliced out of the world’s budgets like expendable luxuries, they were.  Two pieces of unpopular art left to rot in a pitch-black closet.

      Peter and Sergey were like wild animals in an abandoned city zoo, trapped with no escape.  Necessary rationing had pared both men to skin and bones beneath their too large jumpsuits.  Another sixty days of this and they’d be starved dead.  Everyday the two forgotten specimens of this experiment gone wrong brayed and bleated into their radio, but it seemed no one either side of the planet understood a word of it.  “Nothing to be done,” the terse message came battering their minds in wakefulness, and in their dreams.  It sounded to them like, “Joke’s on you.”  Never before were there two men as angry as they at the whole damned rotten planet full of people spinning serenely below them.

      Now Peter perked his ears.  Of a sudden, the faintest notion came over him, as if the people in the apartment above were up and about.  But in this floating tomb-to-be, upstairs consisted only of a lab he and Sergey had abandoned, their scheduled experiments long since done, their will to work, their curiosity, squeezed completely from them.  Peter’s mind was playing more tricks.

      And he’d hoped he would die sane.

      “Did you hear that?” said Sergey, confirming Peter’s delusion.

      “I think I did.  Perhaps we have some difficulty,” said Peter hopefully.  Either they were both hearing things, or he was still in possession of some sense.  “Perhaps there’s a problem in the lab.  I’ll go check.”

      “Not without me, you don’t,” Sergey laughed for the first time in a month.  Perhaps he was mad, hoped the station would suffer a fatal breach, that a collision with space debris or faulty engineering would end their suffering all at once.  More likely, like Peter, he hoped for no more than a little distraction to occupy his troubled mind; to provide them a span of relief from their interminable waiting for the rescue each suspected would never come.

      So up into the lab led the astronaut, followed close by his cosmonaut friend, both in search of stimulus that would rouse them from their dreadful desperation.  They found only the disappointment of emptiness at first—until Dal and Janina decided the time right, when together they emerged from dark matter before a black porthole dotted with sharp starlight.  Sergey saw them first and roared bloody murder.  Peter saw his worthy comrade cowering in a corner, followed Sergey’s line of sight and beheld—what?

      Two people, strange lookers.  Peter, dedicated scientist he was, didn’t believe in ghosts.  These two appeared as solid as he.  Just for a moment he leaped to the jarring conclusion his insanity was now full-blown.  The pair appeared beautiful to him.  The male owned a powerful body and the face of a leader.  His female companion was so comely, her body perfect, her face luminous, that Peter was immediately enchanted.  Their more than handsome—and very human—features reassured Peter, so that he looked on them with sound reason, noticed without much disturbance that their skulls were oddly shaped, larger than he thought they should be.  Human, he judged, but with a twist.

      “You appear troubled, friends,” Dal said to them in speech sounding to Sergey like Russian and to Peter like English.

      “You understate things, sir,” Peter quietly replied.  Sergey, calmed, stood silent.

      “We believe you are malnourished,” said Janina.  “Can we be of assistance?”  The kind words of this angel caused a silent stream of tears down Sergey’s face.  Peter remained the skeptical scientist.

      “We are marooned here, starving.  Who are you?”

      “Marooned so close to your planet?  How can this be?” said Dal, as always the spectacle of ignorance leaving him incredulous.  Then he turned to her and said in a language undetectable to the earth men, “These two are devoid of joy, Janina.”

      Thus began humanity’s long-imagined, long-anticipated first contact with intelligent life from outside the confines of their precious Earth.  The aliens provided food pleasing as nectar to honeybees.  Sergey and Peter felt contentment for the first time in recent memory, and they gratefully poured out their hearts to Dal and Janina as though time were indefinitely suspended.  Who knows how long they talked, but they covered much of Earth’s recent history, showed with pride everything of interest aboard the station, no thought of espionage crossing their minds.  Dal prepared himself a copy of all information available from the station’s computer, still as it was operating in concert with the network that connected this tiny trap with the whole planet.  The information gathered already made for a successful exploration; but Dal, of his own heartfelt necessity, was looking for something more.  Only evidence of genuine joy would sustain him.

      Later the relatively primitive pair rescued from the station would be astonished how during this conversation they had learned virtually nothing from this stunning couple, these most remarkable beings they ever in their lifetimes would encounter.  Few on Earth would ever believe their story.

      Finally, Dal signaled to them the interview was finished:  “It is time for us to leave.”

      Peter and Sergey were completely crestfallen, caged cockatoos whose companions were threatening to fly away free forever.  To be left alone again—wings clipped—in this cramped prison, after such uplifting by this fantastic couple; what could be worse?  Oh, it would be too much to bear.

      “Please stay,” Sergey implored.  “Stay just another few orbits.  We may be isolated forever.”

      “Would you like us to set you down on the planet?” said Dal matter-of-factly.  “It would not be out of our way.”

      The two earthlings looked at him in gaping awe, and then each into the other’s eyes, both pairs silently screaming, “Is he crazed?”  Then, for a little while, tears of relief overcame both men.

 

* * *

 

“They should be OK here, don’t you think, Janina?”  They were set to leave Sergey and Peter, both now lightly sedated, sleeping like satisfied cats near a deserted crossroad situated beside a fresh rushing stream in far northwestern Montana, USA.  Dal had offered to drop Sergey in Russia, but with the war on, he had opted to join Peter in the relative safety of the western hemisphere.”

      “I’m sure they’ll be quite happy when they awaken,” said Janina, “though they’ll have trouble explaining how they got home in a disabled return pod no one can find.”

      “I supplied them a map of their location, and the summer weather will please them,” said Dal.  In no case could they adversely affect their liberators; he, Janina, and the modest crew awaiting them in orbit, would be a million miles from Earth before the two could report their arrival and share their amazing story, or withhold it, as they pleased.  And in their elation at having dodged death, Dal doubted the earth men would be in much hurry.  Dal and Janina after all had now restored to them every man’s daily dream:  a full life ahead.  What greater elixir could anyone ask than to escape certain doom?  Though Dal noted in the two saved men mere sheer relief, a temporary emotion inferior to the pure joy for which he scoured the cosmos.

      As the four had plummeted through the atmosphere aboard Dal and Janina’s craft, Dal, ever searching, had asked the men from opposite sides of the planet the single same question:  “Gentlemen, could you please tell us what matters most to earthling humans?”

      The two spontaneously and in concert had given the single same answer:  “Money.”  Neither man had exhibited the least speck of doubt about this.  Upon answering they had even looked at one another and laughed at their perfect timing, knowing the clear truth of their response, it almost instinctively etched in their brains.

      “Not such an unusual world after all,” said Janina, as she and Dal flitted away from the slumbering spacers.  “Some say ‘money’; others ‘property,’ or ‘security,’ or ‘comfort and ease.’  It all comes down to the same, and yet in the end their graveyards fill and multiply.  Where in the cosmos is there any difference?  Oh, Dal.”

      “Don’t despair, love.  I depend on your steady mind for moral support.  You know anxiety is my specialty; just leave any of that to me.

      “Another stop or two and we will depart this planet and set our course beyond the Milky Way.  Shall we take a quick spin, perhaps cherry-pick a few souvenirs?”

      “That would be jolly.”

      Up and over, down and around the world they flitted in their invisible cocoon observing Earth, recording for all their fellows and for all time the wonders of the planet, and its flaws.  Dal and Janina absorbed the state of Earth’s cultures and grew their understanding of the vast variety of conditions the billions of inhabitants faced in their daily lives.  They were awed by the wealth and knowledge they saw, and disgusted by the pitiable poverty and fathomless ignorance, all so unevenly spread around the globe.  Deep libraries were cultivated as precious crops here, torched into oblivion there.  Here was human blood transfused in life-saving operations of genius, there blood spilt on filthy streets of rubble like so much worthless waste product.

      Joy one moment filled their observer hearts, sorrow the next.  Their empathy was born of deep understanding that those they observed were not lab rats, scientific specimens of an alien species of which they were mere disinterested observers.  No, Dal and Janina’s kind were not in essence different from these humans.  Their perspective as inexhaustible travelers allowed them to know that the human heart was spread across the cosmos, wherever in space-time they turned, like flower fields spanning the universe, even as fields of similar but subtly different flora spread everywhere across the face of planet Earth.  How could the peoples of one field of growth—including even these observers’ own birth world—be more or less worthy than others of love and admiration?

      Janina said, “Dal, I would walk among them, smell their air, touch their lives.”

      “Yes, it is time.  We’ve collected what data we can use.”  Another understatement, for in just a few hours they had copied all the accumulated knowledge, every image and sound, every jot and tittle ever recorded down through the history of this human race, but for those few books earthlings had not yet digitized.  “All that remains is to take personal impressions.  I have fashioned a little disguise, for our uncovered heads look strange to them.”

      “May we find joy within them, and ourselves enjoy being amongst them,” prayed Janina.

 

* * *

 

A passing donkey-drawn cart dusted the air around the pair.  The sun beat down on the Gaza Strip, but bothered them not, for Dal’s head was covered by his kuffiyeh; in his ankle-length kaftan he resembled a tall, husky Lawrence of Arabia.  He strode together with his beloved Janina, her hijab covering her too large cranium while serving to give her a traditional look that had not been questioned all the while they’d been roaming these streets belonging to the poorest of Earth’s poor.

      “Here is where gauze was invented so many centuries ago, Janina, a material used today in every hospital, and in most households in the world.  Now just look what they’ve come to.”

      They had first materialized in the capitol of the Saudi kings, but try as they might they could not obtain an audience with the great men.  Security forces instead pressed them for “documentation,” which they declined to produce.  While officials were preparing their arrest, they quietly took their leave, preferring to search out friendlier attitudes elsewhere.  Their dematerialization before the eyes of their interrogators must have left quite an impression.  Dal was pleased, thinking about it now.  He knew it was not his best self who loved to put the high and mighty in their places now and again, but he enjoyed so doing just the same.

      Not much beyond the necessities for sale here, and even basics were scarce as the money to buy them.  A people oppressed by circumstances, the causes of which were generations removed from those who now suffered as consequence, caught in a spiral of wicked action and retaliation, no one knowing who was the chicken, who the egg, what started it all, how it could be finished and peace established.  The highest unemployment in the world, the poorest housing, raw sewage running in the streets, epidemics ignored by authorities because they had not the resources to address them while the all-important fighting carried on.

      Dal had chosen to observe this particular sprig of humanity in search of heartfelt joy.  Most humans would have thought him a dreamer or a fool.  Janina could only love him, for she shared unreservedly in Dal’s search for that most rare and fulfilling of all mental states.

      Far from joy, the two thus far had observed much bitterness.  On one street, they had joined a crowd listening to a masked leader and his fellow gunmen announcing further jihad, to the especial thrill of resentful young men; and to the trepidation of the men’s mothers, who wondered whether the ceasing of sorrow was a universal impossibility.  As for fathers, there were few, for they died young in this setting, or were imprisoned.  If ever there was a land of tears, thought Dal, here it lies.

      A group of children began to follow Dal and Janina, sensing in them something different.  One boy’s courage stood out.  “Can you help us, honored sir?  Can you help us?”

      “What is your name, young man?” asked Dal.

      “I am Khalil, sir.”

      “And what troubles you, Khalil?”

      “My sister is very ill, sir.”

      “And why should you think we can help?”

      “You look like a doctor, sir; and she like the beautiful nurse in the tale my mother tells.”  Dal laughed and smiled, and the children were visibly pleased.  Wherever he’d ventured in the cosmos Dal’s star-bright smile had lit up hearts fortunate enough to encounter him.

      “Take me to her then, Khalil.”  Khalil latched onto Dal’s hand and the crowd of boys tugged the two around several corners to a ramshackle mud-brick house and in.  His mother, Suha, hovering over her daughter’s bed, despondent, looked expressionless up at the strangers, and then returned to her fretting over the dying child.

      Dal dropped to his knees next to the low bed.  Suha did not object to his touching her daughter.  She was powerless in this life, and knew it well.  After a while she lowered her eyes and inquired, “Can you help her?”

      Dal considered.  Of course, he could help the child.  But he could not help all the children of this world, nor even of this province, even on this street.  He had struggled with this countless times in his travels:  how to decide when to intervene.  “What is her name?” he asked Suha.

      “She is Tahani.”  The girl was perhaps twelve.  She was delirious with fever.

      “I do not know.  Let me think.”  With those words Dal sat back to wall in silent meditation, while Janina shooed the boisterous children outside, then did what she could to comfort Suha with light conversation.

      After a little while, Suha felt comfortable enough to assert the truth in her heart.  “Who are you people?  You are too light-skinned to be residents of Gaza,” she said.

      “We come from afar,” said Janina, “but in heart we are very near to you.”

      “You are strangers, and imitators to boot.”  She had noticed a subtle laxity in the dress of the two.

      Dal, hearing this, pulled from his memory a quote he’d learned just this day, saying,  “The Prophet, peace be upon him, said:  ‘He who copies any people is one of them.’”  Suha, devout all her life, had heard that before, and she was much impressed and comforted by it.  She mulled it over, then arose and went to the open door, called for her son, whispered him instructions.

      Soon women from all over the neighborhood were coming and going, and before Dal and Janina could understand all that was happening Suha was ushering them into the adjoining kitchen, to a table hidden beneath pots that, when uncovered, revealed a feast.  There were rice and boiled vegetables, hummus and spices, and on a grill over a coal-fire, veal enough to feed a family in this place for a month.

      Dal wondered at this display of wealth, here in the jaws of poverty.  He had done nothing for the sick child, who still weighed on his mind.  He felt culpable, if he was the cause of these people’s lavish expenditure.  Why?  Why?  But he and Janina partook, as gracious guests must.

      “Bless our company,” said Suha to all the women and children present.  “They are strangers that have come here of their own accord, and while I expect nothing of them, they give me hope.”  She turned to Dal and Janina.  “Thank you for coming.  Your display of compassion fills an old woman’s heart with joy.  And I give you joy in return.  Now eat.”

      Later, after dark, in a great mysterious confluence, Dal first laid hands on Tahani, lifting her fever like the master shaman he is.  Then one of the neighbor women who’d given to the feast, in the excitement and relief of the moment, lay down and under the skilled hands of Suha and Janina gave early birth to a healthy set of twins, a son and a daughter, whom she straightaway named after these strangers, these workers of miracles.

      Cries of uttermost genuine joy rang out through the night, even in Gaza.

 

* * *

 

“Well, did you find what you were seeking?” inquired Janina.  She lay with Dal aboard the mother ship, a sparkle of light speeding outward from the far edge of the Milky Way.  Earth had taken its place in his mind as one more component of his ongoing dream.

      “Yes and no.”

      “Will you never be completely satisfied, my love?”

      “If ever I were, would we still be searching the cosmos?”

      “But you found joy.”

      “A modicum of joy, yes.”

      “It was great joy, a confluence of many joys.  What more can there be?”

      “Yes, a great confluence of joys.  Now they are past, and seem to me but a portion of an inexhaustible dream, a joining of great rivers that ultimately evaporate into mere memory.  Can one never hold on to joy, and keep it all the rest of one’s moments?”

      “I know this, darling Dal.  Whenever I remember this time with those wonderful people, I will remember joy, and know it is real, and that it is widespread in the cosmos, even to its darkest corners.  Oh, and we have had so many such times.  Everywhere you go you attract joy born from the hearts of others.”

      She stroked his brow as he closed his eyes.  She knew he would dream deep and long.

      He would dream of the next galaxy flinging wide its great arms to welcome them, of that time when he would begin anew his search for everlasting joy.

 

THE END

 

Reviews

[Nathan Noble]

very interesting and fascinating write. this was truly incredible.

[Zeva]

An absolutely fascinating concept. The line about the glorified telephone booth really cracked me up. =]

I didn't notice any spelling mistakes or anything, and I'm pretty nitpicky. So I don't have much to say other than that it was really well thought out and put together, and I enjoyed reading this very much.

[Rylan Batten]

interesting concept. I really like the originality here, I haven't seen this sort of story before. The setting, and the characters, and the theme all went together very nicely. I enjoyed reading this a lot.
Thanks

--Rylan