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=  Chapter Eight =
==================
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They took their doses of transcendental apperceptive essence, and
after some time, the trip began. They began to perceive Stephanie's
transit from Earth to Malasrion.

***

It was stupendous. The entire journey was a warm and sunny descent
onto the inner surface of Malasrion. Exactly how you end up on the
inside of a sphere from the outside of one, when the smaller is not
inside or does not intersect with the larger, Stephanie would never
ever be able to explain to herself, let alone someone else.

The actual time it took, Stephanie could not perceive, either. The
wide-open lawns of Matilda Bay had both rushed away from her, upwards,
just as fast as the surface of Malasrion had been rocketing towards
her feet. She could have sworn she had not rotated in any of the three
dimensions she knew, yet she had, sure enough, gone straight upwards,
and straight downwards—perhaps she had blinked, or lost attention, and
her crew of space Anarchists had engineered their favourite
Disney-ification of their arrivals between Earth and Malasrion.

The one thing Stephanie found disarming was that she had been
perfectly contented and unalarmed while traversing many thousands of
dimensions—all while being perfectly alone.

She suddenly remembered Rayan—Drago—had said to her that her journey
would be on her lonesome. It made perfect sense to Stephanie, the
experience that Stephanie was about to have was going to be
work. Drago did not have to go through a difficult and convoluted
journey between dimensions anymore—besides, he needed to get home
before Stephanie, to prepare the house for a guest.

“It is a little like driving to Melbourne just to get down the road to
the Deli,” Stephanie suddenly remembered she had said.

Stephanie was sure she had slept for some of the journey—or had at
least lost consciousness and then somehow awoken; either which way it
was a pleasant and refreshing process through which to go.

Perhaps she had no sense of the speed at which she was moving—it felt
like an enormous rapid acceleration, followed by a leisurely
deceleration.

Eventually, after waking what seemed like the third or fourth time—she
awoke to the perfect acceptance that she had been joined by the rest
of her Anarchist collective.

“Is this journey the same for everyone, Drago—I'm sorry,—Rayan?”

“Yes it is. And we are both very sorry for the cheap fare we paid for
you to come be with us.”

“It was possibly the most pleasant waiting-room experience I have ever
had in my life.”

“Yes, I absolutely love it.” Goh exclaimed.

“This is a recording, isn't it?” Stephanie laughed. She immediately
felt a little embarrassment, as if a camera had been shoved in her
face.

“More-or-less,” Lutrin smiled reassuringly. “But we can record any
memory at any time, we can even go back and decide to record a transit
such as this after it has transpired.

“I know this might seem a little condescending, Stephanie, but even
though Malasrion assumes physical form here to you now because we are
impoverished from the collapse of our civilisation, most of Malasrion
manages to exist outside space and time. This physical colony of ours
is our shadow of our real selves. Real selves that we are less and
less being able to be.”

“Is the real Lutrin talking to me right now?”

“Unfortunately, yes. Our group of comrades here are very
impoverished. We have a grab-bag of magic tricks we can deploy at will
when we are living on Earth—and in third-dimensional Malasrion—but we
can only use our transcendental powers within the third dimension. We
are, truly, lumpenproletariat. I believe Goh here was born in the
third dimension, only to discover his transcendental powers and visit
other dimensions later on in life, as he is a young one. Of course
both myself and Rayan remember the glory days of the Gremanese
Revolution, so inspired as it was by Noral Mosky. She was a wonderful
idol for both Rayan and I growing up. We were too young to have fought
in the revolution, but we remember the great strides that Malasrion
made into leaving the third dimension.

“We really are old folk, aren't we Rayan.”

“Well, I believe we are both very sickly. To have lived through the
great flourishing of the beginning, as well as the bloody end of
Communism for the Malasrionese, and arrived here in destitution, I
would say we don't have much left in either of us.”

“But we believed in something...”

“Well, I would say your steady hold onto the right cause might just
pay off,” Palm-Frond interjected. “Don't ruin the mood! Earth will be,
perhaps, joining us, in several short millennia, here beyond the third
dimension, fresh off their civilisation's path of flourishing, and we
would have toppled Scanlon, the Pact, as well as the Body Politic.”

“Aren't we so lucky.” Rayan turned to Lutrin.

***

- EOF -