Keeper and the PLANTERS part 5

Copyright (c) 2020 by Randall R. Peterson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED This is a work of fiction. All persons, locations and actions are from the author's imagination or have been used in a fictitious manner.

Keeper and the

 PLANTERS

Part 5

            They appeared to be inside and outside at the same time. A shadow of a humanoid was dwarfed before a vast globe of infinite bright light. Somewhere an English police siren brayed. Keeper and the crew of the vanished Centurion floated forward until they were below the silhouette. A Beatles record was playing “… when we become naked!”. Then everything changed and the shadow became a reverse silhouette against a map of the universe … brighter than the first rays of a supernova. “Why aren’t we dead?” A girl named Greina, who resembled a walking-plant, moaned.

            “The Planters are UBFs,” Keeper, the captain of the Centurion, gasped. The captain was of the Druellian race and appeared as a kind of hologram with no physical body. Light seemed to flicker like fire in the space where his feet should have been. “Unimaginably – Bright - Figures. We always thought them to be myths - legends. It is said that they are what the Drell will become … in another fifty-million years.” The pendulum inside a grandfather clock began to bang against the sides and then exploded. A group of children shouted “Trick or Treat”.

The unimaginably bright figure now spoke into the mind of each crew member. “Welcome,” the entity said. “I am Four-nineteen.” A hundred bugles sounded … a thousand horses broke into a gallop.

The voice was so strange and magnificent a very startled Teuth had to explain to the others. “What we are hearing is not sound waves,” the Centurion’s navigator gasped. A cluster of bubbles broke on the surface of the water. “But sound channels. It appears that the Planters have discovered a way to cut grooves in air molecule clusters … rather than just cause them to vibrate.”

            “I always thought the old vinyl-records sounded better than the CDs,” First Officer Jeff Bland muttered. Insane laughter echoed from somewhere far below.

            “You are not dead …because you don’t believe you are,” the UBF turned toward Greina.

Someone was shoveling dirt onto a pile. An airplane sputtered overhead.

            “Is this all a dream?” Jeff asked. A large wave crashed against rocks.

            “Possibly,” Four-nineteen somehow appeared to smile but with no change to his outward appearance. A wolf howled. The unusual and the impossible had become the norm. A handful of cubes appeared in the air before Bland … dice rotating like small planets.

Jeff Bland reached out his hand to grasp one of the floating dice … a four, a one and an impossible nine. He was astonished when his fingers passed through the four so he tried again. He heard a howler monkey shriek, probably a caged primate from his youth on Earth. The dice appeared to be a hologram but without the faint flicker and color shift associated with the visual technology. It was when his fingers reached up to scratch his head in amazement and his fingers were unable to touch his hair that he realized he was in a dream. He was falling.

Bland awakened suddenly inside his quarters on the Centurion!  His insanely expensive music system was playing Stairway to Heaven at half-volume. He opened the door to his familiar room just as Jimmy Page broke into his famous lead, and after touching several objects, ventured outside.

The Centurion crewmembers were startled to see Bland re-enter the Planter’s globe when he had been standing by their side less than a moment before. His by-their-side image lingered for an instant. Bolts of lightning crashed from the ceiling and then were blown away by a horrific gust of wind. The sound of someone turning a crank on a jack-in-the box that played Pop Goes the Weasel was almost ear shattering. “Where did you go?” Bang! Jack sprang from the box. “And when!” a visibly shaken Teuth asked. Keeper had grown legs … but they belonged on a frog.

The UBF’s strange voice once again seemed to carve channels the air. “One never knows what side of a dream we will find ourselves on … so we must be careful.” A nuclear explosion rumbled the globe.

“I still do not understand,” the plant-girl Greina said. “My emotions showed creatures shrieking, being cruelly ripped apart by ghostly shadows! Keeper even asked me to link my emotions to the ship’s holographic display … and we all saw it!” The plant girl stared as exquisite moth-orchids began to bloom on her fingertips … then on her head. She was suddenly a tiny seed stuck to a bee-like creature and being transported above a meadow. A baby began to cry.

            “That’s because your emotions were real, but they were created by your fear.” There was the sound of fire consuming a vast forest and many running feet. The UBF turned and began to retreat inside the darkened globe, but his voice continued. “Even after five billion years of sleep … I still detect a lassitude in you. Perhaps you all need to rest again.” The sound of an approaching tornado grew louder. Dorothy was about to be knocked unconscious in her auntie Em’s house and taken again … by a dream.

Keeper’s voice rose as the entity retreated. “Why have the UBF come to this side of the universe?”

Four-nineteen somehow appeared once again to smile but with no change to his outward appearance. Somewhere an organ was playing dark chamber music. “Why, to harvest that which we planted,” the UBF said. “The future starts as a dream and unfolds with our expectations.”

Then there was only darkness, a sleep without dreams, without sounds and time once again … did not exist.

-------2-------

            First Officer Jeff Bland opened his eyes inside the sleeping tube aboard the Centurion. A mist covered the floor of the hibernation level making it appear as if he were floating. Teuth needs to get some ventilation in here, Jeff thought. He was walking into the hibernation showers as Leika was coming out. She was naked of course, using an air-paddle to dry the quills that replaced her hair. “I thought we were going to have to jettison you with the refuse dump,” she said.

            “How long was I asleep?” Jeff yawned.

            “About three years longer than the rest of us,” Leika told him.

            “Damn!” Jeff said. “Why didn’t someone wake me?” He was suddenly in a hurry to enter the showers, no doubt expecting a stern lecture from Keeper when he arrived on the command level.

            “Relax little boy.” Leika sighed. “I might have exaggerated you nap-time a little bit.”

Jeff thought he might be imagining things. The Porosities’ normally flashing eyes seemed somehow sad. The ever-changing bright colors under dark lashes … glowed soft and muted.

Bland shook his head and was turning to leave when a quill suddenly attached itself to the area of skin just behind his right ear. Streaming sensations of exquisite delight coursed and throbbed through his limbs and exited through his toes.

            “Not so fast.” Leika smiled. “I need you to find me … a towel.”

-------3-------

            “How long were we asleep?” Bland asked Keeper and Teuth when he entered the command level. Teuth moved one of his tentacles inside the light-array before he answered. “According to the most precise calculations our most limited technology is capable of .000000000497 of a second.”

            “I can’t believe I watched the earth being formed and all of its most detailed-history in five billionths of a second.”

            “Time is relative,” Keeper said. “Put all those numbers on the left side of the decimal and change the second that follows into years … and it’s about right.”

            “Where are we?” Bland tried not to absorb too much theoretical physics.

            “We just passed the Glovian clusters and are more than half way to Zoogutan.” Teuth seemed satisfied with the calculations and moved his tentacles from the colored light beams. “The Planters have returned us to our worlds.”

Bland gasped. “But that would put us on the path to …”

            “Geelo.” Teuth finished the first officer’s statement then stared at him quizzically.

Keeper raised one of his flickering eyebrows. “I know our organic-science officer can be a pain, or should I say in your case a pleasure, sometimes. But don’t you want to rescue your ice-princess from Gorwan?”

            “But I just saw her coming out of the hibernation showers,” Jeff stammered.

Teuth muttered. “The porosities, Leika, was taken captive by Gorwan before we entered Enubus fourteen’s black hole. She has not been aboard the Centurion since that time.” Then he began reviewing navigational systems-checks on the speeding vessel.

Keeper looked at his first officer kindly. “What was it the Planters said … oh yes … the future starts as a dream and unfolds with our … expectations.”

And the Centurion, a research and rare-species acquisitions vessel sanctioned by Mateuse 17 and at least twenty other planetary clusters was once again on a mission. A crew of ten-thousand, eight-hundred and sixty-seven-thousand, four hundred thirty six and one-half life-forms, hurdled through space at reverse light-speed nine. Searching for the secrets of the universe, these assorted life forms flew through an almost infinite darkness … and into the far-reaches … of the unknown.

TO BE CONTINUED …