Chapter 8: Open Doors

Our morning began with meditation. The meditation chamber was the optimal location for that activity, so to save time I simply jumped us directly there.

The hour seemed to vanish in a swirl of thought and emotion. I felt Eru make an effort at one point, and I fed him energy, as I had before. I felt something opening up between all of us, similar to what had once happened with Ginny, Con, Eru and I. I pulled in more energy once I could sense the opening and reinforced it. We finished the session with a slow withdrawal, as we seemed to have pieces of ourselves mixed in with each other in odd corners of our minds.

"I believe that I have, with Dave's assistance, opened a channel to our language centers, reawakening the gift for languages that our minds possessed as infants."

"That's not all you did!" Cyrus added. "Did you realize you just said that in Russian?"

I rifled through my own mind very quickly.

"Eru now speaks 10 languages, just like we all do, including Taluatan. Where did we get all these languages? Fred is obviously the source for the Basque. I spoke Spanish before this, but I think my Spanish is so improved I'm a thousand times better than I was."

"I speak fluent Russian" Cyrus added. You know where that training came from.

"It was me." Felicia said. Nobody knew, not even Cyrus. I speak five languages. German, Italian, Greek, French, and Korean."

"And we now all speak these languages?" Arden asked.

"Yes, along with Taluatan, English, Russian, Spanish and Basque. Fred, are you the source of my improved Spanish?"

"Si, I mean Oui, I mean yes!" He said. With only a slight twitch to his straight-faced delivery.

We sat there for a good quarter hour, just reveling in our sudden linguistic awakening as we spoke back and forth, switching languages in mid sentence.

"Let it settle folks, lets go to the Garden and get a little session in shall we?" I jumped us into the Garden's entry.

We took turns walking to the edge of the garden and being greeted by our teacher. I went last.

"Greetings Dave." My teacher said as he materialized in front of me.

"Good morning, teacher."

"Let us walk along this path" the teacher suggested, "and while we walk, tell me about the problem that has been gnawing at you in these recent days."

The teachers were indeed miracles of design and intent, perhaps equal to the craft and consideration that went into creating Constantine. We talked, as we walked, about the gift of speaking mind to mind, and projecting my consciousness from facet to facet.

We had been talking for a while when my teacher stopped on our path and asked me a question.

"Dave, what are jump points?"

I thought about that for a long time before I answered.

"There are no such thing as jump points." I said. "They don't exist."

"Then why did you once believe they did?" The teacher asked.

"Because I used to think so, back when my talent was weak, and I needed to be near a place where the Light that permeates the universe between the worlds could leak through. It was the availability of the power that let me jump, not the location."

"And what is a Focus?" the teacher asked.

"A focus is that place on any facet where the Light that leaks into it from those places I used to think of as jump points collects, just like the light from a parabolic mirror focuses on a single point." I had first understood that aspect of the focus during my conversations with the three ancient guardians during their brief time with us.

We resumed walking along the path, and as we walked, my teacher posed another question.

"Dave, how far away from Earth is Meadow?"

"It is no distance away. Earth and Meadow are not separated by a distance."

"So when you send your thoughts from Meadow, or Obsidian to someone on Earth, your thoughts travel how far?"

"No distance!" I said triumphantly.

"Is this a special case, or can you make a generalization?" My teacher asked. I sensed a payoff coming here, so I thought hard on this for a while.

"Teacher, there is no special case. Distance is a concept that applies to the physical world. Thought and Light are not physical components of existence, so distance is not an applicable concept."

"Very good Dave." My teacher said, smiling at me. I smiled back. The crafty construct was waiting for something.

"What?" I said.

"If the Light has no physical component, how is it that you are able to move physical things from facet to facet using the Light?"

Once again I had to stop and think. This time I spent more than a minute. Much more than a minute. Everything I knew and more importantly, everything I felt about the Light passed through me. Finally I knew I had the answer.

"Because the Light has no physical component does not mean a physical thing does not have a Light component."

"Very good Dave!" I got another smile.

"Before you ask," I said, "There is no special case. Every physical thing has a Light component."

"Excellent Dave." My teacher said, and raised his arm in front of us to show me that we were back at the edge of the Garden.

"Thank you teacher!" I said with heartfelt emotion, as I stepped onto the flagstones, to discover everyone else waiting for me.

I gave Ginny a hug and a kiss and and walked out of the Garden with everyone around me. Once we were outside I turned to everyone.

"I'm sorry I rushed us over here before breakfast, but I really think I needed this one! Lets go eat!"

One look at the sadly depleted status of our larder convinced me that we needed a breakfast out.

"Street clothes folks, You've got 15 minutes! Were eating breakfast at IHOP!"

I jumped Ginny and I into our room and I quickly changed. I gave Ginny a kiss and said I'd meet her downstairs, as I needed to talk to Con.

I popped into Con's room, where he was just slipping on a Guinness T-shirt that had mysteriously appeared in his wardrobe. We talked for almost the entire remainder of our 15 minute deadline. So close in fact that I popped the two of us downstairs so we'd be on time.

"Legionnaires! I'm sending Con off on a little errand for me, so he will not be joining us for breakfast." I said, followed by Con blinking out of existence in front of them. "As for us. Hang on."

I sent my senses to the International House of Pancakes near Sonora. There was a stretch of road near there where highway 49 and highway 108 were briefly the same road. Highway 49 ran East-West right into the middle of Sonora before looping back around Sonora and wound up in Angel's Camp.

The IHOP was right at the junction with that stretch of 49/108 where a loop road ran around the Western side of Sonora and connected with highway 49 again just as it turned to head to Angel's camp. I'd been there many times, and had no problem finding it with my senses. The parking lot was fairly empty, it was still only spring, after all. I did see two RV's parked side by side, and I could sense nobody in them, so I jumped us all into the space between them. We walked into the IHOP and grabbed two adjacent booths in a corner.

I ordered an insanely large tower of blueberry pancakes and watched as Eru, the only one of us with no previous IHOP experience, looked long and hard at the menu before he ordered the Belgian waffles with strawberries and whipped cream topping. Our orders were pretty evenly split between those two choices. Alicia ordered her favorite French toast option and Mike preferred the Swedish pancakes, which I personally could never develop a liking for, but to each his own, and soon we were each buried in our plates.

Apparently combining the kind of meditation session we had this morning with a session in the Garden was a real fuel burner, because we all finished everything on our plates. Even Felicia, who was notorious in our group as a picky eater. I paid the bill, and then let everyone filter into the bathroom, the girls all at once of course, nothing odd in that, and then the guys, one at a time, until I was the last one to enter a bathroom stall and wind up instantly on Meadow.

Rather than having everyone 'suit up' again, I suggested we spend a little time being Planetary Survey crew. We gathered in the dining room, where there was room for everyone to sit.

The sunglasses which had been issued as part of the Legionnaires original equipment had become something of the joke accessory to everyone, but today I finally gave them something productive to use them for.

I showed everyone how to ask Ava to link the heads-up display built into the sunglasses into the Survey platforms and how to get control menus that they could use. We quickly divided up the portions of the planet amongst them and they began working, finding and tracking places, people, items of interest, whatever struck them.

With everyone else busy with the surveying project I left them to join Con on Obsidian, where I had sent him.

Con greeted me warmly when he saw me approaching him. He had my cell phone suspended in mid-air while a variety of beams played across and through it.