‘Did you just say that?’ Alicia thought back.
‘Yes,’ Béla admitted. ‘Has anyone ever talked to you this way before?’
‘I think that we have met like this before, Alicia thought back, trying to remember, but I don’t know where, or when…’
‘D? vu,’ Béla thought at her. ‘There are other realities besides ours. You think of time as an absolute, but it’s not. Let me show you…’
‘Images appeared in Alicia’s mind – the nightmare that she sometimes had of her son, Jake, dying in a nuclear accident that destroyed a city – of her meeting with her family for his wake in his father’s cabin and finding her son still alive.’
“How did you know about that dream?” Alicia demanded, half sitting up in bed and breaking the mental contact.
“Because I was there, too,” Béla said. “It really happened – in another reality. But that reality was written over by the one we remember with our conscious minds. Different people lived and different people died each time. The first time, your sister lived, and your son died. This time, your son lived, but we both lost a sister.”
“And the city in my dream – the one in the Painted Desert – it’s still there?” Alicia said, finishing the thought.
“Yes,” agreed Béla. “I suppose a sister is a small price to pay for a whole city.”
“Speak for yourself,” Alicia said, sounding a little upset. “I’d rather have my sister back – and I don’t mean Bratty Tabby!”
Béla smiled at that, not having decided who she preferred – her sister and lover, Beth – or her wild, but completely lovable fire breathing daughter, Lisa; not that her preference would matter…
“Come back to bed,” Béla said quietly. “There’s more I would show you.”
“I’m not really certain we should do this,” Alicia said nervously. “I’ll confess something to you. I’m not really keen on someone sorting through my mind, learning all my little secrets – even when it’s you.”
“You asked for my help,” Béla replied gently, sitting up beside Alicia. “The only help I can give you is knowledge. I know what’s going to happen here. You need to know, too.”
“What do you mean, happen?” Alicia asked, more upset, now.
“Come to bed,” Béla implored her. “You will learn what you need to know. I’m not interested in your secrets. I have too many of my own.”
The idea that Alicia might learn some of Béla’s secrets convinced her to lay back down.
‘Ready?’ Béla asked in her mind.
‘What should I expect?’ Alicia wanted to know.
‘An adventure, perhaps, or a nightmare,’ Béla replied frankly. ‘Maybe both.’
An image of the earth whirling madly around the sun assaulted Alicia’s senses. In her mind, she could see what she already knew – radiation from the sun’s increased output was frying parts of the earth even now. As the years swept by, the polar caps began melting more rapidly. Soon, in the coastal cities, buildings stood in fifty feet of seawater. No one could live in them, but it didn’t matter anyway. There weren’t that many people left.
Another century passed. Most of the cities on the planet were destroyed in tiny sparks of nuclear fire that demonstrated the total collapse of civilization as she watched from the safety of her detached view of the planet. The survivors of the holocaust that didn’t die from radiation poisoning were cooked by the sun’s increased anger that seemed directed at the folly of mankind.
Within the next ten years, every living person on the entire planet died. Then, incredulously, the sun expanded and ate Mercury. Alicia watched, stunned as an entire planet, albeit a tiny one, was absorbed into the fiery depths through the sun’s demonic surface.
After that, the sun seems to become more disturbed, almost like Mercury had given it a bad case of gas. The sun expanded again, reaching within ten million miles of Venus. The clouds were blown off of shrouded Venus and vaporized by the intense heat and the solar winds – the atmosphere of the sun. The planet itself cracked into several pieces and, over several months, followed Mercury into the sun’s fiery depths.
The sun tried to expand again, but its mass was no longer great enough to sustain its size. Most of the mass of the sun fell inwards on itself. The thin fiery surface blasted outward in a horribly expanding bubble of fiery, brilliant destruction, dissipating somewhere between Mars and the asteroid belt.
The greater mass of the sun splashed down into itself, then roared outward in a gigantic explosion at a quarter of the speed of light, devouring what was left of the earth, which had already lost its atmosphere and its beautiful blue oceans to the first hellish wave of starfire.
Alicia’s point of view was backing up quickly, trying to stay ahead of the rapidly expanding surface of the sun. Earth exploded on impact like a tiny firecracker thrown into a forest fire. Mars followed a few hours later.
The nova spread outward though the solar system over a period of several hours. The asteroid belt was consumed – an entire planet’s worth of mass broken up millions of years ago in an earlier, comparatively less eventful holocaust.
The sun’s expanding surface was breaking up, now. There were too many masses traveling at too many different speeds to maintain any cohesion. A large mass struck the gas giant, Jupiter, dwarfing its incredible gaseous mass as it flooded over the planet and ignited the remainder of the gas giant’s atmosphere.
Jupiter’s moons spun off in several directions, like particles of sand being struck by an ocean wave. Jupiter itself seemed to become a huge comet – its tail extending out millions of miles behind the planet as the surface of the sun passed on by, leaving its first survivor behind.
Hidden behind Jupiter and completely surrounded by the largest aurora borealis ever recorded was Béla’s home – a small, artificial planetoid – giant magnetic engines attached to each pole striving at full power to hold it in orbit while Jupiter danced across the uneven surface of the nova like a stone skipping on water.
People were dying there, too – some being thrown hundreds of feet into the air and smashing back down against the inner surface as the artificial moon bounced in its orbit. Much of the population was collected in the hollow center, protected with a fragile force field generated by the minds of a few dozen beings like Béla and her daughter.
Alicia sat up, terrified and stunned, breaking mental contact with her tormentor once again.
“That’s your plan?” she cried, accusingly. “An artificial moon?”
She looked at the strange, alien woman in bed with her.
“We don’t have time to build something like that!” Alicia cried out. “We don’t have the resources, the money, the technology… Wait! That’s what you wanted to let me know! You have the technology to build something like that!”
“No,” Béla said quietly. “Not anymore. But it doesn’t matter. It already exists. It took my father’s people four thousand years – but it’s already been built.”
Alicia laughed, sounding a little delirious. “So we just have to… Who’s going to… What? I can’t even comprehend…”
She finally just stared at Béla.
“My father’s ship is coming in, oh, maybe ten, fifteen years,” Béla said quietly. “They’re coming to take me away. It’s a huge ship, and it will be almost empty. It can hold several hundred people. I plan to take everyone I know with me, and anyone they want to bring.”
“Everyone you know?” Alicia asked, incredulously. “I have three, no! Four families! What about them?”
“They can all come,” Béla said, inviting them all. “There’s plenty of room.”
“If others find out,” Alicia told her, “there won’t be enough room. The whole planet will want to go.”
“That’s not possible,” Béla told her. “There’s only enough fuel for one, maybe two more trips. Besides, New Eden isn’t large enough to support more than a few thousand humans.”
Immensely relieved, Alicia leaned over and hugged Béla. She was surprised to actually feel tears in her eyes at the emotion she felt. Then she remembered.
“What about my husband, Walter?” Alicia said, suddenly a little more distraught. “He’s dying. You can save him – like you did Mom, before.”
“I don’t know if my blood can cure cancer, darling,” Béla admitted. “What my blood does to human cells is make them grow faster. A cancer is nothing more than human cells that have forgotten where they’re supposed to grow. By offering him my life-blood, I could be worsening his condition. The cancer could consume him in mere hours. I don’t know what he might grow into.”
“But you have to help him!” Alicia cried.
Watching Béla gaze up at her with her dark, regal eyes, Alicia realized that Béla didn’t have to do anything. She tensed as Béla gently reached out her hand and stroked Alicia’s cheek. An incredible calm flooded through her mind at the vampire’s touch, and she realized that Béla was drawing off the fear and the anger she felt – discharging it like she was simply an energy cell and her overwhelming emotion was simply energy that could be drawn off and grounded out.
“I’m sorry,” Alicia whispered.
Alicia had apologized for something she did maybe three times in the last century. This was the first time she’d ever meant it. Béla smiled at her, recognizing what it took for Alicia to say those simple words.
“Go talk to your brother tomorrow and work out what I tell you,” Béla suggested. “Have your husband see him – call Doctor Frank some kind of cancer specialist if you want, but get your husband to go. Your brother has samples of my blood. He’s been running tests; trying to discover what makes cells heal. If Doctor Frank decides that my blood can help, he can administer it himself as a ‘experimental’ test of a new cancer treatment. If your husband agrees, of course.
“That way, the secret of our longevity is still safe,” Béla told her. “When and if your husband begins to notice that his own life-span in increased, you may tell him then – or not. Depends on how you feel about it then.”
“Béla, you’re wonderful!” Alicia exclaimed, hugging her host tightly.
Then suddenly stiffened up as she realized she was becoming aroused in the presence of this seductive, alien creature. She held Béla away at arm’s length, staring into her soft, dark eyes and hoping that she wouldn’t be offended by her rejection.
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