Chapter 21

            When Mubarak was very young, a mere boy, his father took him on an aerial mission far from home. It was the first time the boy had been allowed to participate in a mission. His father, who traveled frequently on these trips, felt his son was ready.

            The day began when his father brought him to the Circle, the central plaza around which the City had grown. This place never ceased to amaze Mubarak. The expansive floor was made of what Mubarak recognized as highly prized Numidian marble, spotted with flecks of gold, polished to the highest sheen. He looked up at the great pearl-colored dome far above, and at the great multihued columns that supported it. Surrounding this view were hundreds or even thousands of towering buildings – many of them like ornate spears aimed at heaven, some resembling vast inverted bowls, radiant and powerful. The immensity and vitality of the City gave the boy great comfort, and he sighed as he surveyed it.

            His father pointed at a hazy, glowing sphere in the Circle. They hurried toward it, and as they strode, the sphere underwent a silent metamorphosis, taking on the shape of a metallic disk, with porthole windows along its rim. The disk appeared to float about five meters above the marble floor of the Circle. A ramp had been lowered beneath the disk, and climbing it, they headed inside.

            They entered a large room, empty apart from a few jinn, one of whom sat in a central chair, almost a throne, and somehow controlled the movement of the disk. With a crew of five, including themselves, the vehicle took off.

            Mubarak watched through a porthole as the disk rose up toward the pearl dome. Through some unknown action, the dome was opening, and thin curtains of reddish sand began to drop, turning to fine dust and then vanishing as they descended. It was morning outside, and the rays of a bright summer sun washed the stone walls of the great chamber that held their City. They rose beyond the chamber, up and out into the world. Mubarak stared open-mouthed through the porthole as the disk climbed swiftly above a ring of hulking dunes of reddish sand and into the bright blue sky. He looked down, and saw the yawning mouth in the earth that led to his home. The area around the opening was the ultimate in desolation. In these vast, waterless dune fields, sterile under the blazing sun, extending for many hundreds of miles, nothing lived.

            The disk shot silently into the sky and approached a rift in the world fabric, high above the clouds, a gap in spacetime that the jinn knew well. In seconds they slipped between realities. It took a few more seconds for Mubarak’s vision to adapt to the many dimensions of this rift. Their City was in the human world, not in the jinn world, and sometimes he forgot how beautiful and dazzling the universe really was. He saw his father transform before his eyes, becoming more complex as his body found extra directions, new depths. The other jinn in the crew grew similarly more intricate, profoundly richer in their reality. Mubarak raised his hand before his face and studied its amazing geometry.

            Before long, they exited the rift, and were back in their metallic disk, in three spatial dimensions, rocketing over a chain of snowcapped mountains. They descended toward a human city. It was nighttime, and the city sparkled with light.

            “That’s Colorado Springs,” said his father. Mubarak knew his geography. He also recalled vaguely that the city was somehow connected with a military organization, the U.S. Air Force.

           

            Next came their encounter with humans. Mubarak’s memory of this episode was sketchy, as it was meant to be, since this was a deliberate confusion encounter, intended to baffle the humans and raise doubts among them about what is real and what is not.

            A family was taken from its house and brought dramatically aboard the floating disk. The humans seemed drugged or in a trance. There was a husband, a wife and a small girl child. They had been watching television when the abduction occurred. A strange, intense, halogen-like light streaming through the window, then mystical green mist filling the room, then total control of the humans…. It was a fairly routine process, Mubarak was told. The jinn, their shapes shifted into alien grays, pretended to examine the humans medically and spoke to each other in gibberish, nodding sagely. Then they floated the family members back to their home, and the mission was over. Mubarak’s father thought a second episode should be conducted elsewhere, but the commander was adamant – the official itinerary called for only one. So they returned to the City in the Empty Quarter.

            Mubarak remembered the face of the little girl. She had not seemed as drugged as her parents, and she had studied the jinn crew with a seriousness he had not expected. No fear, no hesitancy – just cold, scientific interest. Perhaps the little ones were not as susceptible as their parents, he thought. Perhaps the children could see through this charade….
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