Drops of Murana

Late afternoon came to the Valley and made everything drowsy through its concave honey lens. This summer lens followed the children from where they disembarked at their school bus stops, each scampering off to his or her own home.

One little boy ran back down a dusty earth trail, through the tall brush, to a dome. Dad worked in the yard, commanding the equipment, waving his hands to orchestrate the machines. He stood in an egg-shaped enclosure, upright and oblong. Larger than you think, but there’s nothing to compare it to, really. Out beyond, in the fields, the bots went about the business of harvest methodically, progressing in synchronized pas de deux, neatly rounding opposite ends of the rows simultaneously.

Now this little one, she spent her days watching over the fields, under a rust and tan sky, fading Kodak colored air, there among the sparse pines, on hillsides rowed with dry grass and forests here and there, the California hills. This cherubic little girl, gradually shedding the baby fat of insular childhood, thumbing her nose at the camera, with long dark hair, large Asiatic eyes, chubby cheeks, and bangs cut straight across the middle of the forehead.

The bus settled to the ground and she disembarked. Behind her, the bus rose up and floated off. She was not the only one at the stop, as there were a few boys, too. Being very quiet, she didn’t speak to them much, but they made it a rule to sass her. She clutched her notebooks close to her chest and walked on, head down a little, white cotton dress with the blue flower pattern.

One of the boys cupped his hands around his lips and called from the side of the road, dry grass blowing in the wind behind him, sun yellow as it descended in the sky. “Has your dad seen any more ghosts?” He laughed at her and slung a few pebbles, just missing her head. The shorter boy by his side snickered in agreement.

“Everyone knows your dad’s crazy.”

“Hey.” Another boy walked up beside her. “Leave her alone, Patrick. Come on, I’ll walk you home.”

They passed down the side road leading to her house. “Sticking up for her, huh?” grunted the taller boy, Charles, as they walked away.

“He’s probably got a crush on her,” muttered Patrick, the smaller of the two.

A few minutes later, their persecutors at a safe distance, she said: “Thanks.”

She looked over at him. He was a little taller than her and wore a white t-shirt with a dusty stain streaked across it. He had a brown bowl cut, and the bangs hung in his eyes, but she could still tell he was looking at her every now and then. He had a smudge of dirt on his cheek. He still had a little boy’s belly, which was kind of cute.

His lips rosy, they seemed especially so against the white teeth, a little crooked here and there, where the lips parted slightly, as if he meant to say something for sometime, eyes like blue daisies, nose like an upside-down Pac-Man ghost.

“What’s your name?”

“Luke. I already know your name. I heard them talking about you on the bus.”

“They’re really jerks. It was nice of you to stick up for me.”

They arrived at her driveway.

“Well,” he said, standing awkwardly.

“Do you live close by here?”

“No, I live back on the other side of the highway. It’s all right. I wanted to walk with you. I enjoyed it a lot.”

“You can come in and meet my father if you want.”

“N-no, that’s okay,” he said, waving his hands and smiling. “Maybe some other time.”

“Hello? Are you home?” her father appeared on the front lawn. “Who’s that you’ve got with you?”

“This is Luke, Dad.”

“Pleased to meet you, sir.” He smiled and waved.

“Why don’t you ask him to come in?”

“Thanks, maybe some other time. I’ve got to get going. I’ll see you.”

“Wait! Okay, see you tomorrow.” But he was off before she could finish her sentence.

She ran through the front door, disappearing into the sloping white sides of the house. The hallways branched off the living room smoothly, like the passageways of a giant shell.

She ran her hand along the walls, felt the smoothness, and found her room, an ellipsoid cave carved out of the stone with a big round window looking out down the hill into the golden countryside and the mountains way off in the distance.

Her father walked into the room. “I hope I didn’t embarrass you back there, Murana.”

She lay on her bed with a little notebook, writing on the screen with a stylus.

“It’s fine, dad. I’m not embarrassed.”

“You’ve just started fifth grade. You’re growing up so fast. I don’t want you to be uncomfortable about talking to me if you start to feel interested in boys.”

She blushed a little. “Dad,” and here she rolled her eyes and buried her face in her book.

“Anyway, I’ll be outside if you need me. I set the kitchen to have dinner ready by six, so don’t spoil your appetite.”

“Okay. Dad, I love you.”

“I love you, too, Murana.” She got up and gave him a hug, and then he walked outside.

She returned to her diary. “Dear diary, today I met a very nice boy. His name is Luke. He stuck up for me when some other boys at my bus stop tried to pick on me. They said people think my dad is crazy. I wish people would mind their own business. I worry a little about Dad. He misses my mom an awful lot, and I think he works so hard so he won’t be sad.”

She put the stylus down and looked out the window. She saw her father fix his tripod out in the field to the side of the house and begin taking measurements, training his lens over the power station. He did this from morning until night. The neighborhood parents complained constantly that he neglected his farming robots. It pained her to think of it. It was true, in a way. The robots kept breaking down, and he put off fixing them, saying that what he was doing was too important.

When they asked what was so important, he told them he was searching for fields, disturbances. She wondered if he meant magnetic fields or electric fields, but he said the kinds of fields he was looking for were ‘deeper.’ He said he could see people in the fields, and it was his duty to study them.

The neighbors took that to mean ghosts, and her father had been quick to agree angrily with them.

“That’s right. I’m a ghost hunter,” he snapped at the town meeting.

They laughed them both out of the meeting. Her father took her by hand and the two of them walked out without so much as another word. They hadn’t since been back to a town meeting.

Over dinner, not long after the sun had set (so there was still a faint red-purple glow in the black sky beyond the kitchen window), Murana asked her father if she could go outside tomorrow afternoon with Luke.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked, bringing two plates of food from a materialization processor unit next to the sink: corn, peas, mashed potatoes and synthetic chicken.

“Over near the power station.”

“How many times have I told you not to go there?”

“We’ll stay away from the station.”

“That’s not the point.”

“But, Dad, other kids have hung out there plenty of times, and none of them have gotten hurt.”

Picking up dishes and dropping them into the dishwasher, her father answered, “It’s too dangerous over there. You could get yourselves into serious trouble. There are places and things in this world that aren’t meant for you.”

“What do you mean?” she said, incredulously enough for a precocious grade school student.

Her father planted his arms on the edge of the counter and hung his head, then looked back at her.

“Have you read much about Australia in your studies?”

“We learned a little about the Aboriginals and their culture. It’s very old: at least 4,000 years.”

“That’s plenty of time to develop technology of some form, even if it’s not immediately recognizable as technology.”

“I don’t understand.”

He turned to her, leaned against the counter, and folded his arms. “Aboriginals claim to have a system by which they can communicate over great distances through trees. One Aboriginal whispers something to a tree here. A thousand miles away, another picks up the message in another tree. They claim trees are more efficient than telephones. Nature can be more efficient than any technology we create. If we would just open our eyes and see how to take advantage of it, instead of being in denial, humans could do miraculous things. But nature also can do terrible things.”

“What did you mean by bad places?”

“The aboriginals of Australia believe all creatures of the Dreamtime and spirit world exist in facets of the landscape, all totem animals, and when they appear in dreams, they may signal the coming of storms, or famine, or children. Children, themselves, are in the Dreamtime. The aboriginals believe in a kind of ‘spiritual conception,’ where the father may have dreamed a month in advance of the child coming, and find out his wife is pregnant later.”

Well, she paused to think, that’s just the same thing as having an intuitive understanding that the child is coming, like, unconsciously sensing a subtle change in the way his wife smells. Little changes in her body’s chemistry. Dad was overlooking the obvious.

“Hmm. Yeah, okay,” she said, thinking, so in a way, he’s saying the father extracts the child from the Dreamtime. There is a kind of active male part in childrearing. I guess this is helping my dad feel closer to me in my mom’s absence.

“Then there must be places,” he said, “and creatures, symbols in the landscape, that would harm a person greatly if they were to pass from that world of dream into reality.”

“For example?”

“The T-Rex is the totem animal of the U.S., like the crocodile of the aboriginal.”

“Uh, okay, Dad, whatever.”

She excused herself from the table and went to her room to play.

The next day, girl and boy set out across the auburn countryside, more a fluid of earth with indomitable viscosity, of which only time-lapse could illuminate the vicissitudes, perhaps, like glass in a windowpane slowly thickening at the bottom over a century.

The rhythm of their stride fell in time with the swaying of the scorched grass like so much mid-western grain under the halcyon blue sky dimming at the edges to purple, warped and crushed down at the horizon as though viewed through a thick of alien atmosphere.

The power station rose before them: a grid of crisscrossing lines, slicing up the sky into a kaleidoscope of abstract and simple geometries, rhombus and triangle, alternate interior and exterior. The transformers were like red-hatted mushrooms sprouting out of one another on tall ladder-like wire skeletons. The station hummed with power, bristling with energy. The air felt alive with energy that crackled out toward them at right angles to itself.

Generators humming, they avoided the station, keeping a good distance from the chain-link — at first. Against her father’s wishes, of course, they eventually strayed closer, curious as cats.

“Nobody’s parents really want them going anywhere near the station,” reasoned Luke.

“Oh, I know,” she replied, “it’s just that my father has a different set of reasons.”

She reached out to touch the fence, and he snatched her hand away, held it for an instant, then, blushing, retracted his own.

“It’s dangerous,” he said, stare averted. “I mean, it looks dangerous. I don’t know if it really is or not. Static, you know.”

A few strands of her hair blew between her nose and upper lip, and in the background, the drone of power never stopped. They kept walking. They found the droid station nearby across the stream. Periodically, a droid emerged, its red eye shining first through the black bunker doorway and then rolling out.

Their bodies took up little space, these harvester droids. Tall and slender, on narrow treads with a single Cyclops eye on a teeny cylindrical head, and all these arms to pick the fruit off the trees or scythe the grain and winnow away the chaff. It cringed for a moment when it noticed the children, sized them up, then continued on its way. More came and went. It was rare that a drone even acknowledged the presence of a person.

When they finally reached a good spot on the top of the highest hill on the plain, they plunked themselves down onto the golden grass and lay there making angels in the tall field, head to head, gazing up at the sky. Relatively nothing, no words, passed between them this whole way.

“They say that sunsets are blue on Mars,” he said finally.

She didn’t reply at first.

“What does your dad do, Luke?” she asked.

“He’s a farmer, like your dad.”

“Does he get his droids from this station?”

“Yeah, pretty much all the farmers around here do. The bots zap a lot of power from that station.”

She rolled over onto her belly and twiddled a lingering blade of green grass against her nose. “Why doesn’t your father like you coming here? It’s so lovely.”

“Your father doesn’t like you coming here either.” He looked over at her, squinting in the late afternoon sunlight.

There she was, hand-to-cheek, pensive nine-year-old eyes, drying red leaves stuck to her long dark hair, on the golden grass with red brick framing her from behind. She kicked her knees back, swinging them up behind her. The smell of cedar was light in the air, like a fading photograph.

“My parents are afraid I’ll hurt myself,” Luke continued, “either by interfering with the robots or getting too close to the fence. They underestimate me. Your father’s reasoning is…”

“It’s different,” she said, “I know. I’m not sure what he’s afraid of here. He said he’s been conducting experiments, and that’s about all. I see him sometimes outside with the tripod, level, and camera. It’s like he’s surveying land for the county. But I know it’s something completely different. He’s not crazy. You know that.”

“I wish more people did. It must be hard on you, without your mother and all.”

“That was a few years ago now. I think I’m learning to live without her. It’s him that I’m concerned about.”

He pulled himself up onto his arms, slightly higher than her, turning back to look at her. “You loved your mom a lot.”

“…”

“Murana, do you think your father is watching us right now?”

There was a tinkling like glass wind chimes. It chimed in above the droning resonance of the grid’s field.

“What is that?” she asked.

Luke, caught off-guard, reared up so fast she was shocked, like a predator at the first detection of prey. She had not thought him capable of such quickness.

He stood up. “I hear it too. Get up, Murana. It’s coming from not far away, not far from the power grid, but I can’t see anything there.”

“Look,” she pointed, “there it is.” It shimmered into existence, a mirage. “There’s something peculiar about that,” she said, walking toward it following the boy’s lead.

“Is it a tree?”

“What is that thing? It looks like a tree, but not like any tree I’ve ever seen before.” No, it definitely wasn’t a mirage.

True, there was something about the birch-like bark that, upon closer inspection, actually looked like bone, only silvered and with a metallic sheen.

She felt herself freeze up. Looking down at her flesh, it looked like it had become a soft, rubbery plastic. Her face, too, felt stiff and brittle. The sensation came and went. She could feel her eyes alternately looking out from behind flesh and mannequin skin.

Looking at Luke, she saw her own petrified stare reflected back at her. They were shifting between states at a rate of twice per second. They were both frozen behind plastic-rubber smiles mechanically working open and shut. His eyes stayed human in both mannequin and flesh states for the first few moments, then began phasing between human and glass orbs.

The fields of crops, the control booth, and the robotic irrigation systems all became mock-ups, like fake plastic replicas. Even the hills behind her shrank. They flattened out into backdrops.

Ahead of her, Murana saw a wide black aperture open up, a negative, down-turned half-moon slice with rounded contours, like a vast bay window in one of their dwellings. In the darkness of the frowning concrete mouth, she could see vague outlines of people. There were whole families, children in arms, but indistinguishable in the low light, seated in compartments, silhouettes drifting by.

Even the sky seemed to curl around them, a pellet-shaped room designed to create the illusion of space. From time to time, the space above the dark doorway containing the watching people was lit up with ten lamps, some bright as suns. Murana saw how the light from the lamps cast a gradient of light on the interior of the eggshell enclosure that now encompassed her entire world.

Murana’s father looked up from the aperture of his machine and stared with his naked eye. There was no way he could see them from this distance without the aid of his tripod. The crystal clear acuity needed was nothing a human eye could reproduce. Not without some kind of modification.

His blue eyes stared into the late afternoon, glinting weirdly, head and hair framed in a halo of light.

That night, as dusk came to the prairie, Murana and Luke walked home silently. Neither boy nor girl seemed willing even to look at the other. Finally, she spoke.

“Did you see what I saw, at the tree?”

He nodded, biting his lower lip.

“What do you think it was? Did we imagine it? We weren’t imagining it, not if we both experienced it.” She ran in front of him, stopping him in his tracks, sneakers kicking up a small cloud of dust in the growing darkness. Head lowered still, he seemed unwilling to look her in the eye.

Tears welled in his. She threw her arms around him, told him not to cry, though she herself began to. Those must have been the ghosts her father chased, and that he warned her about. If only she’d heeded those warnings, she and Luke wouldn’t be haunted now by memories of what they saw and felt earlier that day — the horrible sense of something else shifting behind the skin of the dying day.

“We can’t tell anyone about this. Please. Promise me you won’t tell anyone.” He started to speak, but she lowered her eyes from him and hugged close to his chest. “Shhh…don’t tell.”

Because to tell would be blasphemy against this secret life, secret world they had found. Not so much to safeguard its well-being, but to preserve its fleeting character, she thought, and to protect their own fascination and enchantment, wonder and terror. To have something strictly for their eyes, in the final analysis, perhaps, my eyes, she reasoned.

But also because what they had seen was a terrible thing. Holding close to the boy in the near-dark, in the growing cold, she shivered to think that back there, over the hillsides, windows lay strewn about the foot of the crystal tree, like jewel fruits, luminescent as fiber optic tips in the night.

“Please don’t tell,” she pleaded with him.

When they parted ways, Murana looked into the pocket of her overalls. A faint light emerged from the pocket. She dipped her hand in and withdrew the luminous artifact, lighting up her child’s face, her dazzled expression.

She meditated on something she found, a sliver something more than Kodak found here among the dry grass, in the golden meadows, under a strange willow. From a distance, the branches of the willow were oddly thin and lustrous. They looked gray.

Upon closer inspection, the ‘tree’ seemed more mineral than plant. The limbs branched out in angles altogether too sharp, the trunk thick, yet translucent with a dull periwinkle hue that deepened the further inward toward the center you looked, its surface grooved, but more like veins of quartz.

Strung between branches in webs of silver filigree, here and there, were pear-sized teardrops of what looked like glass. The leaves were of a similar substance, and they tinkled like a chandelier with the wind.

A smooth, teardrop-shaped shard, refracting light weirdly, that she found on the ground, swam with images and people, like a window into another world, like a wound on the body of the Illustrated Man.

The next day, getting off the bus after school, a stone came out of nowhere and struck Luke in the head. He turned, putting hand to head. Murana saw a small trickle of blood running down his forehead.

“That’s what you get for sticking up for her, Luke.”

They stood there defiantly. The two heads, with brown bowl cuts, side by side, wore identical expressions of smoldering fury with knit brows.

Luke, for his part, said nothing. He merely stared at them with an expression somewhere between anger and bewilderment — and, every now and then, glanced at the red of his fingertips.

“We know where you two go; know you went up to the power station and lay down on the grass,” said Patrick.

“And kissing,” added Charles, the taller one.

“Yeah, probably. You both know none of our parents allow us to go up there.”

“…”

“We’ll be seeing you up there, Luke,” said Patrick, and with that, he departed, his sidekick trailing him.

At her house, Murana’s father dressed the wound.

“I should call the school board and have those young men suspended,” he said. “This makes me very angry. There, that should heal up just fine.”

“Thank you, sir. That won’t be necessary. I’m not afraid of them.”

“Well, you’re a brave boy, but I’m not so sure if this is a matter you should have to deal with on your own.”

“No, it’s okay, Dad,” said Murana.

“Well, I’ll be the judge of that. I’m sorry we had to meet under these circumstances. Would you like to stay for dinner, Luke? It’s spaghetti night.”

“I’d love to.”

They went to Murana’s room to play while her father finished up his experiments in the last rays of twilight. In the kitchen, the machines whirred into action.

“Luke, look what I have here,” she said, lifting the glowing tear-shaped shard, big as the palm of her hand, from beneath a piece of black velvet she’d pulled over it. “I can’t show it to my father.”

“Murana, you took one of them. I don’t know if you should have done that,” said Luke. “We shouldn’t play with these things. I have a bad feeling about this.”

Still, bathed in the radiance of that strange light, she could see in his eyes that he was mesmerized by that light and by the strange shadows and images that rippled beneath its surface. What had they discovered? They seemed to understand that what she had found was a kind of precipitate. She understood that intuitively, that it was not simply an artifact but some kind of seed.

They would have to return to the tree but were too frightened to go in person.

There was a factory over the hill. Murana recalled when she first saw into it as a young child, from across a stream. It was a little production facility made of stone, a cylinder with tapering parabolic ends. The facility was one of those that the bots set up to self-replicate. A bot left the enclosure through the dark aperture and rolled off on six wheels toward the meadows.

Through the doorway, she could see the molten metal hurled through the darkness by the worker bots. The red glowing orbs flying through the darkness were like angry eyes or balls of fire beneath the surface of a Promethean earth.

She tugged on her father’s sleeve and asked him if the robots would get tired or hurt. He reassured her then that robots felt no pain.

This came to mind as she passed the luminescent shard to Luke when he asked if he could hold it.

“There are objects in our world,” her father had said gently, “that call back to a darker time.”

He knelt down next to her. “Slivers of our time are like the museum exhibits of anti-utopian pasts. All these different realities intermesh. It’s like your little puzzle box, you see?” He took it from his pocket and held it before her. “A puzzle in three dimensions unlocking, a perspective trick, so that what was far away suddenly is near. Like drawing a cube. If you look at it right, the far wall pushes through the near side of the box. The perspective inverts, the panels slide back, and the reality transforms like a three-dimensional object reconfiguring, flowing through itself.”

All those details — the tepid water, the darkness, the red, molten glass — all reconfigured in her mind, when she saw the factory for the first time, to reveal another side, another level hidden in the commonplace, conjugate with our reality under the permuted transform of her imagination, metaphor unlocked by her child’s mind.

“The chances of intelligent life coming into being are infinitesimal,” her father said. “Compound that with the symbols and meaning we find every day: every smallest movement, every person and scene we lay eyes on, they’re indistinguishable from symbols of the highest degree. They create a symbolic resonance of our own minds. The natural world is a projection of the human mind.

“Or perhaps nature means nothing at all. What are the chances of you and I coexisting? Then again, we must already exist to ask this question.”

Remembering seeing the factory for the first time with her father by her side, she got out her Omnibot Repair Kit and started tinkering with the servo unit, determined to get it back up and running before school started again in a few days. She had augmented him with tank treads, cameras, and six photovoltaic cells to replace each eye to provide power. She only went to school three days a week. The rest of the time, so it was thought, children had a right to explore on their own.

Out doing his field experiments, Murana’s father did a double take then backed away from the tripod. Was he seeing things? It looked like… yes, it was, small and white and coursing up the hillside toward the power station and the tree.

Just down the slope of the hill leading up to the power station, holding a small receiving terminal, were Murana and Luke. Luke, on all fours, gazed into the screen.

“Okay, we’re going to try this initially. This is trial one, dated the fourth of October. Everything seems to be in working order,” said Murana.

Up on the slopes of the field by the power unit, one diminutive plastic sentinel rambled unsteadily over the terrain. Like some kind of awkward Martian lander, it’d been retrofitted with large treads, but it was an elementary school kid’s job, so it was a little rough.

Omnibot’s sensors were picking up the tree now, shivering in the wind, producing timbres strangely musical. She extended one of the robot’s claws, picked up another shard and dropped it into a compartment on the chassis. Then she picked up another and another.

Each time the Omnibot’s claw closed around one of the jewels, the border of the claw seemed to warp. The light of the crystal bled into the claw, blurred the distinction between the space of the robot and that of the crystal. Fortunately, unlike when she and Luke were in the presence of the tree, the machine did not seize up. It was not subject for some reason to the strange influence.

“Well, well, what do we have here,” came a voice through the robot’s microphone. It was those two boys from the bus stop. Swinging the camera around, she could see them now looming up on her screen, approaching the Omnibot.

“Time to get out of there,” she said to Luke.

She flipped a couple of switches on the controller and spoke into a microphone: “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay clear of this area. There’s a dangerous field here.” Her words came through a little speaker on the robot. She could tell by the perplexed expressions of the approaching troublemakers that she’d hit a nerve. True, they were scared to enter the space surrounding the tree.

“As soon as you leave that area, we’re going to take those stones from you. Where are you, anyway? You can’t be far from here.”

“They must have been trying to get the stones but were too afraid to get too close to the tree themselves,” said Luke. “Now we’ve started something. We’ve given them an opportunity.”

“Not if I can help it,” said Murana.

Just as Charles lunged at the Omnibot, it shot out a charged electrical pulse, hitting him in the chest and dropping him to the ground. Patrick lunged at the Omnibot. Murana and Luke watched his pained expression as he got a shock from the electrified chassis.

“You fitted it with weapons?” asked Luke.

“Never know when they’re going to come in handy. Come on. Let’s go collect the robot before those two recover.”

They raced up the side of the hill. The robot rambled into view. They knelt down beside it, and Murana opened the storage box and counted the tear-shaped droplets. They rose to leave, and there stood the villains: Charles, the taller one, with his arm behind the back of his head, mumbling some curses under his breath, and Patrick, the younger one, scowling at them.

“Give us the jewels,” he said.

“We got them fair and square. There’s no reason we should share them with you.”

He grabbed her by the hair and Murana flailed her arms at him, missing him.

“Leave her alone,” yelled Luke, and he moved to hit Patrick when Charles swung at him, landing a punch on his jaw. Luke wiped away the blood and hit him back, first in the face, then in the stomach. The two boys grappled, then fell to the ground, wrestling.

The smaller kid was laughing now. “Hey look at your friend. Always sticking up for you, Murana.” He grabbed her wrist and pulled it up behind her back. She screamed. “I have an idea. Let’s go for a walk.”

He twisted her arm, forcing her forward. They approached the perimeter of the station. “I bet I know what you want to do. You want to go in and touch the tree. So go on. Go on and do it.”

She shrieked at him, but he twisted her arm behind her back and forced her to move ahead in front of him. They closed in now on the tree. In a last-ditch effort to free herself, she bucked backward, hitting him in the face with the back of her head. In the split second that followed, Murana wrested herself from his grasp. She punched him in the face, and sent him wheeling into the trunk of the tree, some of which shattered when he struck it. Little crystals of bark got lodged in his skin. He stared down at the splinters and blood in wonderment, leaning against the tree, then up at Murana, who simply stared at him, backing away, trying to escape before the strange fields took hold again, but it was too late.

Luke, on the periphery, called out to her, but it was too late. She and her nemesis began phasing in and out of reality. The boy looked up, his eyes full of terror, and his skin was one moment flesh and blood, the next plastic, with real eyes behind them, and then the eyes went out and they were nothing more than glass orbs.

Murana saw his body collapsed against the tree, a mannequin body. There was no trace of humanity left in it. She tried to move, but felt the paralysis rising up in her, like waking from a bad dream when you’re still dreaming. She tried to fight it, but could feel the plastic sinking deeper into her flesh, her insides turning all to wires and green plastic circuit boards and pneumatic tubes. She tried to scream, but nothing came out. Her mouth was a metal jaw with a plastic skin covering, but it wouldn’t open by her command. Her head merely turned from side to side, a singular and simplistic program for motion.

Now she saw the ellipsoid room again, the twilight mockup of fields of grain, the robotic harvesters and egg-shaped control booth, the lamps like suns, and the dark figures without faces, only vague outlines watching from the periphery. They were whole families, silently watching, drifting by. One outline seemed vaguely familiar. She recalled the hair falling on shoulders, the arms crossed, as if impatient, the slight frame. And she tried to cry out to her, for her, across the intervening space of the chamber, to call out to her for help from out of that silent tomb of a mannequin form.

Murana relinquished control of her body, accepted her plastic shell, and collapsed in the field just as Luke ran up to catch her.

But just as she did so, she saw how, through the spatial boundary of the left side of the tree trunk, though not the adjacent background space (as if the trunk were the central prong of an impossible trident, like the one they had seen in school, of the kind discovered by D.H. Schuster in 1964), there emerged an enormous, grinning lizard rictus, with yellow reptilian eyes and black slit pupils, eclipsing the form of the mannequin boy.

When she awoke, she was lying beside the Omnibot, Luke hanging over her, his bangs in his face. “I got you out of there just in time,” he said. “You must have gotten too close to the tree.”

“What happened to the others?”

Luke sat back, shaking the bangs out of his face. “Charles ran off. Patrick, he’s just…”

He shook his head.

“What?” asked Murana. “What happened to him Luke?” She sat up and shook him.

“He’s just gone. When he touched the tree. One minute he was there, the next he had simply vanished. But these — these are still here,” Luke said, and he lifted one of the jeweled fruits, shimmering teardrop-shaped glass, and placed it into her palms. The glass felt warm in the chill of the afternoon.

Murana looked at it, felt its weight. She saw the image of her hands vaguely through the translucent aurora borealis of the material — that’s what it was like, aurora borealis — and her hands through it, cupping it, moved over the surface. Like the arm of the Omnibot, the boundary between her hands and the surface blurred.

Her father found her crying in her bed.

“What’s wrong?”

She curled up facing away from him in her bed, sniffling. She turned and saw his shadowed outline standing in the hall light.

He came and sat on her bed. “You haven’t said much since the other day when you and Luke went out near the power station. I told you not to go near the station.”

“How did you know?”

“I monitor that region very closely. I know a lot about what goes on there.”

“I wanted to see the station close-up. We got curious. We were making angels in the grass and watching the droids dispatching, and I got curious. There was a tree, papa.”

“Yes, I know.”

“You do?” she said, drying her eyes and looking up at him.

“Certainly. The branches have strung between them something like membranes, sheets of what looks like lightweight metal suspended between the filigree,” he said. “These function like a voice box, of sorts, but that’s not exactly accurate. The ‘tree’ is definitely capable of incantations, of magic. She will show you the world behind this world.”

“I don’t want to see that again,” she sniffled.

“So you did see it. Now you know what this world is. Now you’ve seen how this world is only a shadow of that real world. We live in a world that is a tangent, Murana, an extrapolation from a past era to a future vision that has since become dated. I believe the ‘tree’ sprouted up where it did because of the power generated by the station. Something about the fields generated allows it to exist. Like the magnetic fields induced by the electric, something about the generation of power induces these windows into another world, a darker world. There are objects in our world,” he said gently, “that call back to a more pessimistic time. Slivers of our time are the museum exhibits of anti-utopian pasts looking toward a brighter future. The tree is the locus where these two layers of reality intermesh.”

“I remember.” she said. “‘Unlocking and reconfiguring like the puzzle box…’”

“So when I say that everything around us, people, objects, the land, even events themselves function as symbols of the highest order, and when I emphasize the fact that they, that we are a living language, can you imagine the chances of you and me existing together?”

“I think I saw someone I recognized when I was there,” said Murana. “I think I recognized her.”

He was crying now. “Life unfolds on a scroll of time, and once gone, it is gone forever… To come together and then dissipate, especially two people in love like your mother and I were is to fly in the face of that impermanence. Just to see her again… I’d go with her this time, to let us both know we existed.”

He held her as he sobbed and she embraced him tightly. He brushed away her tears, but some of his fell on her cheek to replace them.

From the side of her bed, from beneath the black velvet she used to hide them, radiated the wash of undulating waves in pink and lavender light. The light played across his face.

“Her tears fell like drops of glass,” he whispered, “and from where they landed on the ground were sown the seeds of windows into other lifetimes, through the teardrop-shaped lenses into other worlds.”

In the end, Luke didn’t tell. She found out they blasted the field around the power station. When she arrived home, her father held his head in his hands, sitting at the kitchen table.

“What’s wrong?”

“They destroyed it. They destroyed the tree, Murana. They said that it killed one of your friends. Swallowed him up. It was the boy, Patrick, the one who disappeared. His friend, Charles, ran home and told his parents what happened. After that, the town’s people held a meeting. They decided to destroy the tree. I tried to stop them. When I saw what they were doing, through my lens, I ran over there as quickly as I could, but I just couldn’t persuade them.”

She tried to console him, putting her arms around him.

“They did it because they can’t stand the thought of things from that world bleeding into this one. They couldn’t fathom the importance of that connection, couldn’t find anything fascinating in it. They never understood my work. What about my work?”

She had to tell Luke. Taking leave of her father after consoling him for some time, Murana ran to Luke’s house. There, she found him with his family.

“Come with me.” She pulled Luke into a back room. “They destroyed the power station.”

“I know,” he said. “Charles and his parents called a town meeting after Patrick disappeared. My parents voted to have it destroyed. They thought it was a good idea.”

“Luke, the tree was there.”

“What tree?” he said bewilderedly.

Was he kidding? No. He was dead serious.

“Look, I know I told you we should never speak of it outside, but this is an emergency!”

His eyes were uncomprehending. “We never go into the area around the power station. It’s forbidden. You know it’s forbidden.”

“Why won’t you listen to me?” she screamed, and ran from the house. Just like the tree in the field around the station, she thought bitterly to herself, his memory of our experience vanished without a trace. She sank down onto her haunches in the middle of the dirt trail leading away from Luke’s house and began to sob. Around her, the golden grass swayed. Like a structure — the power station decimated, the fields burnt — his heart and memory had left nothing, with no trace of acknowledgment behind those eyes.

Time slipped away beyond grasp. She dwelt in the past with no access to it. It lacked tangibility. The memory of that tree and the import of the vision, like the memory of his eyes, and gentle laugh, were all locked away beyond reach. His denial was denial of access. She had come to believe time to be a network of events — like the droid station unlocking to reveal the secret world within — simultaneously existent, eternally accessible through the channels of memory. All imaginary and real, past and present, were equivalent, though totally counter-intuitive in the everyday experience of reality, and accessible.

And yet, there she crouched, denied the mutual memory of the terrible frisson they shared. He denied they had confronted that tree. This denial felt like descending into tunnels with the currents of air melodic and subdued chiming of cephalophones, multidimensional, slowly shifting, like passing through the windpipe of an enormous, subterranean organism, once alive with breath, now suffocated.

She would have to live without knowing what was real, but also without his complicity. Still, something inside her liked it that way. It was perfect, seamless, and so, too, this secret world of theirs, like a cave the entrance of which has been blasted shut, was seamless.

Had it ever happened? There was no way to say for certain. Traces of it remained, but their significance was mutable. Like the future, the past fanned out into an uncountable number of strands.

All childhood collapsed into a soaring field of ambiance, abstract sculptures in sterile, modern museum environments. The power lines on blue sky, the fields of golden grain and humming transformers, seen from roadsides and car windows, the ripple of wind in the grass of a summer day, the dreamlike ephemera of Gestalt museum statues, abstract art, looking like a bomb or a head, all pictures lifted from their place in time.

Traces of it remained, perhaps.

And yet, she can, after all, change the ending.

After school began, Murana returned to the hill where the power station had been, a palimpsest now, the augmented Omnibot by her side. Next to where the tree had appeared, there was just a scorched patch of earth now.

Omnibot’s eyes glowed red as they stood atop the hill. Once one ascended the rise of the hill coming from town, it gently sloped downward into a golden meadow. The meadow was fringed by deep woods on either side. Strands of Murana’s hair brushed her face in a gentle early autumn gust. She contemplated the dark woods, surveying the trees’ trunks on their edge as the leaves rustled and the canopies churned.

She had found her father’s diary after that night when he comforted her and read some of the pages he had written:

Love shared with another person is an exquisite ephemera unfolding on a scroll of time, and once gone, it is gone forever. I saw the love your mother and I shared as a kind of four-dimensional sculpture, the collision of our lives — a drama well beyond the realm of these everyday tasks, taking measurements and making dinner and washing dishes.

The scale of the loss is staggering: in the face of eternity and an infinite void, there is for an eye blink a mote called Earth, and on that speck, the thinnest layer at its surface called Paradise, held in egg-fragile stasis by a narrow margin of conditions, distance from the star, axis tilt — to say nothing of the universal constants, forces, and conditions that had to be in place from the moment of Creation, like the strength of gravity, the number of dimensions, to prime the stage for life on Earth — and if nudged the slightest this would have spelled Apocalypse.

This is Earth. On the surface of that sphere arise humans — exactly alike in the form of body and mind but for the meanest sliver of physical idiosyncrasy. Our thoughts are even the same, except that one last ten-thousandths of a percent is our individuality, the narrow filament of personality that mediates the shoals of the waking world and the black abyss of the unconscious — tumultuous eons of reinforced perceptions.

We ride the crest of all this, having braved the continuum of eons to find one another, steadying ourselves at that tenuous apex of humanity, connecting for one fleeting moment, telescoping from Creation down to that thin, mediating line. The line dilates, blows up exponentially before our eyes. There’s a kind of vertigo, a dizzying nausea. It is a narrow margin to walk, a constantly shifting meta-stable zone where we find ourselves struggling to maintain the balance that must inevitably break. We surf for as long as we can on the crashing wave of a critical situation, the constant state of our lives, with no hope of reuniting when it finally crashes…

To come together and then dissipate, especially two people in love like your mother and I is to fly in the face of the tenuousness. To see her again… I’d go with her this time, to feel something, to let us both know we existed. I would go with her into that other world; I know she is in there.

She had carefully put the diary back in its place, taking care to leave no trace of ever having found it.

After the station had been destroyed, after Luke’s amnesia, she and her father had gone back to the exact spot on the hill where the power station had been to see what was left after the blast.

“Strange,” her father had said. “What are these?”

Murana looked down. There, by where the power station used to be, were animal tracks, depressions in the earth. They only went a short way, seeming to emerge from the spot where the tree had been, but then returing to that spot and vanishing just where they had appeared. But they were not just any animal tracks.

Her eyes widened with wonder. Her father gently placed his foot into one of the animal prints, easily three times the length of his foot, a bit asymmetrical, three-toed, with what appeared to be a large indentation before the inner toe. Her father touched the indentation.

“A claw mark.” He looked at her in wild amazement. “A theropod?”

Weeks after the town destroyed the station, Patrick reappeared near the forest’s edge, badly shaken and with his shirt cut to ribbons. Two long, parallel claw marks ran lengthwise across his back. The boy had some stitches and made a full recovery. He couldn’t remember how he had got there and had missing time, and he was delerious: he spoke about being pursued by dinosaurs, and there was much subsequent deliberation on the possibility of an animal attack and what should be done.

For whatever reason, her father said nothing about the night when she had confided in him that she saw the tree and when they had embraced, when he spent time reassuring her that everything was alright despite his own grief. He must have seen; she remembered his visage swimming in the light that shone.

Had he been in a trance? Perhaps he had forgotten? Maybe he didn’t care. And yet, his research compelled him to study this strange portal between worlds in all its aspects.

Luke, for his part, didn’t remember. But she had decided it was okay. It could all be okay. Only she had the power to change it, after all. There on the hilltop where the power station used to be, a robot sidekick beside her, in the warm autumn gust, Murana withdrew the pear-sized tear-drop of what looked like glass and held it before the setting sun of searing gold in its cradle horizon of crimson and purple midnight. The jewel fruit swam with its inner starlight like the galactic plane on a moonless night.

Like the future, the past fanned out into innumerable strands.

Shhh…don’t tell. Because to tell would be blasphemy against this secret life, against this secret world we’ve found. Not so much to safeguard its well-being, but to preserve its ephemeral nature, to preserve our own fascination and enchantment. To have something reserved strictly for our eyes, in the final analysis, perhaps, my eyes, she reasoned. Please don’t tell, she had pleaded with him. And in the end, he didn’t. And the memory of him, the memory of eyes, like the droplets… Had it ever happened? There was no way to say for sure.

Traces of it remained, perhaps.

For Mercedes.

2004

{Ending modified, summer 2024.}