In the darkness of her bedroom, Julia is sleeping fitfully.

In her dream, she is standing once again at the focus of her Mayan Sun temple. The sky is dark. It is the eerie twilight immediately preceding the total eclipse of the Sun.

A heaviness hangs over the land. Julia is alone. Her village is deserted, except for a few sick and dying.

Julia is praying desperately to the Sun, a diminishing sliver in the sky. She imagines her followers assembled there as before. But now they are only shadows fading in and out.

Her dream vision reappears. The deity who appears is a Lunar deity dominating the Sun God. The Sun is now a black disk, the corona blooming in flames around it.

As before, Julia feels herself flying outward from the Earth and then circling slowly around the Moon. She feels the coldness of the Moon, wrapped in night. This time, instead of zooming back in on the Earth, the Solar Wind is blowing her past Earth -- toward Mars.

The planet Mars grows from a small dot to a huge sphere filling her view.

Copyright 2000 Stewart Dickson and Rebecka Dickson