THE THREE LIVES OF CHRISTINA THE ASTONISHING (#11)

As Told by the Holy Woman in Her Own Words
A Hundred or So Years after the End of the World

How I came to the white city and what happened to me there

Living alone at the top of a great redwood tree was deeply pleasing to me, but I remembered the promise I’d made to Giver: to live on Earth in a way that would help other people align their hearts to the world of Light and Love. To my young and callow mind, following the natural inclinations of my personality self, this meant showing off the powers of my indestructible mortal body. There was no way I could do this if I lived apart. But I couldn’t stay in the duchy of Sequoia without risking a trip to the Hygiene Maintenance Facility, and I doubted even my new abilities would let me survive that. I decided finally to travel to the big white city to the south, which my sisters and I had heard of by report but had never visited.
Leaping off the tree and landing lightly in a clearing hundreds of feet below, I decided I must walk, not fly, to the white city, the better to display myself to my fellow humans. An avenue of thick, darkly shadowed trunks punctuated by bright splashes of sunlight opened up before me. Heart pounding, I took off south.
My trip took fifteen days from start to finish. At every turn I tried my best to express the energy of the world of Light and Love. I greeted those I met with good cheer and gave away whatever bits of food or scraps of metal I had collected on the way, including a single precious EverRed. These small metal cylinders were the only devices from before the Great Miasma that let us operate some of the old machines, and the one I gave away was easily worth six months’ food. Eating and drinking a little bit, though still far less than any other human, kept me going. But as soon as I jumped in the air or stuck my arm in a bonfire or otherwise displayed the virtues of my indestructible mortal body, people ran away screaming.

(to be continued tomorrow)