Chapter 11

2076 a.d.

Plague

"Angel, Goddess, whatever you are, please, wake up!"

Béla moved her shoulder, attempting to disengage from whatever was pushing her back and forth. The movement became more insistent, shaking her awake. Something close by smelled really rotten. She opened her eyes and was blinded by the sun.

'The sun's up! Why doesn't my head hurt?' she wondered, confused about where she was.

As she woke up, she remembered she was millions and millions of miles from Earth, falling through the sky and landing here. Here, there was a huge, terrible, foul smelling creature towering high above her, swaying unsteadily as it gazed down upon her. Béla blinked rapidly as she stared at it, her sleepy mind gradually giving it human features.

"Don't be frightened, Goddess," it said. "I won't hurt you."

Béla recognized him as the man in the deathbed from earlier. He sat down next to her on the blanket. "You should probably cover yourself..." he said, shyly averting his eyes from her naked body now that she was awake and most likely aware of his gaze.

Béla, more awake now, felt him inside her mind. His mind was empathically receptive, like people used to be before Earth got so crowded and the people became obsessed with 'things'.

Béla stared at the young man as she absorbed the information about his life here, in awe at the amazing tale he'd invented in his mind to explain her arrival and, indeed, her very existence.

'This man is certainly not a techie, ' she decided. 'But, he has the most innocent and inventive mind I've ever encountered. I could probably, actually and for real, fall in love with him like he thinks I did!'

"Are you a bard?" she asked, wondering why his imagination was so inventive.

"I don't think so," he replied, gazing in rapture at his wondrous savior. "I'm a farmer. I don't know what a 'bard' is, Goddess."

Béla smiled and suppressed a laugh. The thin young man blushed, not knowing if he had violated some protocol she might expect.

Béla glowed 'peace' at him and suggested in his mind that he could talk to her and not offend her. She noticed that he was trying very hard not to stare at her naked body.

'So, they have taboos on nakedness, here, too!' Béla thought, annoyed. 'Well, if he's upset with the way I dress, he'll just have to deal with it. The name of the place is "Eden", right?'

"A bard is a minstrel that travels from town to town telling tales to entertain the town folk," Béla told him. "They tell stories and legends of gods and heroes and their great exploits. Some of them sing songs and play musical instruments."

"That sounds pretty exciting," he told her. "But we don't have anything like that, here, Goddess."

"You do, now," Béla informed him. "I can't imagine you doing anything else with that marvelous, inventive mind of yours."

'The goddess is assigning me the task of spreading the word of her arrival, ' he realized.

Béla could feel his readiness to cast away his sadness and rise up to walk the long path.

'Before he just walks off and starts preaching, I'd better prepare him a little more for the task of saving his people, ' Béla thought to herself, feeling amused for the first time in what seemed like ages.

"We should put to rest what lies in the house," she suggested, keeping her voice somber, "and get you cleaned up."

"Am I destined to travel with you, Goddess?" he asked, not knowing if part of his divine destiny was to be a companion to the Daughter of the Goddess of Light.

'I wonder if this is how my brother got started, ' Béla wondered, amused. 'I'd better nip this in the bud before too many people start worshiping me ... or crucifying me.'

"I'm not a goddess," she explained. "If you must classify me, I guess I'm a vampire, or maybe a phoenix." 'After all, I did rise from my own ashes... ' Béla watched his mind work as he absorbed what she had just told him.

'Well, the Goddess of Light restored her to life as a mortal girl. She must have also rejected her daughter's heritage because of her love for a mortal. The newborn goddess calls herself a 'vampire' – a type of fallen woman, perhaps?

'She fell from the sky – perhaps that's what she means. Is it possible that she doesn't know where she came from? The Storm God must have stolen her memory like he stole ours. I wonder if she knows her name... '

"Béla," she replied. "My name is Béla. Do you know who you are?"

Startled, he looked at her. "Jeff," he said. "Geoffrey. That's all I remember from before I was here, Goddess ... miss."

"Do you know where you are?" Béla asked.

Geoffrey, rather, Jeff, shook his head. "Inside."

"This place is called New Eden," she told him. "I named it after the original Garden of Eden. Jeff, do you remember the story of the Garden of Eden?"

She could see him thinking. It was buried deep in his memory. If he had been mind wiped by the Praetor, which was likely, then his memories were accessible only by asking direct questions, like this one.

"I think so," Jeff said, squeezing his eyes shut and trying desperately to remember, mostly so he could please his new goddess. "There was a paradise, long ago. Mankind was thrown out because of his sins against nature, or something. I don't understand why, really."

Béla smiled at him. If the Garden of Eden ever did really exist, mankind would have lost it, in her opinion, because of his unrelenting desire to overpower and control his fellow man. The man she was looking at didn't seem to have that base desire. His mind existed in a world that was much more magical. Béla felt him adding more to her already fascinating legend. There was going to be no stopping him once he got started.

'The Goddess of the Land, the daughter of the Goddess of Light and the Storm God, named our land New Eden, after the original paradise, the Garden of Eden. She came to aid us in our desperate time of disease and pestilence to keep us from losing mankind his second chance for paradise.'

Béla shook her head to clear it after watching her new bard's mind work. He was generating odes to her even as they spoke. His mind was so flexible that she didn't believe even meeting her father would be a blow to his understanding of 'how things work'!

Béla helped Jeff wrap his wife in a blanket and bury her in the hard ground behind the house next to her children. Afterward, they wept together for his loss, kneeling in the cold, freshly turned earth.

Once they had Greta out of the house and under the ground, they opened all the windows and cleaned the house thoroughly with strong cleansers they found in the storage room. They burned the bedding she had died in, outside. When they were finished, the only things that smelled bad were Béla and Jeff.

Béla walked around outside while Jeff showered. She looked up at the roof, examining the water heater. It was sun powered, like most everything else on this strange little world. There was a collector tank beneath it, under the eaves of the house, to hold the water after it was heated. When it was used up, a valve would open, letting freshly heated water flow down from the heater on the roof. Then a solar powered electric pump would refill the water heater. It looked incredibly crude and inefficient – and much like the one on the roof of her cabin in Montana – plus, the water was hot. It had been a very long time – years, even in her recent memories – since Béla had taken a hot shower.

She heard the water stop running and went back inside. Jeff was drying himself off. He still smelled, so she pushed him back into the shower and scrubbed him down fiercely with a bar of harsh soap and a brush, making sure all the smelly dead skin was scrubbed off of him and out of his hair.

After she was satisfied with how he smelled, she shoved him out of the shower and began to wash her own body. She hadn't spent the last few weeks in a deathbed, so she didn't spend as much time in the shower as she had spent washing Jeff, but she did wash her hair three times, pleasantly surprised that the hot water was lasting this long. 'Solar heating has made some advances since Frank added a shower to my cabin... ' she decided, then made sure she was clean between her legs, just in case...

After her wonderful, refreshing hot shower, Béla walked into the kitchen, dry, but still naked. She wasn't entirely naked as she had a towel draped around her shoulders that unintentionally hid her breasts. But from her belly down, she was completely bare.

Jeff was in the kitchen, preparing a meal over the heating element. He had put on some pants made from a synthetic material Béla didn't recognize. The leggings went down to just above the knees. He stood before a food preparation area chopping frozen vegetables and tossing them into a pot on the heating element.

Jeff looked up from the meal he was preparing and smiled at her. Then he averted his eyes away from her nakedness. He had never seen a woman that was completely hairless below the neck.

'The Goddess of the Land is newborn; she has no hair down there. Perhaps she doesn't know about clothes.'

Béla sighed. She knew that once they began travelling, he would learn the truth about her identity and would be made to look the fool by his ignorance. She was going to have to tell him the truth before his imagination caused any more trouble.

"Geoffrey," she said, sitting down at the table, "there's something I need to tell you."

Jeff noticed the goddess' special use of his name and knew she was about to impart something of vital importance to him. He stopped chopping up frozen vegetables and sat down across from her.

"Jeff," Béla continued, "I'm not a god or a goddess. I came here to this place on the great ship; the same way you did. The main difference is, I still have my memory of what's happened to me. The Storm God didn't take it away. The reason I fell into your yard is that..."

'How am I going to explain that I can fly without him starting all over again about me being a goddess?'

"Well, I fell off the ship," she finished, lamely. That was as close to the truth as she believed he could manage.

"But, Goddess," Jeff explained, becoming agitated. "Surely you are mistaken! Your life essence cured me of the wasting disease. And if you were mortal, you would have died if you fell all that way!"

"Jeff," Béla said, "I am special. My blood can cure people, and I can't be killed. I'm not mortal, but I'm not a goddess. I'm a different species than you. I was made in a laboratory to look like a human, but I'm not one. I was created to help people get better and to improve the human condition."

Jeff looked like he was going to cry. Béla quietly listened to his mind, ready to help him understand if she could.

'The goddess says she's not a goddess, but she says she was created and not born. She can't die and her life essence heals others. She says she is here to help humankind, but she is not human, herself. Instead, she is cleverly disguised to appear human.'