The Inner Silence:

I was getting a little uncomfortable holding this woman's hand. It felt like some type of warm energy was flowing into me. It began to feel good, and I didn’t like that. I didn’t like feeling good. I looked at her face. She turned her face toward me and scowled.

“Don’t you know I’m a telepath and can hear everything you’re thinking?”

“I don’t know what you can do.”

“Now you know. Stop thinking so much. You think too much. Can’t you quiet your mind just a little?”

“No. I can’t quiet my mind.”

“It’s natural for topsiders to think like that and most of them can't stop it,” Anja said.

“I don’t like it,” Sheila responded.

“Well you have to get used to it because you will be his mentor,” she said. “See how much you can learn from mentoring. Look at the bright side, you could have to go on a walkabout up there with those crazy people.”

“I don’t prefer either,” Sheila said.

“I’m sorry for their great loss,” I said. “The whole world will have to shudder because you aren’t there and you don’t like them.”

“Shut up! You’re mirroring me and don’t even know. You’re picking up my attitude.” She lifted our clenched hands. “As long as we are like this we’re linked.”

“Well how long will we be holding hands.”

“Why? Are you excited or something?”

“I could be, if you were a little nicer.”

“I’ll make sure not to be,” she said, rather quickly. I grinned. I was starting to like this old cranky woman. I couldn’t believe it. She looked at me and sighed. “Once we go through the door we’ll just hang out a little, and you can learn about your mentorship and our expectations, and we can learn about yours. OK?”

“Fine with me.”

“Good,” she said, smiling genuinely. The others parted and let us step through the door first. Inside was the largest cavern I had ever seen. It looked like a whole planet. The roof of the cavern was high enough for there to be moisture and cloud formation. Light shone down resembling sunlight. There were many plants there. Trees, flowers, bushes, ground runners both familiar and unfamiliar. I couldn't believe all of this existed and wondered how long. She was still holding my hand. A small voice entered my mind.

“Millions of years.” She looked up. “An artificial sun that we learned to create from extraterrestrials thousands of years ago. The rest is natural. Remember, it has been evolving for billions of years and not damaged by the extreme changes on the surface. This cavern is more like the original Earth matured, than the topside. We're proud of it.”

We're also proud of our culture and our psychic abilities. It took millions of years to develop them. We’ve been away to the stars and visiting alien cultures, and back again. Our journeys are ongoing. We learn and we pass on information. Our lives are wonderful, I would say.”

I looked at her and noticed her mouth hadn't been moving. I was so blown away I just couldn’t think of anything. Just imagining that all of this had been going on for so many years without me knowing anything about it...without most of the people on the surface knowing about it, was just overwhelming. How much more didn’t we know?

“You can let go of his hand now,” Sheila, Solomon said. She looked at him for a moment and then let go. She looked as though she were in a trance state for a few moments. “There is a blending,” Solomon said. “You have to get used to it and used to letting it go. There is a certain energizing effect when two minds, or what you may even call, two souls reside in one body. Each time you send a message your soul flows to the other and then theirs flow to you in response. It can become rather addictive,” Solomon said. “This, of course, requires touch and consent. So let’s hold off on the touch element as much as possible,” he said looking at Sheila. She smiled at him.

“Had I known that I would have done this a long time ago,” She said. He shook his head. We kept moving, heading down the narrow cobblestone path. It was only about three feet wide, paved with large green, translucent stones. They blended well with the surrounding plants and trees. As we walked Solomon began to point out some of the plants, getting me familiar with the ones I had never seen.

“You'll learn about herbal medicine,” Anja said, “And how to communicate with plants. Solomon will lead you in that area. I will teach you how to control your telepathic abilities and Sheila will teach you everything about our little universe. You're really fortunate to have been chosen.”

“I feel fortunate. It’s still hard to believe that this is real. Am I really here or in a coma somewhere?”

“Only time will tell,” Solomon said with a grin. We continued to walk until we came to a small cottage shaped like a geodesic dome. Solomon pushed a button to the left of the door and it swung inward smoothly and silently. We entered into a dimly lit room with a round table in the middle. All around the edges were various types of furniture, couches, chairs, love seats, and even the bean bag chairs that we were used to having in the sixties and seventies. The place looked comfortable, as though it doubled as a lounge.

There were several stiff-backed chairs around the table. We walked over and took our seats. Soon Mark, another man I saw in the dream, entered in. He headed toward the table.

“Finally here are we,” he said, extending a hand. We shook hands. “We never thought you'd make it, considering we were depending on Sheila for the initial contact.” Her lips flattened and his face split into a beautiful grin. The others smiled also, though trying to hide it. Sheila didn't. She looked at me and shook her head.

“You are not to deal with this man. He’ll destroy any chance for development in a timely manner,” She said. He flagged her off and took a seat.

“Now that you’re here,” Solomon said. “Let’s make a plan, shall we?” I didn’t like the plan.

***

Here I was, living in a cavern deep underground...very deep underground, with a woman who was as mean as a shaved mink. And she didn’t even think she was. I was trying to learn a whole new language as I read texts in glyphs that I had never seen before. She kept bringing new ones to me and clucking her tongue when I couldn’t read them. Several weeks had passed with more books and tablets until I had only caught on to understanding a few. It was too fast.

“Now I know what we have to teach you.” She picked up the last book. “You have to relearn almost everything. I don’t know what they teach you up there. Seems like you only know one alphabet. How can you live in a world and not know enough languages or glyphs to function everywhere? Can you tell me that?”

“It’s a big world, Sheila,” I simply said.

“The galaxy is even bigger, Berry, don’t you get that? We are not alone. You may be meeting people from other planets while you're down here. Do you know that? Since you can't read anything, or talk, it makes it mandatory for you to become a telepath. So we’ll begin with that training tomorrow. Anja will be working with you three to four hours every morning until you get it. Do you understand?”

“Sure. And what will I be doing the other time?”

“Studying old texts from Earth so you know your own history and the history of human beings on this planet. Everything you have learned so far is wrong. What you learned about evolution is wrong. What you learned about origin is wrong. What you learned about the history before recent history is wrong. You have been lied to or misinformed all of your life like the rest of your people. You are not a victorious species. You had help all along the way and now you are a defeated people.”

“What do you mean by that!”

“You are being held hostage, enslaved, and working for others. That is what people topside have been doing for the last 10,000 years. Your rulers made deals with the extraterrestrials, the most violent ones, and sold your planet in exchange for becoming the nobility and the rulers. They promised them gold for information and technology that would give them power and keep them in power."

They would pay it by extracting gold and minerals from the Earth. It was like taking out a loan. Your species has been working to pay for that knowledge for almost 10,000 years and you aren't even near paying it off because most of what you are paying is just the interest. The idiots didn't care about what the small print said.”

I doubt very much you will ever pay it,” she said smugly. She shut the book and walked over to the large bookcase running along the wall. It was full of leather bound books, tablets, copper rolls with information etched in. She looked for the place to slide it in. It fit snuggly. She turned to me.

“Even if you're able to pay it off that won't matter because your leaders will make another deal because they love to have power over you.” She walked over and sat on a stool next to the desk I was using. “I think they know it is safer not to pay it off too because if they pay it off the extraterrestrials they are dealing with will eventually take the whole planet."

The only thing that could possibly stop that is us. We're well connected. We have been to the stars and back and are established in a foundation of planets. We have weapons here and skills that can protect us and hundreds of planets to step in if we can’t.”

All we need to decide is if we are willing to go to battle for the topsiders. To us it wouldn’t make a difference who ruled the topside as long as they didn’t encroach on our space, but it would be a little dangerous, to say the least, to have a violent people that close.” Her head tilted slightly. “But oh...we do have a violent group topside now, don’t we? Thank the gods they are too stupid to even know that we're here.”

“You sound so bitter, Sheila. What did topsiders ever do to you?”

“Their existence is enough. Every time they kill off a new species or pollute more water, or test their nuclear bombs it affects the whole planet. And our fear is that one day they'll destroy all life again and we'll have to go back to the stars. This world came so close to extinction many times and we weren’t even safe down here. Some of us perished before we realized it. And most of the time, it wasn’t because of natural occurrences, as your textbooks tell you and fake scientists tell you.”

Human beings progress. They invent weapons. Their greed abides. They fight and use those weapons and destroy so much that they go back to a primitive age and start all over again. We help them through those ages because it is better to have them up there than Reptilians or other vampire species. We keep hoping they will do better, but they never seem to learn. That is what I have against topsiders. They are dangerous and stupid.” She stood up. "Any more questions?" I shook my head. "Good."

It's your job to change my mind and maybe help turn some of those people up there around when you go back. You're going to experience things the average human has never seen and you'll develop powers that most haven’t developed. Others who have studied here will have the same powers. We expect you to use them to keep us safe and your world safe.”

“So there is a reason for me being here.”

“Yes. There is. So I would suggest that you do some exploring, get some rest, and prepare yourself for tomorrow. Anja is a hard, very strict teacher. She is known for causing headaches.” She smiled, turned, and walked out of my small room. It was more like an enclave, or a smooth, round cave scooped out of solid rock. I sat there thinking about what she had said. It was unbelievable, yet here I was thousands of feet under the ground in a cavern full of what seemed like light from an artificial sun. Apparently there was a lot I didn’t know.

I considered myself educated, and I was. If I didn’t know this how many people would. More frightening was the fact that some of the leading families knew what she was talking about. They probably had access to some of the technology down here and that she was talking about. They possibly even had all of these powerful, psychic gifts that gave them the power to see and rule over a world of psychically blind human beings.

The End (Part 3)