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For a moment I struggled to think about what type of music would match the sense of unity flowing from our common Soul. Mozart's music is rich, beautiful, generous, and uplifting, but its tones, that speak to the soul, didn't seem to match the bright colors of the unity that had pervaded the 'brightness' of this night. Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, and others perhaps had an inkling of the sublime, but had they ever experienced it? Not likely, I thought. How could they have, who could not have set foot on Bohr's planet, since the technology to get to this place had not existed in their time?
The greatest pleasure of that night, though, was its peace, a peace that was refreshing, that was more restful than the deepest sleep in unconsciousness. I felt refreshed in the morning, alive, nurtured, and satisfied.
The morning, of course, came as she had foretold when the orange moon-glow at dawn, gave way to the light of a golden sunrise. Odessa took this early light as a signal for getting up. She invited me to the balcony where we stood at the edge of a world bathed in the purest gold. Its brilliance was reflected in the sky, and in the water of the sea far out in the distance. In this quiet atmosphere we talked very little as if all had already been said, and later we shared our breakfast in this morning light. The breakfast that seemed to last for hours.
What I found pleasantly missing at this festival of life, was idle talk. At one point I began to tell her about my appreciation, to acknowledge what I felt, but she put a finger over my lips. Naturally, she was right. There was nothing we needed to communicate with words. Our eyes and smiles, our gestures, our responses, all spoke in their own language, giving an acknowledgment that words could never fully describe.
Martin returned around noon. He met us during our swim in the lake. He said in passing that it was high time for him to take me back home to the ship before I would be missed. Odessa agreed.
I didn't mind the least going back now. I saw it as a part of the cycle of the eternal day traced out by the sun, a cycle that would repeat itself as such cycles do by the power of the principle of the universe.
Of course, returning to the ship with Martin became another rare treat. We didn't just zip back. He boasted that he could show me the universe if I were interested. Before I could nod, stars surrounded us. It was as if we were an intricate part of a computer graphics illustration in which a million light years of space can be traversed in a minute. The background changed. The stars drew together and formed a carpet of fainter and fainter dots that eventually blended into a haze out of which the familiar spiral pattern of a galaxy became outlined. As the spiral became more defined, it became smaller. Soon other galaxies came into view; some were merely bright and hazy spots in an immensely black emptiness. "We are now seeing an entire cluster of galaxies," said Martin. In time I could recognize five distinct clusters of galaxies.
"Did you ever look for the edge of the universe?" I asked him.
"No!" he said. "What you see may be the extent of it."
He told me later that he was afraid to go much further, in case that he might get lost. "Of course it might be," he said, "that our immediate universe is merely a nucleus of a larger atom." Suddenly he waved his hands about: "Turn around, quickly!"
Oh, what a sight came into view. We were approaching another galaxy cluster. We were racing toward it, cutting through the center and nipping the outer edge of a galaxy. A shower of a million streaks of light passed by us, and then it was dark again. Now it stayed dark for a very long time.
"The third cluster," he said, "contains the Milky Way. See there!" he said when we came closer. "You can't miss it! The good old Milky Way is the third galaxy from the edge of the cluster; the one with its arms looking somewhat ragged. You'll find the ship in the second arm clockwise from the short one, near the outer edge, just above the main disk." He described the two groups of stars between which the ship was. He said one of these were the sun of the Earth, and the others the suns of the Alpha Centauri system.
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Stories about
War
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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