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Noah flew his ship across the Pacific in less than five minutes. He was very keen to explore the post-apocalyptic planet, but he was keener to see his friends in Noosa. Due to the speed of his departure from Pike’s Peak, he only caught the briefest glimpse of the changed geography of the west coast of North America.
He came to a hover about ten miles directly above the east coast of Australia. He paused a moment. Looking south he could see a vicious coastal storm in progress.
Beneath him, where Noosa was, the weather appeared sunny with a line of cumulus forming just inland from the coast.
It was mid-morning, Friday, September 24, 2123, East Australian Time.
He made telepathic contact with Thebe.
‘Everyone OK?’
‘Yes, thank you, Noah,’ she replied.
‘There is a bit of weather down the coast,’ he said. ‘We could be looking at a swell in a day or two.’
‘That will certainly make Slater happy,’ she replied.
‘I’m coming down,’ he said.
He descended in two long arcs, down to just above the water. He marveled at Noosa’s pristine beauty as he approached from the north. He noted that all signs of past civilization were permanently erased. ‘That’s better,’ he thought.
He glided about fifty feet above the sandy bar of the river mouth, then up-river towards the tents and spaceships, which he saw clustered at the junction of a tributary.
His heart filled with gladness and joy as he spotted the group standing by the water waving to him. As he parked his ship, he gave thanks.
‘My work is done, I am full of mirth,
I thank the One for planet Earth.’
2
Rama traditions went back for thousands of generations, but nothing went back further than the style of a traditional Rama campsite, called a dom. Their tents were the shape of tepees and were called wams. These were made of chameleon fabric. Mostly they
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were white, to reflect sunlight, although they could be any combination of colours. They were held up by ring-shaped, gravity sails and were generally arranged in a circle, or a portion thereof, with a larger, communal wam in the eastern part of the circle, with the opening facing westward directly into the setting sun. In the centre of the dom, the Rama always built a campfire. They traditionally lit it at sunset and sat around it in the evenings, singing and exchanging tales, tall and true, well into the night.
The Rama had a variety of gravitationally-powered, heating and lighting devices, as well as lanterns. The heat and light came from compact, portable, friction discs, which spun in opposite directions against each other, rotated by tiny, adjustable, gravity sails.
They had lamps in their tents as well as a variety of hotplates for cooking. They liked to sleep on their lev-mats, which were roll-up mats that incorporated a gravity sail. The mats usually levitated a couple of inches above the floor when they slept. It was like sleeping on a cloud.
At night, their tents glowed in soft hues of pastel colors and, on some nights, radiated mystical music into the vast wilderness around them as the Rama sang their songs and played their instruments.
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‘Welcome back to Noosa, Noah,’ said Ambriel as she threw herself into his arms.
‘Is everyone well?’ he asked.
‘Yes, thank you, Noah, all are present and accounted for. Thebe, Nancy and Slater arrived about an hour ago.’
Thebe came forward and hugged Noah. ‘Well done, Noah,’ she said, ‘mission accomplished.’
‘Yes, mission accomplished …’ he looked around, ‘and all seems well.’
The sun was shining and everyone was smiling.
‘We have prepared your wam,’ said Ambriel.
‘You have all prepared an exquisite dom. I cannot describe how beautiful it looked on approach.’
‘Adam, Ben, Kane, Adrian, Zeke and I have been here for a week getting everything ready,’ said Ambriel. She gestured to the wam at the western point of the circle, the one traditionally occupied by the most senior Rama in the dom, and said, ‘We wish to honor you with the wam of the rising star.’ The opening of this wam faced directly towards the sunrise.
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Noah, Slater, Thebe and Lucy were the only ones in the group that actually executed the time shift. The rest spent the previous hundred years based on Rama. Kane spent the century with Iapetus, the time master, honing his discipline of higher concentration and learning a broad range of telepathic techniques. As well, they explored swathes of the cosmos and surfed themselves stupid at unimaginably perfect breaks in varying gravitational conditions.
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That night they all sat around the fire. Some sang songs and some told tales, and it was a most wonderful night, that first night on the new Earth.
There was much laughter and gaiety and the past seemed to be completely forgotten by them all. There was a release, a lowering of pressure, knowing that they had the whole planet virtually to themselves.
Yesterday was gone. There was no yesterday. There was only right now and the dream of tomorrow.
…….
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