David Rousseau

This account is compiled from the talks and interviews David Rousseau recorded between 2020 and 2022, and from the first two volumes of his Au-delà de notre Monde series, Âme stellaire and Exolition. His website is davidrousseau.net.

1.

Before there is a David Rousseau, there is a decision. He remembers it from the far side: a consciousness that is not human, weighing whether to go down into a world dense with fear, where beings are cut off from each other and from what they are. He knows the price. Most of his memory will be taken at the door. Something will remain, a guidance from inside, as long as he keeps to his heart. He goes anyway. He wants the difficulty, and he wants to be useful.

He does not arrive the ordinary way. There is already a boy, six years old, and the soul in that boy is leaving, by an agreement between them. David comes in as the other goes out. He is a walk-in, and he will spend the rest of his life in a body that was somebody else's first.

By eight he knows he does not belong here. One evening in August 1981 he stands alone under a sky thick with stars and says it out loud, to whoever is listening: give me a sign. A light comes on above him, bluish, very bright. It comes down without a sound and stops just over his head. Then it is gone, and where it was there is a man, very tall, with long black hair, and skin that gives off a faint blue glow. The man does not open his mouth. The words are simply there, inside David's head. Your call has been heard. The answers will come in time. You are not alone.

They keep coming as he grows, and they are not all the same. One day the visitor is small, with a great domed head and eyes like two black stones, and it does not speak in words. It shows him pictures. A star system it calls Zeta Reticuli. A people who used up their own world and have wandered ever since. And then pictures of David himself, on other nights, being lifted out of his bed, and other pictures laid over those so that he would not remember. Some of the visitors, the Grey lets him understand, take samples from children. They make hybrids. There is a small object near the root of David's nose, and it lets them find him whenever they want.

Then something happens with nobody in the room. He is lying on his bed one afternoon when he feels himself come loose and go up, until he is at the ceiling, looking down at a boy on a bed who is him. A voice speaks, steady, like a father's. You are not dying. You are perceiving another level of what is real. When he settles back into the boy and looks out of the window, the air is full of tiny points of light, drifting, everywhere. This is the energy that runs through everything, the voice says, and he is beginning to see it. His third eye is opening.

At the lycée in Nantes he sees things the other students do not. Dark shapes lean on certain boys in the corridors. Bright ones stand behind others, keeping watch. He says nothing about it. But he and his friend Fabrice have found spiritism, and they start doing automatic writing after school, a pen held loose over a sheet of paper, waiting. Words come, then drawings. Then the words change. They threaten. The presences in the room get thicker. Both boys start waking from nightmares. They keep at it for months.

One night David is riding his moped home along a long straight road when a shape gathers in the sky ahead of him, dark against the dark, and grows as he rides toward it. It has horns. Its eyes are red and lit from inside. It tells him its name is the Devil, and that it is going to fill him with fear. He does not stop the moped. He says, out loud over the engine, that it does not exist. He prays. He says it again, and again, until the thing is not there anymore. The next morning he finds Fabrice before class and tells him everything. They have gone too far. They have drawn something. There are beings, he tells him, who work on humanity from the shadows, through belief and religion and power and money, and the two of them have been knocking on that door. Fabrice agrees. They never pick up the pen again.

What they talk about instead is UFOs. David has been reading the specialist magazines, collecting sightings from the region. When a conference comes to Nantes he asks Fabrice to go with him. As the day gets closer a bad feeling settles in him, a warning he cannot make out, and they go anyway.

Near the little house where the conference is being held, two men are standing. Black suits, black hats, dark glasses, each carrying a briefcase. As David passes, one of them lowers his glasses with one finger. The skin under them is white, and the eyes are black from edge to edge. We know who you are. David cannot move. He gets his mouth working and tells Fabrice to run. When they have put enough streets behind them he explains what they walked past. Men in Black. Hybrids, human and alien DNA, belonging to the Greys, whose job is to watch everyone who comes near this subject, frighten the ones who learn too much, and keep certain things from spreading. Fabrice is white. The world is not the size he thought it was.

2.

In 1992, during a break in the school courtyard, the noise stops. Everyone is looking up. Six or seven meters over their heads a man in a tight silver suit is hanging in the air, with nothing holding him and nothing making a sound. He looks over the crowd. He stops at David. Something goes into David like a flash of light, a transmission without words, and something that was asleep in him switches on. Then the figure moves off behind the buildings and is gone. David tells the others it may have been extraterrestrial.

The next day there is nothing in the newspapers. The teachers say nothing happened. The staff say the subject is closed. The uniformity of it is what frightens him. Then a smell drifts through the school, and the students start coughing. He asks Fabrice about the man in the courtyard. Fabrice does not know what he is talking about. He spent the whole day in the infirmary, he says. David asks two or three others, and each one gives him the same blank look, and he stops asking. A whole courtyard saw it, and now it lives only in him, and the silence around it does not feel like forgetting. It feels like a decision somebody made.

That is when the voice comes back, the one from his bedroom ceiling, and gives its name. Ezahyel. The smell, Ezahyel tells him, was a gas, released on purpose over the city, one of the substances devised long ago by what he calls involutive entities, to keep humanity asleep and easy to manage. The world David walks around in is a construction, a three-dimensional matrix built to keep people from seeing what they are. A few have seen past it, masters of wisdom, seekers, and not many.

The name does something to him. He remembers, all at once, the tall man under the stars when he was eight. Ezahyel. And the man in the silver suit was one of Ezahyel's brothers, from the Pleiades, part of a great organization of worlds that is helping the Earth. What he sent into David was light language, energy with knowledge folded into it, meant to wake what David already carries as his DNA learns to hold it.

He is called up for his military service and sent to the naval fusiliers at Lorient, the navy's infantry, and everything in him refuses it. Hierarchy. Discipline. Weapons. Ezahyel does not let him off. You chose this before you came. Even this is part of the plan. So he learns to march, and to wait, and to keep the voice where nobody can hear it.

On a weekend at home, lying on his bed, he comes loose again, and this time he goes a long way. He comes down on a world where the sky is blue-green, the mountains red, the grass blue, and there are three moons up. There is music. He follows it into a round chamber where a crystal taller than a man is sounding, and the notes go through him like a hand passing through water. A being is waiting. Tall, blue-skinned, from the Bootes system: an Arcturian. The crystal called him, the being says, because David once lived here, among them, and certain memories are due to wake. They look at each other. Brother. Then he is sent gently back down the line to his body.

The link had been thinning, Ezahyel tells him afterward. Frustration with the base pulled him out of his own center. The center is the heart. Stay there and you remember who you are. Leave it and the thread goes slack.

One evening in the barracks the talk turns to strange things in the sky. One man saw a light cross the sea in Guadeloupe, low and silent. David tells his own: a summer night with a friend, two green spheres, very bright, hanging over them without a sound, then gone straight up in a flash. He adds that in this uniform it is better not to say such things too loudly.

In time he is assigned to maintain the base's green spaces rather than perform combat duties—a placement that suits him. After that he is moved from post to post: the laundry, where he works beside Olivier and trains for a truck license, the fire crew, and a children's holiday camp the military runs, which he drives for.

3.

Olivier is as deep into UFOs as David is. Olivier has heard of a recent sighting near Lorient, and of the witness who reported it and then was not there anymore. David wants to look into it, quietly. The officers, he is sure, know more than they say.

One night they walk out by the ocean, and David tells Olivier what he has pieced together. It starts in Germany in the 1930s. Groups called Vril and Thule, working on anti-gravity and the first disc-shaped craft, and behind them a medium, Maria Orsic, channeling beings from Aldebaran. Then 1947, and Truman, and Majestic-12, MJ-12, set up to handle everything that touches crashed craft and their occupants, one piece of a cover-up that runs around the world.

He stops talking. Something is coming. He feels it before he sees it, and then it is there, an oval of light, sweeping in fast from the northwest, passing over their heads and going straight down into the sea in front of them. Olivier stands with his mouth open. Neither of them has moved when the headlights come. A maritime gendarmerie patrol, and the questions start before the doors are shut. What are they doing here. Do they know this zone is restricted. David answers as little as he can. The officers, he thinks, saw the same thing on their screens, and what they want to know is whether the two of them saw it too. They are told not to come back.

The next morning, as the men line up, a gendarmerie vehicle pulls up beside them. Two names are called. David and Olivier are handcuffed in front of the whole unit and driven away.

The room has a table and men on the other side of it, and they want to know why he was in the restricted zone. He tells them he was walking. They ask again. He feels Ezahyel there, a steadiness under the fear, and says nothing that matters. Then the accusation changes. That same night, they tell him, sensitive equipment was taken from a warehouse nearby, and he and Olivier are the suspects. He says it is not true. He can feel what is underneath it: either they mean to blame the theft on him, or they mean to squeeze out of him what he saw at the water.

It goes on into the night. They tell him what the penalties are. They say the word treason. The officer across the table stops using words and uses his hands. And David, finally, tells them the truth. They were there because they watched a UFO come down into the ocean.

Nobody speaks. Then the skepticism, and the session is over, and he sleeps in a cell. In the morning they let him wash and eat, and he and Olivier are marched in front of the general who commands the base, and they tell it again: an oval craft, a bluish-white light trailing off it, over their heads in silence and then into the sea.

The general does not want to hear it. He tells them what they saw. A satellite, falling. They will say so, publicly, if anyone asks. In return the theft goes away, all of it, and the file with it. He runs the pages through the shredder while they watch. Then he looks at David and tells him that if he goes on with this, it could become dangerous.

It is the only door out of the room, and they take it. But David does not keep the bargain. Back among the men he trusts, he tells them what he saw and what he was told to say. Silence is what lets them own the story. A witness who talks is harder to make disappear.

Things start happening on the base. A man from an elite commando unit is found drowned in the harbor, a man trained not to drown. Cars arrive carrying generals and admirals, and nobody says why. David traces it back to that night on the shore.

4.

He starts writing it down, the sighting and the pressure to keep quiet, an article for two ufology magazines. Then he lies down, worn out, and as he drifts off a spiral of light wraps around him and he is standing on a ship. Ezahyel is there, and others who are not human, and the place feels like somewhere he has been. He walks to a console without deciding to and asks the ship to show him where he comes from, in the Pleiades. A planet blooms in the air in front of him, luminous. Alcyona. And there is a child with pale blue skin, playing in quiet country under two suns, and the child is him. These memories already live in you, Ezahyel says. They are only waiting.

Someone wants to see him. The ship turns toward Mars and is there in minutes. They cloak for the descent, because there is life down there and it is not what anyone on Earth imagines; far to the east a pyramid stands up out of the plain, enormous. They settle into a hollow among the mountains, pull on one-piece suits that shrink to the body, and a beam sets them on the ground.

A man is waiting by the rocks. Brown skin, black eyes, long black hair, and armor that catches the light like gold. He greets Ezahyel in words David recognizes, without knowing how, as Mayan, and the words run down his back like cold water. His name is Xaman'Ek. He looks at David's face and laughs. They made you forget. That is why you are younger now than when we last met. They sent him back into his own past, he says, and inside a door hidden in the rock he explains what that means.

As a child David was taken by Greys from Orion. A secret organization, one that logs such abductions, flagged him. They offered him a program hidden from everyone, and he accepted it, freely. They trained him to use what he had, the empathy, the psychic reach, to make contact with civilizations across the galaxy, and he did that work for twenty years. When the contract ended he refused to go on. So his body was made young again and put back at an earlier point in time, and his memory left in pieces.

Xaman'Ek wants to give some of it back. A needle of obsidian comes down out of the ceiling and stops over David's head, and something goes from it straight into the strands of his DNA. While it works he sees another world, Ma'ia, Pleiadian: villages in a green landscape, a pyramid at the center, and over the forest a ship that looks carved from polished stone, hanging without a sound. Then it is morning and he is in his own bed. That was not a dream, the voice says.

The next evening only Ezahyel and Xaman'Ek are aboard, and they are going to the Moon. David says it is a dead rock. Xaman'Ek says Apollo 11 came, and did not have time to land, because it came too close to what David is about to see. On the far side, a shuttle the size of a car circles twice over a cleared area, and floodlights come on. A hatch opens in the ground. Under it is a complex, wide and deep, with a parking area for craft at the center, and men in suits moving about their business, and among them beings that are taller than men and have tails. Reptilians, from Orion.

Some humans work with them, Xaman'Ek says, and this place has been here since the Second World War. German scientists built anti-gravity craft from alien technology and started putting bases off the Earth. When the war turned, the people and the machines were moved to Antarctica, and the program went on there, and grew into what is called the Dark Fleet. It is allied with the reptilians. It runs operations between the planets, and on other worlds it keeps populations in slavery. Against it, other programs were formed on Earth, in alliance with a federation of worlds.

And David was in them. He cannot remember, because the implants hold the memory down. At the level of the soul he agreed to all of it, the Greys included. Xaman'Ek offers to show him. There are holographic recordings of his own missions. The thought of seeing himself in them is too much, and he passes out.

He wakes on Mars. He asks Xaman'Ek to leave the rest where it is, so that he can come to it at his own speed. Xaman'Ek puts the sequence back to sleep and gives him only the shape of it. Every abduction is logged, through the signal of the implants, so the military side of the Earth alliance knew who was taken, and when, and where. They came to him with a proposal, and he said yes.

Then Xaman'Ek tells him where he is from. An ancient Maya civilization whose people came down from the Pleiades. And before that, the Orion wars, in which reptilian factions and others split into two camps, creation on one side and domination on the other. The Earth is where the fallout of that war is still coming down, through the duality in every human being and the long work of growing past it. That, he adds, is how David came to know him: on a rescue mission on Mars, when the Draco went too far.

David wakes at home, finishes his service, and takes temporary work. The strangeness keeps coming.

5.

One Saturday night in Nantes, in an alley beside a bar, armed men close in around him, commandos, and tell him he knows what will happen if he carries on. He tells them to shoot, then: they will never reach his spirit. And they are not there. The alley is empty. In the morning a letter is waiting. It carries the logos of all three armed forces and no signature and no stamp. He is to stop circulating information classified secret défense, immediately, or the necessary measures will be taken.

He has seen a black triangle up close, and something in him says he has been inside one, and he asks Ezahyel about it. A TR-3B, Ezahyel says. Terrestrial. Built from crashed craft. That night the memory breaks. He wakes in the dark watching something play out in front of him like a film, and it is his own life. He is eight. A dark triangle passes over him and a beam takes him up. Inside are American soldiers, and one of them speaks perfect French. Minutes later they are over a desert in America, and then underground, in a complex so large he cannot see the end of it, doctors and scientists and soldiers with weapons.

A woman speaks inside his head, and he answers her without moving his lips. She is more than three hundred thousand kilometers away, she says, and it goes through him: she is not on Earth. She is on the Moon. A general explains. They need people like him, people who can speak with the mind. He can refuse. He can go home whenever he wants. At a heavy metal door the general stops and tells him that once he crosses it there is no turning back. I want to, the boy says.

From that night the missions come up one after another, for a special unit, with soldiers, and with Blue Avians, Pleiadians, Arcturians, and Xaman'Ek.

He founds a regional UFO research group, OARPO, with a man from his own commune as treasurer, puts announcements in the magazines, and the letters start to come. One of them takes him to a woman who was abducted by Greys. They took her ova, she tells him, and later showed her three children, hers and not hers, made from human and alien genetics. He drives home certain that the hybridization programs are real and not finished.

The years teach him what Ezahyel keeps saying. Live from the heart. Let go. Reality is one thing, not two, and it is made of love. Everything he has lived, seen from there, is one thread: a mission bound up with the changing of the Earth.

6.

In 1997 he goes deep into Native American spirituality, and a wish takes hold of him and will not let go. He needs a drum. He gets one, and the first time he strikes it his consciousness comes loose and he is somewhere else, and somebody is waiting.

A Cheyenne chief, warrior and medicine man, who gives his name as Black Eagle. Memory floods between them. David knows him. In a life among the Lakota they were brothers, and the bond was the shamanic kind, older than blood. This meeting was set long ago, Black Eagle tells him, for the moment David answered the drum and stepped back onto his road.

The knowing takes a body at a Native American festival in Alsace. He buys a ceremonial breastplate from a Lakota artisan and puts it on, and a vibration runs through him from the neck down, as if the thing has plugged him back into a circle he had fallen out of. Black Eagle speaks to him from somewhere higher. He is on his road now. For days David lives in the camp among friends, in traditional clothing.

The festival closes for the night. He is asleep in his tipi when a voice says his name, and Xaman'Ek is standing inside the tent. There is a mission and it cannot wait. A beam of light forms in the tipi and takes him up into a ship. Two of the crew are Maya like Xaman'Ek. They are going to Mars, and David has done this before, in his years in the programs.

They come in over the planet and there is a city. It sits under a dome of energy that keeps the radiation out and the air in: towers, aerial vehicles moving between them, tens of thousands of people under the shield. Somewhere in it two families are locked up, human descendants of the ancient Maya, born into slavery in one of the off-world programs. They woke up. They reached out with their minds for allies, far away. They were caught. They are to be executed.

The plan is a trick of the mind. Psycho-sensitive projection, Xaman'Ek calls it. The guards will see three soldiers bringing in a prisoner, and the prisoner is David. They shove him forward with his hands behind his back, and he feels handcuffs that are not there close on his wrists. Shut up and walk. Two guards in black stop them. A traitor, Xaman'Ek says, for the cells before his execution; he attended a so-called religious meeting and tried, like the others, to talk to someone outside. A serial number. A protocol code. They are waved through. David looks back, and the two guards are already dissolving into the air.

At the end of a corridor of metal doors, two cells face each other. David goes into one with Xaman'Ek. The family inside presses back from them, afraid, speaking a language he does not know, an old Mayan tongue perhaps, and the father is bent over their things and will not look round. Then they understand who has come, and all four rush to thank him, and the father turns—and David cannot breathe. He knows this face. The man knows his. I am so happy to see you again, the man says at last. I was told you had disappeared.

Have we met?

I am simply another version of you. Or rather, of your soul.

One of the Maya calls from the corridor. Two groups of soldiers, closing in. The teleportation elevator is too far. An alarm starts. Xaman'Ek walks toward the soldiers, reaching into them with his mind, and it does not work; David hears the safeties come off the weapons. He has put himself in front of the children, who are crying, and there is nothing else to do, so he closes his eyes and sends everything in his heart out around the group.

Above the shouting, a sound he has heard before. Two blue spheres of light drop through the ceiling and close over them. The soldiers fire, in bursts, and every round dies in the light. One of them throws an explosive and nothing happens. The spheres lift, and the rescuers and the two families rise up through the floors of the structure as if it were smoke, and then they are in space and moving fast. The Blue Avians, he and Xaman'Ek tell the family, are the ones who send the spheres. What matters is that they are free.

Ahead of them a ship fills the sky, a sphere, lit from inside like a lantern. An Arcturian mother ship. David turns to the man beside him and admits that he cannot even remember his name. I am you and you are me, the man says. Listen to your heart. David shuts his eyes and a name comes up out of the dark. Ixmucane. Four blue beings, three meters tall and more, meet them at the airlock, and kindness comes off them like heat; they move as if they were floating, and their robes seem alive. The ship is a city of light, level on level, and everyone in it is linked by thought to the ship itself. At a round table they are given news of Ezahyel. He is well. He is at an outpost on the edge of the Milky Way, and the outpost is fragile.

At the parting Ixmucane holds him and weeps. I am you and you are me. From now on we are always connected, whatever the distance. You are free now, David tells him, to be who you really are. From Mars orbit they are set down at the base they started from, and Xaman'Ek takes him home, and he wakes in the tipi with everything already there.

7.

Another night the spiral takes him past his body into what he has come to call the fifth dimension. He is on a green hill under a sequoia, and Black Eagle is there, and the land around them is California with no cities and no roads, a higher version of the Earth.

They smoke the sacred pipe together, and as the smoke goes up David sees his own thoughts in it, taking shape. That is how it is here, Black Eagle says. Thought becomes form at once, before it ever reaches the lower densities. Whatever the heart conceives, appears. David watches it happen and understands that the physical world is the last place a thing arrives, not the first.

Human society, Black Eagle tells him, is a dream that everyone is dreaming together. Beliefs, rules, conditioning, handed down. Parents and schools and churches teach each child to take part, and fear keeps everyone in it, so that nobody sees what they are. A walk-in is bound to it less than the others. He was never trained into it from birth.

Before they part, Black Eagle tells him that a new phase is opening. He should follow the creative road now, writing, drawing, music, healing, and hand on what he has learned.

Then his life starts moving fast. His employer's business falters. The ground under him goes soft. And inside, something holds. It has been there since he was small, a presence that speaks from within rather than standing in front of him, so familiar that he calls it his Father. It never gives a name. It wants him to recognize it for himself, and to keep walking down a road he cannot see the end of.

One day he is sitting in his car and Black Eagle is in the passenger seat. There is a woman David met online recently, Clara. She is his soulmate, Black Eagle says. Not a new bond, a remembered one, a reunion across lives. With the word comes a weight David did not ask for: he starts feeling what she feels, her pain moving through him as if it were his. This is an initiation, Black Eagle tells him. It will ask him for detachment, and clarity, and the eagle's habit of seeing from above.

They meet in a crowded bar. It is an ordinary evening for the length of a drink. Then, as they talk, time thins out, and he sees, behind the two bodies at the table, two souls, luminous, alive. They are drawn together. They embrace and merge and the energy of it spreads out to fill the room, and on the surface nothing is happening at all, two people talking in a bar, and he is seeing both at once until it fades and he is back in his chair.

They keep talking, and it turns out that she lives in the same inner country. Without being asked she describes a fatherly presence that guides her, and it is the same one, and they name it together: the Source itself, the Great Spirit, the One. What was uncertain in him settles.

It becomes a partnership. He leaves his work and turns toward art, and she does not resist any of it. She pushes his projects. A move, a new business: they do it as one. Out of it he finds a philosophy and gives it a name, Exolition. To love someone, he comes to understand, you have to be whole first, not looking to be completed or saved. Clara is not there to fill a hole. Love is not a trade. It rests on nothing, expects nothing, holds nothing, and it flows, out of presence and trust and the quiet certainty that nothing is missing.

8.

They move into a new house. There is warmth, and momentum, especially around his work. And underneath it something shifts before he can name it. A distance. She is in the room and somewhere else at the same time, somewhere he cannot follow.

She closes, most of all where the deep feelings are. He can sense the weight of her past, a wound of separation and loss, and every time he reaches for it he meets a wall. The more he reaches, the further she goes. There is a tragedy in her family. She takes a job in Nantes, an hour's drive away, and soon she is not coming home during the week at all.

In August his friend Sweetly comes up from Marseille for a week. On the Friday evening the two men are cooking when Clara comes in, pours herself a drink, and another, and starts attacking David. He cannot see what has set it off. It gets worse. He brings his fist down on the table and goes outside to breathe. When he comes back in and looks at her, the darkness in her eyes puts a chill through him.

He is pouring the coffee when he says it, to both of them: the Greys are here. His nose starts to bleed. It has done that before. Clara is on her feet and gone into the bedroom, and David goes out into the dark. On the roof of the house across the street there is a Grey. By the time he lifts his arm to point it is gone. Then another, in the neighbor's garden. Sweetly cannot see them but he can feel them. David shouts at them, and it comes out closer to rage than he expected: he wants nothing more to do with them. After a while he feels them go.

Was Clara taken too? Yes, Black Eagle says. She does not know it. She lived it as a trauma. And the reptilians David senses around her, silent, working on her from behind? Black Eagle says nothing, and the nothing is an answer. In the night David wakes with words in his head. She is lying to you. She is not sincere.

Weeks later he is working on a Saturday with Clara in the room when they come in directly. First his concentration goes. Then his hands stop obeying him. High frequencies fill his inner ear, then whispers, chopped and scattered, and then a voice, perfectly clear, and nothing like the contact he knows. It does not come through the heart. It carries no love and no peace. He puts up his protection and they hit it, and the pain in his temples and ears goes past what he can stand.

So he builds a mirror. By thought, a quantum mirror, to see who is on the other side of the glass. Eyes shut, he repeats it like a mantra. Let me see beyond the illusion. On the fourth repetition a black curtain drops in front of his eyes, and there they are: four people at translucent screens and two soldiers, all in dark clothes. They can see that he sees them, and it throws them into a panic. An officer is shouting. Cut the link. Cut everything. Now. Who the hell are you? One of the operators is wired to a computer through sensors, and David goes into him, and the letters come up. MJ-12. He tells them he knows who they are now. CIA. Nobody is laughing. He is reaching into their minds for their names when it all goes black. They have cut the link.

They want into his mind, Xaman'Ek tells him afterward, to stop him saying certain things. They know he is having flashbacks of his missions. But he has no proof of anything, David objects. What are they afraid of? The fact that he remembers. They are afraid he will talk, and he is going to, soon. Xaman'Ek and his people are keeping watch over him. What was buried is working its way up, and the people who buried it are pushing down.

9.

It all goes at once. The money runs out. The business fails. And Clara has betrayed him. The day he leaves, she tells him she never loved him. It goes through him like a current, and in the clarity of it he tells her he never wants to see her again.

At the bottom, Ezahyel comes back, after a long absence. There is no preamble. Ezahyel puts his arms around him and everything David has been holding comes apart, and it is not only grief that comes loose. The body has been marked by this, Ezahyel says, the liver, the stomach. He keeps hold of him and something warm moves through the places that hurt.

But he finds something else while he is looking. Under the skin, in the subtle layers of the body, there is a mark. Not visible. Precise, unmistakable, and it has a signature. A reptilian blade. David has no memory of any such wound, and the question hangs between them: what has been happening to him that he does not know about?

He goes back, in his mind, to the night of the Greys. It lasted a few minutes. Ezahyel's face changes. They did not just try, he says. They took him that night. Space-time bends when it happens; he was with them for hours, and afterward his memory was parasitized. They will have put a new implant in him. And despite the watch set over him, no one warned Ezahyel. Will it never stop, David asks. Once you are in these programs, Ezahyel says, nothing ever really stops.

There is one way to find out. Aboard the ship, Xaman'Ek runs the scanner over him and finds an implant at the base of the neck, Grey-made, and shuts it off. Then the scanner finds a second. Reptilian, a new generation, lodged in his back behind the liver, exactly where he has had pains he could not explain. And there is the wound itself. Nothing they have can erase the imprint; the Arcturians think the organ would have to be re-encoded at the crystalline level of the DNA. The liver holds the mark like something on standby. Waiting for what, nobody can say.

At the base on Mars the obsidian needle turns over his head again, hunting through his past for the moment it happened. Then David is placed in front of a quantum mirror. Xaman'Ek touches a small device, a circle forms at the center of the surface and twists into a vortex, and they are pulled through it to another point on David's own timeline.

Soldiers, gearing up. An off-world operation. Mars, a hostile complex, a rescue. He is watching, and he is also in it, his past self among the men, and one of them stands out, a French soldier a little older than he is, with an air of authority that steadies everyone around him, someone David feels he has known a very long time. They go in without hesitating. The craft sets down in front of the complex and they move, and inside it comes apart at once. It is an ambush. Reptilians pour out of the walls, far more of them than anyone expected, and the unit is swallowed.

His past self is firing a particle-beam rifle when it comes from behind. A reptilian, close, and a blade going in. The impact goes through more than the body. In the present, standing at the mirror, the same wound opens in him, and memory and injury arrive together and drop him to his knees, and the lights go out.

He wakes in a medical pod without pain. Xaman'Ek has erased the memory of the blade where it was written into the body. It happened late in the twenty years, and the wound should have been fatal. The commander of the unit got him to the ship and into a medical bed, and he did not wake, and so the commander called the Arcturians, whom he knew David was in contact with, and they put him in a pod and regenerated the ruined organ as far as it could go. And the commander, the one David was so sure he knew? Xaman'Ek will not say. That is for David to remember. Xaman'Ek has already gone past what the protocols allow.

10.

Ezahyel and Xaman'Ek had told him a Frenchman he knew in the programs would come back into his life. Years later, he does. From their first messages David feels that he knows this man, and says so, and Jean-Charles Moyen says, unprompted, that he knows David too. After that, more memories come back.

He is eight or nine, walking down a corridor on a ship, and Jupiter is filling the window. A hand rests on his left shoulder, a woman's, and he knows her without being able to say how. The others call her Maria; later he will be told she is Maria Orsic. She is taking him to a room like a classroom, to meet children unlike any he has seen, and there is only one other little boy from Earth among them.

In another memory he is about twenty-five, in the same military suit as the men around him, on the way to a rescue on Mars. Someone is talking to him, and when he turns he almost jumps. It is Jean-Charles, an officer now, calming him while his troops get ready for a terrible fight with the Draco. David has a bad feeling about it. There is no choice. There are human slaves down there.

The ship lands facing a building that is half falling down. Jean-Charles sends two groups to sweep the site and takes David and a handful of men toward a room at the back. Screams. Shots. A group of Draco bursts out in front of them. Jean-Charles orders David down and goes at them himself, and he never gets within two meters. The tail comes round and takes him off his feet, and David hears a cry from his brother that he will never forget. His whole side is torn open. David covers him, firing at the Draco and screaming for the medics, and with another man he gets Jean-Charles up, shouting in pain, and carries him back to the ship. By the medical room there is almost no pulse. He is losing consciousness. The medics push David out, and he stands in the corridor with his face wet.

They keep him waiting far too long. Ten men or more died in the raid, and he is sure he knows what the delay means. When at last they come for him, Jean-Charles is sitting on the edge of a bed in the infirmary, smiling, whole. David goes into his arms. You frightened me. A little more and you were gone. You saved my life, brother.

Of one thing David is certain. He knew Jean-Charles during his service aboard the Solar Warden fleet, on the same ship, the Solaris, and before that, before the Earth. Jean-Charles remembers the same classroom, and the other boy from Earth in it, three years younger than him, with black hair and big green eyes: David. He remembers the same missions on Mars. And one more memory, from that classroom, with Maria and the children from other worlds: leaving at the end of a lesson, David finds Jean-Charles in the corridor talking to a green-skinned being with red eyes, the one Jean-Charles calls Victor, and throws himself into his arms. Brothers for life. We'll meet again soon. Twenty years on, they have found each other again, on Earth this time, as Ezahyel and Xaman'Ek had said.

The suppression does not hold forever, however well it was done. For David it gives way in exactly the measure that he stays in his heart, and that is the thread through everything he has lived. Before he came, when he asked how best to open the heart, the answer was simple. Watch everything that happens in you. Listen to the voice inside. Let go of the resistance to things not being as you want them. Accept yourself as you are, because only then can you accept anyone else. Ezahyel's teaching is the same. Come back to center. Love yourself without conditions so that you can love others the same way, and do not let what is outside you soak in.

That is how, months after Clara, he comes to forgive her, tears up the soul contracts that bound him to her, and comes back to the present moment and to Exolition, which is, he has come to understand, simply the state we started in. What you resist persists. The more you live from the heart, the more you make your life instead of enduring it, because in the whole there is no separation, and everything is love.