From somewhere below the ordinary ground, huge stones are erupting from the earth in a row, slow and inevitable, as though the land has been holding its breath for a long time and has only now decided to exhale. Nearby, a dense chi ball with a dragon eye center hovers at chest height, neither advancing nor retreating, simply watching. The eye does not blink. The air around it is not cold.
Further into the cedar grove, transparent eggs rest among the deep roots, each one containing a swirling matrix of code inside that shifts and pulses like weather seen from altitude. The process of injecting eggs with brainstorms is already underway, quiet and deliberate, and the code is crystallizing as the eggs slowly turn opaque, their surfaces going from glass to milk to something that holds light rather than transmits it. There is no urgency in the grove. The wrapping and incubating of eggs among the deep cedar trees continues at its own pace, the solid collected eggs connected to something beyond the grove that cannot quite be named from this distance. Earth energy watches back as it is held — a reciprocal attention, unhurried, patient as geology.
Above the treeline the weather shifts register entirely. A futuristic flying SUV is landing and lifting across vast distances, its movements too smooth for anything with mass, touching down and releasing like a breath. Alien light ships are appearing around the vehicle in the sky, neither hostile nor welcoming, simply present in the way that distant phenomena are present — factual, enormous, uninterested in explanation. Through the rear window, a silent executive is making faces from the backseat, private expressions cycling across a face that expects no audience. The craft continues its survey, touring space travel engineering sites from the air, each site smaller and more intricate than the last.
What binds the grove to the sky tonight is the quality of patient cultivation — the same waiting that keeps the eggs turning in the cedar dark also governs the long arcs of flight, the way lightning shot toward the stars and did not return, the way the SUV holds its altitude without apparent effort. Fire energy moves through the upper atmosphere effortless as riding a bike, requiring nothing, burning clean.
Below, the eggs have not yet fully formed. The stones continue their slow emergence from the soil.