The Time of the Titans

Chapter 7: The Nautilus Expeditions

I had a dream which I vaguely realized was not a dream. I was a child, and I was in the institution where they placed my mother when she had got worse. Everything was white, and people spoke in quiet voice, as if wary of every single word and tone. The entire atmosphere was oppressed. I saw my mother, and she barely recognized me, but I was satisfied to see her calm and drowsy, instead of being obsessed about every gesture and word of mine, real or imagined. I hated myself for my wish that she would stay there and not return home soon.

*   *   *

Where did all these dreams come from? Were they real memories from the lives we had had on Earth, or were they something else? The other dreams – the events in the Temple of Stendar – they could possibly not come from my earthly experiences, as I recognized the site here on Atlantis, and I had never been here before this life. Or had I? It was strange how I came to think in terms of 'this life'. Had the titans tampered with our memories somehow, and if so – why would they do that? Were they perhaps side-effects of something else?

I was standing in front of the mirror in my bathroom. It was the only room in my quarters that did not have a window with a pleasant view at the Sinean Sea. I stared at the young man who faced me in the mirror – the man I took as 'me'. But it was in that exact morning that I had finally started having doubts over the matter. As with so many other things here, it had started with a dream.

Another nightmare, another traumatic experience from my childhood: I had accidentally hit my own leg with the axe I used for cutting firewood. At the cabin, by the lake which had the magic island in the middle. Blood spilled all over, and there was a man carrying me in panic to the campsite for bondage and first aid. I used to be a boy-scout. Who was the man, I was not sure – he was a stranger who helped me. It all ended well, but it left a big white scar on my leg, which would still be visible when I was adult.

The thing I had only realized that morning in Atlantis was this: the scar was not there.

*   *   *

One of the things in Atlantis that I kept missing from Lemuria were my frequent conversations with Moom Lala. To my satisfaction, such conversations were reinstituted a couple of weeks into teaching I did in Atlantis. I had the impression that Lala did not get involved with the other teachers on similarly personal terms. Then again, I had had the feeling already in Lemuria that Lala considered me as something special, something almost semi-divine. The other teachers had to deal with the more rigid Hemul controllers who were in formal charge of the school.

"How do you like the teaching so far, Sir Mikael?" began Moom Lala our conversation in an airy, bubble-like meeting room on the penthouse level of the floating city, with wide open views to the sea, and over the channel-bank boulevards.

"It's fine", I answered. "The children are extremely well-behaving."

Lala's expression on their teletubby face was ambiguous but there was a tint of sadness that I didn't quite decipher at the beginning.

"You have no problems?" they enquired, almost apologetically.

"With the children, no." I felt they expected something from me, so I brought up my previous wish. "But I'd like to have the information of the rest of the universe restored in the encyclopaedia, if you don't mind. Now I cannot search for anything related to Lemuria and the other places. It seems as if there's only Atlantis-related information available, in addition to the Earth of the Old Age."

"Ah, I see", said Moom Lala, but they said it in a restrained way. "I should see what can be done to that. It depends on city regulations. As you surely have heard, there was a rebellion in the past, and they had to restructure security policies for Atlantis."