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“Oh,” David rolled onto his back. “I think I’m okay.”
Everyone started to rise to their feet. Yulia suddenly noticed a red translucent stone, almost the size of her fist, in front of her, and automatically reached out for it. It glowed from within, but was cool to the touch. She looked up and realized that it had fallen from the wall: every half meter along the top edge of the palace wall, similar crystals glittered.
“What was that?” Jean-Pierre shouted.
Dandin shamefully shrunk his eyes and said quietly:
“There are no women here. I am sorry.”
“How old are you?” Jean-Pierre wondered. “Didn’t a woman give birth to you?”
Dandin looked at him with tears in his eyes, and Jean-Pierre immediately fell silent. He was surprised and backed away, not expecting such a demonstration of emotion. “All right, all right,” Jean-Pierre repeated, waving back and checking on how the others were feeling.
“The important thing is that everyone is alive,” Debby said, defusing the situation.
A worried Van came down from above:
“Are you all right?”
“Help us to get to the Emperor’s quarters,” Dandin asked, still lowering his gaze. “We will have to walk from here.”
“Oh yes,” Van said, “let’s go. Come with me.”
Jean-Pierre hummed, clapped Dandin on the shoulder and followed Van. The doctor looked at Dandin with compassion. David signaled for everyone to go forward and walked over to Dandin himself. Yulia and Debby joined Van and Jean-Pierre. The Sun dweller’s face was still flaming with shame.
“Don’t worry,” said David, “in our world women do the same to us. You know how many times I’ve blushed in my life,” David laughed.
Dandin looked up with a smile.
“Thank you,” he accepted David’s words.
The doctor turned to him. He decided to distract the young man with questions about the world they were now in. They followed the others.
“What effect do women have on you?”
“They…” Dandin searched for the right words, “I don’t know, it’s like I’ve lost air. Like I was melting.”
“I thought you were all made out of fire,” David said.
“Not as you thought,” Dandin said, even more cheerfully. “Higher the world – finer the bodies.”
“Is the Sun higher than the Earth?” David asked in surprise.
“Yes and no,” Dandin smiled. “The Sun is thinner. We can see you, even if it is difficult, you cannot see us. Your eyesight is different.”
“What do you mean by different?” Dr Capri clarified.
“You see mainly reflected light, we see what is the source of light.”
Dr Capri thought for a moment as he looked at the palace beyond the wall. The travelers, led by the soaring Van, walked parallel to the high fence, behind which was the king’s dwelling. On the other side of the road, the buildings were piled on top of each other. Narrow streets spread out from the main street in small streams. The doctor noticed that the color of the material used to make the roads and buildings changed: waves of energy spread out from the palace, making the color of everything around it brighter. It was as if the city was breathing with energy emanating from the center. The city looked alive, but there was no one in the streets or in the windows of the houses.
“If everything is so beautiful here,” David asked in a more serious tone, “why did you kick Van out when he became sad?”
“It is not like that. Life here lasts for millions of your earthly years: no one has to work, no reason to be sad – but the soul also sounds in its own way here and strives for something,” Dandin raised his hands and started pointing at the city around him. “Imagine you have no reason to suffer. There is all the food you can eat, all the time you have to rest, what would you want?”
David and Dr Capri pondered. David looked at the doctor and shrugged:
“Maybe you’ll want what you don’t have?” David suggested.
“Everything is here,” Dandin said, making a sign for David to keep thinking.
“Maybe You will start to feel sad?”
“Yes,” Dandin laughed, “unless you decide to devote your life to something bigger than you are.”
Dandin stopped and looked up at the roof of the palace with a deep sense of respect. There he could see an enormous weather vane that was clearly not used to determine the direction of the wind, but to demonstrate the supremacy of this building over all others. The weather vane was in the shape of a huge wheel with many spokes. Dandin turned to the earthlings with a sad expression of pride on his face.
“What does it mean to dedicate yourself to something bigger?” David asked.
“Service,” answered Dandin.
“You seem to have decided that for them,” said Jean-Pierre, pointing a glance at Van, who had approached the group when Dandin stopped. “These can only serve the higher-ups?”
Dandin shifted his eyebrows and shook his head in genuine incomprehension.
“Service is nature, not punishment. Serving the greater justifies the lesser.”
The earthlings moved on.
“So, is Vivasvan a kind of God?” David asked, raising his eyebrows.
“What? No,” Dandin shook his head. “Although…” he smiled and proudly added, addressing the Frenchman in particular. “He only wants to make the world a better place. He serves by giving energy to this planet, and it shines to every corner of the Universe. He is simply giving out. Looks into everyone’s eyes and cleanses everything he touches. He wants those with material sight to be able to see.”
Dr Capri smirked, throwing his hands behind his head:
“So this whole ancient system about demigods and demons, about planetary systems, about the soul is true?” Dr Capri asked excitedly.
Dandin smiled softly and spread his hands in surprise, pointing at himself and everything around him: the golden city, the starry sky and the travelers themselves, letting him know that it was clear as it was.
“This is reality,” he nodded.
“Why did you say that your master wants those who have material sight to see? What does it mean?” the doctor asked, running his hand over the rough and warm surface of the wall.
“Our great Surya wants all to return to their natural and present form. For everyone to open their eyes, do you understand.”
“No,” Jean-Pierre shook his head as he walked ahead. “We don’t understand.”
“We are all wandering in the dark and he who has the light should…” Dandin didn’t finish.
“Everyone has their motives,” Jean-Pierre said earnestly, wanting to remind everyone that they are not here to philosophize. “Most of the time they are rather mercenary.”
Dandin looked around at the earthlings:
“The Master is not looking for profit.”
“Of course,” Jean-Pierre brushed him off sarcastically.
“All right,” Dandin shifted his gaze to him. “What do you want?”
Jean-Pierre stopped and turned to Dandin.
“We just want to understand what’s going on and get back to the Earth,” Jean-Pierre said, looking at Debby.
“Ha-ha,” Dandin laughed. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. The fact that you want what you don’t have proves that you can’t see.”
“Are you suggesting we stay with the lilliputians and the volcano man?” shaking his head, Jean-Pierre said.
Dandin looked up, trying to understand what Jean-Pierre meant, but he could not.
“But you wanted something before you came here, didn’t you? A true desire cannot depend on circumstances. To hear yourself is to see the world. What do you hear?”
The question remained unanswered. The eyes of the earthlings went up to the castle gate, which was about 30 meters high. The gate was decorated with amazingly delicate and beautiful carvings: a semicircle at the bottom, from which a glow emanated, and circles of planets of different sizes above. Debby, Yulia and Van stood next to the gate and looked at the design.
“The foundation of everything is light,” Van said, explaining the drawing, “it serves everyone around them.”
“It’s really beautiful,” Debby said.
“Is that the solar system?” circling the drawing with his hand and looking closely, Dr Capri asked Dandin.
Dandin wondered:
“Are you naming our world after the Sun?”
Yulia chuckled. Dandin looked at her reaction and quickly lowered his eyes.
“This is a map of the world where our planet occupies its corresponding position. At the very bottom, serving those above.”
“And where is the Earth?” David asked.
“In the center,” Dandin pointed out, “where else would it be.”
Dandin touched the door, and it slowly opened with such ease, as if it weighed nothing. The inside of the palace was as bright as the outside, but no windows were visible anywhere. Everyone walked slowly along the yellow floor, looking around the interior. Here and there, small creatures peeked out from around corners and immediately hid. Van swam proudly ahead, showing his kindred that he was leading the procession.
Debby and Yulia stopped near a huge sculpture of a beautiful woman. The sculpture was about four meters high, made of the same metal as everything else on this planet. The statue represented a female sovereign seated on a throne. Her face was beautiful, and her body was covered by a light cloth flowing like silk. The rest of the travelers walked forward, Jean-Pierre turned around when he realized that the girls had fallen behind the group.
“What happened?” he asked. “Let’s go!”
“Look,” Debby said, “there are women here after all,” she pointed at the sculpture.
“What?” said Jean-Pierre in surprise.
“Yes, that’s right,” David said, turning to Dandin. “You said there are no women here.”
“That’s correct,” Dandin answered, lowering his eyes so as not to see the sculpture. “There are no women here for a long time now, but there used to be one, an amazing woman – our lord’s wife.
“And what happened?” Debby wondered.
“She left the Master.”
“Are there divorces in paradise?” Jean-Pierre grinned.
Dandin left his comment unanswered and turned to move on.
“Let’s move on,” Jean-Pierre shouted to Debby and Yulia, “no time to wait.”
Part 3 – Chapter 33
The screen in the conference room presented information on the Sun’s activity: figures and graphs showed the situation in real time. The room was buzzing with activity. It was now the command center for all nations at once. Presidents and generals, ministers and heads of intelligence agencies came here. In the next room, a space was set up for press conferences, where representatives of various departments reported to the major news agencies.
It was decided that the focus should be on information about the Sun and the anomaly on it. About Voyager, they were silent for the time being because no one could link the information about the signal to what was going on with the Sun. In half an hour, the head of the European Space Agency had a big press conference. The world needed information.
Numbers flickered on the screen. In the background, people were discussing that weather services had begun to report changes in the weather in all regions of the globe. Jean-Jacques Dordain covered his face with his hands and repeated the same question to himself, “What is going on? Just one sensible thought.”
When he opened his eyes, a dazed assistant stood in front of him.
“What is it?” rubbing his forehead, Jean-Jacques Dordain asked.
“Monsieur,” said the assistant, “we have discovered something interesting,” he pointed to the laptop screen.
Monsieur Dordain picked up his glasses from the table and put them to his eyes, he gazed into the image.
“A new spot?” he suggested.
“Compared to this,” the assistant zoomed out of the image, “everything else on the Sun is a spot. It looks like the beginning of a plasma ejection or something. The temperature at that spot has almost doubled in a matter of minutes.”
“What a nonsense,” said Jean-Jacques Dordain, closing his eyes. “How many degrees is it now?”
The assistant swallowed.
“Twenty million Kelvin,” his eyes darted around. “But we’re checking the data, there might be an error somewhere.”
“No,” Monsieur Dordain said with a shake of his head, “it’s not an error.”
He had already turned his gaze to the big screen and made sure that the information was up to date. The indicators on the screen were growing before his eyes. The last time Monsieur Dordain had looked at the monitor it had a figure of ‘-20%’ next to the phrase “solar activity, changes”, now it had another even more frightening figure, ‘+24%’. There was chaos in the room, everyone was talking and ringing loudly. Jean-Jacques Dordain turned on his microphone.
“Ladies and gentlemen, your attention, please. As you can see, the Sun’s activity has changed dramatically.”
Someone shouted from his seat:
