‘What in the world did you think you were doing?’ Elaine demanded anxiously, shaking her sister and roommate awake. Béla sat up and looked at her sister, sitting on the bed next to her. Elaine looked upset and angry. They were back in her quarters on the great ship.

‘How’d I get here?’ Béla asked, looking around her shared quarters. Then she understood. ‘You’re dream-walking!’ Béla exclaimed. ‘I’m still asleep outside the farmhouse!’

‘What farmhouse?’ Elaine asked.

Béla slid off the bed and held out her hand to Elaine. As Elaine reached for her sister’s hand, she found herself standing next to Béla’s sleeping body outside a farmhouse. She looked around, her eyes wide with wonder.

‘This is incredible!’ Elaine exclaimed. ‘Just trying to see the horizon makes me too dizzy to stand up!’

She noticed Béla looking at the farmhouse. Béla looked disturbed about something.

‘What’s in there?’ Elaine asked, puzzled.

‘Death,’ Béla replied. ‘There is death and disease here.’

Rather than take her sister into the farmhouse, she simply showed Elaine the image of what was inside.

‘He’s still alive?’ Elaine asked. ‘Why did you feed him your blood?’

‘Because our blood can heal people,’ Béla told her. ‘Didn’t Hank tell you that? That’s why the Earth people killed him. For his blood.’

The two sisters found themselves back on the bed in their quarters.

‘That was gruesome,’ Elaine said, shivering. ‘That must be why father stopped the disembarking after the first few platforms went down to the surface. He’s not allowing any of them to return to the ship.’

‘Disease is no reason to quarantine us,’ Béla said, thoughtfully. ‘We don’t get sick. As far as I know, father’s people don’t get sick either, and there aren’t any Earth people on board.’

‘If we can do what you say we can, using our blood, we should all be down on the surface, helping the people down there who are sick,’ Elaine firmly stated, starting to feel upset about the situation. ‘I’m going to go talk to Father!’

Elaine vanished. The room faded. On the surface, the clouds raced away, allowing the crystal sun to bathe Béla in its warmth as she slept, not dreaming now.

~~~~~

‘Angel, Goddess, whatever you are, please, wake up!’

Béla moved her shoulder, attempting to disengage from whatever was pushing her back and forth. The movement became more insistent, shaking her awake. Something close by smelled really rotten. She opened her eyes and was blinded by the sun.

‘The sun’s up! Why doesn’t my head hurt?’ she wondered, confused about where she was.

As she woke up, she remembered she was millions and millions of miles from Earth, falling through the sky and landing here. Here, there was a huge, terrible, foul smelling creature towering high above her, swaying unsteadily as it gazed down upon her. Béla blinked rapidly as she stared at it, her sleepy mind gradually giving it human features.

“Don’t be frightened, Goddess,” it said. “I won’t hurt you.”

Béla recognized it as the man in the deathbed from earlier. He sat down next to her on the blanket.

“You should probably cover yourself…” he said, shyly averting his eyes from her naked body.

Béla, more awake now, felt him inside her mind. His mind was empathically receptive, like people used to be before Earth got so crowded and the people became obsessed with ‘things’.

He had arrived nine years ago on the great ship. He didn’t remember the time before he arrived. None of the dozen others who had arrived with him knew who they were or where they had come from. Once in this impossible place, he was trained in the operation of the equipment used here and given this farmland and the materials to build a house.

Several of his new neighbors, happy to have a new arrival, helped him complete the structure and even gave him pieces of their used furniture to put in it.

There was a large family on the next farm, a few miles away. He met and fell in love with their youngest daughter Greta at a social dance in the nearby town of New Hope. He married her and moved her here with him.

The great ship that had brought him and many others to this place stayed for three years, unloading its cargo, then left. Four years after it left, the sickness began, sweeping from town to town and from farm to farm. No one knew what caused it. Only one out of ten survived.

The two children Greta had blessed him with were now dead. They contracted the wasting illness two months after this last winter darkness began. Greta was already ill by then, and when their children died, she simply lost the will to live, and lingered on, heartbroken and bedridden for several months before passing on.

Two days after she died, the crystal sun began to shine, heralding the beginning of spring. Too weak and ill to bury his young wife or even take care of himself any longer, he lay down next to her and waited for the wasting illness to consume him, too.

As he lay, weakened and hallucinating, he watched as the Storm God commingled with the Goddess of Light, causing her to give birth to a naked angel and deposit her in his front yard. In his delirium, he saw the angel awaken and take her first faltering steps.

The angel noticed him watching her with his mind and came to him as he lay dying. As she sat, gazing upon him, she fell madly in love with him and offered her life essence for him to drink. He did so, and was healed.

The angel, having taken his sickness into her own being, and mortally weakened from her generous offering, collapsed, dying, in the yard where her mother, the Goddess of Light, had birthed her. The Goddess, seeing her daughter’s plight, bathed her in her radiant light, healing her and bringing her back to life as a mortal girl.

Béla stared at the young man as she absorbed the information about his life here, in awe at the amazing tale he’d invented in his mind to explain her arrival and her very existence.

‘This man is certainly not a techie,’ she decided. ‘But, he has the most innocent and inventive mind I’ve ever encountered. I could probably, actually and for real, fall in love with him like he thinks I did!’

“Are you a bard?” she asked, wondering why his imagination was so inventive.

“I don’t think so,” he replied, gazing at his savior. “I’m a farmer. I don’t know what a ‘bard’ is, Goddess.”

Béla smiled and suppressed a laugh. The thin young man blushed, not knowing if he had violated some protocol she might expect.

Béla glowed ‘peace’ at him and suggested in his mind that he could talk to her and not offend her. She noticed that he was trying very hard not to stare at her naked body.

‘So, they have taboos on nakedness, here, too!’ Béla thought, annoyed. ‘Well, if he’s upset with the way I look, he’ll just have to deal with it. The name of the place is “Eden”, right?’

“A bard is a minstrel that travels from town to town telling tales to entertain the town folk,” Béla explained patiently. “They tell stories and legends of gods and heroes and their great exploits. Some of them sing songs and play musical instruments.”

“That sounds pretty exciting,” he told her. “But we don’t have anything like that, here, Goddess.”

“You do, now,” Béla said, laughing.