‘Looks to me like you jumped from the frying pan into the fire. Samuel “the Mule” Agler-everyone’s all- American hero. To do Tikkun Midot means to overcome our less worthy instincts, not to succumb to peer pressure.’
Gene Agler stands, brushing away the sand. ‘When I was eleven, two boys at school beat me up pretty bad, just because I was Jewish. For a long time after that I remember feeling ashamed of who I was. One afternoon my father gave me a card and inside was a poem. “Be your own soul, learn to live; And if some men hate you, take no heed. If some men curse you, take no care. Sing your song, dream your dream, hope your hope, pray your prayer.” ’
‘Whatever you decide, Samuel, do what’s best for you. Do what’s best… for your soul.’
A wisp of thought, in the consciousness of existence.
Jacob?
Are you out there, son?
If you are there, I have no way of knowing.
The Abomination has blanketed my senses, shielding your thought energy from me. While I cannot hear you, I pray you might still hear me in the hopes that my experiences on Xibalba can protect you.
At one time we spoke of love. It’s important you understand the power of the emotion, and how its absence can taint the soul.
As Michael Gabriel, I had lived an existence devoid of happiness-a lonely childhood, followed by a bitter adolescence. I was life’s victim, my later years spent in isolation in a mental asylum. Even those precious few moments spent with your mother were fleeting, the pain of her loss filling me with an angst I cannot put in words or thoughts.
Was it mere coincidence that the Guardian arranged a shared existence with the Mars colonist, Bill Raby- himself filled with an emptiness as bad, if not worse than my own? No, I no longer believe in coincidences.
But it was not just Bill Raby who experienced this heaviness of heart, nearly every colonist marooned on Xibalba shared the same unspoken feeling. It was a feeling of shame, of survivor’s guilt, magnified beyond the scope of human despair.
Nine billion people on Earth had perished so that a chosen few could survive. Many of us had ‘conspired with the Devil,’ meaning we had been selected for Mars Colony based neither by lottery nor merit, but by political affiliation, by favoritism and ethnic background. We survived because of who we knew and how much money we had so that we could manipulate the selection process.
Now, marooned on Xibalba, the immorality of our affairs was tearing us apart inside.
Not all of us, I should say. Your cousin, Lilith, and her son, Devlin, along with their ‘coven’ of friends, seemed quite content with our bizarre predicament.
The rest of us, however, were left to wallow in our existence. ‘Live for those who died,’ became our creed. And so we faked our joy, pretending the whole affair back on Earth was just a test of survival.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily… life is but a dream.
Was Bill Raby’s existence but a dream?
Was Michael Gabriel’s? Can one truly exist without love?
Yes, but it is a self-imposed hell.
It was your love that saved me, Jacob, but in your unselfish quest to release me, I fear you have condemned your soul to the same purgatory, the same ultimate destiny.
You cannot simply be Hunahpu, you must retain your humanity. Step into the real light. Allow yourself to love again, or you will find yourself on the same path as your cousin, Lilith.
Having said what I needed to say, I’ll return to my journey on Xibalba.
Each of the alien planet’s days was divided into three shifts consisting of labor for the collective, personal time, and more labor, for it was essential to our existence that our first crop yield a bountiful harvest.
During these first six months, I was assigned to a habitat shared by seventy-eight single men and women.
It was there that I met Jude.
Judith Fields was a fellow genetics expert whose specialty was in agriculture. Using the surviving portions of our gene bank, she and her colleagues had begun the process of cloning livestock for New Eden’s farms.
Jude was a country girl, originally from Idaho, with long brown hair, hazel eyes, and a great sense of humor. It was Jude who made me feel again, and over the months, our puppy love blossomed into a strong bond. I found myself, or was it Bill, thinking about her constantly. Whoever it was, our time together was one of great happiness that, at least for the moment, sweetened both our souls.
Jude introduced me to Tan Rashid, an astronomer, originally from England, who entertained us with his ‘theories’ regarding the location of our new home world. You see, despite his computers and star charts, despite his infinite knowledge of the heavens, Tan simply could not discern the location of our planet. Was the distant red supergiant Betelgeuse? If so, none of the other constellations were familiar. Seeking answers, he and his fellow astronomers set to work on building Xibalba ’s first telescope.
As for me, my alter ego-Bill Raby-was a marine geneticist. Since there was little we could do to contribute on an alien planet devoid of oceans, we were assigned to the geology department.
Drone scouts gave us the ability to map New Eden’s entire domed landscape, which spanned nearly 3 million square miles, making it roughly the equivalent of Australia. Engineers determined our floating continent had been built in sections over eons. With its temperate climate control systems and agricultural pods, which we still could not access, they estimated New Eden could house and feed more than 2 billion human beings.
Located twenty feet below the habitat’s rich layer of soil was an inaccessible subterranean chamber, its alien carbon fiber plating composed of the same composite materials used in the dwellings. Within this sealed level, we theorized, had to be the environmental systems that perpetually purified the cloud city’s air and water, fertilized the plant life, and controlled the dome’s shielding mechanism.
The first crop was a bountiful success, and the future of our colony and our species seemed secure.
Two weeks later, the plague struck.
The human body is an amazing and complex machine. There are over a hundred thousand different genes in the human genome, and one single gene may contain more than 2 million nucleotides. Our bony framework consists of 206 bones, most of which are in our hands and feet. Our heart and lungs are the power trains behind a circulatory system that supplies muscles and organs with blood, oxygen, and nutrients, all the while removing carbon dioxide and other waste products. Our nervous system and hormones control bodily functions. Our digestive and reproductive systems are marvels of engineering, our brains more complicated than any computer. In fact, the human body is akin to a combustion engine, producing the same amount of energy as a hundred-watt lightbulb.
Yet, for all its nanoscale complexity and metabolic sophistication, the human body is still composed of 70 percent water.
For eighteen months our colony had been consuming New Eden’s water. We were cooking with it, bathing in it, and consuming food supplies grown with it.
What we didn’t know was that it was affecting us… changing us, altering our genetic code.
As Bill Raby, I was among the plague’s first victims.
I remember it being an overcast day. Olive-gray storm clouds whipped above New Eden’s protective domes. Jude and I were on personal time, strolling along one of the artificial lakes, admiring the handiwork of our alien benefactors, when I was suddenly stricken with intense head pains, as if my brain was on fire. I crumpled in agony, screaming to Jude for help.
Mercifully, I blacked out.
I awoke three days later in a medical ward, quarantined with others like me.
The human brain floats in a self-contained sort of womb, surrounded by and filled with a watery substance called cerebrospinal fluid. Doctors informed me that pressure in this cavity had increased dangerously, causing a portion of my cerebrum actually to press against the inside of my skull. This alien form of hydrocephalus had stricken fifty-seven New Edeners besides me, and more cases were being reported every day.
Drugs were not working, and the pressure on my brain was increasing by the hour. Unless relieved, I would lose consciousness and die within three days.
In effect, it was a death sentence.
