Hari Kunzru - Gods Without Men

Dawn tried to keep her distance from Davis, who was friendly in a manner she didn’t care for. She never saw much of Judy, who was usually shut up in one of the caravans or meditating with Maa Joanie. The girl wasn’t like anyone else at the compound. She never dressed up, always wore the same white shirt and jeans. She looked so neat and scrubbed it was hard to imagine she lived in the midst of all that dust and chaos. If you met her on the street, you’d think she was a secretary or maybe the nicer kind of student. A good Christian. She didn’t sing or play music with the others. She never hooked up with anyone, though you’d find her beautiful, if you went for the wholesome type. She looked healthy but at the same time far away, like someone had unplugged something she needed to connect her to the current of everyday life.

Dawn made a friend called Mountain. She had a southern-fried accent and green eyes that seemed to be looking at something just behind you, as if she could see what was coming up in the future. One night they went up on the rocks and Mountain told her the story of Judy and Joanie and what had happened back in the old days, when the First Guide had gotten himself killed trying to reintegrate the Earth into the Confederation. There was a terrible fire, something to do with the electrics in a machine he’d built to communicate with the Space Brothers. He was trapped inside a capsule and burned to death. Others were killed, too. Clark Davis had been there, and lost his eye trying to drag people out. After everything was cleared away there was still one person missing and that was Joanie’s daughter, who was only eight years old. Everyone thought she must have been killed, though they couldn’t find her remains. Joanie refused to believe them. She always said that little Judy had been evacuated by the fleet, and sooner or later she would come back. She knew that if she waited patiently, the Space Brothers would return her little girl. So she came out to the rocks and that was exactly what happened. One day Judy came walking out of the desert, looking like she’d been out for a stroll. She was older, of course, because time had passed on the ships just the same as it had on Earth. But Joanie knew her at once. Judy had spent ten years in orbit being educated and infused with higher knowledge. Now she had returned to be the new Guide.

Dawn didn’t know what she thought of that. She busied herself helping out with the earthly business of the Ashtar Galactic Command, fetching and carrying, chopping carrots and potatoes for huge pots of the tasteless vegetable stew that was all anyone seemed to eat. The food was one thing she found hard to get along with, but she was prepared to suffer a few hardships because her new friends turned out to be on a mission to achieve the salvation of Earth.

Here are some of the things Dawn wanted: to be herself, to live in a bubble, to make it with Wolf, to experience Divine Universal Love. She diced onions and humped scaffold poles and stared into the fire and little by little the Pinnacles became more real to her than the dusty streets of town, more real than the high school or Hansen’s Service Station or the Dairy Queen or even the General Store, though she still spent long hours dreaming behind the counter, tuning out Old Man Craw’s lectures about morals and Communism and the correct way to stack egg noodles. Wolf said the purpose of the Ashtar Galactic Command was to reintegrate the Earth into the Space Confederation. At first she just laughed at him and he laughed along with her, as if he didn’t really believe it, either. But he was serious. They were all serious. There was some kind of project, and thinking about it scared her slightly, but for the moment all she wanted was to be part of something bigger than herself, to clap her hands in the circle and sometimes get up to dance.

Soon the dome started to shine. The Command was cladding it in metal from car tops, which could be had for twenty-five cents a time from a wrecker’s yard in Barstow. The guys drove over in the school bus, and since they didn’t have cutting torches they just chopped the tops out of the cars, standing on the roofs and swinging axes like giant can openers. Back at base, they beat the metal into triangles, hammering them over the frames. The dome looked like a shiny ball trapped underneath the arch of a foot. The metal surfaces caught the sun like a beacon, which was the way they wanted it, except they were trying to signal outer space rather than town, and town was where people found they couldn’t ignore it. At certain times of day, particularly late afternoon, the glare fishhooked you, caught in your eye as you tried to go about your business. A lot of folks found it a provocation.

In town they grumbled. Out at the rocks, girls perched thirty feet off the ground, their bare breasts swinging back and forth as they swung a mallet at some nut or bolt.

“Our job,” confided Mountain one day, “is to reconnect the Earth to the current of spiritual impressions.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re surrounded by negative energy and it’s beginning to tilt the Earth on its axis.”

“What’ll happen when it tilts?”

“Tidal waves. Massive destruction. The devastation of almost all life on the planet.”

She must have looked freaked out, because Mountain stroked her cheek.

“You don’t have to worry, honey. You’re part of the Light now. The Command is monitoring us on all frequencies. If it happens, they’ll evacuate us. It’s the others we’re worried about. There’s not going to be enough room for everyone.”

Dawn tried to imagine a tidal wave rushing across the desert. Like a flash flood, only a million times greater. There were many things she had to learn. It turned out there were many sources of negative energy vibrations, including:

War

the H-bomb

cities

greed

artificial fibers

the financial markets

television

needle drugs

plastics

fear rays

other dark-side weapons

Of all these, the H-bomb was the worst. Not just because it was nuclear. Because it used hydrogen. Splitting hydrogen atoms threatened the life force. It was in air and water, part of the Earth’s very soul. Also, the burning of hydrocarbons such as coal and oil (whose atoms contained Earth memories of the Ancient Times when dinosaurs roamed and man was unconscious of his inner truth) was combining with the modern-day projections of human negativity to produce smog, which lay over big cities and made it hard for Lightworkers to signal the fleets. That was one reason the Earth base was located in the desert. Pollution.

It was a beautiful thing, reconnecting the Earth. It was going to save billions of lives. So it was frustrating that Dawn’s school friends didn’t seem to understand. Whenever she said a word about the Command, they treated her like a mental case. They couldn’t see beyond the lack of air-conditioning and the dust and the vegetable stew. She tried to tell them there was something wondrous about life in the Ashtar Galactic Command. Something real.

“What’s not real about here?” asked Sheri. “No one place’s realer than another.”

They were sitting in the Dairy Queen. Dawn shrugged. From the look of Sheri and Janet Graves and Diane Castillo, surrounding her in the booth, it didn’t seem worth trying to argue. She could talk all day and they wouldn’t hear a thing.

Sheri was suspicious. “Have they got you hooked on something?”

Another unanswerable question. Of course they had. Energy, Reality. Whatever you wanted to call it. There was stuff out there those girls had no idea existed, alien ships big as cities hovering invisibly a thousand miles over their town.