As a young girl, Jolie had been mesmerized by the kaleidoscope of light strobes streaking down between the branches of the nearby woods as he rode her bike down the trail.  In her innocence, she imagined faeries.

By the time she’d become a teenager, her exotic addiction with light gushed endorphins, like euphoric brain fireworks, with each ride, the once-hardened dirt trail now visibly grooved with bike-tire repetition.

Her first time making love, she invited her lover to lie with her there, her physical pleasure enhanced by the play of dancing light surrounding them and, later, enchanted with his dappled nude form in post-orgasmic bliss.

Her obsession followed her, years on, to serve on a diplomatic mission to Noth in the Altair System with its renowned Forest of Djemm.  It was forbidden to off-worlders, but rumors spread like a virus—some true and many otherwise—throughout the habitable worlds about its unique characteristics, about trees stretching to the clouds, their twisted limbs festooned with leaves of unimaginable color clusters, filtering through the argon-laden atmosphere.

Leaving behind her associates one afternoon, Jolie flew to its border in a hover-glider, close enough to see from afar the magical swirl of its upward-spiraling rainbow of colors clusters she couldn’t name, and hear the trees faintly singing in the distance.  Mesmerized, getting a closer look became her personal mission.

Her diplomatic status and a hundred thousand credits bought an audience with Magistrate Jorn, whose eyes never left her. While money had arranged the meeting, it offered no guarantee of its outcome.  Every blue-skinned Nothian had dark blue hair, making pale-skinned, blonde Jolie an enticement for even the most stoic among them.

“No easy request,” Jorn shrugged. “Question of faith.”

“Faith?”

He paused and tried, “Sacred place.”

Jolie, nodding, showed Jorn her most seductive smile. The very act of breathing the Nothian atmosphere left Jolie giddy enough to shed what few inhibitions she harbored.  “There must be a way.”

Jorn blushed a deeper shade of blue. “Come home—me and you—tonight.”

She agreed, certain the pleasures of her alien body would grant her entrance, and at the same time, satisfy her own curiosity.

“One thing I must warn you,” her new lover-benefactor said as she lay in his strong, blue arms. “You different. Maybe God won’t like you see God.”

“God?  No… no God, forest!” she exclaimed, thinking maybe Jorn had misunderstood her.  An easy smile conveyed her outburst had fostered no underlying anger.

Jorn’s eyes crinkled with delight. “So beautiful when you smile. Maybe God like you, then me and you live here.” He opened his arms in invitation, gazing at her with pleading intensity. His eyes changed color to a tumbleweed tone of beige she’d noted before, telling her wordlessly that he wanted to make love again. She smiled and rolled atop him, kissing him with abandon.

In the morning, they visited Naal, the Holy Man of Djemm who led them through dim tunnels to a twilit cave, motioning them stop while he continued on.  Within moments, a bass hum throbbed through the chamber, soon followed by blue radiance emanating from a flask in Naal’s hand as he returned.

“Must drink soon.  Water of Knowledge I make.” Naal explained. “No one outside Noth ever drink. Don’t know what.”

Jolie, understanding the warning, felt her mouth go dry. “I am ready.”

First Jorn and then Naal sipped, passing the flask to Jolie.

“Must finish all,” Naal instructed her.

The humming intensified as she took a deep swallow, as the cave transformed into a vortex of cadencing color patterns.

Jolie found herself in the Forest, awash in the color/songs of the trees. She sang with them in a voice at once her own and not quite so. An orb of blue flame swooped down from the tallest of trees, engulfing Jolie in burning rhythm. Snake-like, she sloughed off her skin, emerging whole but transparent, a single note in the soaring harmony of Noth, aglow in undulating ribbons of color/song, cleansing her in interlaced molten canticles from an ancient past. Jolie vaulted up into space on a billowing cloud of affirmation, finding in the stars an ethereal heavenly choir, soaring ever higher and sweeter until imploding, losing herself in the spiraling helix of Universal life.

From somewhere/nowhere she heard Naal’s call.  “Jolie?  Follow voice and return.”

Jolie hesitated for just a few seconds more of euphoria and then whirled into a maelstrom of thunderous re-creation, plummeting back to the cave and into her body. Completely disoriented, Jolie allowed Jorn hold her firmly up while they followed Naal out through the maze of possibilities and into the daylight.  Helping her climb onto the seat of the hover-glider, Jorn then strapped Jolie her in.  A bubble of transparent shielding closed around them.

The ride felt slow and cumbersome after her out-of-body experience.  Jolie sat trembling in wide-eyed wonder.

Jorn stroked her face tenderly. “What did you see?”

“I saw God,” she whispered. “I saw Its face. I—”

Jorn’s smile, a hint of amusement underlying it, asked. “What God look like?”

She paused, recalling that most intense of experiences.  “It was me. It was ME!”

“Yes, of course you.”  Jorn reached for her hand. “Now we go home.”

Still unsteady, she stepped out of the glider, looked at Jorn, and saw the face of God smiling back at her.