I Met Albert Einstein under a Paper Tree
Or, an Essay about Life and Physics

By Karen Cole Peralta

Through books and stories, movies, consciousness and training, he became a significant master of my life story. Due to this, he was put in charge of a certain metaphysical operation once on June 16 of 1986. This is because he was the Man of the Last Century, replacing Adolf Hitler. Witches from the past, including our special fearless King of the Southern Kingdom, were the sole thing in charge of the whole nine yards. It was secretly playground ethics that led to the conclusion that E=Mc2 - or not.

Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared is the theory; whether or not anything can hold that stable in a nearly unstable universe is beyond me. Finally, it is the eternally vast unknown of fluxing particle physics that leads to the conclusion that all human things whatsoever are held within the vast unknown universe. Expect the unexpected is the challenge of the samurai. You are forever walking or waltzing into a future that is clearly uncertain. On the other hand, many people already have their own gravesites quite bought. I cannot be sure myself where I am going to end up.

I often have fantasies about keeping up with great men. But some part of me is guarded and would rather be a fair young woman. The world’s scientific economy seemingly determines everyone’s entire fate. Therefore, one night in 1986, I was going to wander offstage to impossible oblivion, and by stopping a house burglary in progress which had somehow previously involved me, the elves and fairies showed and ruled the universe. I was allowed to go on living, even though it should have been fictional that I did.

Einstein always appeared to have a clear view of the problems of physics and the determination to solve them. He had a strategy of his own and was able to visualize the main stages on the way to his goal. He regarded his major achievements as mere stepping-stones for the next advance. This meant advanced mathematical thinking that became the atom bomb and other such controllable nuclear weaponry. It is certainly best, under even Hitler or Darwin’s ethics of creating evolution among humans, to keep proceeding onward into the future. There is nothing promised for any one of us there, nor for the entire planet. It is all part of the Uncertainty Principle, where however you may have reality pegged, it isn’t there. Can you really see everything around the next corner?

Perhaps you have today entirely mapped out in your head. You know you have set certain goals, yet you do not know for certain whether you will be able to achieve them all in one day. Today, I am planning to clean the bathroom at around noon, for example, but I don’t know for sure whether or not I will be able to clean it then or at all today.

Once upon a time, I had the strangest weird creative idea for a project. It was kind of understudied by the guy who looks like a statue blended with a human on our website. I’m hopelessly in love with him. He was originally the handsomest, tallest, darkest and most sophisticated man I have ever viewed in an old photo. He was quite inspiring when it came to things like standing up to the Worldwide Inquisition and forming rainbow politics. He was a modern day version of Super Slave, the politician. But he had got all of his basic ideas from his enemies. Furthermore, while not perfect, he was able to shoot to the truth as an absolute, and he played a chess game once.

He did a perfect pawn sacrifice. While being a general in an army, he traded places with another piece of human machinery in 1968. This lead to some lack of KKK Inquisition practices in the United States, due to one person with some guts and some belief. I know it must have some kind of meaning in reality that he looked like a chess piece.

So anyway, this project is in honor of all mankind, including those who would hate it being in honor of them, for them, about them, or in any way connected to them. Somewhere back there, I needed some folks to all have their individual liberties intact so I could get ahead, run my own business and at least make the incorporated hobby I am pursuing into something that could supposedly “break the glass ceiling.” Unfortunately, the project below has already done so in my own life, because I ended up perhaps doing something consequential for a change. It is unknown as to whether or not I actually did so. If so, all of such events may be held within a nonexistent past. It does not strain me too much to keep up with life. Therefore, I can yet help you ghost write, copy edit and proof read your acts of literature.

Don’t get too lost while you’re reading this. It involves particle physics, quarks, pops, whiffs and spoofs. The latter is a derivative Spanish term meaning something has completely vanished, such as the human sense of humor, intellectual thinking, and maybe Canada. In the face of its greatest obstacle, namely nature and the weather, it is there.

But Farley Mowat told me a long time ago that it is the most peculiar palace on God’s green earth. To me, it is full of Einsteinium elves and fairies. It still screens you for whether or not you are worthy to be there, a practice which is slowly beginning to melt along with the icicles and snow. It calls to old men and lovers and people of nature to visit it, fish in it, and settle into it at last. As Global Warming is involved with the continuing recession of the Ice Age, or so I figure, the snow line up above north is receding. Maybe there’s enough room up there for a wanderer’s family to find it, and maybe there is a cozy house with a fire waiting for her daughter.

I feel as if under Albert Einstein, I could finally study upper level math at last. Under Erma Bombeck, I need to get all my stuff done; but my husband is now doing it. Please read the below, as it is only creative, and you may judge me by that if you must.


THE END


Executive Director and President of Rainbow Writing, Inc., Karen Cole Peralta writes. RWI at www.bookauthorswriters.com and www.rainbowriting.com is a world renowned inexpensive professional freelance book authors, ghost writers, copy editors, proof readers, coauthors, manuscript rewriters, graphics and CAD, publishing helpers, and website developers international service corporation. And Four Seasons CDROM Store sells inexpensive cds: fun arcade games, business and e-book software and computer learning tutorials, all state of the art, at www.cdrommarket.com

AC 666 - Timeline

Author: C. O. III
Ghost Writer: Karen Cole Peralta
Word Count: 700


The timeline below has recently been altered to suit revisions to the book.

1,000,000,000 BA, beginning of real vegetation and life on Venus -- when Noah and the mystery spacecraft actually land on Venus (Primitive Past Earth)

2,000,000 BC, beginning of Pleistocene Era (first use of stone tools by primitive humans) -- when the Antis' and the Antichrist's spaceship was supposed to land on Venus (Past Earth)

1,000,000 BC -- when the Tower of Babel was actually built; the Antichrist founded the militia of the Antis, which separated into the Antis and the Illuminati; the Antichrist disappears for a million years; beginning of the Ice Age and land bridges

12,000-10,000 BC -- end of the Ice Age; roughly when Lemurian Atlantis was covered in water and became a sunken, domed city, where the Antis were told to move by the aliens whom they eventually became

10,500 BC -- when the Great Pyramids of Giza were actually built by the Antis; when the Antis began making the blueprints of the spaces

8000-6000 BC -- when scholars believe the Tower of Babel was supposedly built (roughly)

3750 BC -- approximately the time when the Earth was supposedly created by God (Jewish religion)

3114 BC, August 1 -- beginning of the Tzolk'in, the Sacred Mayan calendar, based on the 26,000-year cycle of the Pleiades; 13 cycles of 400 Mayan years will pass and then the calendar will end in 2012 AD, December 27

2500 BC -- when scholars believe the Great Pyramids of Giza were built; also when the beginnings of the Mayan culture were formed in the Yucatan, Mexico

1313 BC -- supposed time of formation of the Jewish people, when God revealed the Torah; beginning of the cultural and religious mythos and prophesies about the Antichrist in the Old Testament

500 BC -- the pyramids of Teotihuacan are built in central Mexico by the Toltecs, who are the Mayan and Aztec precursors and relatives

20 BC to 20 AD -- when Jesus appeared and performed his miracles; beginning of the major and elaborate Antichrist and Second Coming mythos of the New Testament

250 AD -- the Mayans rise to prominence in central Mexico

666 AC -- time of great significance to the Antis, when they actually began building the spaceship, having finally secured the needed technology and metallurgy; on the 666th cycled trip through time, they will begin evolving into the gray aliens

1776 AD -- when the Freemasons/Illuminati were officially born and recognized in America

1976 AD -- Mabus the Antichrist (the AC) is born

1989 AD -- the AC is 13 and has a terrible encounter, is raped and injured, and is rescued by the aliens, which he doesn't know at the time

1992 AD -- AC is taken in by a carpenter and begins to form his theories about the Egyptian pyramids being the exact same ones as the Cydonian pyramids of Mars

2004-2006 AD -- Mabus comes to the realization that he's the AC; Jupiter is hit by a meteor on 6-6-06; AC begins his prophesied 7-year reign of the world

2007-2010 AD -- AC rebuilds Jewish Temple at Jerusalem as the sixth Great Pyramid

2012 AD -- the Second Coming of Jesus occurs, the AC and the Antis leave Earth for Venus, and the Earth is hit by the giant meteor, all on December 27; the reign of the Illuminati on Earth begins; end of the world on the Sacred Mayan calendar

2013 AD (2,000,000 BC) -- the AC and the Antis are supposed to land on Venus (Past Earth)

2013 AC (1,000,000,000 BA) -- Noah and the mystery spacecraft actually land on Venus (Primitive Past Earth)

2500 AD -- all human life on Earth (Primitive Future Mars) has died out

Ghost Written Sci Fi

Author: C. O. III
Major Ghost Writer: Karen Cole Peralta
Word Count: 4,300


PROLOGUE

Many world cultures are based on a cycle of birth, destruction and rebirth. The symbol of the Ouroboros, a serpent or dragon swallowing its own tail, has existed since the dawn of civilization. Yet no one is completely sure where it comes from. We only know that it signifies eternity. The ancient Mayan Sacred Calendar places Earth in a last cycle of life that will end near the winter solstice of 2012 AD. Many other civilizations and faiths maintain a belief in reincarnation, continuous birth and return. Only three world religions use the concept of linear time instead of cyclical time: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

What if we have all lived the same life, and done the same things countless times? What if the world is trapped within a bubble in time where everyone is doomed to repeat the same actions over and over again? Would worldwide religion and the government want you to know about this, or would there be a monumental conspiracy to cover it all up?

Some people currently think that the Illuminati, a highly secretive group which is supposedly a wayward branch of the Society of Freemasons, is responsible for such a conspiracy. They believe that the Illuminati have infiltrated every branch of government, NASA and all of its works, and every religion on the face of the planet. It is said that Fatalism, or the religious doctrine of a preordained and immutable future, is being used to control our hearts, minds and spirits. Religion is being used to keep us unaware of what's happening, in order to maintain a power structure of the elite over us until our deaths, and possibly until the death of the entire world.

This book explores the possibility that life as we know it is going to end on December 27 of the year 2012 AD, as outlined by the ancient Mayan culture of central Mexico. Their most sacred and accurate calendar, the Tzolk'in, which is based on the 26,000 year cycle of the Pleiades, states that 13 cycles of 400 Mayan years will pass before the calendar ends. It begins in 3114 BC on August 1, which is very near the time of Creation as perceived by the Jewish people (roughly circa 3750 BC).

If you count every century as a single "day," as some Biblical scholars do, the world's first day could have begun with the century of 3700 BC, and the last day, or the day of completion, would have been the century of 3100 BC. This juxtaposition seems to be much more than coincidental. However, these are merely calendar estimates concerning Biblical Creationism, and as most scientists now know, our world is much older than that.

In fact, this book relates to a timeline that is an endless cycle beginning roughly 2,000,000 years ago, in the time of the missing link, or first appearance of mankind. This cycle has no real beginning or absolute end, and thus is an Ouroboros, or snake/dragon which swallows its own tail, perpetually manifesting an infinite and eternal universe. It culminates in the year 2012 AD, when the Earth is hit by a giant comet and changed forever, slowly turning into an uninhabitable frozen orb which eventually must become the exact same world as the planet Mars. Before this happens, a group of intrepid, technologically advanced people known as the Antis, lead by the actual Antichrist, must travel backwards in time to the planet Venus, to begin life anew and to perpetuate an eternal cycle which will keep mankind forever evolving and alive indefinitely.

We have much established research pinpointing the Cydonia region of Mars as corresponding to the Giza region of Egypt, where the five Great Pyramids reside. On Mars lie the ruins of incredibly similar structures, which are obviously artificial as they encompass many straight lines and right angles which are impossible to form accidentally in nature. These structures, along with the famous Martian Face, which remarkably appears to be the crumbled ruins of the Egyptian Sphinx, pointedly correspond almost exactly to the Great Pyramids of Egypt. This establishes a very current scientific theory, postulated and detailed in this book, that Mars is indeed the planet Earth in the not-too-distant future. If this is so, then the planet Venus, known by the Romans as Lucifer, or the Morning Star, must also be Earth in its distant past. We have found a lot of highly valid scientific evidence indicating the potential validity of this remarkable theory.

We propose now to show you an entirely realistic history within this book, based on hundreds of hours of solid current scientific research and factual data from a wide variety of interrelated and extremely credible resources. We suggest that the prophesied Antichrist of the Bible will appear very soon in our times and establish a New World Order, fulfilling all of the soundest of the many Biblical prophecies. Then he will leave in a spaceship with the twelve people of his eternal destiny, known as the Antis, to begin life anew on Venus just before the predicted cataclysm engulfs our forewarned but doomed planet, on December 27 of the year 2012 AD; or as it is known and dated by some Christian scholars, AC 2012.

Beyond All Time - Beyond Even Space

A 1950s style tongue in cheek sci fi parody

Author: Tom Paris
Ghost Writer: Karen Cole Peralta
Word Count: 12,500


Surely, this was the bravest possible thing to do. I saw an attractively shiny and elegant black surface, the only one of its kind. It drew me closer, pulling me straight forwards with its seductively sweet blasphemy. I stroked the smooth, polished machine, pleasuring myself, as if anticipating something wonderful. What could I say to it? It knew me, but I didn’t know it...

Then my memory said it was a hyper-dimensional resonator, easily connectible to a space-time modulator for the necessary power boosting, which uses a tesia coil to generate the zero vector. The HDR, both invented and built by the legendary genius Steven L. Gibbs, of course, only moves one a few years in time either way, without the STM attached to it. You could make big money off the stock market, but so what?

I sucked in my Spartan guts, knowing the combined force of these two technological wonders could move me centuries into either the far-flung past, or the omnipresent and surely ever-darkening future. What would I find, what would I seek or would seek me, if I went either way?

My shaking hands connected the two, the glowing electromagnet overheated, and there was a blinding flash of light with a loud POP! I bilocated. My mind and body swerved into two directions as the POP! lingered, not redly volcanic like a firecracker, but sucking small, like a mysteriously vague blue balloon.

Violent waves of dizziness and nausea overcame my entire soul. I knew I was going somewhere real but otherwise, as the whole room spiraled over my exploding head, as my limp body slumped to the multi-colored parquet floor.

*********************************************************

I arose, looking wildly about everywhere at everything, but there was an obvious view port straight ahead of me. And people! It dawned like a starburst that I was onboard an alien spacecraft, clearly orbiting the planet Earth, or so it seemed. Wow, whose side was I on, now? Everything was dark inside, but there were small track lights everywhere, lending a soft, velvety ambience to the environment. The spaceship itself was clearly gargantuan, resembling an overdeveloped version of the Queen Mary, or a similar luxury cruise liner.

It was nearly identical to what we had on Earth before...I could sense a presence behind me. I felt a hand clutching my shoulder. I wheeled, expecting only the worst. For I could see clearly, in spite of the eye-protecting light. Now my time had surely come!

"What are you doing here?" inquired one of the crew, and somehow I just knew it was the ship’s main navigator. Stammering with all the excitement I could muster, I almost screamed aloud every minor detail of how my time machine worked. But then I shut up, realizing they must already know all about it.

“Surely, you’ve studied what Gibbs and I accomplished!” I cried, as the gentleman nodded in an offhand manner, looking more bored than anxious.

"Look, I'll make a deal with you," the ship’s main navigator said in complete English, speaking a tongue perfectly appropriate to my own century and locale, right down to its regional Arkansas accent. "If you help us fight the Draconian Empire for one prescient year, we will take you home."

"HOME?" I screeched into his smiling face. “Home?” I said, suddenly realizing the repercussions of my actions. However, I had no real family, back there, always being an alienate in my own time, stuck perpetually in another’s place.

“But I just got here! I have so much to learn from you, if I’m not so retarded that I can’t understand anything, next to you people!” I had immediately begun ingratiating myself, apparently. The main navigator chuckled, clearly amused, and then became serious. He seemed almost to know what my next question would be.

“Please, can I stay here onboard your ship, and live here with you? I’ll be no trouble, honest!" I stopped short of begging, but had already done so, and held up my hands in prayer to the main navigator.

He suddenly “tsked,” as though what I’d said had been highly inappropriate, anyway. As if what I had blurrily stated held some deeper contextual meaning, like what was supposed to be an ad on a cereal box had already memorized my credit card number. Back and forth, I had slid into a totally fluxing place, one with a constantly realigning, strange new divisional meaning.

He nodded, indicating an answer to my many questions and long-withheld desires to lead a happier life. "Okay, our traveler from both the past and the future. If you vow to Yahway you will stay with us for one single year, we will give you the most appropriate, wonderful, and splendidly possible of all permanent wives.”

This sounded quite peculiar, yet so fetching! Unsure, and promised a way out of perpetual loneliness, it was all I could do to not nod, but my head moved joyfully and expectantly by itself into a firm, and patently normal, yes!

*********************************************************

The main navigator took me to a good old-fashioned cafeteria. We had an extremely nutritious soup and salad, and I gratefully devoured sliced and peculiarly tasty turnip greens with green kale, onions, tomatoes, and peppers. I saw some vegetables I could not recognize, and devoured them all summarily!

Yet, there really was nothing unusual or alien-looking about the soup, merely a thin beef broth with onions. The main navigator slowly explained that this was a minor “punishment,” the idea being to keep us going and guessing. I could tell something was ahead of me, something that would require my full attention, and all my wits and resources. I was so excited!

But the main navigator solemnly handed me sparkling and Puritan-era silverware, obviously made out of undyingly treated pewter: a knife, a fork, and a spoon. This he did to explain the time-factoring. I had already eaten. By the time I finished again, we had “elaborated” the factoring, and I was finally in one piece, permanently established in the time zone I had entered.

Imagine, all this done in the midst of a cafeteria meal!

Ikonor was the main navigator’s name. He was a Kel, one of a highly specialized warrior race of astonishingly tall blond soldiers, virtually created to fight the evil reptilian Draconians. I did not need it explained to me that the Draconians were universally repugnant slavers, from a constantly invading other planet. The Kels were always looking for men of valour with heroic courage to continuously fight, and to most probably perish doing so, these Dracs. I was ecstatic; my mission in life had been found at last! Was I tall enough, was I brave enough, was I real enough? Of course! But surely this was not to be.

For Ikonor gently took me aside, and walked me for seemingly miles to a tiny little crew cabin buried deep within the labyrinth of the huge ship. And he left me there, to rot in blind ignorance.

All that night, I dreamed of death, and where it might lead. To
nowhere, again? Was this to be my perpetual fate? At least I could see all the twinkling stars from my tiny porthole.

Upon the brightest one, I wished to have my supposedly promised wife for exactly one night, just one night alone, and that I would make it the most magnificent night she could ever experience. And I prayed that my wife would be truly a woman, and that in spite of my rampant indecision, that I would truly always be a man, though that way could clearly only lead in one direction.

Then, thanks to a melatonin gas steadily entering the room, I fell asleep on the small bed in deeply exhausted comfort, oblivious to all my fears, hopes, and fickle dreams.

*************************************************

Strangely enough, the next day I was not led off to die. Nor were we anywhere near the planet Earth, which greatly excited me. When we arrived at my new home of Zambawa City on the planet Calarian, I was stricken like thunder by its sheer, raw, unbridled beauty - a world of statuary, of a blazing golden green and all other colors, richly stark virginity beyond compare, constantly changing to the flickering lights of a carefully and respectfully kept illuminated darkness.

It was just like San Francisco used to be when you entered her at night, the brilliant sparkling skyline drifting majestically into view, all the beckoning myriad lights of an unsurpassable distance. I was finally going to live in it forever, or so I wished to myself.

Arching like a vanguard above me was a robin’s egg blue sky. The pollution of darkling clouds of any nature was gone, and the air smelled so fresh and clean I instantly gasped lungfuls of it, like a hungry shark gulping fish. Huge and sprawling coniferous forests swallowed the obviously distant and soul-beseeching mountains, with receding and comfortably well-placed small towns in the valleys, spaced expertly between the spreading meadows and available flatland greens.

I thought I saw a magnificent scientific laboratory observatory, off to the left. Zambawa City, as we entered its sweetly downtown area, was packed with small and curvingly graceful round domiciles, and wide open tree-lined cobblestone streets. I suddenly thought of them renaming it “Sleepless City,” due to the ever-present domed brightly twilight sky.

Ikonor had already explained to me how the past, merged neatly with the future, had simply left our people motionless, giving us a way to stay stable in time. He did not blame any of my actions for the presence of the Draconians, none of which were in sight anywhere. But the destructive nature of their presence permeated the whole area, full of many signs of death, down to the very structuring of the buildings.

They had left scars on the people of the town, scars on the sidewalks, scars on each building’s walls that could be seen by all awakened eyes, many other than mine. Everything was designed to be a shelter in a storm, beautiful, but stonily and deathly silent.

The tallest, most strikingly artistic structure in the peacefully lit and overwhelmingly sunny downtown was a huge oxygen generating tower called the "Big Southern Belle." The O-tower made the planet habitable by all the Kellian people.

They needed air blended with concentrated 30% oxygen, in contrast to the 21% oxygen that humans like me needed. Having been told that much, I could not understand what I was doing being alive at all, then laughed aloud, realizing that I would be automatically “high” on oxygen for the rest of my existence in the alluringly splendid city! Possibly, it would build up my muscle and stamina, to prepare me for what lay ahead. Everyone looked very well-exercised, and someone would surely hand me the equipment, the encouragement, and the time that I desperately needed. I had completely accepted whatever challenge would
come before my new people, whatever idiocy would continuously menace and evade me. I would live and die defending us, wife or no wife.

*********************************************************

No longer the main navigator, Ikonor was now apparently my personal trainer. He presented me with the sparest of small utility apartments, where everything was completely within reach, and all was systematically appealing to the senses. My refrigerator was waist-high, like I was back at college. The stark-white walls, however, were weirdly clean of artwork, or any other adornments or ornamentations.

Just as I reached out to touch what looked like an old black telephone from the late 1800’s, it rang, and I picked it up. Ikonor said all of my preliminary training had been performed in advance, and coughed loudly into the receiver. Instantly, the entire wall in front of me parted neatly like the Red Sea, and I saw all that I ever needed to know or do displayed on a wide screen, with full surround sound.

It was stupendous, awesome, a terrifyingly prolonged Drama of War, a brutal conflict stretching into its frozen, lingering totality.

Much to my surprise, instead of packing me off to boot camp, Ikonor, now the Kel Commander, handed me a huge ray rifle and put me immediately on the front lines of yet another planet. It was barren and deserted, full of the vast unknown. I looked wildly about for mercy, saw none anywhere, and randomly shot my first “Being of Vast Importance.” The Red Sea merely parted again; he sprawled in meaty profusions at my very feet, one pile of very exploded lizard dung.

Each morning was new, each day was a Drag. We were all herded into the humungous flying space buses in vast multitudes, to fight this weird race of 15-foot reptilians; they were seemingly the most subhuman monsters, the kind with a choice which “we” Kels could never have. Our Yahway-given duty was to fight and die while attracting the other Kels, or so I figured. Both sides at first seemed to be grotesque demons straight from the nether bowels of Hell; but then I noticed only one side was scaly all over, like idiotic mini-dragons, with radiation-emitting eyes that could blind one permanently.

These malevolent creatures could only cause utter despair and hideous circumstances wherever they sojourned. I could not feel sorry for them. I couldn’t ever see things their way. They were sheer, raw, unmitigated evil. Our incredible and eternal job was to destroy them all, before they destroyed all of us.

The ugly lizards fought stupidly but fiercely, using their laser rifles, supplied by Yahway-Knows Who Else, to poison our eyes mostly. Every night was fit for laughs about your life, for the terrible lizards even possessed invisibility suits. How could we ever win? How could I even so much as live another day?

I often checked for foot and tail prints, to see if Dracs were around. Most of my time was spent out in the open without shelter, either getting rained on, or being broiled like an Arcturian lobster under the wretchedly dry and consuming vast summer sun of the awesomely desert planet Tory’s war zones. For this is where we fought our battles, in a mutually agreed-upon No Man’s Land.

Howsoever, the race of Kels always treated me as one of their own kind. Every moment with them was nice, complete, and alluring. I was always their total equal. I swore to give my life solely for them. They made me feel I was home, unlike the elder planet Earth, where people knew I was nothing but shit. I was happy to risk my life, even my afterlife, for all of them!

I began learning to speak Kellian, a very elaborate language, similar in style to ancient Sanskrit, with great difficulty. Most of the Kels just used English with me, or something very like it. The vast majority of my time was spent avoiding death and trying to bring it to the Dracs. Once I had bagged three of these monsters, the Kel Supreme Commander, Traxis the Great, held a conference with my Kel superiors. Thanks to Ikonor, now a dear friend, whose life I had saved on more than one occasion, a major decision was made regarding my circumstances. Although technically I was supposed to have killed ten Dracs and to have spent one hazardous year on the front lines, probably to be killed while fighting, Ikonor had discussed my especially alienated selflessness and attainments with our High Command. It was decided to give me my dues, a good, faithful wife and a brief time off, quite a ways ahead of schedule.

My daredevil attitude, where I would bravely scream aloud to attract all available Kels to my side, helping us kill more Dracs with sheer teamwork, had attracted this special attention. The High Command would give me an actual person, a wife, and a small newlywed’s two-bedroom apartment; my dreams of ecstatic pleasure had come true!

It was incredible to me that I would be receiving a life-long partner in the same way that my Dad had given me a puppy dog when I was a kid. What about her feelings, I wondered vaguely to myself; for I did not want to lose this opportunity to mate with the sophisticated, sociable, and highly moral race of Kels. Surely, this was the epitome of a short life and a gorily circumspect death, serving a worthwhile society even if only briefly, gratefully breeding new warriors for this tremendously important struggle between our radically different two empires. I could only imagine what a vastly superior beauty my wife would turn out to be, and dreamed of her every single day I fought. And I finally managed to kill my ten Dracs, right on schedule.

*********************************************************

All of my wildest possible visions were fully realized! Her name was Ikanya, which means “faithful to the end” in Kellian. She was over 7'2" tall, built like a spartanly strong and rawly proud Olympic athlete. She embodied the physical incarnation of total perfection, sweet as honey dripping from a bending tree; she possessed a smooth, milky white peaches-and-cream complexion that was glowingly radiant. She smelled of flowers after the spring rains, and her stride was more graceful and delicate than that of a balletic prima donna’s.

She had been bred for an especial perfection of womanly purity and size, bequeathing the best of health to all our warrior offspring. Her loosely flowing mane was the purest of finely spun gold webs; her eyes were pools of azure blue, gigantic in size next to mine. She was so huge, but always kind, loving, and compassionate when it came to serving me with anything at all. I fell deeply in love with her the instant we met. It was an inner fire that burned us both, a growing flame kindling with our every touch. With one single angelical kiss our inmost passions ignited, sparking the pursuit of our marriage’s eminently fated infinite excellence.

Ikonor told me one thing, however, which only made me more overjoyed: the penalty for ever hitting my wife, or even so much as yelling at her, was instant death! In a broken combination of English and Kel, I whispered, “I accept this fair and just fate!”

Ikanya, who was more than worth it, simply always understood me. She had studied Earth’s history pertaining to my time, which was the main reason she had been paired with me. I, however, was given one mere month to learn the Kel language with her, and to experience our honeymoon, a brief time off where I did not have to kill and die, for one sweet and lingeringly luscious moment...

We spent my off-time in our spacious, luxurious, and well-appointed living room, mostly. It had a continuously shiny linoleum-like floor, which Ikanya never needed to clean, with real old-fashioned wooden furniture from turn-of-the-century France, and a holographic television planted in the centre of the room, surrounded by the usual walls that slid away to reveal command controls for any instructions I would need regarding our new life together. One of the bedrooms was the master, of course, with a larger than king-sized bed, well-suited for our mating rituals; but the other bedroom was smaller than a tiny shoebox. It simply awaited our first blessed and naturally planned arrival, which elated both me and my wife’s very souls’ essences.

I had certainly found my place, if it could ever last.

Ikanya, so knowing about traditional Earth sustenance, prepared an easy meal of spaghetti and meat balls the very first night in our new home. She knew every custom of my territorial birth, taking my small hands into her large and feminine fingers, and looking deeply into my overflowing eyes. When I reached up to kiss her, she blossomed like a lily-white rose, and I murmured softly that we should proceed upstairs and begin to fulfill the expectations of our society, and our
deep love for one another.

In a voice full of honeyed mischief, she said, “Okay, sweetie, whatever you wish.” We casually strolled up the winding, compactly circular staircase, to the master bedroom. As she laid her gorgeously large body down on the bed, I slowly peeled the soft cottony socks off her gargantuan, yet blithesomely female, feet. Suddenly, she stared up at me, frightened as any virginal child.

“Please, don’t hurt me,” she moaned, afraid, yet truly womanly and totally seductive.

“I could never hurt you. I love you more than life itself,” I whispered gently as I massaged her velvety-soft and spotlessly clean rose-pink toes. I need not relate the sanctity of our pure love-making; our kisses alone were surely envied by the cloistered winged minions of heaven itself. I know it sounds corny, but it’s true!

When I awakened the next morning, my wife’s gargantuan form lovingly sprawled across my achingly spent body, I dreamt to myself of my supremely good fortune. On Earth, I had fretted about getting fired, losing my house, my car, and even my girlfriend, from not being able to keep up the hectic pace of day-to-day occupations. But here on the planet Calarian, I had virtually nothing to worry about. Ikanya, ever-faithful, would never leave me, for the Kels always mate for life! I would have a faithful wife and a steady job, and very close and decent friends, until I died virtuously from a just and unusually conscionable war between morally divided eternal equals.

Nothing would make me feel lonely and unwanted, ever again.

*********************************************************

Upon the next blissful morning, we feasted on an old-fashioned breakfast of eggs and toast, lovingly prepared by Ikanya, who in the middle of our meal began showing me the various foods and naming them for me. “You must learn our Kellian,” she softly breathed into my rapt ears. Touching an apple, she said the word for it was “tochan.” “Hobi” was the word for bread, and “juzzot” meant melted butter, as smooth as my wife’s velvety warm skin.

After a time of whiling away the hours happily with my wife, she began teaching me the Kel’s history. I learned they were originally from Earth, as I’d long suspected, from the lost continent of Atlantis, before the Great Wars between many different fighting peoples had nearly destroyed our two planets.

All of a sudden, seemingly from nowhere, my wife looked intently into my eyes, which were gazing at her with unspeakable love. “You’re part Kel!” she announced loudly, to both of our amazement.

“Huh?” I haltingly asked. “Are you sure?”

“It’s in your eyes. Our people were scattered during the Great Wars.” I guessed she was probably right. Ikanya, an award-winning student of ancient Earth history, knew all the generals of the ancient Roman Empire, and often compared me to the heroic Marcus Aurelius. I would always quote him to her, while we made our briefly blissful love:

“How quickly all things disappear, in the universe, the bodies
themselves, but in time, even the remembrance of things.” But I knew I would never forget our brief time together, even beyond my death and utter obliteration.

We went outside a lot together, to enjoy and cherish the beautiful city we were protecting and repopulating for our monumental fight. One day we sauntered out of the apartment, strolling down the cobblestone streets of Zambawa City, locked ritually hand-in-hand. We happily found a lovely verdant meadow, cheerfully blown by the wind, with a gurgling stream running through it.

We both took our shoes off, and began wading until we were waist-deep, and wonderfully cooled off, a most magical moment indeed.

Hours later, Ikanya and I sat on a small marble bench as we searched the heavens for the awesomely potent and available stars. There were millions of them, but sad to say, no readily apparent moon.

“Do you miss the moon?” Ikanya inquired, in her lovely sibilant and sylvanly sweet voice. “Yes,” I replied, burying myself in her soft embraces. “I wish we could be together under a silver moon, forever, not just a few weeks.” My wife smiled broadly as a river, while a meteor shower flashed a spectacular show overhead.

“Make a wish,” she tittered girlishly. “You have that expression, too?” I muttered into her smooth neck. “Yes, it’s old hat with us,” she sweetly sighed, so versed in our old expressions.

I put both arms around my wan, winsome, and somehow petitely glowing girl, and we slowly walked home, going to bed, gamboling playfully as we always did, and falling asleep locked in each other’s embrace. Under the twilight streaming in through the skylight, I gazed upon the gorgeous face of my queen, wondering how she would look under the old-fashioned, delicately pale streaming moonlight of Earth; that light would be able to precisely capture the diaphanous glow that always seemed to radiate from her austere, yet childish features.

There was something ethereal about my wife’s face; it held mysteries about Earth and my new planet that conjured up visions of boldly spiritual places and far-off wonders to come that I would surely get to behold, someday, and soon.

Unless I simply died - first.

*********************************************************

The next morning, Ikanya gave me her family’s greatest and most treasured heirloom, an old Terran music box. Its singing was so sweet that it brought tears to my eyes as I held it. The box was fashioned of antique burnished rosewood, with brass cylinders and myriad bells all working in perfectly refined unison.
`
I gazed at my wife through a hazy, grateful blur. But suddenly, Ikanya was crying too, enormous tears running down her reddening face. What had I done, and would I receive the death penalty for it? I richly deserved it, to have made my wife cry so. I asked her what was wrong. “It’s only because I love you so much,” she stammered.

That was always her way. She had a fabulous gift for selfless compassion, and cared solely for my well-being, constantly. She held a sweet, forbearing kindness, and a gift for love I have never seen in any other living person.

The month flew by like a single summer’s day, and I was back on the space bus, sent to fight with the constantly oncoming Dracs. It was truly the most boring of work, standing in the hot sun with nothing to do, only more sad and gray days on the battlefield. Overwhelming black clouds drooped near the horizon, affording some shade, and beckoning a terrible thunderstorm that dropped sheets of scarlet rain, drenching me to the bone.

Cold and shuddering as I was, I knew that if I survived, I’d soon be embraced and held in the warm and loving bosom of Ikanya, my truest reward for being a heroic and valiant warrior. But it seemed forever and ever before the space buses finally gathered us all up, and ferried us swiftly home.

Ikanya slowly peeled off my soaking wet uniform, as my frozen and aching form huddled near her. “I’m cold,” I chattered through my teeth. Ikanya simply said, “Don’t worry, we’ll warm each other right up!” And we immediately began to do so.

*********************************************************

Each morning was the same routine. Ikanya gave me a huge kiss, handed me my lunch, and I went out to catch an aging space bus. These ancient flying contraptions from earlier days rattled in flight when full of people, and took us all far away to the planet of Tory, where we had managed to relocate the raging war between our peoples. Over the course of immeasurable time, we had lost many brave and lusty warriors, including our Captain, our Troop Commander, and my dear friend Ikonor. His loss grieved my heart most greatly.

Our new Troop Commander, Zykor the Magnificent, named me our new Captain, assigning me the job of piloting one of the old space buses. Its controls were written in ancient Kellian, and were difficult to read, but I slowly eked out their meaning; the lettering looked like scribbles, scrawls, and loop-de-loops, which Ikanya translated from my hasty scrawls, brought home at the end of the day. Ikanya was always my lifesaver, my guide to everything mysterious and Kel.

As the weeks wore on, the battles became high-pitched and feverish. I was forced to crawl on my belly through a mucky and brackish swamp, swarming mud flies eating me alive, worse than the sweat bees of old Earth. They would sting me right in the eyes, big and mean things that they were, just like the damn Draconians.

Thoughts of Ikanya flooded my mind constantly. She was more holy and pure than a church’s sanctuary, a true womanly vessel of sacred honour and right. In spite of the pressing need for battle, we attended church regularly, once a week, for the Kels were a very religious race. I often thought of mortality and what it meant, seeing and experiencing death every day of my sure to be brief life. I thanked Yahway each second for my wife and continued existence, day after tiresomely lengthy day, night after serenely blessed night.

One typically sweat-drenched, mind-numbing afternoon, I heard a peculiar grinding noise, and froze like a naked statue. An odd-looking machine was making its way towards me; I finally recognized it as a remote recon ‘droid of the Dracs. I shot it down, realizing there must be more Dracs nearby. I brought my squad together in a huddle, and told them, “Men, the Dracs sent their toys out to do their dirty work; keep your eyes open, and be alert!”

Out of nowhere, thousands of Dracs arrived. My men were being cut to pieces, and after an hour of heavy fighting, most of us were wounded or dead. Moans and screams of the lost dying filled the air. This was duly recorded as the famed Battle of Carmoosh, where many valiant warriors died, including my Troop Commander Zykor. Right there on the field, I was summarily named new Troop Commander.

A raw recruit, a mere twelve-year-old boy, as we needed even these youngsters in our hard-pitched battles, told me right there on the red-soaked battlefield that he wanted to bag his ten Dracs, so he could get a wife before he died. Dripping sweat, looking over a nearby ridge, I saw a swarm of at least three large oncoming “bugs.”

“Can I take ‘em?” asked the boy. “Have at them!” I screamed. “But be sure you know what you’re aiming at, not our men!” As he shot his ray rifle, far away to the horizon, black clouds of dusky smoke filled the sky with an odor of burning rubber. Firing their lasers, the Dracs blinded the boy in one eye.

He screamed out his rage and protest. It got even harder to see, as the smoke from distant fires blocked even my vision. “Do you have a pair of binoculars?” I begged of the boy, having lost mine. “Of course I do! I’m just like anyone else!” But the faded, fuzzy images on his nightscope could have been anything...disregarding my feverish precautions, as the voluminous smoke cleared, the boy fired.

I heard his abject screams of horror, frozen in time and space, too late. He had exploded the chests of three of our best men.

We carried his limp body over to an instant military tribunal, where it was decided that although he had meant no harm, an example needed to be made of him. He was found guilty, and executed very painfully by firing squad. This was indeed a dark day for the Kels. But a new boy was instantly sent out to replace him, a much nicer and more cautious lad, of twelve years also.

I felt a swiftly growing concern that so many youngsters were dying in this hideously prolonged war against the Dracs. But the new kid only told me the same thing: he wanted to kill his ten Dracs quickly, and snag his promised wife. So I decided to give him tips and tricks on how to fight the beasts.

“Dracs wear invisibility suits, so you have to scout out signs of their presence. Look for bending blades of grass, large dirt and mud trails. And remember, Dracs always travel in threes, so if you shoot one, shoot all around it for the other two. It’s the only way you’ll survive. Finally, Dracs use chemicals and lasers, so remain behind your head shield at all times, no matter how hot it gets. You can see infra-red around a live Drac when it’s turned on.”

After this speech, and several weeks later, the new kid, whose name was Virkon, had slaughtered his ten Dracs. Ecstatic, he jumped up and down, hugging me with a man’s strength. His fortitude had paid off well. The Kel Central Command gave him a beautiful, innocent little twelve-year-old girl, who wore dazzling, virginally white silken robes, with her golden hair flowing freely over her narrow shoulders. She had smoothly pearl-white skin, flawlessly glowing teeth, berry-plump ruby lips, and starkly pure blue eyes that radiated kindness and virtue. She was an absolute angel, almost as lovely as my Ikanya.

Her name was Bellayette. She strode bravely up to Virkon and breathed with words like pure air, “I am so fortunate, for I get to marry a courageous warrior.” Virkon simply and boldly said, “I am surely the lucky one, here.” When he came back from his one-month honeymoon, he was not the little boy I’d known before. He was truly a man, respectfully full of “Yes, Sir!” and “No, Sir!” but expecting to be treated the same as any other man. He told me, “I thought being married would be wonderful, but I had no idea how magnificent it was until I kissed my Bellayette. She is the kindest, sweetest person in the entire endless universe.”

I pounded him soundly on his back, and cried, “Welcome aboard, proud warrior!” He asked me, a broad grin stretched across his face, “How’s it going with your wife, Commander?” I replied, “I have to be honest with you. There is no one who will ever come close to her, for everything she does is the best. For example, she performed an ancient medieval Japanese flower arrangement ceremony yesterday that almost rivaled herself in its beauty and modest perfection. You should have seen it.”

Virkon cried out, “Come by our place sometime, and we’ll see what my wife does!”

*********************************************************

I told Ikanya that we’d been invited by the newlyweds to eat at their new apartment. “Perhaps we can bring them a little gift,” she gently suggested, and produced a crystalline ball of pure glass that refracted all the kaleidoscopic colors of an overarching rainbow.

Yet, I thought I could see something looming dark and menacing, huddling secretly within the curious ball’s most hidden shadowy depths.

The very young couple cooked an awesomely appropriate meal for us, a series of little ancient Italian pasta dishes, antipasto, and three flavors of ice cream for desert. Ikanya helped Bellayette in the kitchen, and we four sat down to a most delightful repast.

During dinner, the kid asked me, “So how do you like it here? I mean, compared to ancient Earth, where you grew up.” I answered, “This place is ever so much better. It’s like an unearthly paradise. The Kels are the best; everyone is so friendly and helpful, ready to give his life to serve our valiant cause. Earth was terrible, with rivers like sewers, and oceans that were gigantic cesspools.” Virkon said he’d like to see it anyway. “You mean use the time machine? Trust me; you would never want to go there. It’s hopeless. Here, we have a majestic land, people we can be proud to be part of, and a real cause, worthy of our entire lives’ devotion. This is the place to be!”

Ikanya and I spent the night at their lovely apartment. We both felt happy to have made new friends. Soon, squeals of delight came from both their bedroom and the guest one where Ikanya and I frolicked, locked in a chorus of joie de vie.

There was no smoking or drug use anywhere on our planet, no casinos, bars, or dance clubs. There was no need for anything like that there. It was a great place to raise your family, though it could be a bit boring at times if it was not for the war raging constantly, and reminding us how precious our lives were. Alcohol consumption was extremely rare among the Kels, sort of a bow to the distant past. I was given a ration of one bottle of medicinal wine per month. I saved my rations for four months, and invited the kid and his wife over for dinner, having enough wine saved to fuel an army.

Yahway, did we ever party that night! We each downed one bottle, and sang and danced the night away. My wife pounced on the table, singing her lungs out, and the kid’s wife drunkenly joined in. Then from nowhere, the kid punched me out, and it was over. Everything spun around, then went black, just like before.

I woke up in the brig at military headquarters, with two angry Kels pounding on my chest and screaming at me. “Why did you get them drunk? What were you thinking, Commander? ANSWER ME!” Supreme Commander Traxis the Great was highly insulted by my behavior; his face was contorted into a mask of crimson rage. He told me my wife had been found naked in a ditch, totally covered with mud, and crying. The kid was found in a treetop, howling like a Wactovian monkey, and his wife had been captured by feral humans and dragged into a cave, where she was brutally and repeatedly raped.

They blamed only Virkon for the crimes, as the Kel’s policies on getting drunk had never been properly explained to me. A firing squad was immediately convened, as the poor kid had also struck an officer.

Me.

The Kels, who had always welcomed me as one of them, felt I had brought deep dishonor upon their people. They shunned me. My poor dear wife was sobbing uncontrollably, in a lot of physical and mental anguish over what the ferals had done to her friend. What were these ferals, I asked? The Supreme Commander told me they were human/ape hybrids created by the Dracs to demoralize and weaken us. Ferals could not talk, or even walk upright, but they could mate with Kels. Ferals lived in the hidden mysterious depths of dank caverns, only crawling out in the black of night to seek out any errant victims, arcanely stalking the dark penumbral shadows of our bluely domed city.

On the spur of our drunken night and the attack on Bellayette, Supreme Commander Traxis the Great decided to destroy all the ferals. “We’re going to smoke those devils out of the caves!” he screamed. And so we poured gas down every cavernous hole we found, and then exploded them with torches, setting the caves on fire like raw infernos. Angry, red, screaming ferals raced out, dazed, into the broad daylight. God, they were ugly! We simply shot them one by one as they came out. I ached to make them die slowly, for what they’d done to Bellayette.

I thought we’d got them all. But somehow, I knew otherwise.

********************************************************

For several months after the incident, Ikanya slept with all the lights on; the slightest noise would wake her up screaming in the middle of the night. Our nightly ecstasies were gone, tainted forever. Oh, well; I was usually so tired at night, anyway. I tried to get her to talk, but a Kellian cultural taboo kept her from ever telling me exactly what had happened to her. All I could do was longingly gaze upon her sleeping, restless form, nightly keeping watch, forever scarred by hideous guilt over my thoughtless and selfish acts.

But slowly, ever so softly, our lives began returning to us.

We men pressed on in the battlefield, warring constantly with the Dracs. And every evening I drove all of my squadron who were left safely home, leaving the bodies behind for the medics. It was all of a fifteen-minute flight, vast miles being travelable in mere parsecs by the rickety old buses, the very least examples of Kellarian engineering excellence. I knew when I got home I’d find her, my faithful wife, tearfully afraid I would not return, waiting for me. As I pulled the thing up to the space port near our apartment, she’d spurt like a track star joyfully straight to me, shouting my name aloud, her voice filled with excitement as she yelled, "HAYPAYPERRI-AH!” It was the most common of all Kel greetings, and the most endearingly loving one.

But a horrible day was soon to follow. My own mortality was drawing ever nearer, and I was nearly wounded by a special unit of Dracs assigned to kill me in particular. When I returned home, I was battered and bruised, but only happy to once again see my beloved. Ikanya immediately saw to nursing each of my cuts and bruises, while I vainly tried to assure her of my physical health. We hugged each other tightly, both knowing that one day, probably very soon, she’d never see me again.

Just as we entered our humbly peaceful abode, a SHRIEK! hit my ears. The piercing alarms of air raid sirens were signaling a direct Drac attack on Zambawa City! Huge Draconian bat-like ships swiftly materialized over the horizon, peppering our once beautiful and fertile landscape with rapid bursts of outspreading, voluminous fireballs!

Every building around us seemed aflame; all our scientific and cultural laboratories broke into enormous infernos, funeral pyres for everyone inside them. Hundreds of buildings exploded to smithereens. I couldn’t drown out the pitiful screams of my fellow noble Kels as they and their children were systematically burned alive.

The cremated centre of the city was now only flame and ash, pouring liquid metal out of the fortified steel like molten lava from an erupting volcano. Although the Kels had prepared for such an awful attack, apparently the Dracs had forged ahead with new technologies, and we only lay open and helpless before their horrendous onslaught.

A shrill hissing noise, the cry of a gigantic abandoned infant, filled my ears. The Big Southern Belle, our oxygen tower, had been blown apart, and was leaking out all our air supply! Horrifyingly, this would only feed the flames much faster, incinerating the city.

Meanwhile, I could feel the thinly oxygenated air deserting us, becoming weaker every passing minute. I was forced to gasp for what life I could keep. But what would happen to my oxygen-deprived wife?

Thinking fast, I forced her into an emergency hyperbolic oxygen chamber, concealed within a sliding wall in our living room. Ikanya needed much more oxygen to survive than me, a mere human. Her skin had already become bluely cyanotic; her breathing was forced and labored as the hypoxia worsened. I prayed fervently to Yahway, while the enclosed and carefully monitored pressure within the chamber slowly grew from two to four atmospheres. Alive and well, Ikanya smiled kindly at me as I gaspingly breathed what was left of the air outside the glass.

I stumbled outside, somehow managing to draw halting breaths. But the emergency evacuation procedures had already begun. I was forced to strap an oxy-tank onto Ikanya’s back, as the alarm system turned into a loudspeaker blare announcing the evacuation of the entire planet of Calarian. The oxygen production towers had been destroyed, not only in our decimated city, but everywhere in the Drac’s reach.

It was now time to leave. We wept as we boarded the buses.

My wife and I gripped each other, milling among the saddened throngs, whose lives had been shattered. Most had relatives, snuffed out by smoke and flames, or buried forever in deep and twisted rubble that had once been beautifully wrought fortified steel and concrete.

The Dracs had won. We had lost the war. It was all over.

While I muttered this to myself, a sobbing, dirty-faced girl wandered into our midst, tiny and lost in the teeming throngs, crying inconsolably about her dead mother. Ikanya, ever the comforter, even during this worst of all possible times, held her closely to her breast and rocked her like a baby, slowly calming her down.

All was insanity, but this moment was microcosmically precious. Two other little girls, intrigued by Ikanya’s motherly graces, drew near. We gently assured the crying girl that we’d keep her as our own, if she didn’t have any other family left. Then the two other girls began teasing Ikanya, pulling off both her shoes and socks.

“Whatever are you doing?” my wife asked, giggling timidly. Everything was just crazy, and now this! “I am a confirmed nibbler,” said one of the two girls, who were twins. She began sucking on Ikanya’s big toe, and the other one joined in. Ikanya laughed, quite relieved by this simple comic act, and hugged them both very hard.

It turned out the crying girl’s name was Mitalla, and the twin’s names were Chiaretta and Samayette. The twins were quietly whisked away from poor us by their relatives on the space bus, leaving us very bereft. We never forgot how much we’d laughed at their silly antics.

The space buses finally packed themselves in, huge fleet after endless fleet, arriving on the nearby world of Kumara, friendly to the Kel Empire. It had been carefully prepared for our arrival in the sad event of such an occasion, although we could not have anticipated the destruction of our entire planet, but the Draconians had already broken several war zone treaties; they simply invaded anywhere they wanted. Anyway, a spacious hostel system was organized, committees being formed in hours to assist loved ones in finding one another. Many people were forever scattered by this tragedy, akin to the olden time’s Great Wars.

As we stood in one of the largest hostel lobbies, a man surged from the crowd and tore the little girl my wife had claimed on the space bus out of her loving arms, crying, “That’s my daughter, let her go!” Ikanya instantly faded, like a rose losing its petals as it died. “I’m sorry. Here she is. We were only protecting her.” The humbled man took pity on us as he saw the heartbreak in our eyes. He reassured us we could visit them, once they had found their assigned quarters. The little girl cried again, struggling as she left with her daddy.

“We almost had a child,” Ikanya sighed, listlessly watching their fading backs as the noisy crowd swallowed them whole. “We will, someday,” I told her, trembling with a guilt-ridden rage, fearfully induced by the overwhelming commotion, sorrow and suspended reality of vast suffering, on a scale the likes of which I’d never experienced before, and certainly never would again. Or so I thought.

Somehow, it shocked me less that it took a mere twelve weeks for the planet Calarian to become basically habitable again. The Kels, with limited help from the Kumarans and others, simply descended on it in unstoppable droves, and we broke our backs restoring and upgrading Kellarian technology to its rightful place, exploiting any opportunity to make things better, safer, and longer-lasting. I was immediately assigned an enormous work crew, and we drove ourselves remorselessly, a struggle much more difficult than the battlefield had ever been.

Our magnificently crumpled, broken-down city came back to life again, as we slaved away like tireless dogs. The huge O-Tower was the first structure to be revitalized, with new materials engineering to make it more firmly proof against the Draconians. She was pumping out breathable oxygen, freeing my wife from her oxy-tank prison, as each factory and laboratory came back to life, repainted, shiny, splendidly sound, and virtually renewed. Even the scorched grass sprouted green new shoots, filling out as we formed fertilizer spreading teams by the hundreds, helping the greenways, plants, gardens, and even the burnt-out corpses of splintered trees sprout from their musty, dead stumps.

My life, honour, and sense of worthwhile purpose had fully returned, along with a renewed sense of deep humility. We frequently attended church, and always thanked Our Yahway. Hope hadn’t died, and the women and children were flown home, summarily. We all kept busy like ants in an anthill, repainting our restructured domiciles. Soon our small apartment was fully functional and back to normal, and Ikanya celebrated our grateful return by fixing us a meal of rare roast beef, mashed potatoes, asparagus, and chocolate mud pie. I felt great, but couldn’t shake a displaced sense of alertness, and constantly worried about the future. Wasn’t it unlikely to not happen again?

Twenty weeks after the unforgettable “Rain of Awesome Terror in the Skies,” or RATS, I was back in command on the front lines, glad to be fighting and killing the evil beings who’d wreaked such havoc and devastation on my beloved homeland. Meanwhile, the Dracs had not been idle. Another heavy attack had totally destroyed the mining, farming, and industrial planet of Ronson, in the Kellarian Empire’s incorporated Mutara Cluster. We slowly gleaned from unbelievably wretched but vital star system reports that we had only twelve planets left of an original galaxy-spanning empire of over fifty. And our own situation, though hopeful, was edgy at best. From the original Kel population of nearly one trillion people, less than fifty million survived the evil tragedy.

Though I kept busy fighting, daily worry became more prominent, riddling my head with fears. But our concentration on death was broken one day by the sudden appearance of an unreported small shuttle space bus. Thank Yahway, we didn’t fire, for out of the entry hatch stepped Ikanya, smilingly delivering my lunch, a peanut-butter sandwich!

Rule-breaking was one of the things I loved most about my silly and vivacious wife. I shook my sweaty head in wonder, but told her she wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near the battle zone; women were never allowed in mortal combat roles, only as nurses, doctors, and medical personnel. Of course, the medics had to venture behind enemy lines, sometimes. She laughed at my vain concerns, while we ate together.

Then from the unknown, a thin cry escaped from a nearby cave. Was it a leftover feral human? I drew my weapon and clambered down the dismally yawning hole, with Ikanya’s taughtly breathing form close behind me. Such caves were common in the war zones, and often full of ferals, which the Dracs sometimes used to attack our wounded, and those stuck attending on them at night.

Incredibly, there was a row of filthy, smelly cages, and each one of them held a tiny little Kel child inside.

Ikanya shouted, "OH MY GODS!" For her, such a bold statement approached blasphemy, but that was my wife. She didn’t care about her. I blasted open each of the locks, freeing the children. Several were dying, and we screamed loudly for the medics. I pulled out one ravaged little boy, apparently about three years old, who hugged me like he couldn’t ever let go again.

"Please, help me!" he cried, black and blue all over, with open wounds that bled; he was covered in sores, and had unnatural, twisted injuries. My wife immediately realized the truth. "Those monsters! They’ve been experimenting on them!" I coughed into my hand, overcome by sadness and the underground stench of disease and death.

Several of the children died in hospital. But we personally flew the tiny little boy home with us. He screamed almost constantly, even at night. He would wake us up, pleading and crying for mercy.

My wife, sadly well-versed in torture from the past unpleasant experiences I had caused, turned grimly to me one night and said, “He’ll have nightmares like this for the rest of his life.”

“Why?” I questioned, in a daze of shock and sleepless horror.

“They destroyed him,” she replied, in a low, guttural murmur. We both turned over and tried to rest, stuck listening to him scream his fear and rage like a demented baby, sometimes all night long. But we took turns getting up and trying to quiet him; he would finally fall asleep in our arms. We relaxed, finally having a child, at last. At least that much, and someday he would surely be normal and happy again.

We had only our faith, recovering ourselves after losing so miserably, to guide us. Night after night we kept watch, and waited.

But his mother and father finally turned up, through the local civil authorities, and the boy was taken away from us. His parents were so grateful and relieved that we all streamed in tears at their touching reunion, and for the first time, the little boy smiled! They told us his name was Bato, and his cheerful grin made this both one of the happiest and saddest moments of my entire short and eventful life.

“Well, I guess we’ll never have a baby of our own,” I sighed, as my wife looked alluringly into my drooping, listless eyes. “Yes, we will,” she softly whispered, “for I just happen to be pregnant!”

O, my wonderful Ikanya! I grabbed her, and we bear-hugged.

*********************************************************

Supreme Commander Traxis had given me some time off after the tortured children’s rescue, which I spent answering to the media about the awful feral prison experiments, and even signing autographs. We never did find out how they’d kidnapped those kids. Was there someone amongst us on the enemy side? And of course, Ikanya and I had put our time together to good use. We’d laid awake nights from the poor boy’s screaming; we must’ve accidentally done something right, in our sleep.

After this little erstwhile vacation, one blessed announcement of my family’s invigorated life, it was straight back to the battle fields. This time we fought over the devastated planet Ronson, which the Dracs now savagely held captive. There were few living Ronsonians, and we didn’t hold out much hope for them. We kept attempting find and rescue missions, to no avail. We fiercely battled, coming very close to losing the planet to superior forces. But we fought on, undyingly, in the relentlessly scorching heat. It was enough to affect anyone’s judgment, and I was far from immune from such desert abandonment.

Early one morning, before the twin suns were up, I ran down the dried-up banks of the Green Moon River, towards a rocky escarpment. I thought I was spying out Dracs. As I ran, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky; the summer doldrums were on full blast, with not even the faintest whisper of a breeze. What had been the simmering kettle of an absurdly glorious morning, given the wastelands created by the Dracs, had become the boiling cauldron of a wetly molten afternoon. Yet the battle raged on, blindly, as in any other war. Was this one really just as unfair, just as mistakenly waged as our Earth wars had usually been, and was I finally waking up to that salient fact? Were we somehow misguided?

I had to rest. I took a moment to duck out of the glaring sun and into a darkened cave, tired and worn from baking like an apple in that oven of a desert. It was extremely hot and stuffy inside the cave, but at least it was shady. I raised my visor, wiping my face, and realized that I’d been wounded, shot in both arms by a laser rifle. I began to treat my injuries, as taught by the female Kel medics.

My vain attempts at comfort fled as I saw three large devils approaching the cave’s entrance, armed with flame throwers, jabbering away to each other in Draconian. They must have smelled the blood that dripped from my wound, and were drawn directly to me. They knew who and what I was! Dropping bandages, I gripped my laser rifle tightly, fell to the ground, and fired three shots, one right after the other. If I missed just one, I was a dead meat. In spite of the heat, my aim was fantastic, and all that was left was smoking lizard shit.

One of the monsters was a Drac Commander, not unlike me. I proudly ripped the gold chain from around his scaly throat, placing it around mine as I shakily strolled through the smoking ruins of that infernally hot planet. Now I had a proper war souvenir to give my good wife, to remember me by when my aim was finally sloppy.

The desert heat made the horizon violently shimmer. Beyond the sand dunes lay an old, abandoned Ronsonian building, from the looks of it a museum or library once, now empty for time immemorial. Ducking inside to wrap my wound, fearing lurking Dracs would kill me, I found instead one of my best warriors, Yak, the youngest in the group I now commanded. He was worse than mortally wounded; his entire midsection was weirdly and surgically removed, by what, I couldn’t fathom. How was he even alive? It was only a matter of moments.

I cradled him in my bleeding arms. Over and over, he cried, “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die!”

The very next day, at a mass funeral held on Calarian, I gave a eulogy speaking of this boy’s heroism and honour. His mortal sacrifice and valour were what saved the planet Ronson that day, I very solemnly intoned, as the Kels wretchedly sobbed into their sleeves. The truth is always the most painful aspect of our reality, I realized. For the first time in years, I wondered to myself about the moral righteousness of the Kel’s cause. Were we just as blind and stupid as the lizards?

Were we, in some way hidden and unknown to me, well, evil?

My beautiful, brave wife now stepped up to the podium, her head held high. Overcome with emotion, I could only hug her. She read off the names of those killed in the battlefield for the entire past week, over three hundred men, as it had been a particularly bloody stretch.

Later, I whispered in her velvety ear, “Thank you for being so kind and compassionate. It’s not just your hair; your very heart is entirely composed of the purest gold.” I thought she’d like my words.

“Don’t ever say that,” she whispered back. “Your hair is not gold-coloured, but your heart has always been exactly the same as mine.” Apparently, in spite of the Kel’s general blondness, they were not racist; a part of me was thus secretly relieved of a heavy burden.

In the months that followed, my wife’s already large, normally flat belly began to grow, swelling quite profoundly. I started doing all the housework. The Kel culture didn’t use servants or maids, and you had to pull your own weight, unless you were very disabled. My wounds had healed, and I set to, even with the little energy I had left after a long day in the battlefield. I’d been elevated to Head Major Commander, so I didn’t have to actually fight in person anymore, but I usually waded in with the rest of them anyway. I was needed. And I still managed my chores every evening, while a cranky Ikanya chided my mannish incapabilities. I couldn’t seem to do anything right.

Boy, was it ever worth it!

In the spring, our glorious ball of wonder, Tirana, was born, looking every inch like her mother, though her hair was more a straw colour, not richly golden like Ikanya’s. And for some reason she was sickly at first, and we almost lost her. But then she rallied, and by the time she was two, there was a definitively Kellarian glow in her chubby twilight cheeks. After two years of limping around, she was able to run and horse with the other children, when the boys played soldier, and the girls pretended to nurse them and dress their wounds. This form of activity was more dead serious practice than mere kid’s playtime, unfortunately. But at least our Tirana was a girl, and not predestined to die in a barren pile of dirt, like her daddy.

On a lazy winter day, and for no particular reason, Tirana was boredly playing with the antique music box Ikanya had gifted me when we first married. As she wound it, the charmingly melancholy melodies brought me back to a happier time, when I had first started out with all my dreams of fortune, death, and ecstasy, on a new world and in a new time. I smiled dreamily at my little girl, knowing I must cherish every minute spent with her and my wife. The battle front afforded me precious little time to spend with them, as tedious battle strategies now consumed every waking moment of my hard-working existence.

That night, we three gathered together on the balcony, and we watched as our brilliant little girl tried to count all the equally brilliant stars. What was out there that the Dracs needed so much, I vaguely wondered. Our empire was always trying to enlist support from any inhabited planet we found, warning them about the slavers’ threat.

I began singing to Tirana, “Star light, star bright, Daddy loves his star tonight,” and I hugged her tightly. She beamed up at me, and impishly replied, “Star loves her Daddy, too.” My eyes twinkled with tears. Ikanya brought us all a hot chocolate. We sat, and drank well.

Another night, our little girl came into our bedroom while we two were sleeping. She climbed up and whispered “Daddy, I’m scared, there are shadows in my room.” And then she added “and I’m lonely.”

My wife smiled, and I knew there was nothing to do but give in. “Then why don’t you stay here, with us?” With a beaming grin on her openly innocent face, our little angel crawled under the sheets.

In the morning, I watched her sleeping for a long time, feeling very grateful indeed. She was so sweetly beautiful, clearly down from heaven. Our union had been blessed, all of my dreams richly fulfilled.

But the war was getting steadily worse. I knew this well, from my strategic duties in the field. My troops were almost gone. We had
tried very hard to keep what few men we had. I’d been promoted to Head Major General, and had been given a lovely three-bedroom house. But it couldn’t contain the restlessness and helplessness I always felt.

Once again, it was just another day. I went off to the front as usual; nothing extraordinary happened. It was dull and dreary, and I couldn’t keep down the stale old rations and the liquid nourishment from my canteen. Something was different, something was weirdly wrong.

When I got home, my wife and child were gone. I knew they’d been kidnapped by the Dracs, who had rumoured methods of using certain traitorous Kels, unknown spies who’d been promised prestige and life by the Draconian Empire. These subhuman traitors had enticed my family into a vehicle, and taken them to the Drac Territories. They were somewhere out there, lost and alone, and I was so important now, they’d show them both absolutely no mercy. Immediately, I flew back into the battle, leading my troops deep into Drac-held areas. We checked out three different planets, which took over a week, and we fought harder than we’d ever fought before. But there was no sign of my wife and child. We rescued a few other people, but not them.

There was a chill in the air, making my panic even worse. We marched on the planet Ronson finally, through the cold of the twilight. With an ever-impending sense of doom, finally, we found them.

They’d tortured my little girl with incredible ferocity, before finally killing her. Then I saw an unspeakable horror beyond Hell, or any possible description. It was the thing that was left of my wife.

I cried a river of tears, then suddenly stopped. The fright had left me entirely. The vast emptiness of space hollowed out my insides, engulfing me in a black, starless cloud. There was no such entity as love in this sick universe. It was beyond all time, beyond even space.

Beyond all time, beyond even space. What did that mean?

Our Supreme Commander, Traxis the Great, approached me with some overdue caution, as I appeared absolutely insane. But I was really just standing there, deathly still, feebly lost in thoughts of suicide.

He told me to take all the time I needed to recover. Recover?

“Use the time machine. Go back to Earth, visit your folks, and when you’re ready, then come back.” The time machine--?

“I don’t want to fight anymore,” I replied weakly. My heart was haunted by the thought of killing anyone for any reason, ever again.

“You’ve personally slain over a thousand Dracs. They did that horrible deed to your family because of your virtuous, loyal service to us. Retire if you like, and draw yourself a pension.”

Mental disability, the women doctors said. So I did.

*************************************************

A year later, I finally gave up the struggle of holding out. I decided to kill myself, having nothing to live for; I would have to die slowly, painfully, and ingloriously, after what I’d done to my family.

I would jump off the Qumran Bridge, an old relic leftover from bygone days of glory on the once-industrious planet of Ronson, where we’d found my loved ones, at which point my life had come to an end. I would linger where they’d perished, completely isolated from any hope.

And far away from the damned time machine! I didn’t even know where it was anymore, having lost its location years ago. Thank Yahway that such a temptation was stolen from me! I didn’t even deserve to go home, to the wretched old planet of Earth I’d originally fled, seeking my fortune, life, and nobility. What good was leaving the best place that ever existed, without being able to defend it anymore? I had doubted our noble cause, and not upheld the virtues of love and honour. I was too cowardly to fight the Dracs, and they were winning anyway. We were being quickly overwhelmed, losing planet after planet. There was no hope left, yet of course the Kels and others bravely continued to fight, probably to the very end. I was retired, so it wasn’t really desertion, but even that thought came to me. Though there was nothing I could do but pray to Yahway, or maybe even to God, it felt like I was deserting the Kels, and the entire universe. I was just like the damn Draconians, which I’d known all along. I wasn’t good enough to be a Kel warrior. Clearly, I deserved anything at all that happened to me.

What good was War, what price my wretched honour? My family had paid it in full. Now I must pay, too.

I stole an old space bus, took it to a deserted area of Ronson where even the Dracs never went, and marched several sandy, sweaty miles to the bridge, rusting and shimmering verdantly greenish under the molten sun. I would fall, break my body, and probably suffer for hours, which I clearly deserved, having thought things over carefully.

At the top of the bridge, I took one final breath, absurdly hopeful in the moment of my final reckoning that somehow there could be an end to the pain. Though I knew it was cowardly, I prayed to anyone listening that there would be. Then I took my dive, falling forever, and landed with a pronounced THUD! that scattered sand around my body.

Against my prayers, I lived! Writhing painfully in the sun-blackened sands, hideously hot, but so broken I couldn’t feel it at first, after some time I finally settled down, gasping. The pain was impossible to bear, beyond all human suffering. But I remembered what I’d done, my final plans to atone for a reckless life filled with guilt and stupidity. Though my every bone was broken, I would fulfill them.

I’d strapped powerful post-nuclear explosives to my back. They were on a timer, and in about three hours an explosion would rock the planet, destroying all Drac outposts and any chance they could hold the irradiated deserts anymore. The Ronsonians were all dead, or suffering unspeakably, so it didn’t matter. This was my last act of desperation, one calculated to cover up my disappearance mostly, not to further my good reputation. I hoped to go down in history as an insane fool.

Screaming and crying uncontrollably, begging the God I vaguely remembered and the Yahway I had pledged my soul to for the blessed peace of death, I began to crawl on my bleeding belly. Through a time unendingly long, I suffered, and was almost glad of it, due to my supreme mental anguish. Seemingly hours later, I finally despaired.

I wasn’t going to die. I had gone to Hell, forever, like I deserved. Looking straight at the blasting sun, I let it melt my eyes out, like the Draconians had always wanted. For I was one of them.

********************************************************

An eternity later, making myself feel all the pain I could muster, I crawled into an abandoned building. The bombs had not gone off yet, and I guessed they never would. Fainting, I shook myself awake, knowing why I hadn’t bled to death yet. It was my destiny.

I was stone blind, and without mercy made myself lurch to my feet. With my years of Kellarian training, I was able to perform such an act of titanic strength, but I didn’t know where I was going. God didn’t love me anymore. Yet something rattled through my broiling brain, the words I’d heard across a remorseless distance so long ago:

Beyond all time, beyond even space, that’s where they keep love. That’s where you can find it, that’s the only place. Beyond all time, beyond even space, beyond any meaning. The only place is with God.

I laughed weakly, insanely, knowing there was no such thing as love! And I fell down, rolling, and bumped into something that felt peculiarly familiar. It was hot to the touch. I held it in my hated, bleeding fingertips, which had slowly scraped off all their nails on the desert’s rocky floor, and without any sight knew it instantly.

My memory said it was a hyper-dimensional resonator, easily connectible to a space-time modulator for the necessary power boosting, which uses a tesia coil to generate the zero vector. The HDR, both invented and built by the legendary genius Steven L. Gibbs, of course, only moves one a few years in time either way, without the STM attached to it. You could make big money off the stock market, but so what?

If I had my family back, hang the stock market, hang adventure, and hang me. God, I begged, save the universe. Make it whole.

My shaking hands connected the two, the glowing electromagnet overheated, and there was a blinding flash of light with a loud POP! I bilocated. My mind and body swerved into two directions as the POP! lingered, not redly volcanic like a firecracker, but suckingly small, like a mysteriously vague blue balloon.

This time, there were no violent waves of dizziness and nausea. Instead, I arose, looking wildly around me. I could see.

There were people everywhere, happy smiling faces strolling past gorgeous statuary and portraits on the colourful museum walls, chatting amiably about the most fascinating topics. Ronsonians. I’d never really seen them before, in all of their splendour and majesty.

“Look! It’s that famous retired Head Major General of the vast Kelliconian Empire, What’s His Name! Oh, I’m sorry! Whatever is your name?” chortled an overweight, buxom lady spilling over with expensive jewelry. “What?” I gasped, in a raspy and totally unfamiliar voice.

Looking over at an antique silvery mirror, lost in a cloud of confusion, I could only gape at my new reflection. I was over ten feet tall, with magnificently flowing blond hair spilling over my uniformed and medallioned shoulders. I was wearing the gold chain I’d taken off the dead Drac Commander around my muscular, scaly green neck...scaly? Green? A pale, winsome shade of green, and quite attractive, really! I cut a nobly tall, combination Kel and Drac figure, and I knew the gold chain had never belonged to any “Drac Commander.” It was mine. It had been mine all along, a treasured wedding present from my wife.

It took hours of explaining matters to me, by the distinguished Ronsonian scientists, to learn what I’d accidentally accomplished. The bombs had gone off, somewhere back there in time, when I had miserably gone unconscious. Due to the lingering aftereffects of my previous time travel, a space-time continuum was instantly created, which had thrown me through the flux I’d experienced again, when I’d first used the time machine. It brought me back to the moment when I’d connected the blackly seductive machine to its smoothly white counterpart. But something important had been altered, as inalterable but flowing past events had entered the continuum, changing my reality.

There never has been any evil, slaver Draconian Empire, nor a separately good Kellarian one. We have been the Kelliconian Empire since time immemorial, and our duty is to police the universe, making sure that all hosted planets are safe from disaster or any attack by outside forces, though there never are or were any. We’re fortuitously locked by time and space into a graciously eternal, infinite peace.

My job is to continuously scout and monitor the Kelliconian Empire, and attend to any problems or troubles our widespread, mutually helpful alliance of thousands of planets ever has. And my family?

My wife, Ikanya, is beautiful and moral as ever, and now over ten feet tall, as I am. I can finally kiss her without craning my neck, and she is the most wonderfully vibrant shade of emerald green you can imagine. And our little daughter, Tirana, is fair and glowing as ever, but mysteriously darker, with deeply green skin covered in fishlike scales that protect her from any harm. She plays constantly with her brother Yakanyo, a handsomely tall lad of twelve who thinks he’s already a man, here on our brilliantly twinly moonlit planet, far away from any such imaginary planet as “Earth.” Sometimes, I tell the children chilling fictional tales of it, and wildly weird stories about strange “wars” we once fought there.

“Silly Daddy,” they chant in unison, sometimes. “There’s no such thing as ‘war.’ What on Calarico are you talking about?”

Parallel Worlds of Meaning: Excerpt

Author: Tom Paris
Ghost Writer: Karen Cole Peralta
Word Count: 2,000

This is the second in a series of tongue in cheek sci fi parodies, with references to the time space theories of Albert Einstein.


It was very late at night, and I knew I was in mortal danger. You could almost swear a presence was waiting for me, that it was lurking insanely within the walls of my vastly shadowed and dimly-lit house. I had just left my boring, stunningly monotonous job, and was so totally exhausted that I tripped over something huge and sprawling on the front porch, something that squished and moved unspeakably strongly, and crawled to rest directly underneath me. I cried out, reaching for it!

To my surprise, it was the carefully packaged box I’d been expecting, badly battered and dented from its lengthy delivery processing. I gasped in sheer delight! It contained the oversized, bargain-basement, user-friendly time machine I had ordered three months ago. The thing was from the renowned world-wide factories of the legendary inventor Steven L. Gibbs, who had created the very first time machine, ever.

Rushing inside with it, I shoved it end-over-end, roughly pulling and scraping the box along the parquet kitchen floor. I stopped, finally ripping wide its already fallen-apart cardboard. What a peculiarly black, plastic, eerily shiny machine was revealed, loaded with gizmos, dials and switches, all kinds of tiny metallic levers just for you to pull! But it looked small, withered, unmajestic, as if it was missing something important.

Of course! I had bought the cheapest possible upgraded version, the one without the special space-time modulator interface. No expensive zero vectoring was involved, and it could only take you a few decades back or forth in time. However, it did contain the infamous tesia coil, deep within its hyper-dimensional resonator, and thus it had the proven capacity to take you to any one of several parallel Earths...and to change your life, potentially forever. I could use it well, I figured; my life couldn’t possibly get any worse. So what if I died, or never returned? No one would miss me. No one! Well, maybe my Mom, but what the heck, I could probably write.

It was extremely exciting to find the obvious “on” switch, activate the machine, and then raptly attend to its low, almost bell-like sonorous hum, like a moody cow’s lowing...hmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

Who needs manuals? Chuckling to myself, I started playing with the minute control switches. I laughed louder and even more maniacally as the dials all sprang to screamingly crimson life, and the humming sound increased into a deafening, high-pitched roar as a time travel vortex exploded wide open, over ten feet high and wide, sucking up all the space in the middle of the room. I finally thought enough to turn on the kitchen lights, but had to fight the tremendously pulling vortex like a crazed demon just to reach the wall! I hit the switch. As I turned, the gaping hole changed, glowing softly gangrene as an inter-dimensional doorway formed at its ceaselessly gravitational heart.

Wrenched away from the wall, I was sucked into a whirlpool of energy, SHOOMED around like a well-wring dishtowel in the washer’s final spin cycle, and then thrown up like spit into grayish daylight. I hurt.

But not too badly. I stood, wobbling, and paused at my surroundings.

Where, and even less importantly when, was I? Shrugging, I checked out the scenery. The quiet was stark, somehow electronic, like a noiseless background humming. An emptiness surrounded me, but seemed to slowly fill itself up with objects.

It couldn’t be. It was only a small town, like those pretty little ‘burbs from the 1950’s, before any unhappiness or desperation had entered them, or any other kind of weird. . .people. People? Feeling hollow, I dimly walked over to the nearest street sign; it boasted strangely familiar alien writing, which you could almost make out.

I walked away into a sprinkling of steam, like on those moist July days in Louisiana, the bayou land of my long-ago youth; millions of droplets of vaporous rain fell, streaming down my uncaring face, and everything was coated with a thin spray of foggy mist and stickily pernicious dew.

It only added to my overall sweat and fatigue, and the deeply groaning misery of failure and despair. This place was not exciting at all; it was merely dark, dank, and disappointing.

The fine particles of rain, gleaming greyly in a twilight haze, were quite similar to the thin spray from a cheap dime-store perfume bottle.

Sighing, I looked skyward, and gained my very first acquaintance with the sad iron grayness of air that always seemed to loom overhead in this land, as heavy, black stratus clouds hung over the foggy streets. People; could such a thing as that live here? Who would they be, the Grey Rain Aliens of Rainworld?

Yet there they were, slowly moving into view, misty, a barely visible crowd of middle-aged men and women. The emerging men all wore grey flannel suits with spider-slim neckties, and casually strolled with their obvious wives down the rain-immersed sidewalks. Their pants were ironed straight as an Indian’s arrows, and their 1950’s flat-collared shirts sported French cuffs at the wrists. You could even swear you saw twinkling diamond cufflinks gleaming at you through the fog. And they all wore equally grey fedoras or homburg hats, every one of them.

The women? Well, they were all draped in similar fashion, drably in grey, the clothes being of a similarly spartan fabric, and each one wore a full skirt with a firmly belted waist perched primly above it. But each female middle was a bit on the thick side; not perky, only mooshy like a wet marshmallow. As they strutted by me, I could see no lipstick, eye makeup, or earrings, nor could I smell any perfume. And they all wore basically grey, schoolmarm 1950’s style ladies’ hats.

Either these people highly value sexual modesty, or the Mormons have taken over an entire planet. I reasoned this softly to myself as I sauntered down the sumptuously tree-lined boulevards. They were fairly narrow, and each was flanked by greyly, wetly besprinkled two-bedroom ranch houses, all of them lined up bungalow-style.

My, was this ever a sweet little small town, I began to mutter under my sweaty, steaming breath. Then suddenly I came out into a small patch of bright sunlight. Yes, it actually was daytime, although it turned out that around those wet parts, you’d hardly ever think so. And I saw a delightfully cozy little restaurant, and of all things, a malt shop, on a carefully shaded corner of the swiftly drying street, as I found myself approaching what had to be the small ‘burb’s downtown area.

My mouth dropped open. I couldn’t believe anything I was seeing.

Stores stuck out at crazy, old-fashioned angles, everywhere. Small antique shops were bursting with peculiar devices not seen in over half a century, things like tube radios, vinyl records and their players, eight-track tapes, black-and-white TVs, and tape recorders with reel-to-reel tapes, all of which spilled out onto the sidewalks. There were these enormous sales going on, and the signs seemed to indicate, in that same strange but almost readable alien language, that most of the items on display cost less than ten cents! And as greyly ancient as everything was, it all looked weirdly brand-spanking new, like fresh rainbow-colored slick acrylic paint had been plastered all over the vast grey canvas of life in a small ‘50s American town. “Americana” seemed to mean everything in this, well, “city.” But that isn’t all there is to life here, as I was to find out.

As you went past them, you could see elderly people merrily passing the time of day with raw young teenagers. And there were some different folks, rocking away listlessly for endless hours on their small front porches, even socializing with their neighbors, apparently. So there is a realistic variety of people here, I thought quite happily; but this turned out to really not be the case. It was just a particularly joyous moment for me, before I learned better. For both you, all readers everywhere, and also myself. About what the Choams were.

Hey, I know exactly what I’m gonna do with these people, I smirkingly thought to myself. I’m gonna...

I STARTED! at a purring, loud whirring noise. A subcompact electric vehicle had whooshed past me. All the passing cars were alike, none larger than a Geo Metro, and they made a sound like you’d expect from a souped-up golf cart, an eerily familiar and low-pitched whine. There didn’t seem to be very many of these cars, and that’s why the noise had startled me. Or they were slowly appearing from nowhere, one by-one, like some half-hearted aftereffect of my time-space vortex, I guessed. These cars, which I instantly deemed “toys,” were either parked on the street or tucked away in a shed near a house; there were no garages, hereabouts. I would never see one the entire time I was there.

I was hungry. There was finally a farmer’s market, and when no one was looking, I grabbed an apple, like I used to do with my brother, back when we were kids. There was plenty of fresh produce, and obviously no such thing as a huge, multiconglomerate grocery store anywhere in your sight. And no cops! I took off, munching my apple, eager to explore.

As I meandered through the many little parks dotting the landscape of this idyllic ‘50s town, looking for trouble, the thing I noticed the most that was missing from my new grey Fantasy Island was dogs. None in the small yards, none being taken out for a stroll. It gave me a slowly growing uncanny feeling, just the start of something big; it wasn’t clearly appropriate. No dogs. Why did these people fear pets?

The sun spread its setting substance over my archaically narrow street, and when it finally disappeared, the whole place reassumed its haunted, fakey, greyly moist atmosphere. The dropletting mists rearose. All around, things had become positively spooky. On a cool, breezy summer night, the streets were abandoned like they’d rolled up the sidewalks; the electronic quiet redescended, no crickets chirped, and no “party hearty” music was blaring from any of the completely silent houses or restaurants. Not very far above me, just as in the ‘50s, the bending iron streetlamps glowed like a hovering carpet of stars. The eerie greenish haze around them was so wildly familiar...like animals.

I was caught nervously pacing under one such streetlamp, unable to figure out where to go or what to do. Two burly men popped out of the raw darkness, and quickly approached me. Damn, they were the most obvious cops! They gently spoke, but in sheer lockstep unison, like Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, only saying, “Who are you, Mister?”

"Charlie, I'm a time traveler," I muttered back. Damn, I hate cops! They won’t even believe me! I wanted to kick myself for not hiding deep within one of the quaint little parks, under a gigantic, sprawling tree, so like the weeping willows of my old-time Louisiana bayous.

However, "When’re you from?" was all they softly inquired, in a funny yet mostly natural accent. They both spoke English. As I was to learn, most of the people there spoke a closely related language, one that was always most queer to me. One that sounded like the wrong way out had surely been taken, that the wrong row was all there was left to hoe. Anyway, the Tweedle Brothers took both my arms and non-violently escorted me to what turned out to be the Centerville police station.

End of Brief Excerpt

A Most Generous Offer

Fan Fiction on The Twilight Zone, Batman, and the Commedia del'Arte

By Karen Cole Peralta
Word Count: 6,500

Slow pan right to the usual eerie shot of Rod Sterling, in color this time, standing there with that maddening know-it-all smirk on his face.)

...what happens when someone crosses the line into the reality of her wildest dreams, only to find that the end of them is closer than she thinks? Picture if you will, a woman who wants only to live life to the fullest, who finally finds herself stepping smartly into...the Eventide Zone.

A MOST GENRE OFFER

As though it knew of my presence, the white park bench embraced both me and the snow. I stretched slowly, yawning, taking a content appraisal of my surroundings. Covered in newspapers that crinkled and floated off me banally, as though all was suddenly well, I simply stood up as the snow caressed my face. Why was the park bench white? It seemed odd.

I remembered being so hungry, and lying down in Central Park to sleep. I was very cold. I knew it was somewhere near Yuletide. But I had no home, no place to go to celebrate the holidays. My husband...had been cruel to me. I had ended up outside, asleep on a bench. The newspapers had been my last refuge of warmth, and they now blew around my chilly feet.

I was standing, and had a touch of my former disability, which involved turning left. Patting my head with the flat of my hand, I discovered my handicap had rather abated, which was a nice feeling, and I heard a female scream to my immediate right. It echoed around in my head like a narcissistic wail of mistaken ecstasy.

It was regal, absurdist, and I knew better. She was in trouble. I suddenly bent over in a humble bow, like I was reintroducing my Marsha Larts self to me. I could trash me. Had I done so? Was I dead at last?

Running would be best. I must not be thinking straight, I mused. Therefore, I had best get over there, and see what I would be interfering with.

Toddling off in that general direction, I found a tragic panoply of a winter’s scene. There were four young guys. Three of them lined up to one side on my right, and the dude to my left was clearly the leader. He...had a rather menacing looking long knife in one hand, and was threatening "the girl" with it. She was simply standing there, laughing, held in another's arms. The leader started tossing his knife from one hand to the other ever so lightly. I was watching, and clearly looked intrigued, like I rather enjoyed the sight -- to fool them.

She was laughing merrily, lines of drug tracks on her arms, and was "grabbing the strawberry" like crazy. That means she was enjoying her last moments. Guy was going to slice and dice her. I thought, hey, it's my turn. I am, after all, Marsha Larts! Don't I hate all such rippings? Maybe I shouldn't…what is -- caring? Isn’t it what Christmas is all about, I thought squeamishly?

It's true that my husband knew more martial arts than I ever would, I mused to myself. But he only used them for self defense, and when he got defensive he was impossible to appreciate. He had given me a permanent disability while I was under his tutelage, and the general shape I’d been in lately was lousy. Sometimes I felt like I’d lost all ability to feel, about myself or anyone else. Still, that girl needed help, or I would be stuck observing her murder.

So I grabbed her left arm, swiftly jerking her away from there, and danced The Unexpected. I moved right into place as "the girl," as Laughing Boy behind me took me right into his big ol' arms. But he was shaking with laughter, certain about what would happen next.

Everybody seemed to be having a great old time, and most of their seasick emotion eluded me completely. I was sober, and they were under water, filled with alcohol and crystal meth. I stood there smiling, and said, "You look like a great leader, guy. Say, what's that?"

"Huh?" he said, his Male Self suddenly alerted to the presence of a wise gal. He stood perfectly motionless, getting his drug-tired self to reappraise the situation. Which made a perfect moment to Japanese-karate-style sidekick him. You see, I really didn’t know what knives are.

That was indeed unexpected. The knife went flying, I pulled the right arm of the guy holding me simultaneous to that moment of lurching time, just as I twisted sharp too, and I was out of there.

I took off, running like the wind, but knew I was going to run out of it. Like a character in a movie, I tried to relish the moment of my demise, while fleeing. I was grabbing that final strawberry, as they had told me to do in Karate Class. I wondered why they had prepared me to die. I would only be unconscious forever...was that what my husband, the one who had hurt me, had wanted? No, he was too altogether into dying for me.

Unfortunately, I was now headed down a weirdly angled city street. Curious and a little off in my timing, I started to lose "running abilities" as I right-angled into an obvious dead-end ally. I was slipping on the snow, and surely was heading toward my downfall. I slid into the alley, and saw the end of the road -- and death.

Tears began streaming down my freezing cheeks, and froze instantly. Wheeling around, I grabbed two frost-covered trash can lids that were handy. I thought maybe I could distract the thugs, as I could at least lift those things. They weighed about as much as sea foam. I lifted Flotsam and Jetsam, waving them around at the oncoming pack of guys. They definitely had all their Larger Knives out now.

I didn't matter. Somehow that girl did. I would at least die fighting.

Then, something swooped straight out of the cold and isolated darkness itself, and clobbered their leader. I could tell it was an evil thing, not a good thing, that was so swooping and darting and ploughing through their faces like several sledgehammers leading at once into nowhere.

Languages, once written, can never be taken back or destroyed, came a voice into my head, clear as a bell, like the insanity around us.

The trash can lids, as though disappointed, drooped down to my Marsha Larts sides. For indeed, my name was not that, and something most intriguing had shown up. I kept up a brief time of holding trash can lids before me as I felt their coldness sink into my grasping fingers. It, whatever it was, seemed to be a ninja made of no substance, and it took out the other three one at a time as they looked up, robbed of their easy victory.

Then the moving shadow of a sudden took the shape of a very large man. "Jesse Jackson? Not the dead Bruce Lee?...no, Vlad Tepes," I muttered under my disgruntled gasping breath, referring to Compte Dracula, the Moslem ruler who had killed the 700 Christians of The 700 Club. “Jim Crow?” Was this a racist figure, with which to spook superstitious blacks? Nah, I thought, honest to gosh, from an even older Italy..."Pierrot--?" A somber doll this, one with lengthy black horns on his head, and yet somehow it was so. And finally, I thought to myself, the thing somehow smacked of a medieval Jewish knight.

But that was not what Pierrot had been, though, quite. Out of nowhere, I was smack dab in the middle of the Commedia del'Arte, the centuries old farce of farces, of the clown and the serious man. It was ancient, Mediterranean, and mystical. What could I make of the serious man?

Pierrot had been white, handsome, and held up a head of straight black hair. He had contested with the curly haired Harlequin the Madcap Clown for Columbine the Beautiful, lost, and then hung himself due to losing his "wife." It was the woman he was going to marry. That was the Italian “del’Arte” thing, I recalled so vaguely from my dreams. It dawned on me; this black, masked and still hard to see figure must indeed be...Pierrot.

"No," said this deeply masculine but vaguely boyish-sounding voice, "I'm Me." I thought: I can't believe how much I feel at this moment of time. I'm disappointed. I had lost the fight. It would have taken less time if I'd been killed. What did this now mean? I had risked my life to save another's -- for what? For this?

You see, it simply wasn't Vlad Tepes, or any such vampire, knight, Kung fu artist, medieval Moslem leader or Italian farce comedy star who was standing there before me. I immediately phased into an abject terror mixed with my lack of disability, changing into a childish sense of wonder. No it couldn't possibly be...Bateman.

How understated. The snow blew about in the alley, swirling around his draped costume, the grey and blue-black suit of The Bateman, a mere comic strip, book and movie character.

"Who are you? What do you think you're doing?" was said to me in this deep, bell-like carefully measured tone of an actual someone trying to reach an actual someone else. I choked, reaching for my own knowing throat. I had something very strange to tell him, as though it now gripped my brain, and I knew what it was well in advance.

He only thought I was "one of them," a street punk, and was trying to "reach me." Was it possible that I was like Columbine, and that Old Italian Farce, so faded in the echoes of time, had caught up with me? Was it my turn to dance away, off the cliff and into infinity? Surely -- not with him. Not with such a laughable premise!

Why, this was evidence of the downfall of Western civilization!

Because he really was "The Bateman." And he was angry at me, for so much as existing, for being what he wasn't; what...was he? A comic book superhero, or Pierrot? I knew what I had seen back there, and my mind was screaming that as much as this looked like Bateman or The Bateman, it was indeed the old Italian serious man.

He was standing there, thinking. I dropped both trash can lids with a loud clatter as "one of them" took off running and made it to elsewhere. Must have been an onlooker. The other three boys had been flattened. I achieved a wise gal look on my face, and shrugged. My husband was a tall Semitic Jew, non-practicing, who to me had always looked a lot like the Jester. I’d always thought it to be a mere coincidence. Now I had to stop and wonder…could it be? He had told me that though Jewish, he hated all Hebrew people. He was somehow anti himself.

The Jester...that would absolutely have to be Harlequin, from The Harlequinade. Nothing, nowhere, and no one else. The Madcap Clown himself.

But now Bateman was going to arrest me, or something.

And the Jester had reeked summarily all along of being Harlequin. The many bright colors of his costume clearly showed it. That comical character of yore, which was surely now going to take vengeance against me through such a ridiculous proxy as this -- The Bateman.

Vengeance—again? Harlequin had won so many times at the Harlequinade. He had made fun of the police, and he had practically pulled the rope that had hung Pierrot when the serious man had finally suicided...from losing Columbine to him.

If anything ever began to happen, or if "Bateman" there ever even moved. Snow swirled coldly about us both as he stood patiently watching me. A final clatter of noise seemed to hum in the background, as if some cars were nearby.

I squeamishly thought to myself about this. The Jester had started out as a "grubby" Jew in Detective, in the very first panel of the very first comic book strip he had appeared in, December of 1940. Harlequin had lost his battle in the eventual death throes of the Harlequinade, so long ago. He was not “pure.” Racism had pulled its own ancient strings, one way or another. Harlequin was either too boring or too evil, and therefore Detective had found their victim, someone to lampoon as a villain, apparently. Casting him as a Jewish miser was fairly typical of their occasionally dismal style. A clown to contest with a vampire, for the kids buying "all in color for a dime" funny books. Bateman had merely been a Suprememan ripoff, a detective as a superhero. I remembered it.

My husband, on either the same or the other hand, had not been any too heroic. He was a curly black-haired clown. He had been up until now my loving and laughter-ridden companion of many years, and we had practiced the martial arts together. But I have already told you about him. He wasn't...nice.

And this weird guy in front of me didn't look any better than him. If anything, he was meaner, tougher and more domineering than my mate. And younger. He now recalled to me nothing more than a black suited boxer, or perhaps a pro wrestler.

The Bateman, or whoever he was, remained motionless, with that cape surrounding him like an enormous black wrapper. Then he shrugged it off with one arm. He stood there silently, as if appraising me. I briefly wondered if I was good-looking at all to "The Bateman." For some strange reason, I was wearing a short sleeved shirt and shorts, which didn’t help much in the cold.

Who was this guy really, and why was he dressed up as...the dark knight?

"You are going to tell me what your role in this is," Brice Wayne breathed into my errant ear from too far away. Something told me this man was somehow named that, memories and fleeting impulses did. I had used to read scads of those silly comic books while growing up. And indeed, I had shown that "cop" there fighting capabilities, and had to deal with him -- while at the same time trying to figure out what to tell this...human being.

"Yes, you're right, Brice," I muttered, "Good old martial arts are to save only me. Self defense." I had to droop down to Columbine’s status in my innocence. She was, I think, the innocent ingénue of that o