Chapter 73: Launch

“I STILL DON’T BELIEVE you’re a demon, Bob,” Sonia said. I had been one hundred percent truthful with her about my nature since the day I met her and she still wouldn’t accept that I was a demon.

“I don’t know what I could possibly do to convince you, my love. I’ve been completely honest with you.” She’d even been present when I was in full demon mode and carried the lifeless body of my priestess into the pool.

“Don’t try. I know you believe that is your nature. But I have seen more since becoming one of your women than any demon could possibly hope for.”

“What is that?”

“Bob, look out at this incredible world of Areola. I won’t say there are no arguments and no pain, but look. Everyone here is cared for. There is food for all. If something is needed, it can be found. There is good, healthful, and productive work for everyone. Even if it is not perfect, it is as near to a Utopia as any human dwelling is likely to be. You are not a demon, Bob. You are a god.”

That statement made me shiver. In my experience, gods get crucified. That’s what happened to Issa.

“Did you know that in the United States and in several other countries, including Japan, India, the UK, and Turkey, there is now a ‘Church of Bob?’ They profess to believe in you and offer the hope that you will take them to Areola where they will live happily ever after.”

“Oh, dear Zeus, no!” I said. “I don’t want a church. How can they offer something I have not offered? I’m not going to start moving people at random into Areola.”

“Do you think a visit to the churches would help? You could tell them outright that you aren’t sanctioning their religion.”

“My experience is that none of the gods actually sanction the religion that has grown up around their legends. Ninra, Isis, Athene, Aphrodite, Buddha, Issa, Mohammed, Confucius, Zeus, and now Bob. They were all called into existence by the devotees of the religion, not the other way around. And when the devotees cease to adhere to their principles, they close the gates on their world and fade away from even the memories of the churches and temples.”

“Well, you needn’t fear that in Areola. The world would cease to exist without The Bob. Now, make love to me again before the others get here for our celebration.”

The celebration was the start of the second season of To Boldly Go on the Hearthstone Celebration Entertainment Network. I’d received word that our original ship would be ready to launch at the end of the season and we’d be headed off earth, to safety at last.

We watched the first episode, that included the original crew sitting around like goddesses to decide who should be included in the second season competition. It included several different candidates, some of whom would be surprised to find they’d been considered. Those who were eliminated received a nice check for their screen time and I knew for a fact that some of them could really use that extra income. So, the first episode left everything open as to who would be selected. There would be more people introduced as the season went on. Our actual acceptance rate had been about one out of ten. It just wasn’t easy to find compatible harem members.

“I was so worried,” May said. “I wanted to like The Bob, but I’d fallen in love with Cleveland Bob and just didn’t know what to do. And then I couldn’t believe they were the same person. Do people still believe you do those persona changes with just makeup?”

“We may never know,” I said. “The capacity for people to not believe is beyond my ability to comprehend.”

That night, I had nine women in my bed, and Tommy. No, I didn’t screw Tommy—not this time. But the musician was surprised to find how completely he was accepted into the cast, including being accepted into several of their pussies.

It was a long night of celebrating and I indulged in a deep and sated sleep afterward.

“Bob. Bob!”

“Huh?” I said groggily. It had been an active and exhausting night satisfying all ten of my new crew. I rolled over and pulled a pillow over my head.

“Bob! Wake up!”

“Bob’s not here,” I muttered and went back to sleep.

“BOB!”

“What?” I growled sitting up in the big bed in the palace. The nine beauties and one man were still sleeping next to me. No one else was there.

“Bob, I need to talk to you.”

I’m not completely unfamiliar with head talk. My possessions and my wives, most notably, can carry on conversations with me in my head. But this didn’t sound like any of them. And they should be the only ones who could reach me in Areola.

“Who is this?”

“It’s Issa, Bob.” That gave me pause. I hadn’t seen Issa in 2,000 years, in spite of looking for him all through Asia.

“Right. Who is this really?”

“Really, Bob. It’s Issa.”

“How did you manage to reach me? Are you in Areola?”

“No. Areola, by the way. I like that name. It suits you.”

“Thanks, but...”

“Just listen up for a minute, would you? I don’t know how much time I have to talk. This connection is tenuous at best.”

“Okay, okay.” I wiggled my way out of bed and went into the magic room to have a private head-to-head talk with my old friend Issa.

When Issa and I traveled from Mesopotamia to India, we had a great time together, sharing about life and philosophy. He called me ‘brother’ and that made me feel special. We shared a lot with each other as we drifted along in a gentle breeze that seemed to move our craft always toward where we needed to go. He taught me a lot about the philosophy of Buddha and tried to teach me to turn water into wine. That was a disaster. If he turned water into wine, I could replicate his bottle and get the same results. But fill my bottle with water and let me try to turn it into wine and it wasn’t drinkable. I might have inadvertently killed some fish when I poured it overboard.

He couldn’t teach me to heal, either, though he acknowledged that my infinity room seemed to have healing powers and to keep people there forever young. He said it had to do with the primordial mass I spoke of having been created from.

“The Jews just called it mud,” Issa said. “Or if you go way back, they referred to earth and water as being ‘without form and void.’ It might be that the people taken from the natural world to your infinity room are separated from the primordial mass in some way but the people born there are part of your world’s mass. The mass from which you create things in that world.”

I still didn’t understand how the infinity room worked, but I shared the spells with him that I’d used to create it and to open a gateway. He wanted to practice, but there was no convenient container to put an infinity room in, so he put off working the spell until he had a good place to do it.

I was really sad to see him go when he headed up the Indus and I continued down the west coast of India. But he said it wasn’t good for two of our kind to be in the same place for too long. A couple of centuries later I tried to find him and kept finding traces of where he’d been, but couldn’t locate him.

“Let me in, Bob,” he said when I’d settled into the magic room to converse with him.

“In where? Where are you?”

“Behold I stand at the door and knock.”

“Oh, Jesus!”

“Your front door, Bob. The door to the swanky mansion in Beverly Hills. Let me in before I attract the attention of the cops.”

I opened a gateway to the mansion and ran to the front door. There was a shriveled bald man there, walking with a long stick.

“Issa?” I asked. He nodded. “Well, come in. Come in. Let me get us some wine.” We went into my study and I opened a bottle of Goídel Glas’s finest. When I turned back to him, I found a man about thirty, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. He looked a lot more like Issa than the old man at the door.

“I’ve been in the country on a diplomatic tour and decided to stop by to see you when I saw your first episode air last night.”

“Diplomatic tour? On whose behalf?”

“Oh, they ask me to come around occasionally because the Dalai Lama is still respected as a leader of Buddhism.”

“You’re the Dalai Lama? Come on. I came through Tibet a few centuries ago and met the Dalai Lama and he wasn’t you.”

“No. Of course not. I was sorry to miss you, though. I only ever serve one lifespan at a time. Then I switch it off to various others so I can go into my own infinity room and have a rest for a couple of generations.”

“So, you did create one. I probably walked right by it and didn’t know it was there.”

“That’s true, but it was still too early for us to meet face to face. I was still getting organized. Prester John has always been a little pigheaded about how things should be run. And Mary is still giving me advice on dealing with people.”

“John the Baptizer?”

“No, Bob. That John died. I haven’t raised anyone from the dead. The one time I tried, the guy stunk to high heaven and he died again a year later. I won’t put anyone else through that. John my disciple was the last of the apostles still alive when I finally found him on Patmos. He was near to being a raving lunatic from the isolation. You should have seen some of the things he’d written.”

“I read Revelation.”

“That was just the part I let remain. The rest of his writings were completely off the wall insane. I figured Revelation would give people something to worry over for a few thousand years.”

“And Mary?”

“My beloved. I’d given her directions on where to meet me, so as soon as she could separate herself from the disciples, she made her way to me in India. Would have been a miserable eternity without her!”

“That I understand. Without Nimia, I’d have been lost more than once.”

“You’ve got a treasure there.”

“So, what brought you to see me? You’re not upset about that preacher I got rid of, are you? He was possessed and had no desire to shake the demon within him. Now that fellow was truly ugly.”

“No. You know how I feel about killing things, but I don’t see any way you could have redeemed the situation. I came to talk about your show and what you plan to do.”

“So, you’re a fan, too?”

“No. I just caught the first episode of season two last night. You always were a ladies’ man. This has to do with you taking the infinity room—or Areola—with you into space and leaving forever.”

“You want to come along? Bring your infinity room and we’ll sail off into the big black.”

“I can’t. And neither can you.”

“What?”

“You can’t leave, Bob.”

“Issa, I’ve been planning this for years. It’s the best solution. I can finally go into the room and not worry about anything outside.”

“You don’t get it, Bob.” For some reason, he sounded like Zeus telling me how to keep a palace cool millennia ago. Same frustration.

“I guess not,” I admitted.

“Areola is not in your bag. It’s a different dimension of earth that is different, but compatible. No matter how far you send the bag into space, Areola is still here,” he said.

I should have known that. Even when I started opening gateways from other locations, I still thought of Areola as being in the bag stuck in an evidence container someplace in the bowels of the FBI building. Like that movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. Or maybe they’d taken it to Area 51. It just didn’t compute with me that it was tied to earth in some way.

“You can carry around a bag as a crutch, but you can open a gateway to and from it anywhere. It exists in the same time and space as the natural world.”

I was beginning to get a headache and poured another glass of wine, which I downed before I answered.

“So, Areola is One with All.”

“And All is Nothing,” Issa repeated. “We can have what appears to be eternal life in our infinity rooms, but in reality, when earth fades back into the primordial mass, so will our alternate dimensions. I believe, however, that attempting to separate and go off into space would separate you from the mothership and that might be catastrophic for both Areola and the natural world. It would most certainly return you all to the primordial mass.”

“Well, shee-it. That kind of puts a damper on things. Our whole intent is to culminate the last episode with our launch into space. The ship is almost ready.”

“Here’s what you do...” For a minute there, he sounded just like Doug. No. I knew Doug was asleep with Avril in a room of the palace.

Issa outlined a plan for me to go ahead and blast off with the crew and everyone, then to just open a gateway into Areola and disappear from the ship. He said leaving a satchel behind on the ship would be a great inside joke. I wouldn’t even need to tell anyone that we weren’t traveling into the deep. No one in Areola would know the difference.