Chapter 49

I introduced Gerry to Bill Clearwater the next day, and then flew back to the Shoshone reservation and the land of grizzly bears. It was a long day, and I crashed as soon as we all landed.

The next morning, Jed Somerville was parked outside the Dark Wolf abode. I was passing the front door and saw him sitting there. I opened the door and waved him in.

“What’s up, Jed?” I asked.

“I’m in charge of security in the McKesson area: people, places and bears.” He laughed. “And that includes you. So, I’m picking you up, and gonna drop you off at McKesson Creek.”

“I’m spending the day at a construction site?”

“Only temporarily. As soon as I can talk to Ares, we’ll figure out something better. Or a guy I know.”

Ares? Oh, Apollo’s twin brother.

“You’ll be 100% safe out there. Anybody new would stick out like a sore thumb. And there’s a hundred and a half Indians to watch out for you. The goal is NOT to put you in jail.” He laughed again. “Just to put you in an environment where you can see trouble coming and then act to avoid it. That’s the goal.”

In other words, I have to get trained ... like a puppy. Okay, what does Toni do with the pups. Show them the behavior. Repeat it until they understand it. Introduce a command. Well, obviously some steps can be skipped with a human. I hope.

Wait. I know how to do this. Can I get to a mental level that lets me NOT focus on just one opponent, but on the whole environment – and have that be a background activity, so I can still have the ‘front’ of my brain being its normal self. Okay, I may not know how to do this, but I have the tools I need to learn.

[Lexi, by the year 3500, no human – or other life form that I know of – could do what you are proposing.]

So? Not to brag, but I can do things other people cannot. I’ve already proved the existence of an unprovable entity. And I’ve been in touch with an abiological entity from the future. I know that was not my doing. But it’s never been done before. Has anyone ever changed the future?

[Not that we know of. But what if Lincoln had a sore throat on the day of the Lincoln-Douglass debate? Or what if the young Adolf Hitler had died in the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1917? History, as we know it, would have changed.]

You can suppose a million things. But we know that some things that were already foretold to happen, happened differently because of you and me. Would Intel have built a factory near Burnside. No. That’s just one example.

I’m just supposing a new thing. Oh ... And just because you didn’t know of a person who could do what I’m supposing, doesn’t mean there wasn’t such a person. You said yourself that in the far future, these levels of the mind were commonly known. If there were such a person, he or she would probably keep this ability secret ... It only takes one person to invent a light bulb. Edison didn’t invent electricity, he just used it differently.

[It is an interesting conjecture.]

Red, if you looked back in history to the day BEFORE the first light bulb, and examined the newspapers of THAT future, what do you think you’d see? Nothing about light bulbs, you can be sure of that.

[You’re asking about the future on some past date? That would require a different universe to exist, parallel to this one. Somehow.]

Red, do you think you’ve come back to the past of your own universe? Or to a different, but very similar one? Suppose the big change that we create in our future, kills the man who invented YOU?

[These are well known philosophical arguments. Suppose you killed your own grandfather, and so on. As for us being in a different universe ... we’ll never know. And discussing it only clouds the mind with meaningless dust.]

Well, I’m going to try and do what Jed suggested, even if he didn’t know he was suggesting exactly that.

[I see no harm in trying. But I will scan the future news for signs that you are exposed as a ... I don’t even know the word for what you’d be called. A charlatan? A mind controller? A freak?]

I am a freak, we both know that.

I came out of this long dialog with a start. Apparently, while I was in discussion with Red, I’d somehow gotten to the construction site. Jed, Ares, and two dogs were standing nearby, all looking at me. They were silently waiting – even the dogs.

“Oh,” I said, looking around me. “Sorry, I was just ... um ... thinking.”

Ares said, “Quite alright, Miss Lexi. Would you like to get out of the sun, maybe have a little water. It’s quite hot today.” He didn’t even look like his brother. First of all, he had a close cropped haircut. A straw hat was in his hand. More Anglo looking, I guess I’d say, from the way he was dressed. And he wore a button-down collared, short sleeved shirt, and chinos. Not at all an Indian look. But his face was an exact duplicate of Apollo’s. Good looking son of a buck.

‘Good choice of words. Not everything has to be a dirty word,’ said the voice of life #1.

‘Now you’re an arbitrator of language? Don’t make me laugh,’ I said back to myself.

[Lexi, he was the quarterback on the same high school football team his brother was on. And he did attend the SA College, earning a degree in civil engineering. It’s a four-year college, not a two-year community college.]

“You must be Ares,” I ventured. “Sorry about that, sometimes I get lost inside my head – thinking of things that don’t exist yet, or things that might happen.” I shook my head, causing my braids to swing around, almost hitting myself in the face. “I think getting out of the sun would be good, and some water, too.”

“Do you want to get to your own hacienda?”

“No.” I looked around, selecting a nearby unfinished ranch of modest size. “That one will be okay.” It had a #17, painted on a board in front of it.