Time Twisters Page 8

  The sound of a door opening shook Joan from the reverie that her prayers had become. She raised her head in time to see three figures bathed in light enter the room and stand before her, their arms outstretched in welcome.

  She started to rise and accept their embrace, when the remembrance of her nakedness stopped her. She dared not touch them with her unclothed body; their holiness would surely destroy her. She was in their presence only by the grace and mercy of God and not through any merit on her part. Afflicted with the shame that the first parents felt when they encountered God in the garden after they had eaten of the deadly fruit, she covered herself with her hands as best as she could and waited for their judgment.

  “Ave, Ioanna!” St. Michael’s voice resounded with the fire of a church bell tolling the Easter Mass. “Welcome, beloved and faithful sister.”

  From behind him, St. Margaret and St. Catherine stepped into Joan’s sight, holding between them what looked like a robe of shining cloth. Together, they clothed her in the soft fabric, winding it about her into a garment a little like the paintings of the Roman women she had seen in the homes and courts of the nobles of France.

  “Merci,” she murmured, feeling the comfort of modesty in the presence of these holy beings.

  “Come with us,” St. Michael said.

  Joan responded immediately to the sound of command in his voice, following the three sanctified ones from the room and into a garden. The sweet fragrance of summer flowers filled the air around her, and Joan breathed deeply, letting the scented air flow deep into her lungs. Near the center of the garden, the flowers gave way to a clearing of fresh green grass. Three stone benches formed a semi-circle in the center of the clearing, with a small pond occupying the remainder of the circle. Michael indicated that Joan should take a seat on one of the benches. She did so, folding her hands demurely in her lap, awaiting whatever lay ahead.

  Her suffering was over, and she was with God’s saints in eternity. What had she to fear?

  “Joan,” Michael said, his deep blue eyes penetrating the new clothes, stabbing her soul with his righteous power, “we have delivered you from the fire because God is not finished with you. Once more, you must be his instrument. But where once you saved France, now you must save the earth itself.”

  4.

  Joan fasted often during her short lifetime as a way of getting closer to God and purifying her sinful body. So she thought nothing of the hunger pangs that gnawed at her stomach as she listened for most of the day to Michael, Catherine, and Margaret explain to her the task at hand.

  Michael spoke briefly about God’s plan for creation, which seemed to involve something called “evolution,” a concept that puzzled Joan.

  “But is not the world already perfect as God created it?” she asked when Michael paused for a moment.

  Michael tensed, his jaws clenching as he struggled to find a way to answer Joan’s apparently simple question. Catherine stepped forward, looking at Michael for permission to field the query. He nodded, trying not to appear disturbed.

  “What is perfection, but growth and change?” Catherine said. “It was God’s will that you be born a helpless infant and that you grow into a woman capable of delivering France from her enemies. You grew into your perfection as God willed it. So, too, does the world grow more perfect if it is allowed to become what it was created to be. This changing and growing is what we call evolution.” Catherine watched Joan’s eyes as she absorbed the answer. Finally, Joan’s expression cleared. Her face grew calm. Catherine continued with the story that Michael had started.

  “People have become greedy for wealth and personal gain,” she said. “They desire to make their fortunes by using the world’s riches without taking the time to replenish them. Over many years, they have carved great wounds into the earth, wounds that cannot heal by themselves—” she paused, aware that Joan was leaning forward on the bench, drinking in the words and turning them over and over in her head. I’ve said too much.

  Frantically she looked over her shoulder at Margaret, who was staring at Michael and mouthing something only she and Michael could hear. Catherine did not have to hear the words to know that Margaret was suggesting to Michael that the time had come to speak the truth. Something beeped softly at her wrist and she glanced down, surreptitiously pressing the button on her wristcomm. An urgent message flashed across the display. This time she spoke in a whisper that both Michael and Catherine could hear.

  “We have no time to waste,” she hissed. “There’s been another incident, a volcanic eruption just off the coast of Alaska. A big one.”

  Michael sighed and closed his eyes. Margaret took his gesture as a signal for her to take over. She moved closer to Joan and in one swift gesture, knelt before her and took her hands in her own.

  “Joan, we are not your original voices,” she said. “And this is not—”

  “—heaven,” Joan finished. “I know that now, though I do not know what place this is.”

  “This place is your future,” Margaret said. “We are from your future. We traveled back in time to your present and snatched you from the fire under cover of the smoke and flames.”

  “But my body is whole,” Joan said. “Even the scars from battle are gone. How?”

  Margaret allowed herself a small smile. At least Joan wasn’t panicking yet.

  “We have learned much about medicine and healing since you received those scars. We were able to grow new skin for you and replace your hair and eyebrows. For us, it is a natural part of our lives.”

  “Why is the world in danger? Is this the end of the world?” Joan’s voice was calm. After all, she had grown up believing that God would eventually destroy His creation and bring all the blessed souls to Heaven to be with Him.

  “It may very well be the end of the world,” Margaret said, “but it is not God who is causing it. We have brought it upon ourselves, and we are the ones who must make it right.”

  5.

  Joan learned quickly, absorbing the knowledge of nearly nine centuries of history, politics, and eco-science. As a peasant girl in Domrémy, she and her family lived close to the land, so she easily grasped the principles of cause and effect that led to the world’s current state of advanced global warming, worldwide famine, a near-permanent pattern of El Niño winters and mammoth hurricane seasons. A crash course in geology and earth science helped her understand the mass tectonic shifts that caused unprecedented numbers of hurricanes and the eruptions of long dormant volcanoes. She was particularly fascinated by Michael’s discussion of the development of science and the discovery of the Einstein-Hawking principle, which ultimately allowed humans to bypass the constraints of time and space and make short visits to the past. With the help of subliminal induction, she learned to speak modern French and English fluently and to carry on simple conversations in Arabic, Mandarin, Russian, Hebrew, Fulani, and Swahili. For her personal interest, she asked for a Bible, which she read almost constantly when not occupied with her grueling learning schedule. She also asked for history modules and was particularly fascinated with the history of France just after her death, though she found parts of her post-mortem story disturbing. She wept for two days when she read of the fate of Gilles de Laval, Baron de Rais.

  “I failed him,” she said, when Catherine asked her why she cried over such an evil man. “He believed in me and I deserted him.”

  “How did you desert him?” Catherine asked.

  “I died,” Joan replied. “I do not think he would have done those horrible things if I had lived. I would have prevented it.”

  “You cannot hold yourself responsible for his actions,” Catherine said, but Joan shook her head emphatically.

  “I am my brother’s keeper,” she said. “I did not keep him well enough.” And nothing Catherine or Margaret or Michael said would change Joan’s mind. They soon caught a glimpse of the determination and stubbornness that propelled Joan into the heart of the French army.

  Joan grew angry when
she read about the latter half of the twentieth century and the entirety of the twenty-first, two eras marked by a general disregard for the nations they called the “Third World” coupled with an almost manic desire to make money regardless of the expense to others or the effect on the environment. She learned how national governments were decreasing in significance in proportion to the rise of the multinational corporations with their climate-controlled bio-domes that housed their employees and provided all the amenities to support a comfortable lifestyle. She read of the early space programs in the twentieth century and the early twenty-first. And of their abandonment in the middle of the twenty-first century as “inefficient and nonproductive,” even when those programs were studying ways to protect the earth from the massive asteroid strike that many scientists were predicting before the end of the twenty-second century.

  When her three teachers thought she was ready, they left the research complex that housed not only the rooms in which Joan lived and studied and the garden where she often prayed, but also the device informally known as Hawking’s Arrow. The Arrow was named in honor of the legendary physicist’s reference to “time’s arrow” and its unidirectional flight into the future.

  They traveled throughout the world, visiting places of cultural, historic, or environmental significance. Joan saw Paris, with L’Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. She visited the Vatican and rode the canals of Venice, now much smaller than it used to be due to a rise in the water level. She toured the United States and parts of Central and South America, charmed by the scenic beauty, the strange animals and the strangeness of their big cities. She also visited lands plagued by famine and disease, wartorn landscapes, burned swathes of Amazon rainforest and land stripped of its valuable topsoil through the process of stripmining. Almost a year to the day from her reprieve from death, Joan was ready to begin.

  6.

  Wearing clothing carefully selected to appeal to young activists and the environmentally conscious—hand-woven trousers, a lightweight cotton shirt and sturdy walking shoes—the young woman who called herself Jehanne Dark started out by speaking to select audiences on college campuses, at Save-the-Earth rallies, and fund-raising dinners for victims of the almost daily natural disasters. Her words, delivered with the passion of her conviction, caught fire in the hearts of her listeners.

  In the background, Michael, Margaret, and Catherine watched as their protégé quickly outstripped even their best expectations. She caught the attention of the media, and soon a camera crew followed Jehanne wherever she went. Her Campaign to Save the Earth became the hottest story in all the media formats. Her following grew, and more and more people all over the world took to heart her few basic principles:

  “The world was here before you. You must respect its sanctity as if it were a holy place, for it is.

  “You do not stand alone in the world. Your neighbors share it with you, and they will share your burdens if you but ask. Their poverty makes you poor. You must give to them so that you will in turn receive from them.

  “The world does not need to be conquered or mastered. It needs to be healed.”

  Billions of people heard Jehanne exhort the multinationals to become accountable and to treat the resources that made them wealthy with respect. Little by little, a few changes became apparent. One company declared a moratorium on its deforestation of the rainforest, and planted new trees and other plants to replenish the depleted earth. Another company closed its sweatshops, redistributed its force in new, state-of-the-art workplaces, raised the minimum wage, and instituted free health care and assistance in living expenses. Armies of young people took a year off from college to work in environmentally troubled areas. Another “army” of consumers used the pressure of their buying power to force other companies to become accountable.

  “We must find a way to heal the hole in the sky,” she remonstrated at a rally in New York’s Central Park. Almost immediately, funds appeared for studying the ozone layer. A new Global Warming conference was held in Geneva, Switzerland, with Jehanne as the keynote speaker. This time, a universal accord was adopted and signed by every attending country—and even some that did not bother to send delegates.

  Toward the end of the year, the first of the letters started arriving. Initially, Michael, Margaret and Catherine read them to Joan, finding them amusing and also inferring from them that Joan’s campaign was closing in on its objective. They stopped reading them when they discovered her crying uncontrollably in the garden, the latest letter clutched in her hand.

  “They are calling me an alarmist,” she sobbed through her tears. “They say I only want the fame, that I am a ‘glory hound.’ ”

  Catherine placed her hands on Joan’s shoulders and worked the aching muscles in Joan’s back, forcing her to relax a little. “These letters only mean that you are succeeding. They are running scared.”

  “Desperate people do desperate things,” Joan said, her voice shaking with anger, hurt, and something else Catherine reluctantly identified as fear.

  7.

  The bullet that ended Joan’s second life came during her speech at the first anniversary rally of the Campaign to Save the Earth. Joan stood tall on the outdoor podium and looked out over a sea of faces and signs proclaiming “Love the World!” “Feed the Hungry, Feed Your Soul,” “Care for the Earth: It’s Your Job,” and other pithy slogans. In the year since she delivered her first speech, she had learned how to work a crowd, how to win their minds by securing their hearts and loyalty. Already, small signs that her agenda to heal the earth was taking effect began appearing: new growth in the rainforest, indications that the hole in the ozone layer might actually seal itself in a few years, a new understanding of the need to preserve the great predators, and a resurgence of several endangered species.

  As contributions came pouring in, scientists were able to study the increasing instability of the tectonic plates and form some tentative theories on how to relieve the internal stress of the planet.

  The crowd was eager to hear her speech, delivered with the simple fervor of a French peasant girl from Domrémy but expressing ideas both sophisticated and tactically sound, ideas they could latch on to. Joan gave her audience a purpose and the will to carry it out.

  “I do not expect everyone of you to believe as I do, that God wills us to shepherd his creation on its journey to perfection. But I do expect you to believe in the existence of good and evil. I expect you to choose the side of good and to fight evil wherever you find it. Evil’s power is destroying the earth, and only the power of good can defeat it.”

  A soft thud of displaced air marked the bullet’s path from the gun to her abdomen, a coward’s shot that lacked the finesse of the instantaneous kill from a head or heart shot. She crumpled, her hand clutching the bloody wound that opened up just below her waist. In an instant, Michael was there, followed closely by Catherine and Margaret. She lay on the ground now, gasping for breath as she tried to grab control of the pain.

  “Lie still, ma cherie,” Catherine whispered, “we can tend to you.” She reached for the medical kit she carried with her as a para-doctor, licensed to use certain common medications in emergency situations. She pulled out a preloaded syringe. “This will take away the pain and help you relax,” she said.

  “No!” Joan said. “I do not want to rest yet. That will come soon enough.” Her words came slowly, forced out through a wall of pain that separated her from the people hovering over her.

  “Get those cameras out of here!” Michael snapped, motioning toward several reporters with their micro-cams who had managed to close in on the dying woman.

  “Let them stay!” Joan said. “I still have something to say. Let them give my message to the world.”

  Margaret looked at Joan, tears already running down her cheek. She recognized the gut wound for the death sentence it was. “She’s right,” Margaret said. “Let her make the next few minutes mean something.”

  Michael took Joan’s hand in his. “Are y
ou certain?” he said, his voice cracking.

  “I am.”

  The cameras zoomed in closer as Jehanne/Joan haltingly but with determination delivered the remainder of her speech. As her life blood seeped slowly away from a wound too massive to repair, she braced herself against the growing agony. She forced herself to remain conscious enough to finish exhorting a now utterly silent crowd to dedicate themselves to their brothers and sisters all over the world and to the preservation of the world.

  “It is a worthy way to spend your life,” she said. “It is a cause worth dying for.”

  Finally, she fell silent, lost in the final tumble toward death, yet struggling to hold on for as long as she could. Her three friends, constant companions of hers for almost two years, knelt beside her. Michael held her upper body in his arms, raising her up a little to ease her raspy breathing and letting her head rest against his chest. On either side, Margaret and Catherine held her hands and stroked her face with the tenderness of lovers, for all three had fallen in love with her soul.

  All three wept silently, their faces wet with tears that would not abate.

  Joan’s hand suddenly gripped Catherine’s. She tried to moisten her lips, now nearly bloodless. Catherine reached behind her and felt inside her kit for a wet-swab. She snapped the seal on the swab with one hand, releasing the moisture into the small sponge set on the end of a four-inch stick. She swabbed the inside of Joan’s mouth and coated her lips. Joan pulled Catherine close until the blonde woman’s ear was nearly touching Joan’s mouth. A few seconds later, Catherine pulled away from Joan and kissed her forehead.