“If you can’t participate, just look at the view,” she hissed at him.
“Can I do that? I’m supposed to have my eyes shut.”
“So cheat a little. You’re not entering into the spirit of the occasion anyway.”
“Is that the force of the vortex, or your fingernails I’m feeling?” he asked. She didn’t reply.
They sat like that for some time, until Ross Ed had had about all the meditation, contemplation, energy vortex force, and view he could stand. At last Sharona broke the silence, her eyes still shut.
“Speak to us. O voices of Gaia! Speak to our innermost longings. Show us the True Path to the Inner Light.”
“Okay,” said a disembodied voice.
Several of the sealed blinked. It was to their credit for something else) that the others kept their eyes closed. One man started to rise, but those flanking him gripped his hands tightly and held him in place.
Unable to resist the opportunity, Ross Ed was throwing his voice again, making it sound as if it originated from Jed. He wasn’t sure how he came up with some of the things he said, but as usual it all seemed to fit together appropriately.
A well-dressed woman in her early sixties spoke up from the far side of the semicircle. “O Voices of the Earth, tell me: will I be young and beautiful in my next reincarnation? I, who am the many-times distant great-granddaughter of Neraiep of Mu.”
Ross Ed heard his Jed voice replying. “You’re not the many-times distant great-granddaughter of Neraiep of Mu. You’re the many-times distant great-granddaughter of Edwinna, daughter of Wentworth, a farmer in the Cotswolds. She wasn’t particularly comely either, but it doesn’t matter, since there’s no such thing as reincarnation. So you’d better enjoy this life while you can, because when you’re dead, woman, you’re dead. You can’t even come back as a puppy.”
Mercilessly skewered by this response, the outraged matron opened her eyes to stare murderously at Ross. She was about to offer a rebuttal when the attractive woman in her thirties who was seated in the middle of the semicircle interrupted.
“Speak to me, O Voices! I am a miserable trader of stocks and bonds. Will the market steady and rise over the next six months?”
Eyes still closed, Sharona commented disapprovingly. “That is not a query worthy of the Great Light. Here we decry crass materialism. Here we—”
The Jed voice overrode her protestations. “It doesn’t matter, because unless you move your ass right quick, Hendricks is going to find out about the six hundred thousand you’ve siphoned off the Baxter and Rozensweig accounts. Unless you can find a way to restore the missing funds, the only Great Light you’re going to be seeing in six months will be the kind that’s filtered through metal bars.”
Dropping her hands and opening her eyes, the stunned stockbroker gawked at Ross. He, however, had his eyes shut and was to all outward appearances meditating ferociously. The smile on his face was a decent approximation of the guide’s.
“How did…?” The woman scrambled to her feet, nearly falling in the process. “Excuse me, I have to make a phone call.” Thanks to her two-hundred-dollar walking shoes, she was out of sight in minutes, racing toward the airport motel.
Sharona sighed reluctantly. “Close the circle. The path must not be broken.” Complying with her directions, the remaining supplicants edged close enough to reform the chain of hands. “Please. No more inquiries unless they are worthy of the Forces and the True Spirit of the vortex.”
No one said anything for several minutes, until a portly gentleman could no longer restrain herself.
“Tell me, O Voices, of my daughter. She died last year, aged eleven. Cancer.” His voice. Ross Ed thought, was remarkably even and controlled. “Why do such things have to happen? Will she ever come back to me? Will I meet her again in the Afterlife?”
“The Afterlife,” an uneasy Ross Ed heard himself replying in alienated tones, “is a question of such profound uncertainty that no positive reply can be given. But if your offspring lived her brief life as truly as she could, and was given honest love in return, then that is sufficient to justify any existence and ensure that the memory of it will be forever enshrined. In such circumstances, the highly debatable nature of the physics of an Afterlife pale to irrelevancy.”
While the bereaved father sobbed silently to himself Sharona found she could not longer remain aloof. “Tell me, O Voices, how may I best learn the True Way? How may I let the full force of the Mysterium into my being so that I may better guide others who seek the Path? Let the full energy field of the vortex flow through me!” She stiffened slightly.
Ross’s alien voice replied without hesitation. “There is no Mysterium, no True Way, no Path, and no vortex. You’re squatting on a pile of Kaibab sandstone that contains nothing more enlightening than a few simple invertebrate fossils. There’s no inner light, no energy in crystals, no power in triangle reinforcement or any of the other pseudo-superstitious baloney you’re dreaming about. If you really want to improve yourself and help others, then dump this ludicrous psychobabble, get a few good books, and rejoin the natural universe. Profound cogitation doesn’t work rear well if the body’s on fast forward and the brain’s always in pause.”
Her composure more than a little shattered, guide Sharona dropped her hands and opened her eyes. “Of all the nervy, sarcastic, insulting…!”
“The truth is often insulting,” Ross Ed responded via Jed.
She climbed to her feet and dusted off her buckskins. “Come, people. After opening our hearts and circle to these newcomers, it is evident they have not the necessary will to clear their minds for new ways of perceiving.”
“Not at all,” declared the disembodied alien voice. “Self-delusion is a common method of ‘perception’ among the less advanced species. It offers a comforting refuge from thought. Like any advanced being, I simply choose not to make use of it. Incidentally, if you would but take the time to examine them, you would find that the rules by which the cosmos actually does operate are far more sublime and enlightening than the pablum you propound as a substitute. Chanting is no substitute for calculus, crystals no surrogate for cosmology.
“Of course, they’re harder to comprehend, but that’s the beauty of it. You get out of cerebration what you put into it. And settle down. You’re leaking bad karma all over the place.”
The agitated members of the circle stomped off in the wake of their guide, following her toward the parking lot. Only the man whose daughter had died remained behind. He looked long and hard at the alien body and at Ross Ed before shaking the latter’s hand, solemnly and firmly. Then he, too, departed.
When they were out of earshot Caroline turned from the magnificent panorama to her tall companion. “Well, you certainly livened up that little get-together. How did you know some of those things?”
“I just make ’em up as I go along, like I told you before.”
She was eyeing him intently. “Pretty specific invention, if you ask me. How’d you know that stockbroker was an embezzler?”
“Aren’t they all?”
“You named accounts and an amount.”
He looked away. “I’m not sure she heard the details, Caroline. The accusation was enough. It was a lucky guess.”
“Yeah, sure. If you’ve seen enough red rocks, let’s go.”
SIXTEEN
They recognized the woman standing athwart the trail as one of the two members of the semicircle who had not asked a question. Early forties, stocky but attractive, she wore her auburn hair cut short and fashionable. Caroline saw her makeup as sparse and expensive. Signs of a recent, expertly executed face-lift were barely discernible. She didn’t strike them as the vortex-sitting type.
“Aren’t you leaving with the other true believers?” Caroline inquired. “Or did you lose your way?”
“I’m no true believer. At least, not in this blarney.” Her voice was strong, her words clipped and forceful. She extended her hand to Caroline first, making an instant friend of Ross Ed’s companion.
