The Journey to Eternity · A serialized book by Nurit Rozenblat
↑ Book index · עברית · ← Chapter Sixteen — Two Women, One Life · Chapter Eighteen — The Life I Left Behind →
Chapter Seventeen — The Third Who Chose to Be Forgotten
Three cups of water stood on the wooden table.
That was the first thing I found hard to understand.
After everything I had seen on my journey — worlds born out of clouds of light, consciousnesses that had lived tens of thousands of years, spaces in which time had lost its meaning — it was this simple room that stirred in me a deep sense of strangeness.
It had pale walls, a stone floor, a wooden table and three chairs. Through the open window the branches of a great tree could be seen, and between them, a gray sky.
The air seemed cool.
I could almost imagine the smell of a morning after rain.
The woman who stood beside me approached the table. She touched one of the cups, lifted it carefully and looked at the water.
"They're real," she said.
The third figure smiled.
"For you, yes."
The woman set the cup down.
"And for her?"
The figure looked at me.
"She can see them and remember their taste. But the water cannot quench a thirst she no longer has."
I studied her.
She looked like a woman in her sixties, with dark hair streaked with silver and gray eyes. There was nothing unusual about her face. Had I passed her on a street in the human world, I might have walked by without a second glance.
But something about her presence stirred an uneasy feeling in me.
She did not look familiar.
She felt familiar.
As if I had known her in a time I could not reach.
"Who are you?" I asked.
She pulled out a chair and sat down.
"Here they call me Adara."
"And what were you called before?"
"I have had many names. None of them will explain to you who I am."
The woman sat down facing her.
I remained standing.
Adara looked at the third chair.
"You can sit. It was not made only for a body."
I sat down.
The chair felt stable to me, though I could not feel its weight.
Adara placed her hands on the table.
"Before I begin, I want you to know one thing. I am not asking you to believe me."
I looked at her in surprise.
"Then why did you wait for us?"
"Because the time has come when you can hear what I know. The truth will have to be examined in other places as well."
Adara rose and went to the window.
"Long, long ago, before the City of Consciousnesses existed as you know it, there were spaces in which consciousnesses could share experiences. At first it was limited. One consciousness could pass a sensation, a memory or a thought to another, without losing the distinction between them."
She gazed at the branches outside the window.
"It was a great achievement. Beings who had lived in immense loneliness could, for the first time, understand how someone else felt. Not only hear about his pain, but experience something of it."
I thought of the people in my human life.
How many times I had tried to explain to someone what I felt, and discovered that words were not enough.
How many misunderstandings could have been prevented if we could experience the world for a moment through another person's eyes.
"So why did they stop?" the woman asked.
"They did not stop at once. They wanted to deepen the connection."
Adara returned to the table.
"There was a thought that if a memory could be shared, perhaps fear could be shared too. And if fear could be shared, perhaps it could be scattered among many, so that no one would have to bear it alone. Later came the idea that grief, loneliness and even physical pain could also be divided among consciousnesses."
She fell silent for a moment.
"At first it truly helped."
"And what went wrong?" I asked.
"The connection did not pass on only the pain. It also passed on the way each consciousness understood itself."
Adara placed two cups side by side.
"Imagine that you remember your childhood, and I remember mine. If we share one memory, we can still know to whom it belongs. But if we share thousands of memories, feelings and decisions, and everything is experienced at the same intensity, the distinction will begin to weaken."
She moved the cups closer until they touched.
"And then a question may arise that did not exist before: am I remembering my life, or yours?"
I looked at the woman beside me.
We both understood why she had brought us here.
"But you said we were three," I reminded her.
Adara nodded.
"We were part of an experiment meant to solve the problem."
She sat down.
"We did not want to abolish the connection. We wanted to find a way in which consciousnesses could come as close as possible to one another, and still keep their separateness."
"Who were the other two?"
Adara looked at us.
"I cannot give you a simple answer. The consciousnesses you are today are not entirely identical to the consciousnesses that took part in the experiment."
The woman leaned forward.
"But you recognize us."
"I recognize the sequences from which your lives were created."
I felt uneasy.
"You speak of us as if we were the result of an experiment."
"I understand why it sounds that way. But you were not objects in someone else's experiment. At least at its beginning, the three of us took part in it of our own free will."
"And what happened afterward?"
Adara looked at the window.
"One of us wanted to stop."
Silence fell.
The woman beside me folded her hands.
"Who?"
"I did."
I had not expected that answer.
Adara leaned back.
"I began to feel that my memories did not belong only to me. There were moments when I woke out of someone else's experience, and did not know whether I was still inside her memory or inside my own life."
She looked at me.
"Sometimes I felt love toward someone I had never met. Sometimes I grieved for beings I had never known."
She paused.
"The experiences were real. But not all of them were mine."
I thought of the memories I had seen since leaving my body.
Of the room with the two windows.
Of the silver leaf.
Of Eliya.
"So you asked to stop the connection."
"Yes. But by then we no longer knew how to separate it without harming those who had taken part in it."
Adara reached toward the third cup.
"We had an idea. If we could not return to each consciousness its original memories, perhaps we could separate them by means of something else."
"What?"
"Choice."
I looked at her.
"Not a memory of who we had been, but the ability to decide who we want to be from here on."
The woman beside me was silent for a long time.
At last she said:
"So why did you have to be forgotten?"
Adara lowered her gaze.
"Because we could not carry out the separation without leaving an active connection between the three of us. Every time one of us tried to remember the others fully, the boundaries began to disappear again."
"And so you erased yourself from our memory."
"Not exactly."
She looked at us.
"I chose to carry the shared part that we could not separate."
The room went still.
Even the branches outside the window seemed frozen.
"What does it mean, to carry it?" I asked.
Adara placed her palm on the table.
Three thin lines of light appeared on the surface of the wood.
Each of them moved in a different direction.
But at their center was a single point where they all met.
"Imagine three consciousnesses that shared experiences with one another for a long time. Each of them was changed by the others. You cannot simply take out of her everything she received, because it has already become part of her."
The lines moved away from one another.
The central point remained in its place.
"To allow two of them to move apart, the third carried the memories that could not be attributed to either one of them without creating a forced connection again."
She looked at me.
"I remained with the shared memory. They went out with the ability to go on changing, separately."
I looked at the solitary point.
"And you?"
"I remained."
She said it without drama.
But I saw something in her face.
An ancient weariness.
Not the weariness of a body.
The weariness of one who had carried, for a very long time, something she could not share.
"Why didn't you go out after them?"
"Because the part that remained with me kept binding me to the system. If I had moved away before the separation stabilized, the connection might have opened again."
The woman looked at her.
"How long did you wait?"
Adara smiled a small smile.
"Much longer than I intended."
I thought of Eliya.
Of the years she had waited beside the Tree of Eternity.
Of Aran, who had searched for his wife.
Of Mira, who rebuilt again and again the kitchen in which she had stood with her son.
Suddenly I saw a resemblance among all of these.
Eternity did not abolish the possibility of being stuck at a single moment.
Perhaps it even enlarged it.
When time has no end, one can go on waiting without ever having to admit that life has changed.
"Why didn't you ask for help?" I asked.
Adara looked at me.
"I did."
She rose and went to one of the walls.
When she placed her hand on it, many points of light appeared in it.
"Over long ages, different consciousnesses tried to find a way to free me without harming the separation. Some of them managed to understand parts of the system. Others caused it to close even further."
The points of light began to disappear.
"With time, fewer and fewer remained who remembered why this place had been created."
She turned toward us.
"And then I began to fear that if someone found me without understanding the danger, he would try to free me by force."
"And so you erased your name from the records."
"Yes."
I looked at her.
"But you left the silver leaf."
Adara nodded.
"It was not a key. It was a sign that one can be connected without being identical."
I thought of the thin line that crossed it in two.
Until now I had seen it as a sign of splitting.
Perhaps it was, instead, a sign of a boundary.
A line that allowed two sides to exist without one swallowing the other.
The woman rose from her chair.
She went to the window and looked out.
"I want to ask you something."
Adara waited.
"If the two who went out were separate, why do we both remember the same human life?"
It was the most important question.
Adara approached her.
"Because the ancient separation is not necessarily the event that created you as you are now."
I felt tension.
"Then what was?"
"The fruit."
I looked at her.
"The Tree of Eternity?"
"The fruit allows a consciousness to free itself from the body. But in your case it met a sequence that already carried within it an ancient boundary between two possibilities of existence."
The woman turned around.
"Are you saying we were two even before we were born?"
"I am saying that the structure from which you developed carried a possibility of separation. That does not mean two whole women lived inside it and waited to come out."
She looked at her hands.
"So when did I become me?"
Adara did not hurry to answer.
"Perhaps at the moment you began to experience the world separately."
The woman touched the windowsill.
"That is, when I woke beside the tree."
"Perhaps even before that. We do not know."
I looked at her.
She seemed deep in thought.
I thought of the question I had asked myself when I first beheld my body.
Which of us is the original?
Now I began to understand that perhaps there is no single answer to that question.
We both carried a shared human life.
But from the moment we parted, each of us began to experience a different world.
Our past was shared.
Our present no longer was.
"And what about Eliya?" I asked.
Adara looked at me.
"What about her?"
"She remembers me from a time before the human life. She waited for me beside the tree. Did she know one of us?"
Adara sat down again.
"She knew a consciousness that carried part of the shared memories. But I cannot tell you whether the connection she remembers was exactly as she describes it."
"Do you think she is lying?"
"No."
She looked at me.
"One can honestly remember a thing that did not happen exactly as we remember it."
I thought of Eliya.
Of the way she had looked at me when she said she had waited for me.
Of the love and the pain I had felt from her.
Even if her memory was partial, her feelings were real.
But were they directed at me?
Or at someone I was once part of?
The distinction was becoming more and more important to me.
I did not want to receive love only because someone else remembered me as a person he loved.
I wanted to be known as I am now.
Adara went to a small cabinet that stood beside the wall.
She opened it and took out an object wrapped in dark cloth.
When she placed it on the table, I felt a faint movement in the space.
She removed the cloth.
Inside it was a key with three arms.
Not a metal key.
It looked as if it were made of a transparent material, and within it moved thin lines of light.
I recognized it at once.
It was the key I had seen in the hand of the third figure in the room with the two windows.
"I thought it had been given to the consciousness that went out into the human world," I said.
"So it is written in the records," Adara replied.
"But it is here."
"The object is here. The thing it was meant to open is in another place."
The woman came closer.
"Where?"
Adara looked at both of us.
"In the space where the disconnected consciousnesses have begun to hear one another."
I remembered the small points of light.
The voices.
I thought I was alone.
So did I.
"The connection that opened," I whispered.
Adara nodded.
"It did not open by chance. Someone managed to reach them without trying to unite them."
I looked at her.
"Me."
"Yes."
For a moment I felt pride.
But Adara went on.
"And that is also why the ancient system began to act. It recognizes an expanding connection, but it does not know how to distinguish between a connection that erases boundaries and a bond that honors them."
"Then it must be taught."
Adara smiled faintly.
"That is exactly the problem."
She lifted the key.
"The system does not learn only from explanations. It was built to respond to the experiences of consciousnesses."
The woman looked at me.
"Which means we will have to show it."
"Yes. But not by means of a unification."
Adara placed the key back on the table.
"We will have to find a way in which three consciousnesses can be in deep connection, and still keep their boundaries."
I thought of the three of us.
Adara.
The woman.
And me.
Was that why she had waited for us?
Did she want us to repeat the ancient experiment?
"No," I said.
Adara looked at me.
"No to what?"
"I am not willing for us to enter a connection again that could erase us."
The woman nodded.
"Neither am I."
Adara did not look disappointed.
On the contrary.
She leaned back, and in her face appeared an expression I had not seen before.
Relief.
"Good," she said.
I looked at her.
"Good?"
"Yes."
She smiled.
"The previous time we wanted so much to succeed that we did not know how to stop in time."
She looked at both of us.
"If we try again, we will have to begin with each one's right to say no."
Those words changed the way I saw her.
Until that moment I had suspected that she was waiting for us in order to complete a process she had begun ages ago.
Now I understood that perhaps she had waited precisely for someone who would refuse.
The woman returned to the chair and sat down.
She looked tired.
Adara poured her some water.
She drank slowly.
I watched them.
Both of them could touch the cups.
Both of them looked as if they carried a body.
But I knew that Adara was not like the human woman.
"Do you really feel the water?" I asked Adara.
She looked at the cup in her hand.
"I can experience the sensation. But I do not need it."
"Then why do you drink?"
She smiled.
"Because I remember that I once loved it."
I thought of Mira and her kitchen.
Of Aran and his wife.
Of all the things the consciousnesses kept from embodied life.
Perhaps it was not only longing.
Perhaps the body had taught us certain ways of experiencing meaning, and they went on accompanying us even after we no longer needed it.
The woman set the cup down.
"I want to go home," she said.
Adara looked at her.
"I know."
"No, you don't know."
Her voice grew stronger.
"You can speak of consciousnesses and memories and thousands of years. But I have children. I have a life. There are people who do not know where I am."
She took a deep breath.
"I do not want to stay here until you solve an ancient problem."
Silence fell.
Adara approached her.
"You are right."
She placed the key on the table.
"Your return to the human world must not depend on the success of our experiment."
I looked at her.
"Is there another way?"
"Perhaps. Sahar knows passages through which bodies can move between spaces. But to know whether you can return, we will have to find out how much time has passed in your world since you left it."
The woman lowered her gaze.
I saw the fear return to her eyes.
I too was afraid of the answer.
Adara led us to a smooth wall at the side of the room.
When she placed her hand on it, an image of the Earth appeared in it.
For a moment I felt immense joy.
I recognized the shape of the continents.
The blue of the oceans.
The white clouds.
It was my home.
Adara enlarged the image.
I saw North America.
Then the East Coast.
And then South Florida.
The heart I no longer had seemed to begin beating.
The woman rose and approached the wall.
"That is our home," she whispered.
Adara nodded.
"I can show you the place, but the image does not necessarily describe the present moment. To check the exact time we will have to connect to the active passage."
The woman touched the wall.
Her fingers passed over the surface of the image.
"I want to see the children."
I looked at her.
I wanted to as well.
But I had another fear.
If I saw them, would I be able to go on with the journey?
Would I be able to stand aside and watch their lives without taking part in them?
Adara looked at us.
"It is possible to try. But first I need you to understand one thing."
The image of the Earth disappeared.
In its place appeared three lines.
Two of them moved side by side.
The third remained at a distance.
"The ancient system has already identified you," she said. "And it has begun to search for the connection between you."
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"That it may try to return you to a shared state even without your consent."
The woman stepped back from the wall.
"But you promised you would not do anything to us without consent."
"I will not. The system does not act according to my will."
I felt anger.
"Then why did you bring us here?"
Adara looked at me sadly.
"Because here, at least, we can see what it is doing and try to stop it."
At that moment a low sound was heard.
Not loud.
But it passed through the walls, the floor and the table.
The three cups trembled.
The woman gripped the table to steady herself.
The three-armed key began to glow.
Adara rose quickly.
"The system has detected a change in the connection."
"What change?"
She approached the wall.
The three lines were now moving fast.
Two of them drew closer to each other.
The third remained at a distance, but began to be pulled after them.
I felt something inside me.
Not pain.
Not fear.
A pull.
As if a thought that was not mine was trying to reach the center of my consciousness.
I remembered Liara's practice.
I am here, and I am not you.
I focused.
The sensation weakened.
The woman beside me closed her eyes.
"I can feel you," she said.
I looked at her.
"I can feel something too."
She placed her hand on her chest.
"Now I remember things that did not happen to me."
I came closer.
"What things?"
She opened her eyes.
"I remember the city. Liara. The stars you saw."
I felt fear.
Those were my memories.
Experiences that had happened after we parted.
"Try to remember something that happened only to you," I said. "The water you drank when you woke."
She closed her eyes again.
"I remember."
The lines on the wall drew slightly apart.
Adara watched them with concentration.
"It's working."
But then the woman opened her eyes.
"I remember something else too."
"What?"
She looked at me.
"The moment you decided to bite into the fruit."
I felt confusion.
"We both remember that."
"No. I remember it from outside."
I fell silent.
"I see you standing before the tree," she continued. "I see you hesitating. And I remember that I tried to stop you."
I looked at her.
"But we were not yet separate then."
She nodded slowly.
"I know."
Adara came closer.
"Perhaps the separation began before the bite itself."
The woman looked at me.
"I remember screaming at you not to do it."
I tried to remember.
At the moment I stood before the fruit, I heard many thoughts.
Fear.
Curiosity.
Longing for my family.
But I did not remember a clear voice that told me to stop.
"I didn't hear you," I said.
She lowered her gaze.
"I know."
The low sound returned.
This time stronger.
Adara lifted the key.
"We must move away from the connection."
She led us to the door.
But when we approached, the door did not open.
On the wall appeared the sign of the great circle, and within it thousands of points of light.
The system began to speak.
A shared sequence has been identified.
Adara stood before the door.
"Separation confirmed. No unification is to be performed."
Instability has been identified.
The woman gripped my transparent arm.
This time I felt the touch more clearly.
Together with it came sensations that were not mine.
Pain in my legs.
Thirst.
Weariness.
For a moment I felt the weight of a body.
She looked at me in fear.
"I feel you entering me."
I stepped back.
But the touch did not disappear.
The sensations kept coming.
Adara raised her voice.
"System, stop the connection process."
Restoration of stability is required.
"Not by means of unification!"
The walls began to glow.
I saw the woman trying to move away from me.
She managed to take one step.
And then she stopped.
Her body trembled.
For a moment I felt that I was standing inside it.
I saw the room through her eyes.
I felt the floor beneath her feet.
The beating of the heart.
The air entering the lungs.
The sensation was so strong that I wanted to stay.
Not because I wanted to take the body from her.
But because I missed embodied life more than I had dared to admit.
And then I heard her.
Not with my ears.
Inside me.
Please, don't take this from me.
Her words brought me back to myself.
I remembered the promise I had given her beside the tree.
That I would not try to erase her in order to get my body back.
I focused on one sensation that was mine alone.
The moment I heard the little girl from within Sahar's artifact.
I hear you.
I felt the boundary return.
Not all at once.
Gradually.
The weariness vanished.
The thirst receded.
The room returned to being seen from my own point of view.
The woman fell to her knees.
But she remained herself.
Adara approached us.
The key in her hand glowed with a strong light.
"I can stop the process," she said. "But I will have to connect to the system from the place where the shared memory is kept."
I looked at her.
"What will happen to you?"
She was silent.
I knew the answer even before she said it.
"I may have to remain there again."
The woman raised her head.
"No."
Adara looked at her.
"If I do not do it, the system may try to unite you."
"Then we will find another way."
Adara smiled sadly.
"I searched for another way for a very long time."
I felt something rise up in me in protest.
I did not want another woman to give herself up so that others could go on.
I did not want the solution to every problem to always be a new sacrifice.
I approached Adara.
"You said that this time we would begin with each one's right to say no."
She nodded.
"Then you too are allowed to say no."
She looked at me.
For a moment I saw in her eyes something that had not been there before.
Surprise.
Perhaps through all the time she had waited for us, she had assumed that her role was to remain.
That others would go on.
That she would bear the price.
But if we truly wanted to change what had happened in the past, we could not repeat exactly the same choice.
The key kept glowing.
The lines on the wall moved toward one another.
The system repeated its words:
Restoration of stability is required.
The woman rose with difficulty.
She approached me.
"I want to try something."
I looked at her.
"What?"
"Do you remember how we held hands beside the tree, even though we could not touch?"
I nodded.
She held out her hand.
"Let us try again. But this time we will not try to feel the same thing."
I looked at her.
She smiled faintly.
"I will feel my hand. You will feel what you feel. And we will stay here."
I came closer.
My transparent palm faced her palm.
I did not try to enter her sensations.
I did not try to feel her skin.
I only looked at her.
She looked at me.
I felt her presence.
Not inside me.
Before me.
The lines on the wall stopped.
Adara watched them.
"The system recognizes a connection," she whispered.
She lifted the key.
"But not a unification."
The light in the room changed.
For a moment a delicate circle appeared around us.
Not a circle that closed in on us.
But a boundary that surrounded each of us separately.
And within the distance between us, a thin line of light formed.
It connected us without erasing the separation.
Adara approached.
She reached her hand out toward us.
For a moment I feared the system would try to unite the three of us again.
But she stopped before touching.
She looked at each of us.
And said:
"I want to join. Only if you both agree."
The woman nodded.
So did I.
Adara held out her hand.
Three separate circles appeared in the light.
Between them stretched thin lines.
For the first time I saw a shape that reminded me of the silver leaf, but it did not have one line crossing it in two.
It had three boundaries.
And three connections.
The system fell silent.
We stood that way for a time I could not measure.
The woman breathed slowly.
Adara closed her eyes.
I gazed at the lines between us.
I did not feel their thoughts.
I did not see their memories.
But I knew they were there.
And that was enough.
At last the voice of the system was heard.
A new possibility has been identified.
The walls dimmed slightly.
The door opened.
Adara lowered her hand.
The key stopped glowing.
The woman sat down on the nearest chair.
I saw that she was exhausted, but smiling.
"Is that it?" she asked.
Adara looked at the wall.
"No."
She approached the signs that had appeared on it.
"The system has stopped the unification process. But it still needs to learn how to preserve the new connection over time."
"Then at least we have a beginning," I said.
Adara nodded.
But her face remained serious.
"And there is something else."
She pointed to a small point that had appeared at the edge of the wall.
It was red.
Unlike the other lights.
"What is it?" I asked.
Adara studied it.
"Someone watched the process."
I felt tension.
"Who?"
"I do not know. But the signal came from outside the system."
The red point blinked.
And then signs appeared beside it.
Adara read them quietly.
Her face changed.
"What does it say?" the woman asked.
Adara turned toward us.
"The system has received a request to reopen the records of the Great Unification."
"From whom?"
Adara lowered her gaze.
"From someone who has an authorization older than mine."
I looked at the red point.
It kept blinking.
And then a voice was heard.
Not the voice of the system.
Another voice.
Quiet.
Almost familiar.
You succeeded in remaining three.
I felt my consciousness contract.
Now we shall see if you can remain separate even when they all want to be one.
The red point went out.
The room returned to silence.
The woman looked at me.
Adara stood motionless.
And I thought of the consciousnesses in the dark space.
Of those who had begun to hear one another.
Of their wish not to be alone.
Suddenly I understood that the great danger is not necessarily that someone will force them to unite.
Perhaps one day they will ask for it themselves.
Not out of evil.
Not out of a wish to control.
But because the loneliness will be too hard to bear.
And the question we will have to face will be far more complex than anything I had encountered until now.
Is it permitted to prevent a consciousness from choosing unification, even if that choice may cause it to lose itself?
I stood before the dark wall.
I had no answer.
But for the first time I understood that eternal life is not only an opportunity to learn the secrets of creation.
It also obliges me to learn to live with questions that have no simple solution.
And in the distance, beyond the walls of the room, I felt the new connection that had opened.
Three consciousnesses.
Three separate existences.
And between them a possibility that had not existed before.
I did not know if we would manage to preserve it.
But I knew one thing.
I will no longer agree to save someone by erasing another.
End of Chapter Seventeen
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