“I've read a Lot of books, both professionally and for fun, and I have to say that Wes' Alien series is one of the best. I urged him to continue it, and I'm glad it's a series now!”—Ben Ohmart, publisher, BearManor Media

It’s been awhile since I posted an excerpt here from The Third Earth, book 5 of the Beta-Earth Chronicles. I freely admit understanding what follows will be easiest for those who have read the previous four volumes or those who have read the introduction in The Third Earth which fills in the story of what took place before what is below. Here, hopefully all new readers will get a taste of Malcolm Renbourn’s first person narration and enjoy meeting the main cast of characters:

In the beginning, I was the most ordinary of human failures on a planet I later called Alpha-Earth. The most important moment I experienced on Alpha-Earth was the moment I left it and was captured in a device that dragged me across the multi-verse to Beta-Earth. All I left behind was my mother's grave, my father's grief, my energetic dog, and little else. I had an old car, a part-time job as an adjunct history professor, and a usually empty bed. If the gods needed a human instrument for their grand design, I was the least obvious of all candidates.. .and the least willing.
Later, I described that wrenching moment:
"Unexpectedly, mysteriously, in a flash, an acrid, pungent flash, the air changed around me. Gravity shifted, and the space around me expanded strangely. I could no longer see. I felt a scorching white light. Every cell in my body exploded, stretched, every hair on my skin turning into a field of burning wicks. In that wall of fire, every bone, muscle, and tissue of my body disintegrated and then, somehow, remolded."

Twenty years later, in exactly the same geographic location, I experienced those sensations all over again, but there were differences. When I came over from Alpha-Earth to Beta-Earth, I had no idea what was happening to me. When I came over from Beta-Earth to Cerapin, I unhappily knew what was coming. The second time around, I didn't come through the dimensional barrier alone. Five of my Betan wives also had to make the journey.

The most important difference was that the first transfer blinded me. It took away the sight I'd known for thirty years. For the next two decades, I saw absolutely nothing. After the second transfer, I felt my rubbery, jerky, awkward body slide to the floor, and I noticed something special: I could see again!

Strange said, the first thing I saw was the floor beneath my face. Is that white tile? Light brown? I'd forgotten colors. As I lay on the cold metal — at least I assumed it was metal — I could barely move. Just turning over and looking up took time. A painfully bright yellow light glowed down at me. I felt and saw the body of a woman crawling on top of me. My blurry, confused eyes slowly brought her face into some form of focus. Oh, it had to be Elsbeth! She had been standing next to me in that circle back in Bergarten, so it had to be her. She seemed drenched in hot, white light, and I knew what dangled before me had to be her long brown hair. I wasn't sure if I was actually recognizing it with my eyes or accepting what my mind was telling me what those things had to be. For twenty years, I hadn't known what brown was. Was it memory of long lost colors I was perceiving, or was I piecing together descriptions I've been hearing all these years?

I shook my befuddled head as my blinking and blinking new eyes tried to bring coherence to the face people had been telling me was so plain. Plain! Whatever my odd vision was doing, I'd never seen anyone so beautiful in all my life!

Elsbeth looked into my eyes, and her own brown doe-eyes widened with pleasure. "You can see! Husband can see!" She turned her head and again called out to our
company, "Husband can see again!"

I reached up and explored Elsbeth's face with my shaking fingers. Tears ran down
my cheeks. So long ago, Elsbeth Cawl had been a poor and simple farm girl, a tiller of
the fields certain she'd never bear children. Elsbeth and her sister Lorei had joined the Scratchers of Freedom underground. Planning to help shelter runaway slaves, they instead hid a fugitive blind alien in a little cell beneath their little farmhouse. That first night, Elsbeth had drained so much fear and pain from a very anguished and very ill alien by pulling a very surprised stranger as deep inside her as she could. After that, I can't count the days and nights Elsbeth soothed my tormented heart simply by her gentle and devoted presence. Not just me. Elsbeth could soften and melt away so many hard and harsh emotions in anyone around her merely by being her loving self, and here she was in this place simply because she would never let her husband be anywhere without her.

"It's absolutely perfect," I said, "that my first sight is you!"

She beamed and looked at me even closer. "You look as the first day we met! Your
beard, your hair, have lost their gray, their whiteness of age! You have much hair
again! Your skin has no wrinkles, your color be flushed with youth!"

I puzzled over this revelation and wondered if my muscles would soon show any
sign of restored vigor. Our lips were pressed together, and then she rolled off me, as I
began to try to sit up.

I managed to prop my back against a slick wall, holding Elsbeth tight against me.
We were next to a transparent glass wall that surrounded us on three sides. The
yellow light I'd noticed before pointed at us from the top. Everything seemed to bathe
in bright light. I didn't know how much of this shined from above or how much
resulted from what was happening to me. My pupils felt watery, heavy, and dilated.

I turned my head to the right, knowing Joline had stood beside me there on Beta-Earth. As my vision seemed to be clearing, at least for short distances, I saw Joline
lying on her belly, her face turned to give me a lop-sided smile. While I had known
what would happen to her, what I saw was still a shock.

On Beta-Earth, Joline Renbourn was world-renowned as quite a beauty. Her fame
partly drew from her towering figure, a heritage from her upbringing in the cliff-
dwellers in the ice-country of Aufry. I had spent many nights delightfully playing with
her ridiculously long legs. In this pyramid of glass, I couldn't tell if she still stood on
tall limbs, but I could see in her face just how much she had been transformed.

Before we had come to the Bergarten chamber for the transference, Joline had
been told she would be joining her consciousness with her bond-sister and my former
wife, Bar Tine Renbourn. Ten years before, Bar had been murdered in Dellmire by the brother of Kalma Salk, the brown-skinned woman prophesized to be the wife who would reconcile my family with the country of Balnakin.

For ten years, Bar's spirit had watched over us on Beta-Earth, but her essence also voyaged often to the planet we had just come to. In one vision quest, she had brought the spirit-selves of Lorei and Doret Renbourn to Cerapin, showing them the world that the six of us must come to so Cerapin would become aware of the multi-verse. As
a result, Bar knew the language most of the rest of us didn't.

In many ways, Joline and Bar merging together seemed weirdly appropriate. Joline and Bar had become my wives together at the same time in the same ceremony on the same day when Bar had been freed from her so-called Balnakin rehabilitation. In our Wellnee home, while Lorei and Elsbeth tended to household duties, Joline and Bar sat together with me on my office porch helping turn my Alpha-Earth stories into articles and books for Betan readers.

They became fast friends and had much in common. Joline's parents had exiled her from her cliff home because her father thought her a mere nuisance and burden with no prospects. All her life, Bar had been a blue-skinned Balnakin slave with no will of her own, until she found the courage to help send me on the road to freedom, sacrificing herself to face the vengeance of her brown-skinned masters.

With the hideousness of the Bergarten disaster, Bar became a tormented soul, who fled our family to try to escape the memories of that awful day. The only one of us she kept in contact with was Joline.

Despite Bar's self-imposed exile from us, she and Joline had even more in common. Joline became known for her books of rather graphic erotic verse. Bar's creativity came out in her sculptures and ceramic objects. After her death, Bar's spirit was very much Joline's special guardian angel.. .until now.

I saw her face divided as if she was half Joline and half Bar — "Jolbar." While I couldn't have described her with the right words at the time, I can now say that the right side of her head had obviously belonged to Joline, with the emerald-green eye and the straight light-blonde hair that reached her chin. The left side had belonged to Bar, with the puffier cheek, the inset blue eye, and the buttery, flowing blonde mane. On Beta-Earth, I'd heard that her skin had an enamel smoothness. I now saw this description made sense. The right half of her lips were thin, the left fuller. Her eyes looked not coordinated. Her right one was glassy as it stared at me. The Bar eye seemed to be looking off to faraway places.

After a few moments of soft groans, Jolbar tried to focus both eyes on me and say, "Hello, husband. With your new eyes, meet your new wife — well, wives. I guess we shall be Jolbar Sonam Tine Renbourn. We no doubt look as strange as we feel. We can't get the strength to stand up."

"I know the feeling, or the lack of it. Maybe it's just any strength I can't manage."

Jolbar nodded, and withdrew into herself. Likely, she lacked the energy or the will to talk further. She rolled over on her back, holding her hands up in the air. She twisted and flexed her fingers, the Bar half of her no doubt exploring sensations she hadn't felt since her murder. She must have been curious about the differences she saw and felt, her Joline hand long and slim, her Bar hand smaller and a bit more pudgy.

My wonderstruck eyes moved past Elsbeth on my left to look at her birth-sister, the once blind prophetess Lorei Cawl Renbourn. Like me, she was sitting against the glass wall. For the first time, I could see how the Cawl sisters were so different, at least in appearance. Unlike the curvy Elsbeth, Lorei was long and lanky. Unlike the rough-skinned Elsbeth, Lorei's skin was clear, creamy, smooth. She had been known
for her grace, elegance, and the nimbleness of her fingers with needles and thread, especially when she sewed children's clothes and toys.

The most obvious difference was her distinct eyes. One looked sharp at me, the other seemed dead in its socket. That was because, like Jolbar, Lorei, too, had a dual consciousness, a duality she had been sharing with Doret Renbourn for several years. Half of Lorei's mind and senses were back on Beta-Earth, housed in the tiny frame of the mutant dwarf who had become the Mother-Icealt of All-Domes. Likewise, Lorei's body now carried part of the essence of Doret in this very room. So the eye that looked sightless and opaque was really the eye of a sister sitting wherever she was on Beta-Earth. This meant Doret Renbourn could witness everything Lorei saw.

Again, I thought the joining of these two souls was perfectly appropriate. From the beginning, Lorei had carried the breath of Olos inside her, her gift of prophecy a dominant force in nearly every aspect of all our lives. She had always urged a worship of Olos as the spiritual rudder of our family. She had known when new wives would join the tribe, she had seen many of the coming battles and challenges that faced us, even when she herself resisted our foretold futures.

When Doret joined us, our spiritual pair became inseparable. She often guided Lorei's gift drawing on her years of training in Appool Hollow-Bone Dream-Guessing. I admit, the rest of us came to dread their pronouncements. They always seemed to place more and more heavy burdens on Tribe Renbourn. None had been anywhere as burdensome as what had happened to us this unhappy day.

Still, I quickly thought how good Lorei looked in her bright-green three-piece suit of protective fabrics, identical to the suits all of us wore. In all our jackets and pants, we carried skil-pads of so much knowledge of Beta-Earth in very deep pockets. I also had pads of all my writings about Alpha-Earth, and a thin music player rested in my inner right jacket pocket that not only had all my Alphan music but many samples of Betan sounds as well. I planned to protect that for as long as I could, feeling the music was too precious to just hand over like we planned for all of our other pads — except for all the thin vials of Beta-Earth seeds that Elsbeth carried. According to Lorei, these were the most important gifts we brought with us. They should not be revealed until — well, I had no idea.

"Hello, Husband," Lorei smiled. "I see you have regained the youth of your first cross-over. True said, in many ways, our bodies have been restored to what they were twenty years past. Our biological clocks have been reset, and more. I also see you are practicing new sight. Trust me — I remember well trying to adapt to having vision for the first time when Doret and I were transformed in that cave ritual. Push yourself not! Comprehending depth, focusing on distant things will take time and much queasiness and head pain. Determining what be up, what be down, what be left, what be right and how far things are from you will be clear not for some time."

"And everything is so bright! Is that the light above us?"

"In part. Much be your visual organs trying to process what they haven't expected to digest for so long. Unlike me, who was blind from birth, your mind has all those old memories of colors, shapes, dimensions, and distances you're trying to match with what surrounds you here. Your mind be reaching back to all those previous
experiences to start to reuse them to make sense of where we are now. Correctly matching what you touch and what you see will also take getting used to. I certain if anything is going to form quickly in your sight, it will be us! If all your senses know anything to the smallest sensory details, it be the bodies of your wives. I wager all else will sharpen much more slowly."

I nodded and tried to look around some more. I turned to look at my other two wives, and my jaw dropped with almost incomprehensible disbelief.

On Beta-Earth, Alnenia Ricipa Renbourn had considered herself no beauty, but not unpleasant to look at. I had heard her most distinguishing physical characteristics, beyond her very muscular and well-toned body, were the long, single Pynti eyebrow that ran over her eyes and the thought lines that often creased her forehead.

On the other hand, Kalma Salk Renbourn was known as a most attractive Balnakin brown-skin, with unique yellow eyes, a commanding presence, and a very noticeable intensity in all her doings.

I can say that the pairing of Alnenia and Kalma was the least likely of all the changes to my wives. Unlike Lorei and Doret, or Joline and Bar, I don't recall any special bonds between Alnenia and Kalma. True, unlike the lifelong poverty of the rest of the outcasts and exiles of the original sisterhood, both these women were raised by prosperous tribes with privileged backgrounds. True, both women were highly skilled at working with numbers, especially tribal accounts and ledgers, not to mention international commerce. Alnenia had been Kalma's first friend when the then haughty and aloof Balnakin had come to help save Tribe Renbourn from financial ruin.

Both these women were easily the strongest physically of all my wives, and I confess, the most assertive in bed — especially Kalma. She didn't shy away from pinning me down on the sheets before rolling over and putting her powerful legs to work.

For all the years we were together, the closest friendship I saw between the Salks and Ricipas was that between the fathers, Lius Salk and Sikas Ricipa, two giants of both commerce and moral leadership. Both hadn't been too certain I was worthy of their daughters, but over time I discovered I had gained two important mentors, as well as two indispensable wives.

The women that sat together across from me bore no resemblance to what they must have looked like on Beta-Earth. Now, they had identical gray-skin faces that had been transformed beyond recognition. What hair they had worn before was gone. Their foreheads bulged out with a wide, rounded, and almost oval lobe on each of them. Their jaws were now extremely pronounced, jutting out with squared thick chins. Streaks and spots of different colors illustrated their flesh, especially their arms. Their incisors looked almost wolfish. Their feet had grown so wide and large, they had had to remove their boots. I sorrow to remember because my expression when I first saw them must have been one of revulsion and fright, and they looked back at me, their faces mirroring exactly the same emotions.

Order The Third Earth at:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MSH4KZG