The Journal of Dr. Colwyn Rhys-Myers

Entry: 27 Apr 1919, Part II

When I awoke, it was to the scent of lilacs.

I was warm. I was lying down. I was comfortable. And I was staring into the benign face of what I could only describe as a six-foot tall river otter.

“You’re awake. Good. No, don’t move just yet; your muscles are probably still a bit stiff. And I suspect my appearance must be rather startling, to say the least.” It - he? she? - spoke. I understood it.

“My name is Pao Tsen T’Chang. If you feel you can’t pronounce that, I won’t be offended. ‘Pao’ will be fine. Do you think you feel well enough to sit up?”

I decided whomever, or whatever, this was, it was probably male. I wasn’t certain why, but perhaps it was merely to give me something solid, familiar, upon which to grasp. I answered Pao, “I think so. Physically, at any rate. Psychologically, I’m not as certain.”

Pao laughed; at least I think it was a laugh: a short, guttural bark. “Yes, you must be horribly confused.” He helped me to sit up. My muscles were stiff, but I felt strong enough, and Pao, I could tell, was very strong indeed. “You’re full of questions, I’m sure, and I’ll be happy to answer as many as I can.”

“But first, let me nudge things in a direction that will perhaps help.” He walked over to a low bench, next to which sat what looked like a trunk, almost like a pirate chest. The chest appeared to be made of wood, very dark, like mahogany, and simply, but expertly constructed. He opened the lid, reached in, and pulled out a bundle of clothes. He put on a top-coat, hat, and a full-face mask, and turned around. He posed as if modeling in a menswear catalogue, and said, “Do you recognize me now?”

I did. May God help me, but I did. “Y…you!” I stammered.

“Yes, me,” Pao replied. “We met in your world, and now,” here Pao paused, and continued almost regretfully, “you are in mine.”

Pao took off his disguise, put it back in the trunk, and sat down on the bench. “You saved my life. I had become convinced I would never see my world, my kind, my family ever again. For that, I thank you. But you have paid a price, one I only hope I can repay. Allow me to begin by answering your questions. Where would you care to begin?”

It was my turn to pause. Finally, I asked, “I’m not dreaming, am I?”

“No, you’re not. You are here, and this is real.”

“May I?…” My words caught in my throat, so I merely reached out my hand. Pao reached back toward me. “Certainly. No offense will be taken.”

I held his hand, what was actually quite close in appearance and structure to a human hand. Essentially, Pao had a strong, sturdy set of fingers that were webbed together, attached to a small palm. His arms were short and stocky, as were his legs. He was covered in short, brown fur in fact much like that of a river otter. It was as if the otters I knew had one day long ago decided to stand upright and began adapting to a more human mode of locomotion. Whether or not this was truly not my world, I could only imagine what a scientist like Darwin would make of this creature.

Pao allowed me to place my right ear close to his chest, and what I heard there was certainly a recognizable, if not human, heartbeat. His fur and hide were warm. I had to accept either that he was real, or that my hallucination was so all-pervasive that I must accept its reality until I learned more.

“So, I’m real?” Pao asked.

“You’re real. And this world is yours, not mine?”

“Yes. If you feel well enough to walk, perhaps seeing more of this world will help focus your questions more easily.”

“Lilacs,” I said.

“A non-sequiteur,” Pao replied.

“No, lilacs. I smell lilacs. From my world.”

Pao barked. Now I was certain the bark was a laugh. “Ah, the scent. Yes. I wanted there to be something familiar to you in the room while you recovered, so I set some local plants in a pot. Z’Har - the plant - smells much like your lilacs.”

“Most kind. Wait a minute!” My choice of a next question became suddenly all-too clear to me. “How is it I understand you? Am I speaking your language? And when last we met, your command of English was, well…”

“Terrible, yes, wasn’t it,” Pao replied. “This is as good a place as any to begin. Let me tell you my story, and you may interrupt whenever and wherever you wish.

“We can understand each other because in my world, all living things are very carefully attuned to one another. You are attuned particularly well because of the bond you and I formed when we returned using what you call the amethyst. But more of that later. It is not so much that we are speaking the same language , but more that we can hear, see, feel, each other beyond a mere exchange of words, or gestures. Our thoughts and surface emotions intertwine. I believe one word in your language is ’empathy’. Perhaps this word help you understand?”

“Yes, ‘empathy’ helps,” I replied. Pao barked - laughed - again. “I’m sorry, did I miss something?”

“The pun in your answer: unintended, I guess?”

“Oh, yes. So even the subtleties of language come across in the way we’re communicating?”

“They can. And though I didn’t speak your language well, I did have over two-hundred of your years to learn it,” Pao replied.

As once I been stared at incredulously, so now was it my turn to stare. “Two-hundred…years?”

“As good a place as any to begin ,” Pao said. “I was a slave navigator on an interstellar scout ship that burned up in your atmosphere. I survived the crash in an escape pod along with…” Pao stopped when he noticed I was now several steps behind him, frozen in wonder.

As we had been talking, we had walked out the entrance of what I now realized was a large tent-like dwelling in which I had been recuperating. Never before had I stepped out of one mystery into another quite in this manner, but I could not help but be transfixed by what I saw. For I had walked straight into the vision of the landscape I once thought I had imagined in the medical tent on the fields of Amiens. The purple and orange sky was the same, the plant-life was as lush and foreign as I remembered , and I knew from a familiarity somewhere inside me that this was the same place. But where was it, and how had I come to be there?

Pao let me stare for a seemingly endless moment, as indeed all notion of time had lost meaning for me since awakening. Finally, I spoke, or communicated in whatever fashion I was apparently interpreting as speech. “I know this place.”

“You do?” Pao asked.

“I was here once, during the War. How, in what way, I couldn’t tell you, certainly not now. I thought I had imagined this place, that it was an hallucination, yet…”

“Here you are. Yes, it’s real: as real as am I. I wondered if perhaps you were even more sensitive than I suspected.” We were interrupted by a scurrying sound from underneath a stretch of dark green foliage nearby.

“Excuse me,” Pao said, and motioned for silence. He dropped to all fours, and worked his way along the ground on his belly, almost like a snake. Quickly, almost too quickly for me to see, he pounced into the undergrowth, and I heard a high-pitched squeal.

“Hah! Got you!,” Pao cried. He emerged from the undergrowth with a much smaller version of himself dangling in his mouth. The smaller one was, from what I could tell, giggling.

Pao stood up, dropped the giggling bundle gently to the ground, and said, “Mr. Rhys-Myers: my daughter, Ichi. Ichi: this is our guest, Mr. Rhys-Myers, not prey.”

“I was just practicing stalking, Daddy. I wanted to meet him, not eat him.”

“You’re getting better, but I could still hear you,” Pao replied.

“I’ll try harder.” Ichi turned to me. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Rhys-Myers. I hope I didn’t scare you.”

I may have been farther from my known surroundings than ever I could imagine; but, I still had my manners. “I’m pleased to meet you, too, and you hunt very well. I never saw you coming.”

“Thank you. Are you coming to eat with us?”

“I would be honored.”

“Tell your mother we’ll be there in a few moments,” Pao said. He bent down to Ichi, and they nuzzled each others' whiskers; then, she loped off on all fours through the undergrowth.

“You say I helped you return home?” I asked Pao.

“Yes, and she is one of the most important reasons I thank you. Now, where were we?”

“You were explaining something to me about a ship, and I was completely failing to understand you,” I replied.

“Forgive me; I’ll start again,” Pao said. “You accept that this world is not your own?”

“Yes.”

“And you accept that my world is far beyond the reaches of your planet?”

“I’ve heard of a film - a form of entertainment in our world - by a man named Melies about a voyage to the moon. I’ve read some of Wells, and Verne,” I replied. “They write adventure stories of fantastical worlds both in the vast reaches of space, and far beneath the surface of our planet. Your world, to me, seems not out of character with their novels.”

“I am familiar with them,” Pao said. “Now, could you accept that there could be worlds not just out in space, but out of time?”

“I suspect I’m going to have to.”

Again, the bark of a laugh exploded from Pao’s substantial form. “My world was once on the edge of where your world was, in your space, in your time. We had no…technology, science, as you would call it…but, we did have a mineral. We knew nothing of it, but other creatures, on other worlds, did. They learned of it, and came here to mine it. When they did, they unleashed a power they could not control.”

“Am I correct in assuming that mineral looks like an amethyst from my world?”

“Yes, it does,” Pao replied.

“Just what is that mineral?” I asked anxiously.

“Exactly? Scientifically? I cannot tell you. We, my kind, really doesn’t know. We call it simply ‘zhu’. But we have learned just how crucial it is to the structure of our world, and how potentially dangerous it has become to the rest of the universe. That knowledge has come at a terrible price, one such that some of us work tirelessly in order to ensure that no one will ever have to pay it again.”

“Another mystery?”

“No,” Pao replied, ’this I’ll explain as best I can. We’re almost at my home. Come, sit by the fire, and I’ll tell you more of the tale.”

Without my realizing it, we had walked into the middle of what I soon learned was Pao’s village. A group of some dozen tents much like the one in which I had been berthed were gathered around a bend in a green, slowly flowing river. A series of burrows ringed the village, and it appeared that the villagers used them for storage of food and belongings. I noticed what could only be weapons as well - long, sharpened spears, and some metal hand-axes and short-swords - in one of the burrows. Several of Pao’s kind were eyeing me curiously, but not unkindly, from their tents.

We walked to a tent near the banks of the river, and sat down by a cooking fire. Pao called in to the tent, “I’m back, and our guest is awake.”

A clear, high voice answered from within, “Ichi told me. I’ll have food ready in a moment.”

“My wife - mate, as you would say - Tayuu. I’ll introduce you when she comes out. But, back to what you need to know. That mineral, zhu, is what one might call the heart of our world. It contains a power within it truly remarkable; but, until our world was invaded by outsiders, that power was a benign one, and significant only here, and only to us.”

“I’ve seen that power,” I said.

“Indeed you have. That power, and your ability to bond with it, I believe, is what brought you here, and brought me home. Let me return to asking what you, what your reason, will accept. You will accept that a mineral can possess such power?”

“Of course.”

“Would you accept that a mineral on any world might possess such power?”

“As a matter of pure speculation? Yes,” I replied.

“Would you accept that on any world, every thing, whether living or not, is an essential part of that world, and linked together in some way?”

“I’ve heard people we call naturalists speak in such terms, so, yes.”

“Finally, would you accept that everywhere there is life, on every world, such a relationship might exist?”

“Again, I’ll say, ’Yes,’ if only to find out where your explanation is headed,” I replied.

“I understand. Your world is only at the very beginning of such change, such terrifying and wondrous advances,, and I am trying to teach you in a moment what it took us centuries to learn, sometimes unwillingly so.

“If you accept all this, then you can begin to understand who we are, and why our history is now inadvertently so important to you. Our world existed on a crack in the vastness of space: a spot where what is, and what is yet to be meet. We were unaware of this, and existed peacefully in harmony with our world, and only our world. As such, time in our world has never moved in the same manner as it would in, say, yours, and after we were invaded, we became separated even further from the ’normal’ flow of time. But more of that in a moment. For now, accept that whereas I was trapped in your world for some two-hundred years, here I was gone but a few weeks.”

“You see my village around you.” Here, Pao gestured to the tents lining the riverbank. “You would call this primitive, pastoral, quaint perhaps?”

“A fair description,” I said.

“And you would consider your civilization far advanced from this?”

“Developed, advanced: yes.”

“As you have developed beyond us as we were, so there are worlds that have developed far beyond yours. Many of them have ships that travel the stars.”

“Back to Verne,” I replied.

“Yes, you’re following me. Good.”

“You keep speaking of your civilization in the past tense. I don’t understand. We are here; we’ve established this is real.”

“Yes, the answer is coming,” Pao said.

“And so is dinner,” called the voice from inside. We were interrupted by a rustling of tent flaps, and an intoxicating smell of something thick and soupy in a large, earthenware pot. The pot was carried by a stout, dark-furred creature I took to be Tayuu, and following her, juggling four bowls and spoons very precariously, was Ichi.

“Welcome,” said Tayuu. “I’m glad to see you’re well. My name is Tayuu. You’re very lucky to have woken up today. This soup is one of our specialties. It takes two days to make, as it must go from hot, to cold, to hot again in order to get the right flavour from all the ingredients.” She placed the pot on the fire, and Ichi began filling up the bowls.

“Mr. Rhys-Myers, you get the first one,” Ichi said, handling me a bowl practically overflowing.

“Thank you. You may call me by my first name: Colwyn.”

“No, I can’t.”

I looked at Pao and Tayuu, then back at Ichi. “No, really, you can. It’s not impolite.”

“No, really, I can’t,” Ichi replied. “I tried for days while you were asleep.” Pao and Tayuu stifled a bark. “C’mon, Mom, I got really close!”

“Yes, dear, you did,” Tayuu replied. She looked at me and continued, “Our tongues aren’t quite made for your language.”

“Quite alright,” I replied, “neither is mine.”

Ichi finished dishing up the soup, and suddenly realizing how hungry I was, I dove in without a second thought that this food was probably nothing even close to anything my digestive tract had ever experienced. It didn’t matter; the soup was delicious.

“Potato and leek,” I said, “or close to it. My compliments. Thank you.”

“Our pleasure,” Pao replied. “Shall I continue the explanation?”

“Please, yes.”

“Those civilizations that travel the stars have ships in need of immense amounts of power to travel the distances they do, and at the speeds at which they move. Many use some form of minerals from their worlds, and from the worlds they visit, to power their ships. We had never desired to travel to the stars, but the beings of the stars traveled to us, and that’s when our problems began.

“Generations ago, we were visited by a people with immense technical prowess, but little understanding of that prowess. They began to mine our world, and discovered the mineral you have seen. It was similar to a mineral they already used, but because of who we are, and where this world once existed, ours was far more powerful. This made it invaluable to them, and they mined our world to the brink of extinction.

“Here is where the tale becomes more complicated. On their world, their mineral was nothing more than a source for their power: a fuel, as is your coal, gas, and oil. Our mineral - the 'zhu' - was a far more powerful fuel, but that was all it was to them. However, as they began to mine more and of the heart of our planet, we began to experience the pain our world felt at its loss as a pain in our bodies. Later, we began having visions, hallucinations, seizures. Some of us were driven mad. Eventually, our world, like a wounded creature, began to fight back. Somehow, in ways we still don’t fully understand, our world began to unleash forces in and through us, forces both of healing, and destruction, and zhu was its channel.

“The invaders left on our world were few in number. They were ready to abandon the world and move on. Most of us hoped they would simply leave us, and we could go back to the life we had known, rebuild our world. Perhaps we were foolish to believe we could do so. But some of us, in our fury, attacked the remaining invaders, and a war began.

“During that war, our new powers, immense, untested, and misunderstood came to the fore. We lost, of course. Technologically, they were far superior. But worse than that, the invaders saw the emerging control we were developing over the use of zhu. In one final, cataclysmic battle, the power we unleashed split the crack in space open, and our world emerged in a separate reality: a new space, a new time. A new universe, if you will: an expanding universe of our own foolish, accidental creation.

“We were defeated. The mines were nearly empty. But now the invaders had not only ransacked the heart of our world, but also they had captured a race they could enslave and use to manipulate the power of zhu to their own ends. They forced us to create a door from our new universe back to theirs. That this worked at all was a fluke, but work it did. They established permanent settlements - outposts, they call them - on our world, and use them still to ’restock’ their world with slaves from ours.”

“Do you still fight back?” I asked. “I couldn’t help but notice a cache of weapons in one of your burrows. And this does look like what on my world we would call a resistance encampment.”

“We do, and that’s where the tale becomes even more complicated. But that’s for the morning. Night is here, and we all need our rest, you most of all.” Pao was right. His story was so enthralling, and so much to absorb, that I had not noticed the sun had already set. I also had not noticed how tired I suddenly was.

“You may join us in the tent,” Tayuu said. “There’s plenty of room, and we have a spot for you.”

“Thank you. If I could just sit by the fire for a moment and digest what I’ve heard. It’s quite a lot to…well…”

“I understand.”

There was one last question I had to ask that night. “Will I be able to return to my world?”

“We believe so,” Tayuu answered. “But that, too, is for tomorrow. If we’re to succeed, you will need all your strength.”

I leaned back on a log and stared into the night sky. At first glance, their sky was no different from our own. I realized, as I counted stars, that I had never paid any attention to the constellations of my home. To my untrained eye, the lights in the heavens were all where they should be, but I knew that couldn’t be right. If this was indeed a world unthinkably far removed from my own, each of those points would be in the wrong place. An astronomer would be driven to distraction trying to put them in what, to him, was their proper place.

A slight rustling behind me caught my attention. “You’re still making too much noise,” I said.

“I had to scratch my nose. Before that, you didn’t know I was here.” Ichi crawled out of the brush and sat next to me on the log.

“You’re right. I’m sure you’ll make an excellent hunter when you grow up.”

“And tracker, and guard too, just like my Dad.”

“Is that why you’re out here, to guard me? I’ll bet your parents think you should be asleep by now.”

“Shhh!” Ichi scolded. “They don’t know I’m out here; but, I’ll keep you safe until you come in to bed.” I never knew a river otter’s face could smile proudly, but Ichi’s did.

“Oops! I forgot!” Ichi loped back into the brush and emerged with a finely-polished piece of driftwood almost as long as she was tall. “My weapon. It’s my special monster-stick. With this, we’ll be safe.”

Ichi sat back down next to me. “I’m going to lie here just a few more minutes, and then I’ll come in,” I said.

As I lay there, wondering just what tomorrow held in store for us, Ichi sat bolt upright next to me, resolutely on guard …for a moment. Her posture began to relax. She started leaning against me, heavier and heavier, and in minutes was fast asleep on my shoulder. I moved gently out from under her, picked her up carefully, and went to carry her, and her monster-stick, inside.

I looked in to the star-lit sky one last time. This night was ending peacefully; but, all my questions, all my fears, would be waiting for me come the dawn.