Chapter 2

Subi nudged Maria with her nose, then looked at me and whimpered. "It's OK, Baby," I said, reaching down and scratching behind her ear. So much like a puppy yet her nearest relative would think nothing of taking a chunk out of the hand that just petted her.

Maria looked peaceful lying there. All she needed to do now was heal and grow. No school lunches or harvesting squash to worry about. She was gloriously naked so what to wear wasn't a concern.

I don't know how long I sat there watching her. Subi stayed with me, her head in my lap. A couple of times I thought I saw a flutter of something, not sure if she was breathing or her heart took a quiet beat.

I stood up after a while and said, "Want to go for a run, Girl?"

She yipped, as if she knew what I was talking about. Maybe she did.

We headed out, down the hill and took a left when we reached bottom. We ran and ran and ran, probably close to twenty miles. My body felt alive and I'm sure hers felt the same. Her tongue hung out the side of her mouth and her ears were pointed back and her eyes sparkled.

When I decided to head back and clucked my tongue a couple of times before making a wide swing to the right. Subi was right there with me. By the time we got back to the river, I was breathing a bit harder than normal but I could have easily done another lap or two. It felt good to let the body loose. My longest walks for the past decade had been from the house to the barn or the truck or from the truck to a piece of fence I was repairing.

We played around in the river and the little bathing alcove for a while, then headed up to the cave. I dug through the dinners the kids had brought up and found a chicken dinner that looked decent. I supposed chicken would be OK for Subi for one night. Tomorrow we'd have to go out and catch something.

She liked the chicken just fine. The noodles were still in the bowl when she turned away. It was interesting to see a wild animal like that eat so delicately.

I was drinking my fifth or so mug of water (from the river, not our special pond) when I realized I'd only had one cup of coffee the whole day, before we left to take the kids back and pick up Maria. I usually had a cup glued to my right hand most of the day, drinking a couple of pots worth, at least. No headache, no withdrawal, I didn't think about it until I glanced at the mug and noticed it was clear instead of black.

I went out to the latrine and told Subi she could catch something small if she was still hungry. She seemed to get what I was saying and took off into the woods.

I went back into the cave, checked on Maria to find no visible change, then lay down on my sleeping bag. A few minutes later Subi came in and plopped down next to me, her chin over my leg. She let out a big sigh and was quiet. I rested my wrist on her back and the next thing I knew I was out for the count.

That was when the dreams started. I would have dreams every night for the next two weeks. I could tell they were dreams yet they were so real it felt like I was living them.

We were somewhere else. It was the same universe but was so far away from Earth that the distance was incomprehensible to my mind. We were on a ship and I could see other people around me but I wasn't one of them. Well, I thought of them as people but they weren't human by any means. They walked on four legs but they had erect torsos and a head, like the pictures of centaurs. Like them, two arms with hands came out of the torso. They had opposable thumbs on both ends of the hands with five fingers between them. Their heads were like a Disney version of an ostrich, with oversized lashes and a curled beak, not quite forming lips. I looked closer at their bodies. What looked like body suits was actually a covering of feathers. Their feet were similar to their hands only the fingers and thumbs were shorter, like toes on a human. They seemed to communicate by chirping, though I was getting concepts when they did, not the equivalent of interpreting sounds, more like telepathy, direct to my mind. Like moving your lips when you read.

They were checking on a project, one they'd looked at twice before. The first time was right after the planet formed, the second was after it had cooled down enough for primitive life to grow. It was on that second trip that they seeded the oceans with a couple of dozen varieties of single celled life.

Now it was time to check up again and see what had developed. There was a large screen in the control room with an unusual map that showed the base we were now near on one side and the planet they were observing on the other. Between were dividing lines and symbols and several formula. As soon as I saw it, I knew that the things between the two locations weren't normal space but a representation of other universes that were used as shortcuts to get between the two points on opposite ends of our universe. It was three dimensional and had a sort of wavy quality to it, depending upon where you focused. You could move your hand near the surface and it would bulge and expand where you got close.

We headed away from our planet and gathered speed, then we emerged into a universe of swirling lights and colors and sounds. Time didn't exist in this place, if it even had location as we know it, so I have no idea how long we were there. A flash of white light brought us back to our own universe, only the stars were all wrong. Twice more we repeated the transfer to a foreign universe, each completely different from the last, ending up somewhere else in ours when we were done. With the final transfer, we emerged near a gas giant that had rings of debris around it. Its atmosphere and the gasses on the surface combined to make it beautiful. I recognized it as Saturn.

We continued toward a small yellow star, slowing down and hovering about a planet that was green and blue with white clouds surrounding it. It had one satellite, quite large for a planet of its size. This was our destination: Earth. I realized that it was I, Burt Hendrix who recognized it and that I was not the one recalling what was happening. That being wanted to be referred to as "Dreamer."

Several of the crew got into a shuttle and I went along with them. I realized that while Dreamer was more or less free, its essence was contained in a package one of them carried in a back pack. A seamless box, maybe a couple of inches deep and six by eight inches in measure, its outside made of a dull metal. I knew then that Dreamer was an artificial intelligence and was going to be left behind to observe and guide the life on this place as necessary. It was up to it to determine when it was necessary to interfere and how to guide it. It was primarily an observer but could help out where it felt it was august to do so. I caught flashes of other worlds and other Dreamers. Previous experiments where something had gone bad, telling me that these beings were not omnipotent.

We took the shuttle down to the surface and discovered what I knew to be the Jurassic period. It was easy to see that the dinosaurs resembled birds much more than they did lizards. Dreamer's makers had outgrown the necessity to fly eons before and had lost their wings except for a slight bump on each side where wings would have been. These distant cousins were somewhere towards the other end of the evolutionary scale and it was almost disgusting for my masters to consider being related to them but they were, at least genetically.

The plant life, though lush and wild, seemed less developed than what I was used to on modern Earth. The variety of both plant and animal life astounded me. I saw no primates, just sea life and dinosaurs ranging from the size of a mouse to that of a house and larger. Oh, yes. Insects. The place swarmed with insects and there was a constant buzz in the background from them. At times a swarm would come up and everything would go black. There would be billions, maybe even trillions of them in a swarm like that. All of this variety from a couple of dozen cells tossed in the primordial ocean.

Dreamer was eventually left in a small cave, its entrance hidden from observation and the elements by some kind of a force field that was under Dreamer's control. That's all I saw before I woke up.

I thought a lot about what I'd dreamed the following day. I assumed it was the next day but I could have been asleep for days or even weeks for all I knew. Maria was still out and the kids hadn't stopped by that I could tell. They were supposed to come out and check on us every couple of weeks. Subi was still asleep at my side. I decided I'd probably only slept through one night.

One of the things I thought about that day was God. I think pretty much every religion has a belief that its god put the breath of life into some clay and came up with a living, breathing being. But these ostrich centaurs weren't God or even gods. I could tell they were far in advance of us. They traveled as we'd only conceived in science fiction and they'd designed my dreamer friend to have powers close to those of God but had also made mistakes with countless worlds, something no self respecting god would allow to happen. So, was God a myth, a made up opiate of the people? Or did he put that breath of life into the first ancestor of ostrich man a gazillion years ago? Had the birds taken the command to go forth and be fruitful as more than an invitation to fuck and decided to expand to the point where they could go out and seed the universe?

The cave changed in my next dream. I watched it grow to about five times its present size and then a small tribe of neanderthals found it. One of the men had been severely wounded, obviously going up against an animal that got the better of him. There was a slash across his belly and two men carried him while one of the women had to hold it closed to prevent his guts from falling out.

They placed him with his head toward the pond, right where Maria was now. His woman used a piece of bone and some animal sinew to sew him up and then washed the wound with water from the pond. I could see it bubble, like hydrogen peroxide on an infection. That brought forth gasps, oohs and even a scream from the rest of the tribe. She washed his whole body, cleaning him up for his journey into death. Finally, she gave him a drink from the pond and he appeared to die.

These people had a funeral ritual of leaving their dead for several days, then they would take the body away from the rest of the tribe and leave it for nature to dispose of. They believed the several day wait gave the dead person a head start before the animals took care of the body. They hadn't designed a heaven to go to yet; it was enough in their minds for the dead ones to get away from this place with its constant struggle to survive.

The tribe set up shop in the cave while waiting for the time to take the body into the forest. A communal fire was constantly burning at the entrance to keep wildlife out. A few of the men went out and brought back some small game to feed them each day. They hadn't found out how to use fire to cook meat and most of them were sick to some degree from the parasites. Sometimes whole tribes would be wiped out from eating one infested animal.