You thought You Were Dreaming? Science Fiction You Wish!

Chapter 2 

I was just about asleep finally, there on the ground with the old sleeping bag and pad that I could see were going to serve quite well for a chilly night. The glorious beautiful sky of Ignacio's "Thousand Star Hotel" reminded me how long it had been since I'd actually slept out under the stars. And now, after at least five years since I'd re-connected with Ignacio, I smiled at the lucky end to this exhausting day. The many months, adding up over many years -- that I'd spent camping out in "The Canyon" (Cotahuasi) where I walked in so often that locals said I "lived there" -- had all been spent in my tepee under two dense Mango trees.

       I was really dog-tired from an eight-hour day of extreme exertions to finally leave Quechualla under sudden, unique and difficult circumstances. My Peru visa was almost up and I didn't want any delays. I had a hard route yet to cover to visit friends in Pauza before getting to Bolivia. But word had come through only at noon the day before -- no trail access for three days due to road work starting this afternoon! I tried anyway, starting very early, along with a half-dozen road workers just as uninformed about details as I was and just trying to get to work. This turned out to be not just some landslides as usual, which you could struggle across with determination and good boots. Now you crossed a few of those, only to come to a near-mile where the picturesque old trail, along with the hillsides and cliffs that had held it, had all been dynamited down into the river, leaving a truly impassible smooth mountain face twice as steep as the usual simple boulderfield.

   My determination to leave that day anyway probably had some of the flavor of a "grudge battle" against the road -- so near now! -- that I'd always told locals I hoped would never arrive. Did that rough paradise of autonomy with large fruit crops where, really, anything would grow really need to be "modernized"?. I'd even considered wading the river to avoid the return to below town to cross the final bridge and get to the old trail. I picked the calmest stretch of that first mile and tried it out without my pack, with boots on and a patched-together staff. I only got ten feet from shore and knee-deep before already losing balance from the slippery rocks of the river bed and getting the message -- 'Forget It!'

      Herbert, one of the road workers who lived in Quechualla, lost no energy in informing me, when he saw my jeans wet above the knees --- "Don't EVER try to cross this river!! Many people have died! Even just fishing, they fall, hit their head on a rock, it's over!" OK,OK . It was a great relief to find Herbert and another road worker setting out upriver too, and he helped me a lot at the roughest stretches, often carrying my pack, and knowing the way of the old trail that sometimes went far uphill.

    So I was really tired from a satisfying exertion, and just drifting off to a blisssful sleep when -- I felt a great shock as a heavy weight crashed to the ground just beside me. I sat upright with sudden alarm to have a good look in the last twilight and starlight. My God! It was "The Captain"! He rolled over to face me and slurred his words as he spoke -- with some sort of giggle in that massive deep voice? -- "You're probably wondering why I brougnt you here?!"   This was an ovbious reference to our first meeting, when he obviously did bring me and a whole group of strangers to a meeting room in Cusco that later disappeared ---- with some kind of mental "tractor beam" or something. But this was so different! Was he capable of a joke? That didn't fit the image. But I was soon to find out that The Captain was entirely different now.

    "The Captain" had come crashing to the ground next to me --- from where? Was he serious about "bringing me there"?-- like somehow causing my unwavering determination to get out of Quechualla that day despite the numerous obstacles? He seemed to read my mind. At least I was prepared to think this right away now, after last time's surreal hour at the Cusco meeting ---   "No, I din bring ya here dis time" -- he said, again with a ridiculous "giggle" to the deep voice of his enormous frame. He really was making a joke! And he was roaring drunk!  It was obvious from his sloppy speech, and now I spotted a giant jug of something next to him -- "I just saw ya down here and I been catchin up wit a few of you before settin' up another lil meetin' in Cusco one of dese daaays."

   Oh right! Was he just levitating around, or he decided to "beam down" from the Mother Ship?

    Again he obviously knew what I was thinking right away -- part of my "catch up" training? Just figure out the telepathy angle? And be ready for that next meeting if I ever dared to pass through Cusco again? -- as he said --

   "Actually I am just kind of -- "flyin aroun" you would say -- on my own right now. Things are very diff'rent fer me..."

   His voice trailed off -- with, could that be? -- a note of sadness and uncertainty? Already a very HUMAN-seeming character this time! Total contrast to the guy I had thought might be a robot! I had to turn to take a close look at him again.

    Yep, it really was that enormous, intimidating figure of "The Captain" I saw next to me -- now comforting himself swallowing a huge dose of the local wine, or was that the much stronger local pisco? -- from the big jug.

     Now I was wide awake. How could this be? The very figure of manly control, claiming to be the Commander of Multi-Millionaires and worldwide "high flyers" through unknown ages of past human history?! Now brought to lose control like three men I had personally known in that remote wine- and pisco-producing area of extreme canyons -- two of them having fallen over the same cliff in the middle of drunken nights of the past few years, and a third drowning in the town water tank trying to get a drink of water after three days of pisco -- just last month?!

    Again it sure seemed like The Captain picked up on my thoughts directly, as he began to speak as a sort of answer to the first of them. With a boost from that giant drink, he sat up now and spoke more clearly --

      "I rode with Genghis Khan" .. he began ... "and with his son Ogedei, and his grandson Batu. It was my job to keep the Mongol attack going, all the way across Asia. I had to not only fight along with them, but to fight THEM almost daily sometimes. Often several of their men at once! No way they wanted to go on plundering and raping and killing mass millions of peaceful farmers all the way to the Atlantic -- why would they? They each had hundreds of concubines and wives all the way back to Mongolia! But those were my orders."

     The giant of a man paused briefly before adding -- "We would've conquered the rest of Europe too -- except -- but who cares, it's all different for me now. That's why I decided to get drunk. I'll tell you what happened."

    Now he paused again, and lifted the jug for another pull. Somehow a question came to my mind -- might as well ask, he's gonna read my mind anyway it seemed --

   "Are you under orders to tell the truth now, and to tell me certain things?"

   The obvious suggestion that he could be lying was no issue with him as he spoke immediately and forcefully --

     "NO!  I'm not following any orders at all... really, I don't know what I'm doing!" Again he finished with a tone of sadness or uncertainty and lapsed into an awkward silence. After a final large swig from the jug he settled himself for a time and then continued --

   "I'm telling the truth now, but it's ... I don't know, it's all different." He shook his head and looked around helplessly before continuing --

   "I've been alive for thousands of years, by Earth time. That robbing and murdering and destroying with the Mongols was maybe the hardest. But all that, and a whole lot more, whole centuries of it never affected me like -- like being ordered to tell the truth for an hour to that group in Cusco!!!

   I had to laugh, this really was too much! -- and he looked at me kind of funny.

  "What it did was give me some sort of total heart failure," -- he said almost matter-of-factly, with a sudden look like he was offended that I might not believe him! 

   "Just the THOUGHT that I might have to respond to a question and tell the truth about anything in my life?!?!" -- he shuddered and shook his head and took another sudden swig from the jug to dispel the simple idea that was clearly still so very awful to him -- and continued.

"I found myself up in -- "the "Mother Ship" as you would call it -- on an operating table, with my chest cut open. The only thing I knew was -- I had obviously died and I was looking down at my body on the table when the doctors removed my heart -- a metal and plastic heart! And they started to put in another one just like it! I found myself back in my body instantly, shouting "I WANT A HUMAN HEART!!" I hadn't even known I didn't have one!"

    "Then I was back up on the ceiling again right away, watching the doctors as two of them shrugged and laughed about it. But then right away an assistant sprayed something in the face of a young man in the bed next to me, and he immediately passed out. I had talked to him earlier! Then one of the doctors stepped over and cut his heart out, like some Aztec human-sacrifice priest -- and they put it in me!"

   Here The Captain paused. I noticed that, unlike the meeting in Cusco, I didn't instinctively doubt the outlandish things he was saying this time. But it immediately dawned on me that this slayer of millions with generations of barbarian invaders would never have given a thought -- much less the obvious feelings he'd just expressed-- to a single victim on an operating table! Something was definitely VERY different about "The Captain" all right.

   He continued -- "After I recovered, I just came back to Earth on my own, really without official duties. The only one of my commanders I ever saw again suddenly looked strange to me. And he looked at me and just turned away like I wasn't there!  I realized that -- over all those centuries -- I had rarely ever seen more than just the machinery that gave me orders!  "Advanced computers" you would call it all -- with "Artificial Intelligence".

   "That's really Alien Intelligence," -- he added after a serious pause.

   Then a great grin came to his whole face -- "Right away I remembered all the way back to my infancy and childhood! I had a human mother! I was fed at her breasts! Between having a human heart, and having to tell the truth that hour, I remember everything now! I was stolen -- from Earth, I guess? -- at about the age of ten, as I was such a brute already that I could knock down any of the older boys or even adult men who always wanted to try picking fights with me."

   He stopped and looked at me, and then at the jug. Then he shrugged, with a real laugh this time, as he decided not to drink more and turned to complete the last part of his story. I was relieved, as the thought of him getting ever more drunk had entered my mind -- not because there were any cliffs around, but we were only ten yards or so from that softly roaring river, down a steep edge just on the other side of the narrow dirt road and a fence with an unlocked gate. Obviously, I had started to like this strange, gargantuan being!

He continued -- "So I lived on Mars -- underground, in what you would call a "slave camp" -- until I was fully grown. I was well trained in all forms of combat and the most advanced high-tech weapons, which I could use as backup in any of the great campaigns they put me through. And of course when I was pressed so hard that I needed to do that, it bewitched everybody around. Then they thought I was a "God" or something, and nobody would dare oppose me."

    He continued, sadly -- "Now those weapons are here on Earth, for the first time in this little recent phase of human history, the last few thousand years. That's the only part that's taught to you guys now I guess?" I shrugged in agreement.

   "And if it's that old Great Battle coming to its final phase -- I don't know what to do! Which side am I on? The Martians -- and the other ColdBloods with them -- kill anybody who they even THINK might be getting wise to their ..."

   He hesitated. Did he think, like I somehow partly did, that thoughts might go to the other side of the Universe, especially if spoken aloud?  Then he bulled ahead, even louder -- "Their plans to rid the Earth of humans! -- so slowly and deceptively that the dozen or more Human Ancestor-Species never get past their differences and get together to prevent it."

    Here he paused and noticed me, finally rather overwhelmed and just listening to what seemed like the soft, comforting sounds from the really quite-dangerous river. He laughed. He'd picked up on my earlier thoughts too, all right, as he now assured me -- "Don't worry, I'm not so lost as to just go wandering off into the night here and wondering whether to keep on living! It's just -- like I just decided telling you all this I guess, what if the "Ancient Enemy" of humanity does consider me an enemy now? Not only is the whole Galaxy changing with a whole new energy, reversing some things completely, and in unpredictable ways. But what better way to go anyway, finally being human and mortal and away from their life-extension machinery -- than to finally be on the side of life, and creation? After all the destruction I've gone along with -- with never a human feeling!?"

   "The Captain" threw his arms into the air with a great gesture of freedom. "And to finally get past that great bewitchment! -- that most unbreakable first rule of all the ColdBloods -- to always tell the biggest possible lie, or at least avoid truth entirely!"

    He looked up solemnly at our "roof" in that "Thousand Star Hotel" and repeated his newly-revealed mantra with solemn reverence --- "Truth! Truth! ... Truth ..."

To be continued
Chapter 1