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Jenny entered her bright living room with a sandwich on a plate and a glass of cold lemonade. She set her food down on the little table next to her cozy reading chair and greeted the big black cat that was curled up lazily on the window seat, basking in the California sun and watching the birds in the bougainvillea that twined up the wrought iron arch of the gateway in her front yard.
“Comfy, Tidbit?” she asked aloud.
Tidbit replied in mindspeech, “It’s been a long week. The sun feels good.”
Jenny knew what he meant. They had spent the past week at Dimensional Alliance headquarters, working with beings from many different dimensions preparing for the ongoing battles to free the multiverse from the restrictive influence of the Insenium. Although the Alliance had been able to create havoc and chaos on the main Inseni planets, which disrupted the political structure of their enemies in an effort to stop their incursions, there were yet hundreds of planets and dimensions throughout the multiverse that still lived in slavery from the Inseni’s previous conquests.
After her wedding to Burt, she and Tarafau, Tidbit’s alter ego, had returned to Alliance headquarters to discuss tactics and a reasonable solution to the suffering caused by the Insenium. Then she and Burt and Tarafau, now in his persona of the black cat Tidbit, had returned home. Burt had been able to spend only one night at home and then headed off to Sanglarka to bring the other Earth guardians up to speed. So much for a honeymoon, she mused.
Lova, the guardian of the Sanglarka gate in Sweden and the trainer and support for new guardians, had her hands full. She had been assigned to find replacement guardians for both the India gate and the Australia gate, as the Alliance needed Brendan in the space fleet. Brendan had temporarily returned to his gate until such a time as they could locate and vet a suitable replacement. He wouldn’t be able to stay long, as there were some major offensives in the planning stages and he needed to be there. Once Lova had located some suitable candidates, she would be coordinating with Jenny before offering them the posts.
The India gate had been without a guardian for nearly a year now and had been temporarily sealed. Although there were troopers stationed within the gate, they were authorized to report back to the Alliance only if there were issues; none of them had the gate key that would allow them to do more than just watch the gate for potential intrusions. The gate-guardian system was strict about that. Therefore, getting a guardian for that gate was a high priority.
Then there was the resettling of Miriha’s people to their home world after their having been abducted and relocated by the Insenium. That gate also needed a new guardian.
As the Gatekeeper, it was Jenny’s responsibility to oversee not only the Earth gates but also the gates in other dimensions. This included the finding and vetting of guardians, as well as being involved in the finding of new gates, analyzing different cultures that might be added into the Dimensional Alliance as participating members, and generally being the face of the Alliance.
Of course, she didn’t have to do this alone. She worked closely with the Dimensional Alliance Council, and she had agents available to be her eyes and ears. All of this could have been overwhelming even under “normal” circumstances, but nothing about Jenny’s journey to this post had been remotely normal.
However, while she had been at Alliance headquarters, the chief physician at Dimensional Alliance headquarters had ordered a three-week rest at home before continuing her extensive duties. For the first time since she first moved into the little house on Infinity Loop with all its secrets, she actually would get to spend some quiet time here.
Bob, her neighbor across the street and a newly vetted Dimensional Alliance agent, was also taking some much-needed time at his house, reorganizing his lab, checking in with the various neighbors, and preparing for a project with Mervin, also known as Merlin of King Arthur fame. They were making extensive plans to research and explore the gate system from a scientific and historic point of view, with the goal of potentially finding additional security risks and determining how to prevent them.
Bob was fitting in agent training (something, as had been true for Jenny, that had been skipped by necessity). Jenny had worried about that due to Bob’s age, but so far he seemed to be excited about it. And he was admittedly a lot more fit than most people his age, especially because he had spent most of his time since his retirement puttering in his workshop with his bots and other experiments.
He and Merv thought that finding the origins of the gate system might aid them in continuing to liberate those who had been enslaved by the Insenium in other dimensions, as well as in locating potential natural portals that had been missed.
Bob was going to rent his house out to his son in his absence, but he wanted to secure his lab and be sure there were no telltale signs of his recent activity for his son to discover. All of the private projects he had been pursuing for various Earth tech companies had been turned over to those companies’ own research labs, as Bob would have no further time for it. He told them all he was taking a research sabbatical. Over the years he had worked for a number of large companies and had put a tidy sum away for just such an eventuality.
His son Chris would be housesitting while he was off on his adventures, but Bob would be taking Ignatius, his hyacinth macaw with him on his journeys. Chris had been told that his dad was going on “walkabout,” to coin a phrase from Brendan, the Australia gate guardian. Bob’s son, Chris, was a nice young man, a bit older than Jenny and very much like his dad. Jenny knew that Bob had given Chris her cover story about working for an international firm as a ghostwriter and she wouldn’t be home much.
Now, before she sat in her cushy reading chair, she wandered over to the dining room table. Sitting down, she invoked a box out of her MDP. The first week she had moved into her aunt Lizzie’s home, Bob had brought over three boxes. One of them had contained many volumes of journals and photo albums. At the time, events had moved so quickly that she had never gotten the opportunity to even open the journals. She had idly flipped through a couple of the photo albums, but the journals would have required time and attention that she didn’t have available at the time.
She pulled the first volume out of the box. The year on the spine said 1952. Finally, she would learn the full story of her Aunt Lizzie, the former Los Angeles gate guardian who had left her everything, including the key to adventures beyond anything Jenny could have imagined.
She turned to Lizziebot, standing near Jenny’s reading chair. “Please take messages for any incoming calls or reports unless there is a true emergency. I will check in this evening with headquarters, per my doctor’s instructions,” she told the bot before settling into the armchair with a sigh.
“Not a problem, Jenny. Do you wish me to set a reminder? I know it is easy to get absorbed in your reading.”
“Yes, please, Lizziebot. Around suppertime would be good.”
“Got it,” the bot replied and settled herself at the opposite end of the fireplace.
Jenny opened the journal carefully. The pages were yellowing and somewhat fragile. She made a mental note to have Lizziebot scan the journal when she was done with it, so they could keep a digital record of the original, including her aunt’s handwriting. She wasn’t sure if it would ever be of any interest to anyone else, unless she eventually had children, but it seemed a shame to lose this artifact if it could possibly be preserved.
Of course, she imagined much of it would be somewhat classified, due to the nature of her aunt’s adventures, but still, she wanted to be sure it would not be lost to time. Jenny had hopes that the time would come when Earthlings would be ready to know about the gateways. But until then, one of the issues Jenny constantly had to deal with was the necessity to constantly keep her secret. Of Jenny and Lizzie’s family, only Jenny’s father had any hint of what was really going on in Jenny’s life.
Chidwi crooned from the back of the chair, where she had taken to perching whenever Jenny was moving about the house. She had been a delightful addition to her household and liked to help with meals as well as cleaning and straightening. Jenny had made sure she had a comfortable bed in the room they had labeled “the office,” which was not the same as the “gate office.” Chidwi also had a nest she had created for herself in the little yew tree that hung over the koi pond. Both Chidwi and Tidbit were fascinated by the calming undulations of the koi, sparkling in the light that filtered in through the branches of the little tree.
Chidwi was an unusual creature, reminding Jenny very much of an emperor tamarin monkey with the exception of her coloring which was in various shades of green. A light, almost chartreuse green fur covered most of her body, and she had a long dark green moustache and eyebrows. She had a prehensile tail and tiny gentle hands, as well as feet that she often also used like hands. Her huge intensely periwinkle blue eyes were surrounded by bright white circles of fur under her dark green brows, giving her the appearance of always being somewhat surprised at the world around her.
Chidwi was known as a linkling. She had linked to Jenny permanently during a visit to Tarafau’s home dimension and was now Jenny’s constant companion. Like Tidbit, she used mindspeech to communicate, but she also had a lovely soft voice and crooned when she was content or when she was trying to soothe someone. Her kind could, however, also create a high-pitched, extremely loud call of alarm when danger happened, something Jenny hoped never to hear again.
Chidwi was careful to “turn her reflection off” whenever she sensed anyone besides Jenny, Burt, Bob, or Tidbit anywhere nearby. This made her invisible, for all intents and purposes. For now, however, she draped herself across the back of the armchair like a large green doily, peering over Jenny’s shoulder. Jenny was pretty sure Chidwi couldn’t read, but you never knew, as she was constantly discovering new and interesting things about her little companion. Of course, one of the linklings’ abilities was the gift of being able to actually read the minds of the beings around them, so whatever Jenny read, Chidwi would also be able to experience.
With a satisfied sigh, Jenny settled in for a nice read. Her aunt’s now familiar hand was clean and neat. The cover of the journal was dated 1952. On the very first page it said: “I’ve been in college for two years already, and it occurred to me that perhaps someday someone might want to know how things were in my time. My study of history tells me that a lot has been lost because ordinary people didn’t keep and preserve a record of everyday events....”
As she began to read, Jenny nibbled on her sandwich and sipped lemonade without even noticing she was doing it. Her aunt wrote so clearly and with such vivid description that she could picture what was happening in her mind, especially since she and Lizzie had grown up in the same area. Many of the landmarks were familiar to her, and her parents, who were very engaged in family history and genealogy, often told her stories about that time so long ago.
In her mind’s eye she saw....
