After the Flood, Chapter Three

They climbed back onto the F.P. Lightspeed, and Joe brought the platform through the time-portal Gala opened and forward several years. The day they emerged upon was a rare one for the first Dark Advent, with sunlight of a somewhat purer quality than the usual pinkish-yellow murk breaking through the black sky in a few shafts that made ripping golden patches upon the ocean. Below the travellers on the deck of the plague-ship was Gala, by now grown to a small girl in a simple white dress. She was playing with a ginger kitten, while her mother sat close by in a wooden chair and watched her with a sad smile full of love. She looked to Joe to be in her mid-twenties, though the plague’s ravages had made her as much like a weak old woman as an early adult. Our hero remembered what Gala had told him about the life-span of all that sickness’ victims, and knew at once the impending sorrow that overshadowed this apparently happy scene.

The older Gala by his side, meanwhile, was suddenly looking flustered. She whipped out her Time-Shifting Device and hastily began to tap its buttons. “Blast,” she muttered, “I’d forgotten it was still set to this one. Just a minute, I’ll get us to the point we’re supposed to be – ”

Joe touched her on the arm. “Wait,” he said, not taking his eyes from the past.

“There were cats long ago on this ship, Gala, even back when I was a little girl like you,” Gala’s mother told the child Gala, as she and her kitten happily frolicked. “There was a whole family of them that lived in the kitchen below decks. I can see them now.”

The young Gala went over to her mother, took her bluish-grey hand in hers and sat down comfortably at her feet, the ginger kitten in her lap. “Tell me about them, Mother!” said she.

“Well, they live almost as long as we do, so some were old by the time I knew them,” Gala’s mother began. “They were big grown-up cats. Every year in May, though, one of the younger females would have kittens, and oh, how I loved those times! It meant new faces every springtime, new members of the family, and some of those babies grew up to be such loving, faithful cats. I can remember them all as if they were still here.”

Gala held her kitten up to her mother. “They were the cats of long ago, Mother, and this is the cat of today!” she beamed.

“The cat of today,” her mother repeated fondly, and drawing her small daughter near to her they both sat back to watch the sunshine dance over the waves.

“I didn’t mean to bring you here,” the adult Gala said to Joe in a quiet voice, over the sound of her mother telling her younger self more cat stories from days gone by. “It was a mistake on my part. We don’t need to see it.”

“But the Time-Shifter was set to here?” Joe asked her gently. “So you use it to come alone to this moment, and watch?”

She did not look at him. “Sometimes,” was all she said.

“Then perhaps I did need to see it,” said Joe. “You wished to show me all that made you who you are today. This memory is a part of that too.”

When Gala looked up, revealing her face under the brim of her hat, her expression had hardened. “You want to see the events that made me who I am?” she demanded. “Then you’ll find the next part much more informative. Come.”

Another jump through time brought them out of that day and into another not far from it. Gala was there again, still a child, but now she was surrounded by the plague-ship’s entire compliment. In silent togetherness they stood on the deck, assembled around a coffin of bare planks.

“She was all of twenty-five,” the adult Gala by Joe’s side said shortly. “A grand old age in the first Dark Advent.”

There were no tears in her eyes and her voice was steady, but it seemed to Joe this was the result of a lifetime’s dedication to controlling her emotions whenever she faced this scene or the remembrance of it. Turning to the child Gala, our hero saw he was witnessing the very beginning of that long struggle. The expression on the little girl’s face resembled that of her grown counterpart in many ways, and it was clear she was fighting just as hard to keep her feelings in check, but they were rawer at that time, and she had not yet the strength to force them below the surface. Her complexion was burning, all the more apparently for her being the one healthy pink-skinned mourner among her pallid contemporaries, and her lips trembled even as she tried to hold them in a straight forbidding line.

“My father was already gone,” the adult Gala continued. “The world made orphans of you and me both at an early age, Joe. From then on, all that either of us had was our cause. I hope you’re seeing by now something I’ve told you many times before: we’re the same.”

Joe’s eyes lingered on the younger Gala as her mother’s coffin was lowered over the side of the ship, and the last statement uttered by the woman she grew into gave him an apprehensive pang. He was not sure he was ready to agree with her on that point. It was true he had lost his own mother and father when he was not much older than Gala was then, and he had grieved for them, but the look on the girl’s face before him was not one he had ever worn. He knew it well, but not from the mirror. Rather, it had blazed from the features of the desperate, the hate-fuelled and the warlike – in other words, those he had fought in the name of upholding the cause Gala spoke of. It was not an expression he associated with any who had striven alongside him. Those whose faces bore it were usually pursuing a very different cause, one that could only end in revenge, bloodshed and tragedy…

Next for Joe was the cabin of the plague-ship, to watch another Gala who was about sixteen years of age. She looked only a little younger than the Gala standing beside him, and by this time the white dress of her childhood had been replaced by piratical clothes much like the ones she wore today, including the long black coat and black hat with a scarlet feather. The sparse room was full of tidal-charts and maps, some rolled up and others unfurled, and the young Gala was stooping over the table to pore intently over one such sheet of parchment.

“Years of training and study brought me to this moment,” the older Gala explained to Joe, as they looked on psychically-shielded. “Much of my youth was spent reading tide-charts to try and discover how and when the flood occurred, and from there, hopefully to unravel its mysteries. Such documentation wasn’t easy to locate with most of the planet submerged. However, by comparing old charts with the newer ones I eventually learned that the flood-waters were already receding, and vast areas of land across the planet had already been reclaimed. Slowly, our world was returning to normal. There was one more highly significant discovery which, I do believe, has just this minute occurred…”

Sure enough, before their eyes the younger Gala at the table straightened up with an air of great urgency, and shouted a command to the crew on deck that they should set sail at once.

“I’ve just confirmed my theory that long ago, at the exact time the flood is said to have come, there was an enormous tidal disturbance in the Afric seas,” her older counterpart went on. “That chart I was reading contained the final proof. We went there at once to investigate.”

A swift jump ahead through time on the F.P. Lightspeed brought Joe and Gala hovering above the shore of an island, actually the tip of a mountain that had survived the flood, covered all over by dense jungles. The plague-ship was standing off a short distance away, while the younger Gala and two of her sickly crewmen had rowed across in a small boat and were talking to the chief and shamans of the island’s tribe. Their skins, which should have been a rich brown, were instead the pale blue-grey of most of the populace, and they gazed at the young Gala with a sort of awestruck reverence as they spoke.

“Conversing with the locals wasn’t any problem, because I’d found out some time ago that I was psychic,” Gala’s older self explained to Joe.

“By talking to cats,” Joe added with a smile. “Bret made the discovery the same way.”

“What the people here had to tell me provided all the answers I needed,” she went on. “The plague had long ago taken all their generation who remembered the coming of the flood, but preserved in their oral tradition was a legend of how most of their home was swallowed by a giant wave. After I’d figured out how their calendar worked, I saw that the date of this event was the same as the tidal disturbance my charts spoke of. I then asked them if they knew what caused the wave, and they told me their ancestors had witnessed a great star falling to Earth, far out on the western sea, on the night the disaster struck.”

Joe’s eyes widened with revelation. “A meteor?” he exclaimed. “A meteor caused the flood?”

Gala nodded. “It all made sense,” said she. “The resultant tsunami swamped all land on the planet, while the impact threw a massive cloud of dust into the atmosphere. That’s what discoloured the sky. It also explains why the ecosystem was recovering by the time I was born. And as for the plague…the plague was extraterrestrial in origin. It came to Earth on the meteor, and the flood spread it to every corner of the globe. Simple, straightforward science turned out to be the explanation for the first Dark Advent.”

END OF CHAPTER THREE