Jahar

We are in the middle of a living room. Three other people are staring at us. “What are you doing here? Where did you come from?”, one of them says. We do not answer, but instead take a step forward. The room is bright – there are sofas by the windows and a dining table right in front of us. We go to the dining table and look under it. A medallion is lying there, in the form of a triangle with a hammer over it. The symbol is familiar – it belongs to a Pythagorean sect that deals with time travel. The name of the sect is Jahar. We must have been teleported here. The room is a hotel room, the people in the room are hotel guests. Each room that we are being teleported to belongs to a different epoch. But we do not know why this is happening.

The hotel is located at the intersection Hornsgatan / Torkel Knutssongatan. We leave the hotel and stand in the middle of the intersection. It’s still bright outside. The Earth moves into Jupiter’s gravitational field. In the sky we see how Jupiter’s rings have broken up; soon the grains of dust, ice particles and pieces of stone that the rings consist of will rain down over Earth. Maybe they would make the same noise as when we saw how the flight of a green woodpecker over a lake caused the undercooled clouds to burst and rain down on the houseboat we once traveled in.

The back of the hotel leads onto a dark clay field. Animals walk around there randomly – worn animals without fur, quadrupeds, big as sheep but tired and skinny as if they had decided that they need nothing more than mud. It is unclear what the Pythagorean sect want with the animals. In any case, the situation became much more threatening when the animals entered the picture.

We stand under a tree and start to gesture with each other. It is so strange to see one’s own hands in one’s own field of vision. Everything in one’s field of vision belongs to the world out there. The one you have to travel through as an infiltration force behind enemy lines. But you can control your own hands. And when you notice that they are moving, everything suddenly becomes a little more real. As if there might be more things you can control. While these thoughts wash over us, the surroundings become all the grayer and filled with hail. We stretch our arms and start spinning around. It is the fastest way to travel to the Department of Physics and Mathematics.

Of course, you only move to different rooms, in different ways. But it’s basically the same room. The same old ordinary rooms with the same old ordinary hands that you hold in front of you. In any case, it’s the same three people at the department as it was at the hotel. Two are associate professors, but everything is so dark in the entrance, what are they doing here now? They say that they must investigate the relationship between astronomy and astrology, that it may be the case that the meaning conveyed to mankind by the constellations of stars also has geometric connotations. They must establish a phenomenology for the constellations. The third person is a well-known Soviet physicist – his presence underlines the seriousness of the situation.

This makes us suspicious. We have previously heard of a new sect claiming to consist of “the true knights”. These are knights who have gone beyond “individualistic materialism” and who “manage to use both u and t”. They operate with a kind of free dissemination of information, but are actually closely related to the old Gnostic archons. The knights’ base of operation is a small shed in the middle of a jungle, where they have set up advanced measuring devices in the windows. Elephants and zebras stand motionless outside the shed and observe the measuring devices.

Is it because of the inverted solar eclipse – the sky gets darker and darker the farther away the moon moves from the sun – that everything seems to converge: the hotel guests, the docents and the Soviet physicist, the true knights, the sects, the elephants and the zebras? Be that as it may, the monetary system has dissolved due to the celestial movements. It is no longer possible to trade with money. People want to pay when the apocalypse is over. But it feels impossible – is not the apocalypse a terminus rather than a transient stage? And the planets, these wanderers, why are they always the ones to signal the end?

It feels like we’ve learnt enough; it’s time to leave this planet. We head to a temple in a nearby forest grove. It is now completely dark outside and the stars are clearly visible. We stand in the middle of the temple square and focus our gaze on one of the constellations. The stars are of course only small points on the celestial sphere, but it is possible to imagine the lines that connect the points so that a constellation emerges. This can be used to travel through space. It’s actually a fairly simple trick: since the constellations are two-dimensional projections onto the celestial sphere, the whole third, radial dimension has been packed together into a tangible image, and you can then travel along the graphical representation instead of in real space. From one of the constellations, one of its connecting lines is released and begins to rotate towards us to finally drag us into the space behind the constellation.

We end up on a beach on an alien planet in a dying star system. Acid waves wash up along the shore, and various birds and sea lions make noises further away. The area is gray and filled with ash. In the tired sky, faint stars can be seen, forming unknown constellations. At the beach we see a bird that does not belong on this planet, which can mean nothing more than a complete disaster. A faint light begins to wave back and forth in the sky, perhaps it is associated with the misplaced bird. We approach a ramp nearby. The ramp leads down to the interior of the planet. It is covered with snow and there are shovels nearby that you can use for steering when you go down the ramp. We do it – and realize that “jahar” means “inner”.