Chapter 21: Goddess Revealed

Wednesday, 17 August 1955, City of the Gods

Wesley watched from his hiding place as the argument came to an end with Pol leading a reluctant Doc and Margaret away from the rostrum into the West where they seemed to disappear into the sun. Had they realized he was missing earlier, he would never have been able to remain hidden in this small world. But Pol’s plea to Doc and Margaret was so insistent, and their memory of the warning against the night so clear, that they disappeared along the Aquarius Avenue with a pang of misgiving.

Wesley was no longer afraid of the superpowers warding the city, nor of ancient curses that warned against the night. Perhaps that was hubris, but he had a clear message that he must brave the night in order to penetrate the veil. His misgivings, what there were, originated in the feeling of being alone in a vast, empty, and foreign space.

Daylight in the City of the Gods breaks almost instantly at dawn. As Wesley watched the setting sun, he realized that nightfall would be equally as sudden. Within an instant of the sun’s last rays, the city dissolved. Its presence surrounded him, but it was more felt than seen. The pillars seemed to disperse into the darkness as Wesley made his way back toward the rostrum. Wesley hadn’t realized how far down the Leo Avenue he was. It took a long time to reach the rostrum. Too long.

It was vaguely luminescent ahead of him, the colors lifting from the surface into the air. Perhaps it had absorbed the daylight and would glow for some minutes after nightfall. He stumbled on toward his goal. Once he reached it, he would stay there and wait for whatever it was that the night would bring.

He stumbled on one of the paving stones as he shuffled toward the rostrum, losing his balance and going down painfully on one knee. He had never noticed an uneven flagstone during the daylight. He reached in his cargo pocket for his flashlight, but when he turned it on, it flickered and the beam was eaten by the darkness. He slammed it angrily against the heel of his palm and stared into it demanding light.

There was an instant burst of brightness as the light went off in his eyes like a flashbulb, then died completely. Wesley was left in the total darkness with a myriad of colors burned on his retinas by the blinding flash. He had never realized that there were so many colors inherent in darkness. They continued to move and play in his eyes. He could feel his eyelids open and close, but could see no difference in the darkness nor in the patterns of color that lit it.

He continued to half stumble and half crawl toward the distant dais with one hand stretched in front of him to protect against running into one of the massive but invisible pillars. Instead he stumbled again and his outstretched arm crumpled under him as he ran headlong into the ground.

“All avenues lead back to the rostrum at the center,” he repeated to himself. “I need only continue forward, no matter how far.”

Shaking himself from the daze sent the colors vibrating around him. They no longer seemed to be at a point ahead, but he was within the swirl of colored lights. He could not remember falling, but it seemed he had once again tripped on a step. He was walking along and was suddenly lying on the ground as if he had walked into it like a wall. Beside him was the hard ridge of a step.

He did not remember steps in the City of the Gods.

Yet he stumbled against another. And another. In a flash to his childhood, Wesley thought that he must be ascending the Northern Steps to the Temple of Aurora Borealis and the colors around him were the dancing Northern Lights. He stumbled and fell once more, caught up in the colors that surrounded him.

He felt farther around him and found no wall. Smooth. Not even the small cracks between the closely set paving stones that should be there. Just a surface as smooth as glass for as far as he could reach. Perhaps his sensitive fingertips could also feel small indentations as if delicate characters were softly etched into the cool surface.

He shook his head again and sent the colors swirling about him. If only he could clear his eyes to focus through the darkness on his surroundings. But as far as he could see, there was nothing but the swirling pattern of colors.

Pattern. As Wesley sat, still blinking and rubbing at his eyes, slow realization dawned upon him. These were not the random colors of a flashblinding. These colors moved in defined patterns—the same type of patterns he had discerned in the faint pastels of the rostrum. Now, though nearly invisible in the daylight, the colors were all that he saw in the darkness and they burst into three-dimensionality, springing from the surface to surround him.

He was—must be—on the dais.

He stood regarding the colors with a new sense of fascination. He reached out for them as if they would have some physical presence. He remembered distinctly that first time, at age three, when a photographer snapped a flashbulb in his eyes. The child Wesley had wandered around the room for several seconds with hands outstretched trying to catch one of the balloons that floated before his eyes. Wesley chuckled in mirth at the reminiscence as he once again reached out to touch a visual image that had no physical manifestation.

Here, again, Wesley was surprised as there was a tangible presence. Not exactly shape or texture, but temperature. As he passed a hand through a red presence, he was aware that it was warmer than when he touched a blue presence. Not only was there temperature, but Wesley could smell the hot dryness of the red, the wetness of the blue, the freshness of the green. So intense was his fascination with this new phenomenon that he momentarily forgot the bizarre nature of the experience. He wrapped his hands lightly around a green presence and noted that the color did nothing to illuminate his own body, but the color itself seemed to vibrate and Wesley’s ears picked up a childlike giggle. As he held the color in his hands, it brightened perceptibly to a joyful yellow. This color he released and it danced in among its fellows.

No wonder he had so much difficulty mapping the rostrum. It was only a two-dimensional representation of a multidimensional phenomenon. It depicted not only the pattern and color, but also shape, texture, temperature, and movement. And, Wesley nodded to himself, the sound. As the clarity of the music faded into his consciousness, he was reminded of the choir singing in his ears on the climb to the City. Each presence had a voice of its own and the beings passed him from one to another, moving in such patterns that Wesley could no longer be certain that his feet touched the ground.

Wesley opened his mouth to join the chorus and could not find the note.

Lean against me, said one of the presences. Or Wesley thought the words were said, though his ears did not feel the sound. Wesley leaned into a magenta presence and felt the notes vibrating in his chest. He opened his mouth and his voice resonated with the other, sometimes in unison and sometimes in harmony.

If ever there was truly the possibility of joining heavenly choirs of angels, I have experienced it now.

An increasingly dominant shape captured Wesley’s eye as he moved in the pattern, himself no more than one spirit among those who danced. Sometimes the presence was pale white, sometimes almost blue green, Wesley followed the presence among all the rest, whether it was ahead of him, above him, or even beneath him. At last, its shifting form came to rest beneath his feet as he spun clockwise around it, stooping, bending, reaching toward the rich effervescence of this being.

So close was this hypnotic treasure—the end of Wesley’s rainbow—yet when he reached toward it, he felt only the solid flat surface on which he stood.

Stood. The illusions began to fade. His traverse of the patterned pathway was ended. The colors began to dissolve and soon Wesley was faced with only the single unreachable form beneath him.

As he watched, a multitude of smaller glimmering lights surrounded the being. They moved slowly from place to place in the dark field of the dais, making patterns and breaking to form new designs. Some of the patterns looked familiar, but he could not decide what they reminded him of.

Wesley lunged forward, having suddenly lost his balance. The surrealism of the colored presences surrounding him made it easy to believe that he was walking on air in some other dimension. As he regained his footing, the realism was too much to bear. Dizziness overcame him and he lurched again. He had never seen such depth and dimension in the sky before. His footing was solid, but his mind would not let him comprehend having the moon and stars beneath his feet.

The moon, that presence that had drawn him through the pattern, ultimately held his eyes. The surface gained additional depth and texture. As if fractured by some kaleidoscopic lens, there were more moons than he could count, in all phases of the lunar cycle. Wesley was plunged back into the dream of his childhood.

People have watched the moon for millennia, imagining shapes within it, but to Wesley it was a new and vivid experience. From the ever-changing moons before him emerged images—presences—beings struggling to escape from the satellite to invade his mind.