Excerpt from Chapter 50 of the book Quantusum, James Mahu
“...I realized that something had shifted. Time had stopped. I was alone in a fragment of time that Kohana and Uncle weren’t in, even though they shared my space. I was confused, and a strange fear gripped me, as if a nightmare were about to begin.
Why was I able to move and see in this space, but they could not? Then I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I spun around with fear pounding in my chest.
“It was necessary to meet in this way,” the stranger said.
Standing to my right side, was a figure of an old woman, perhaps seventy years old. She had kind eyes and a narrow face. She was human, but not quite human at the same time. Something about her felt familiar to me, but her appearance was entirely foreign to my mind. I breathed a sigh of relief that it was not Nammu.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I’m you.”
“I am me, who are you?”
“I’m truly you, but I’m in a different body, and presently I’m on a different planet, well, technically, it’s an asteroid, but it’s similar to this place you call earth.”
“How can you be me when I am me?”
She reached out and touched my shoulder again. “I could ask you the same question.”
She waved her hand in the air dismissively as if she had erased her comment. “May I sit with you for a moment?”
I looked around and confirmed that Kohana and Uncle were still frozen in their time. I must have nodded, because she sat down next to me and grabbed my right hand, turning it over in her own and examining it with interest. “You’ve had an interesting life…”
“I don’t know what you want or why you think you are me, but can you explain what is going on here?”
I pulled my hand away from her and turned my body to face her more directly, and as I did, I took a quick glance at Uncle, noticing that his mouth was now closed. He wasn’t actually frozen in time, rather it appeared that he and Kohana were suspended in ultra slow-motion.
This woman, whoever she was, didn’t seem threatening, and even though Uncle and Kohana were lost in their own perception of time, I felt reassured knowing that they were only a few feet away.
The old woman squirmed with a degree of discomfort and awkwardness, and looked at me, resting her elbows on her knees. “You look nothing like I expected.”
“Why did you have any expectations?” I asked in genuine wonder.
She shook her head briefly as if she were trying to clear cobwebs from her mind. Her hair was pure white and reached almost to her shoulders in straight lines with only a subtle, outward curl at the very end. Around her head she wore a headband that was made of a simple red cloth. She was dressed in a threadbare gray robe that had patterns that reminded me of crude, yet beautiful cave paintings. Her ringless fingers etched graceful expressions in the air when she spoke. Her skin was dark and weathered, and her frame seemed thin, but not frail.
“My name is Dhaleeb,” she said, holding up her hand. “I know who you are, Solomon, you needn’t respond in pleasantries. We’re of the same soul that animates these bodies, and a few hundred others that are scattered in the winds.” Her hand pointed between the two of us as if it were a separate entity.
“I’m a humble woman. On my world I’m one of about a hundred thousand who are known as the Samiton. We live on a small asteroid about one-tenth the size of earth. Our world is quite strange when compared to this one…” She paused and looked around the chamber with a measured eye.
“On my world, I’m a nomad. I have no permanent home. We roam like a herd of animals. We prefer to live this way. Permanence is not the way of the universe. We embrace change for that’s the way of all things and it’s the way we stay young— even though I appear anything but young.”
Dahleeb looked past me and seemed to be examining Uncle. “He looks like one of my kind more than you. Are you sure you’re Solomon?”
“Look, I don’t know what’s happening here… how you came here… how I can talk to you when you claim to be from another world… why… why they can’t move—”
“They can’t move, because I’ve activated a part of you—the soul part—so we could have a conversation. This soul part operates on a different frequency of time. It still has time, but it is not the same time as a human would experience. I’ve simply borrowed a part of you. I’m sure you’ll forgive me once we’re done here.”
She looked up at the Quantusum skeletons and then back at me. “Look at yourself, if you don’t believe me.”
I didn’t know what she meant, but I looked down at myself and saw I was actually two beings. One of me was animated; the other was frozen in time looking at Uncle with unblinking eyes. I was split, divided into two beings: one a phantom that was conscious, the other a stone sculpture. I suddenly felt sick to my stomach. “What did you do?” I demanded.
“I told you, I activated a part of you that would enable us to speak. If I appeared to you in my real form your planet’s gravity would crush me. You wouldn’t understand my language, nor would I understand yours. Not a good way to converse, wouldn’t you admit?”
As you, the patient reader well knows from reading the implausible descriptions of my life, whether you believe them or not, I’ve encountered some strange things. But this, this was the most confounding of them all. It was exactly then, to the absolute second, that I declared myself insane. If there’d been an asylum for the insane anywhere nearby, I would have checked myself in and pleaded with them to hold me in solitary confinement. I didn’t wish my curse on anyone else.
Dahleeb looked at me with interest. “You’re not insane. You’re me, and we’re definitely not insane.” She smiled at me like one would a small child who just caught her first butterfly. “The ones who’re insane are the ones who sleep while the drums of greed and exploitation beat loud and clear. Now that’s insanity.”
“How’d you find me?” I managed to whisper.
“The soul that is us is like the hub of a wheel. We’re out here at the rim of the wheel where the spokes go outward, but I can travel to the hub, and when I do, I can enter the reality of other bodies who share the same soul… so can you if you tried. It’s an eye-opening experience, I’ll tell you that.”
I listened, I heard, but I had no idea of what she was saying. “Why did you want to visit me, and why now?”
“Ah, a very good question,” she said, pointing upwards. “They sort of invited me.”
“The Quantusum?”
“Is that what you call them?”
“Yes, do you have a different name for them?”
“We call them the Unplanners—though our official name is the Faroukhanad.”
“The Unplanners?”
“These are the beings that flow. They’re the beings that created our sacred beliefs. They’re the ones who operate across realms and dimensions.”
“What do you mean?”
“What part don’t you understand?”
“…Across realms and dimensions?”
“Ah. Well, in space, galaxies cluster together. They’re bound to one another and they’re never completed. These star systems are complex and sparsely filled with life forms, but even in this sparseness, trillions upon trillions of sentient beings live in these star systems that flow through expanding space, and there are an unimaginable number of these realms. No one really knows the number.
“Within these star systems are galaxies, and within the galaxies are solar systems and within the solar systems are asteroids and planets. Upon these smallest units of real estate, are the sentient beings like us. The sentient beings are guided by freewill, and exploited by greed and power. The Unplanners are the ones who brought freewill to our realm, but more than this, they brought freewill to all the realms. They are the ones—the only ones we know of—that can travel from realm to realm.”
“They’re basically sea serpents—extinct sea serpents,” I said with disbelief.
Dahleeb looked up at the bones again and then to me. “They’re whatever you need them to be. The Unplanners operate beyond time. They can appear when they need to. If you know them as sea serpents, consider yourself lucky. Very few in my world know of them at all.”
“But how can a sea serpent travel from one realm to another?”
“They incarnate differently in different worlds. In our world they looked like large birds. They’re extinct on my world as well, but it’s only because they install something on the planet—at the collective level—that enables the sentient beings on the planet to have freewill, and then they leave.”
“Why do they leave?”
“Freewill is freewill,” said Dahleeb with a subtle wave of her hand. “You can’t bring this kind of a doctrine to a species and then dictate how it’s implemented or even protect it. It’s freewill. The Unplanners are called this, because they know that what is real, what is true, what is eternal is unknowable. If the Creator of all that is, is unknowable, then how can one plan anything that achieves more reality, more truth or more of the eternal? And that is why we call them the Unplanners.”
“So they bring freewill and that’s enough?”
Dahleeb nodded. "It's enough."
“And those who exploit, they get away with it all—that’s freewill, too?”
“Freewill is not about doing whatever you want without consequence, it’s about choice. It’s about the power of choice. In my world we have a ritual called the Way of Being. Being to us is not about our achievements in life or how many friends we possess or how happy our family is. Being is clarity.”
“And how do you define clarity?”
“It’s the choices we make to be of the soul, to honor the Unknowable Creative Source that fuels our soul and connects us to one another through this force.”
“How do you honor this force?”
“By being genuine in how you give freewill to those around you.”
“I don’t understand. How do you give freewill?”
“Our Way of Being states that you can only live consciously in the present, and to do this, you must trust the unpredictable flow of the forces of the Unknowable Creative Source wherever and however these shifts occur inside or outside of us.
“You give freewill by practicing this in your life. You learn to flow, and adapt to the forces of change. You learn to find compassion in your world and you follow it and support it, and in the same way, you learn to find exploitation, and you reject it and withdraw from it. This is freewill in its essence. It’s quite simple, isn’t it?”
I nodded my phantom head. I looked again to Uncle, and I could see his body had moved since I last looked—small, almost imperceptible changes. My own body had moved, too, the one I increasingly felt was my estranged shell.
“On my world,” I said with a quiet, deliberate voice, “we understand freewill, but we’re still exploited by those in power and—”
“Then you don’t understand freewill… at least not enough of you. Freewill is not the same as freedom. Freewill is what allows you to make a choice to believe nothing but what beats inside your heart. Freewill is what allows all tribes to unite. Freewill is the force that connects people in nonjudgment. Freewill is what allows people to learn how to live in harmony even when there’s been a history of disharmony. It’s all a matter of choice.”
“What are you on your planet—a leader, a priestess?”
Dahleeb giggled like a school girl. “I’m nobody. I have no big mission. I exist to learn and share and that’s enough. That’s enough.”
I looked into her eyes for the first time. I looked deeply. There was love and humility in her words, her mannerisms, even her eyes. I wanted to be more like her.
“There are many more like me,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
She leaned inward and touched my hand. “Our soul’s sparks are everywhere in this realm, living and dying, flowing like schools of fish in the ocean’s currents. You’re not alone in your endeavors. I know what you have to do in this lifetime, and I’m honored to be of service if I can.”
“Why now? I mean why did you appear now?”
She leaned back and looked around the chamber. “This spacetime made it possible. I felt the nudge to go inside to the soul’s hub and see where it took me. It took me here… to you, another me, us. I know it seems impossible, but that’s your mind judging what it cannot possibly imagine.
“The thing is, Solomon, everything that matters, that really matters, is outside of the mind’s grasp. Even the invention that you’ll help discover, it will not shine the light on the mind, it’ll shine the light from the mind, and finally those of your world will see a new thing illuminated, and when you do this, people will learn that they’re not one being living inside one body. They are vast entities, sovereign and integral to the Unknowable Creative Source, and that they encompass an entire realm. An entire realm!”
Dahleeb stood slowly to her feet, pointing to Uncle. “I like this man, who is he?”
“He’s the keeper of this sacred site, his name is Lives Above the Clouds, but we call him Uncle.”
“Stay with him, Solomon. He’s… connected to this in some powerful way.”
“Are you leaving?” I asked.
“Yes,” she nodded gently, and then took a final look around. “The frequency here is powerful. The Unplanners are here you can be sure of that. I feel their soft eyes on us even now.” She paused and closed her eyes with a deepening smile. “We come from silence, and when we leave, we return to this silence. But when we’re here, on this patch of lowly dirt, we can dance, talk, yell, flirt, laugh, and a thousand other things. Always take your next step in love, Solomon, that way you’ll never be lost in the noise.”
She vanished into a sheet of light, and the next thing I knew I was looking into Uncle’s eyes, hearing a slow-motion voice revving up as if I were editing a movie soundtrack. In the span of a few seconds I returned to my world, but I was not the same person. Now I knew that I had another me in the storeroom of my soul— perhaps many more as Dahleeb had suggested.
It suddenly dawned on me that I had a deeper case of amnesia than I had originally thought. I smiled at the notion, and Uncle smiled back, his eyes probing. Could he have known that I had left this reality? I smiled again, adding to the pattern, for one smile begets another.
