The Sequel to my Novel

is currently in progress. Here are the first four chapters.

The Journeyer’s Return and The Returner’s Journey

Chapter 1. Unicorn’s Mother

The red mare galloped at a steady pace, her hooves contacting the ground in sequence, piston-like in their rhythm. Night had turned to day and night again. She felt no hunger or thirst, nor heat or cold.

She remembered when she began her journey. The stars were blurry and seemed like glistening atoms in a crystal, their electrons fuzzy with uncertainty. And the ground wasn’t really ground then, but the same intermolecular space as the sky.

Now the untwinkling stars seemed scattered like jacks tossed on a floor, raw randomness uninterpreted as constellations. She knew their lack of twinkle meant she was seeing them without an atmosphere; nevertheless, she was breathing heavily.

She recalled that it was windy when the journey began. No, it was a single gust of wind. No, not that either, just one breath from a very old man. His voice was soft and his body was thinned by age but he wasn’t frail at all.

What were his words? “If you want to stow away, I can help you. But it will be years before you can come back. The only one who can assist you has not yet returned to our era.”

She had bobbed her head enthusiastically. The next thing she knew, he puckered his lips and blew at her once: po-wa. She floated away as gently as a dandelion, but then a vortex sucked her in noisily like a jet engine.

Sponge-like, she reconstituted on the other side of the violent sieve, a quiet place that seemed no different from where she had been as the dandelion. Soon she became a horse, a form which had the rightness of familiarity.

Now, galloping at her unbroken pace under the unfamiliar night sky, she remembered other men and other horses. She recalled her first love, a grandson of the very old man. His grandfather had entrusted him with a book, which he then shared with her.

Her lover wouldn’t mate with her because he had a wife somewhere whom he hadn’t seen in years. Eventually she gave up on him and took the book away for her own use.

Then she’d met another man who, like her, could become a horse -- a Persian blue stallion. Together they’d frolicked in a realm beyond the physical, and after nature took its course, she had given birth to a girl who became a blue-violet unicorn.

Chapter 2. Stable Hand

In due course in this timeless place that seemed not quite solid, the mare found a building. It resembled a barn so she picked up her pace, excited by the prospect of finding other horses, or people, or even unicorns.

But as she approached, it looked more like a house. And her gait started to change: her forelegs still churned but they no longer touched the ground. Her body felt compressed in the direction of her motion, as if a wind was forcing her to be vertical.

She glanced downward and saw that she had hands and feet instead of hooves. She now knew what she was and what she had done. She'd expected the journey to be completely different from any she had taken before. But she hadn't expected to be so absorbed in her avatar that she'd forget who she was.

A hand pressed the center of her back. Her weight swiftly came back to her and she felt her feet solidly on the ground. The room lit up but her eyes felt no shock from the sudden illumination.

A man was facing her, standing well beyond arm’s reach. His skin was not much browner than her own but it had a coppery sheen. He smiled and said, “Now you have felt the Hand of the Stable.”

She frowned at him, signifying confusion and impatience. She had intended to glare at this stranger, indignant at having been touched by him but something about him calmed her annoyance before it could rise to her face.

His smile broadened. “Don’t look at me, sister. I didn’t touch you.” He stroked his forelock and snickered, which sounded more like the whinny of a horse than the chuckle of a human. “I should have said, ‘Do look at me’ because I’m clearly too far away to have touched you.”

Another whinny. “Now that you’ve come to your senses, you’re wondering what it was. We who work here call it the Hand of the Stable. It’s a feature of the grounding capability built into this house.”

“What kind of house is this?” she asked.

“A stable and a place for stability.” Yet another whinny. “It’s not really a pun, because both words have the same root.”

She finally smiled. “I guess that makes sense. My avatar is a horse.”

“Your avatar?”

“A representation of myself that manifests when I travel to subtler realms.”

His laughter was louder this time, like a kind teacher correcting a young student’s mistake. “What makes you think this ‘avatar’ is part of you?”

Back on Earth she had founded and led the Octagon Group, developing methods of teleportation and testing them with three independent cadres of 8. The backgrounds of the 24 members spanned the globe and included at least one descendant of each of the four alien races: Gold, Silver, Copper, and Violet.

She reared up and responded firmly to this challenge to her expertise, “I’ve explored these realms for years, transforming into the same horse every time.” But as the words left her mouth, she imagined the po-wa man winking at her and whispering, “Are you sure that’s what happened?”

The Copper man shook his head. “The horse is your familiar. She exists in this realm and guides you whenever you enter it. The empathy is so complete that it feels like you are the same being, but you’re different entities.”

He gestured at her with his right forefinger, as if drawing a circle around the center of her chest.

Suddenly Alya saw a red mare staring at her.

Her guide grinned. “I forgot that you might think you’re just looking at a mirror. Let me give you a mirror now.” He flicked his left hand outward.

She turned to her right to follow his gesture and saw herself as a human, looking at the same mirror that the red mare was looking at. “You’ve convinced me. But what do you mean ‘this realm’? I’ve already returned to the physical.”

He smiled gently. “Look at the floor.”

She looked down and was surprised. Instead of straw or tile, she saw stars.

He continued, “This is an intermediate place where one can pause between realms. We use it for orientation. Would you like me to begin now?”

The journeyer nodded, which felt like more like a bob of her head.

“I am called Ngatmi,” he began, enunciating the initial consonant with enough nasality to distinguish his name from “got me.”

“My name is Alya,” she replied with a smile.

“The training I received qualifies me to attend to anomalous events, none of which occurs often, if time is measured by the local frame of reference. I have a chameleonic ability that helps me adapt to the wide variety of encounters that I am responsible for, some of which are completely unanticipated.”

He smiled broadly, revealing more teeth than anyone she’d ever seen. “You may have perceived me as having some equine characteristics. That’s only because one of my functions is to put you at ease by matching your vehicle, your vahana. My own familiar, which brought me to this ethereal stable, does not resemble a horse at all.”

He continued, “I am native to the star system reached by the spaceship that you targeted as your physical vehicle.” The guide paused to correct himself. “Actually, I was born on a colony established by my people in that star system, but our home world is another jump further.”

Alya abruptly felt tired from her astral exertion. She glanced around looking for something to sit on. Ngatmi read her feeling instantly. He promptly sat on a pile of the straw that suddenly appeared as the floor of the stable. She sat on one, too.

His face showed mild concern. “If you need anything else, Alya, just speak up. Travel at near-light speeds is disorienting enough due to time dilation. You got a double whammy by combining teleportation with the interstellar journey.”

She nodded, feeling her head to be clearly human-shaped now.

“I understand that your Octagon Group can restore an individual to your headquarters via teleportation, but only within a limited range. You must have realized that stowing away would take you far beyond that range. I assume it was a bold act to start a new adventure.”

She nodded again and smiled.

Her guide took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “In fact, it was part of your destiny, because you have an important role to play offworld.”

Alya’s eyebrows rose but she remained silent.

Ngatmi frowned like a skilled artisan about to perform a delicate task. “That role will become clear when you visit our home world on a faster-than-light ship. You must travel via FTL in order to correct the time dilation from your first trip, relative to your home world. At this moment, so to speak, you are not only separated from your loved ones in space but you are also years in their future. You must go to their past —beyond the point where you left them — before you reunite with them.”

After she nodded solemnly, Ngatmi opened the door. “Let’s go for a walk.”

Chapter 3. Ata’s Kin

The group assembled at the entrance of the alien trader’s spaceship to begin their quest to find Alya: her daughter Asmara, her husband Rustam, her nephew Elisha and his wife Mariko, as well as her former lover Michael along with his granddaughter Amina and his grandfather Martin.

Grateful for the one-way transportation, they planned to form a temporary octagon with Alya and use her method to teleport everyone to her team and her twin sister Asli back on Earth. Mariko’s mother Kikuko joined the group at the last minute, saying she could return on her own if necessary because she was acquainted with other alien traders, who came to her tea plantation as buyers several times a year.

“My name is Ata,” said the 40-ish woman before they boarded her ship. “I’m only going as far as the base of operations that we use to connect with your planet, not our actual home world. I trust that you each brought along a couple of familiar items to ease your recovery from the disorientation you will experience when your first interstellar journey ends.”

Her skin became coppery shortly after the airlock closed and they began breathing the ship’s artificial atmosphere with its abundance of argon. All of the earthlings were surprised at the intensity of Kikuko’s golden sheen. Even Mariko had never seen her mother’s skin change under the influence of a full 9% argon, which was nearly double the proportion she could command the intelligent house at her tea plantation along the Connecticut River.

Shortly before their arrival, Ata invited them all into the ship’s lounge for their last meal together. Kikuko opened a cubic container made of woven bamboo and removed some of the tea leaves she had brought as one of her familiar objects.

Their hostess savored the delicious tea much longer than her guests. Ata noticed a photograph lying on the dyed cotton cloth that Kikuko had wrapped the container in. She frowned. “The old woman in that image is the daughter of my cousin.”

“Heyyyy?” Kikuko said with a rising tone, an expression of surprise Martin had heard in Tokyo 50 years before she was born. She quickly regained her composure. “This photo was taken when I graduated high school in 2051. The other three women are my mother, my grandmother, and great-grandmother. At that time, my great-grandmother told people she was 87 years old, but the rest of us in her family knew it was an approximation because she wasn’t born on Earth. How old is your cousin?”

Ata remained puzzled. “She is my age.”

Kikuko frowned, “That doesn’t seem logical. Perhaps you’re mistaken.”

Ata shook her head and replied firmly, “I’m quite sure. As you can see, I’m a Copper. Our empathic ability is strong and we can detect family linkages like this with very high certainty, tuning our perception to sift changes due to age or other characteristics.”

Elisha asked calmly, “How old is your cousin’s daughter now?”

The trader used a calculator. “About 15 years, as your planet would measure it.” She chuckled. “That girl is never satisfied with what is familiar. Although her parents are both Coppers, she chose to join the Gold race.”

Chapter 4. WYSIWYG? WYTIWYS?

Alya silently walked alongside Ngatmi on solid ground through a landscape that seemed like ordinary countryside on Earth. After a while he sat down and gestured for her to sit next to him. He then handed her a book and a pen. “Read it.”

She was astonished to find her encounter with him already described in the first pages of the book. The rest of the pages were blank.

“Now write what you have seen since we left the Stable.”

Alya found the pen seemed to move in her hand without any effort. A few minutes later, she felt that she had described what she had seen so far during their walk. She handed the book back to Ngatmi, but he held up his hand to refuse it.

“This is your story. I will now show you what makes it so.” He pointed to a couple of trees nearby. “Did you describe them?” After she nodded, he said, “Now describe a tree that you imagine is between them.”

She picked up the pen again and wrote a short description of a different type of tree. When she looked up from the page, she saw that a real tree was now located in the place where she had described an imaginary tree.

“What?! How?” was all she could say as she stared at the three trees.

“As I said, this is your story. You are writing it as you live it. You may find that some has already been written, such as your initial encounter with me. Other parts of your story may seem unclear, or impossible to express — you will discover those limitations on your own sooner or later. At this point, I will demonstrate other limits.”

Ngatmi stood up and plucked a leaf from her imaginal tree. He glanced back over his shoulder at her. “Yes, I can see it, because it is real to me.” Next he plucked a leaf from each of the two trees that originally stood with only bare ground between them.

He then returned to Alya, sat down, and set the three leaves in front of them in the same left-to-right sequence as their trees were positioned. “Look at them.”

She noticed that the middle leaf lacked the vein structure of the other two. But as this observation crossed her mind, the leaf taken from her imaginal tree suddenly showed such infrastructure. She looked at Ngatmi with an expression on her face that combined the confusion of an alien with the wonder of a small child.

He grinned. “What You See Is What You Get? Or is it really What You Think Is What You See?”

She smiled, enjoying this new mental adventure.

He nodded. “Now feel their texture, saving your own tree for last.”

Again, she noticed the difference as soon as her fingers rubbed the newer leaf. And again, its character changed as soon as she recognized its incompleteness.

Her guide waved his hand and conjured a microscope, complete with glass slide and lighting source. He then broke a small fragment from her imaginal tree’s leaf and put it under magnification. “Look.”

She bent her head over the microscope and saw an undifferentiated surface which quickly resolved into a cellular structure. She lifted her head and silently smiled.

Ngatmi waved his hand at the microscope. “Look again.”

Now Alya saw cell nuclei and the sluggish movement of intercellular processes that were coming to a halt as the plucked leaf gradually died.

“Read your book again,” he gently insisted, then he fell silent.

Alya opened the book and found that their encounter was already written, up to the point where it said, “‘Read your book again,’ he gently insisted, then he fell silent.”

He nodded. “Close it and write the rest later. Look into my eyes for a minute.”

As soon as she locked her gaze with his, an ethereal light passed back and forth between their faces. His face became fluid, flashing images of various men she had encountered and not really noticed. Perhaps they had guided her in some way, or guided other people nearby. Yet none of their faces closely matched Ngatmi’s.

Although neither of them was timing the eye contact, they both felt their heads recoil slightly when a minute had passed. Then they each glanced downward briefly to break the union of souls and return to the mundane world. However, Alya felt it wasn’t mundane at all!

Ngatmi calmly said, “That brief exercise was to show you what I can’t explain. It will probably make more sense later, perhaps much later. My role of guide includes the ability to enhance experience, as you saw via the microscope. However, I am not an editor of your book. That’s an entirely different level of involvement.”

He continued, “Enhancement has limits. I could conjure a stronger microscope and show you the molecular structures in the leaf, but there is a point beyond which my mind cannot lead yours. However, you will occasionally experience perception beyond the point of human guidance. The ultimate detail in the leaf, or any other object, is created by what we call All Universe One Being which I understand has been interpreted by some of your planet’s religions as the invisible Godhead.”

Alya snorted like a human, not a horse. “I’m sure you can see that all of this has fascinated me, but it seems a lot like the power of suggestion. For example, you reminded me to perceive structures that were more detailed than the initially broad strokes of my imagination. In addition, you’re framing the process within limits that I cannot verify. And further, you’re hinting that they might not really be limits.”

He sighed. “You’re a headstrong one. I could tell that from the way your familiar bobbed her head. Your twin sister isn’t as stubborn, but your daughter and nephew each got a double dose of willfulness, so I guess it runs in your family.”

She was surprised that he knew so much, but not as shocked as she would have been if this conversation had occurred as soon as she’d met him.

Ngatmi pressed his point about ultimate knowledge. “Is the extra detail coming from me? from your mind? from the tree? or something beyond all three? Our culture believes that the imagination of All Universe One Being is inexhaustible, if not infinite.”

The journeyer ignored his epistemology. She took the initiative and stood up.

Her guide laughed, “By all means, lead on. This is your story, not mine.”

She resumed strolling in the direction that he had initially led her. Soon she saw a river that made her stop in her tracks. Its moving water rose higher than its banks but somehow seemed to be contained the same way that rivers are on Earth.

Recalling basic chemistry, she recognized that this river water had a convex meniscus due to internal cohesion, in contrast to the concave meniscus shown by water in a glass on Earth which is caused by surface adhesion.

He grinned, “Where did that come from?”

copyright 2023 Martin Schell