Thirst No. 4 (27 page)

“I hope your parents didn’t see you as a divine incarnation when you were born,” I teased her.

“Far from it. I wasn’t a priestess when our array first began to appear. I was a pot maker. My hands were stuck in clay all day. Except when I was firing and painting my creations. Those were simple days filled with a great deal of satisfaction. My childhood was joyful.”

“Something must have triggered the creation of your array,” I said, with a note of impatience. Umara has only one fault. She’s never in a hurry. I suppose it’s a reasonable quality for a twelve-thousand-year-old woman to possess. But I find myself often wishing she would get to the point quicker.

“It started rather innocently. On our equivalent of Sunday, our day of worship, we used to gather near the banks of the Nile at nighttime and pray. We had maybe a dozen songs we all knew, and we used to sing them with great love and devotion.
Thanking nature for rain, the river, our crops, our good health. Like I said, we were a devoted people. But as a race, we began to enjoy the silence that would follow our prayers, and for that reason we made it a rule that we’d sit quietly for a few minutes after every hymn.”

“How did you begin to ‘enjoy the silence’?”

“I mean exactly what I say. We were a sensitive race and we found it pleasant to sit still after each prayer. A large number of us sensed a presence in the silence. I think it’s the way we lived that made us so receptive. We had no enemies. When other tribes from the interior of the continent visited, we welcomed them with open arms. We never tried to take lands that didn’t belong to us. We were content with our own village beside the river.”

“So what triggered the array?” I asked.

“While sitting in silence after our prayers, a few of us began to make sounds.”

“Involuntary sounds?” I asked.

“Well, they weren’t planned.”

“You began to speak in tongues. Like the Pentecostal people.”

“That’s a fair example. But I must add that we were by no means a dogmatic race. We embraced all religions as long as they were based on love and gratefulness. We saw gratitude as the key to invoking the grace we felt from our prayers.”

“Did you personally speak in tongues?”

“It started that way for me. I didn’t do it because others were doing it. I was a shy teenage girl. I wasn’t trying to show
off. But imagine ten thousand people all singing in harmony, and then falling silent, and in that silence a few sparks began to ignite.”

“Sparks?”

“It was like an energy burst through some of us and we had to let it out by speaking. Only we didn’t know what we were saying. We only knew that it sounded like a language. It seemed to have structure and syntax.”

“But you were just speaking gibberish.”

“No. It got to the point that one in ten of us started to talk like this. That was over a thousand. And when that number was achieved, the words we were spouting became clearer, and we began to sense their meaning.”

“Wait a second. Are you saying that nature itself began to teach you a language?”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Try telling that to the millions of people worldwide who go to Pentecostal churches. When they pray with fervor and start to speak in tongues, it’s nothing they can control. It just happens.”

“I understand that. I’ve seen it. But they never make any sense. You’re saying you were spontaneously given an intelligent language.”

“It happened. In time, we wrote down the words and realized that an intelligence greater than our own was trying to teach us things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Like how to sterilize our milk and water by boiling it. How to build aqueducts to channel the water from the Nile so we could grow ten times as many crops. It even taught us how to build a thresher to separate our wheat kernels from the stalks.”

“Right. I suppose you ordered the parts from the steel mill it taught you how to build.”

“You don’t need steel to build a basic thresher. All you need is rope, lumber, a saw, primitive spokes and wheels, and some ingenuity. I add that last word deliberately because the knowledge we were channeling didn’t tell us everything. It was more a source of inspiration. It was for that reason we began to call the being who spoke through us the Source.”

“Hmm,” I said.

“You don’t look impressed with my story.”

“It lacks the scientific basis Sharp’s explanation does. His discovery was uncovered step by step. It produces results that can be mathematically measured. Your array sounds more like a revival meeting.”

“The creation of our spontaneous language is throwing you off.”

“Most languages are the result of a random searching for sounds to describe something. No, my problem with your tale is that you were taught so much so quickly.”

“Once again, it happened. Thanks to the Source, in a
few short years our culture evolved tremendously. We discovered higher math, algebra and geometry, and used it to help develop engineering principles that allowed us to build huge structures.”

“Don’t tell me you constructed the Great Pyramid?”

Umara hesitated. “That came later.”

“I would hope so.”

“But not as late as you think.”

“You forget, I was in Egypt five thousand years ago, not long after Krishna died. That’s where I met Suzama. I know the Egyptians had pyramids even then.”

“Good.”

“But you’re asking me to believe they had them seven thousand years before that.”

“We did.”

I considered. “You were there. I can tell you’re not lying. But it’s hard to accept this channeled information—and that’s what it was—was of such practical value.”

“Nothing I’m telling you is really different from what Sharp told you. Your prejudice against our discovery is the form it took. So we didn’t use decks of cards and record hits and misses on calculators. The principle of using a group mind to tap into a faint ESP signal was identical. It didn’t matter that our information came us to after praying. It still took thousands of us listening together to understand what we were being told.”

“Could your people hear this voice?” I asked.

“In time, yes. After many years the most sensitive of us discovered how to link our minds together so we could hear the language as clearly as you hear me speaking right now. Come on, Sita, you have to believe that we could become telepaths. You’re a telepath yourself. Just look at how your mind melds with Seymour. He practically wrote your life story before he met you.”

“Seymour and I do have a special connection. And I can hear other people’s thoughts, from time to time. But I’ve never had the universe speak to me.”

Umara sat back in her seat and nodded to herself. “Ah. Now I see the problem.”

“Really? Why don’t you wipe that smug expression off your face and tell me what it is.”

“Your problem stems from the fact that Krishna has never spoken to you in five thousand years.”

“How do you know he hasn’t?”

“It’s obvious. Otherwise you wouldn’t protest how we came into contact with the Source.”

Her words stung. They hurt because they were true.

“Tell me more about how you linked your minds,” I said.

“Just as Brutran has the Array and the Cradle, we had a thousand of us who could sense the Source, a hundred who could channel information from it, and a dozen of us who could link our minds so they functioned as one. We called our inner circle the Link.”

“I assume you were the head of it.”

“My father was. But I was a member. I saw how it evolved over time.”

“How much time?” I asked.

“Now we come to the Telar’s deepest secret. How did we become immortal? It didn’t happen overnight. As a people, we were in contact with the Source for two decades before it gave us insights into how to extend our lives. These insights Brutran and her inner circle are already using. We were taught herbal formulas, yoga exercises, and breathing techniques that greatly slowed down the aging process. That’s why the scriptures talk about people who lived to be several hundred years old.”

“Umara. I’m the last person on earth who needs a history lesson.”

She ignored me. “But the secret of the Telar’s immortality came from the Link.”

I waited but she didn’t continue.

“So what was the secret?” I asked.

“A great white light came and blessed us.”

I groaned. “Now I know you’re a born-again Pentecostal.”

“You’ll have trouble with this part of my tale. But I suspect after you leave Brutran’s castle—if you manage to survive—you’ll have no trouble believing every single word of it.”

“Go on.”

“The Link grew in power with the passing years. As a group we aged very slowly. We were together perhaps a hundred years
when we had a great breakthrough. We were sitting in silence in our largest pyramid. We had been fasting on nothing but water for weeks and our physical bodies felt as if they were made of air. Yet our Link kept growing stronger and stronger and with it we were able to peer into realms you can’t imagine. Prophets speak of angels and archangels and elementals and gods. But we actually saw such beings. We were able to communicate with them, learn from them, and at each step we were led higher and higher. Eventually we reached a point where we believed we might one day see God.” Umara paused. “It was then it happened.”

“A great white light came and blessed you.”

“Don’t ridicule me, Sita. You’re alive in your original body. One reason is because Krishna gave me his blood. The other reason is because of the light I experienced that day. The glory and power of it has never left me. It’s possible it’s the same light the Bible refers to when it speaks of the Holy Spirit. I don’t know, it can’t be described. I only know that after it came, and left, all of us in the Link, and the majority of the others who were able to contact the Source, were immortal.”

I took time to digest her words. I knew she was not lying. I would have detected the falsehood in an instant. But her tale was so fantastic, it created more questions than it answered.

“What went wrong?” I asked finally.

“Why do you assume something went wrong?”

“It always does. Never mind the fact that you’re the only one left of this Link.”

Umara’s expression was sad. “I think the light gave us so much joy it was hard to return to the physical world. Imagine, we felt as if we had been touched by God. But the next day, when we broke our fast, we still had to chew our food before swallowing it. We still had to urinate and move our bowels to get rid of our wastes. We still had to wash our skin to keep it from smelling. But it was difficult to go back to being simply human.”

“Were those in the Link the leaders of your people?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sure that created problems right there.”

“True. We were supposed to be leading our people but all we could think about was returning to the light. Because our breakthrough had come as a result of much fasting and meditating, that was all we did for the next few years. But it had the effect of separating us from our people and in the end they began to resent us just as we resented them.”

“Didn’t your better angels advise you to be more loving?”

“We continued to experience higher dimensions. Realms of light and bliss. But none led us back to the great white light. As our frustration grew, I think we began to attract beings that promised us they knew a secret way to the light.”

“Who were these beings?”

“Familiars. They came as the best of friends, and they
looked very bright themselves. It was easy to believe what they said. But, looking back, I realize they never would have come if we had been more attentive to our people. We had become selfish, self-absorbed, interested only in our own level of achievement. We didn’t pray and meditate for the sake of our people. We hardly spoke to them, especially after we met the Familiars. To us, they were the most wonderful beings. We began to see them as almost as valuable as the great light. You see, they gave us powers.”

“What kind of powers?” I asked.

“All kinds. We discovered we could move objects with our minds. It didn’t matter how large or heavy they were, not if we were linked together. We learned how to bring walls of fire. This power proved especially useful when we were attacked.”

“Attacked? I thought you had no enemies.”

“We were attacked by our own people.”

“But you just helped make them immortal!”

“Those connected to the Source were made immortal. The rest of our people realized this and wanted to be given the same gift. We might have given it to them if we had control over it, but we didn’t. They turned against us and since they now outnumbered us fifty to one, we had no choice but to call upon the Familiars to protect us.”

“Did they save you?”

“All of us in the Link survived. But many in the Source died, despite their gift of immortality and the fact the Familiars
were able to create waves of fire that flowed through the streets. It was a horrible time. Even though I hid deep in our greatest pyramid, I could still hear the screams of my people as they burned to death. It seemed to me, even then, that the Familiars liked to kill our foes slowly. Of course, I didn’t understand at the time that they actually fed off the agony they caused.”

“How long did this battle last?” I asked.

“Three days. When it was over, my father made himself king of all the land and set down stern laws everyone had to follow. We had never had a king before. We had never had a caste system. Now those who were in contact with the Source were the upper caste, while those in the Link were supposed to be treated like gods.”

“You must have enjoyed that.”

“I hated it, I knew it was wrong. I went to my father and begged him to let us return to our simple life, when everyone was treated as an equal. But he said that was impossible, the people would always be jealous of our immortality and would try to take it from us by force. Then I begged him to at least stop invoking the Familiars. I couldn’t stand the feel of them in our chambers, never mind what they had done to our people during the war. But again my father said we couldn’t go back. He believed we needed the Familiars for protection, and to continue our search for the great light.”