“Wait, are you telling me Earth is Berudim? But that image—”

“—is how Berudim appears to us in my time.”

“Avi Socha, show me Berudim in relation to Charon!”

The hologram returned to the gray world, pulling back to reveal a smaller blue world, the fourth planet from the sun.

Multiple thoughts raced through my consciousness as I processed the information. If Berudim was Earth, then Charon had to be Mars—ancient Mars. If Avi Socha’s species had seeded ancient Earth with life, then I was communicating with a being that had lived 3.8 billion years ago.

The suddenness of the history lesson was overwhelming to both of us as I realized the E.T. was tuned in to my thoughts.

“Charon is called Mars; Berudim is called Earth. You are a human. Life has evolved differently on Earth, but your RNA was harvested from our genetic matrix. Despite our appearances we are one.”

“Avi Socha, what happened to your planet? In our time Mars is a dead world lacking oceans and an atmosphere.”

“Charon’s ruling clans engaged in technologies that weakened our atmosphere, while they ignored the threat of our calderas. The magma pockets became unstable as our two planets’ orbits coincided in a doomsday event prophesied as the Miketz. We seeded Berudim in the hope that intelligent life would evolve, allowing my consciousness to communicate with an incarnate who could provide us with the secret to generating a quantum vacuum flux field. We need it to leave the solar system, to relocate our people to another suitable world.”

And suddenly everything made sense.

I had been chosen to be the gatekeeper of zero-point energy not because I was intuitive or smart, but because my soul had inhabited this being’s body billions of years ago. The information imparted to me by the alien Joe Tkalec would save Avi Socha’s species, the forebearer species that had seeded life on Earth.

Joe was right. In a sense, I really was saving my species.

“Avi Socha, I have been given the knowledge you seek. Do you have the ability to extract it from my memory?”

“I already have, my brother. Take care of our soul.”

And he was gone.

42

“One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth the doing is what we do for others.”

—Lewis Carroll

My consciousness passed through the center of the whirling electrogravitic rings. When I opened my eyes, I found myself back inside the chamber, which had again been created to resemble Joe Tkalec’s home library. I was seated in my familiar padded rocking chair adjacent to a wall of books. Alien Joe was in my mentor’s easy chair, a leatherbound copy of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland open on his lap.

Adjusting the book’s page to the light from his flickering red candle, the E.T. read aloud:

“‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,

‘to talk of many things: