by Geoff Rodkey
But we stopped screening it after the food riot happened. The riot was terrifying. Eleven people were injured, and during the worst of it, we had to barricade ourselves inside our compartment while rioters pounded on our door and yelled for Mom and Dad to come out. Security got things under control eventually, but it was a couple of weeks before Mom let me walk around the station by myself again. Even after that, every time I left our compartment, a little knot of fear settled into the pit of my stomach, and it didn’t go away for the rest of our time on Mars.
The situation might’ve gotten even worse after the riot, but then the problems with the air processors started, and the lack of oxygen made everybody too tired to cause trouble.
“They did it on purpose,” Jens told Naya and me. “My dad says the GC lowered the oxygen levels just to control people.”
I was pretty sure that wasn’t true, but I was too tired and hungry to argue with him.
All of us were tired and hungry (not to mention smelly and desperate) by the time the GC crammed us all into the cafeteria to watch the government of Planet Choom’s official offer of refuge to the entire human race. They moved the big screen over from the rec center for the occasion, and Mom stood under it with Dr. Chang and General Schiller to introduce the video.
Mom started by telling us all how kind and selfless the people of Choom were, what a precious gift the invitation was, and what a great job the Diplomacy Department had done negotiating with Choom’s government.
Then Dr. Chang asked us to turn on the translator apps the GC had pushed to our screens the night before.
“You should be able to hear a clean translation of the Zhuri through your earpieces,” she said. “Unfortunately, while we’ve been told that everyone in the video is speaking the Zhuri language, our translation program can’t comprehend the accents of the Krik, Ororo, and Nug people. We’ve prepared subtitles for those sections, so please keep an eye on the video screen. And now…here’s the invitation.”
Mom and the other two leaders stepped aside, the screen came to life, and four very different-looking aliens appeared on it, in a wide shot that let us view them from head to foot.
Except that not all of them had feet.
At the first sight of the aliens, there were gasps from the crowd. A couple of people shrieked in fear. “Mercy!” cried a woman from somewhere behind me.
I didn’t gasp or yell, but my whole body went weak, and my heart started to thump.
They just looked so…alien.
Taking up the whole left side of the screen was an Ororo: a giant, white-blue marshmallow with sleepy dark eyes. It must’ve had legs, but its body was so thick and blobby I couldn’t see them. As it lumbered toward the camera with the others, its flesh quivered like an enormous bowl of gelatin.
In the middle of the screen, leading the group toward the camera, was a Zhuri. I’d seen plenty of photos of them by this point, so the sticklike body, huge compound eyes, tube-shaped mouth, and long wings that folded down its back weren’t a surprise. But the bendy-legged, funny-scary way it walked was deeply weird. Watching it move, I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream.
On the near right, and less than half as tall as the others, was a Krik: a fuzzy little green werewolf with bulging muscles, red eyes, and an enormous mouth with double rows of razor-sharp gray teeth. If it hadn’t been so short, it would’ve looked terrifying, although I wondered later if it only seemed short because the others were so tall.
Finally, there was a Nug. It was the strangest of the four—a massive wormlike creature that slithered forward in an L shape, its slick body topped by a gaping hole. It was like a combination of an eggplant, a sea slug, and an open garbage can.
The four of them moved to what I guessed was a few feet in front of the camera, then stopped. The Zhuri’s tube-shaped mouth vibrated as it began to speak in a high-pitched whine:
“Yeeeeeeeyeeeeeeeh…”
A moment later, the translation came through my earpiece. The translator app had given the Zhuri a voice signature that sounded like a gentle elderly man. In a weird way, the voice was almost soothing—it was much less scary listening to a giant mosquito talk when it sounded like somebody’s kindly old grandpa:
“On behalf of the Unified Government of Choom, we send greetings to the humans and offer our sorrow at the loss of your home planet. All four of our species, at earlier stages in our development, suffered from varying degrees of self-inflicted violence. But just as we evolved beyond violence, we are confident the human species can do so too.
“Thus we offer you refuge among us, that you may live and thrive in our multispecies society. As long as you remain peaceful, you are welcome here.”
The Zhuri’s body bobbed up and down as it stepped back on its bendy stick legs. Then the muscular little Krik came forward and opened its toothy mouth.
“GZZZRRRRGZZRRRKKKKKK…”
Its voice was a rough, snappish growl. The translator app beeped in my ear. “Unknown language detected,” it said as the Krik’s message appeared in a subtitle on the big screen:
The Krik have always lived on Planet Choom. We like it here.
You may join us if you do not make it worse.
The Krik stepped back, and the giant-marshmallow Ororo glooped forward.
“MRRRRUMMMMRRRRMMM…”
The Ororo’s voice was so deep that, even through the speakers, I could practically feel the vibrations in my chest as the translator beeped helplessly in my ear again.
The Ororo are not bothered by the thought of your arrival.
It seemed like a strange thing to say. But I didn’t have time to dwell on it, because the Nug was already slithering forward with its own greeting.
“SKRRREEEEREEEREEEREE…!”
The Nug’s voice was so loud and screechy that it drowned out my translator’s “unknown language” message. People around me covered their ears, and even the other three aliens in the video seemed to lean away from the Nug and grimace uncomfortably as it shrieked its welcome.
Hello! The Nug are Planet Choom’s newest immigrants!
We are excited to meet you!
We hope you will share in our celebrations! HEE-HAW!
The Nug’s final “SKREEE-SKREEE!” was so loud that I felt like I’d been stabbed in the ears with a pair of forks. Fortunately, it stopped talking and slithered backward after that.
The Zhuri leader loped forward again on its springy legs. “We hope you will accept our invitation. Your journey to Choom will be long, but a new home awaits you here, and we are eager to meet you. Until then, may your travels be safe.”
The video ended. There was an uneasy silence as General Schiller walked back to the front of the room to address us. Mom and Dr. Chang trailed behind him.
“I think it goes without saying,” the general told us, “that this is a real unusual situation. It’ll take some getting used to. But all of us on the GC are in strong agreement that if we want the human race to continue, Planet Choom’s our best bet. We hope you feel the same.”
As it turned out, though, not everybody wanted to move in with the strange-looking aliens and their earsplitting screeches.
Some people wanted to hold out for terraforming Novo, even though the GC warned that they still didn’t have enough data to know if it was possible. Dr. Chang suggested that the Novo group come to Choom first. It was twice as close to Novo as Mars, so it’d be much easier to study Novo and launch a trip from there. But the Novo faction didn’t want anything to do with Choom. In the end, four hundred of them decided to stay on Mars and prepare to go straight to Novo.
Even more shocking were the almost nine hundred people who voted to go back to Earth. All the scientists agreed it wouldn’t be livable again for hundreds of years, but the Earthers refused to believe them.
Jens and his dad were Earthers. “You’ll see,” Jens told
Naya and me. “It’s going to be fine. Once you’re off living with those alien freaks, you’re going to wish you were back on Earth with us.”
I was sure he was wrong, but I didn’t argue with him. It wouldn’t have helped unless I could’ve somehow changed Jens’s dad’s mind too. And Mom and Dad both told me that was impossible.
“People believe what they want to believe,” Dad said with a shrug.
In the end, all Naya and I could do was hug Jens and tell him we’d keep in touch.
“That’ll be super weird,” he said. “You’re going to spend the next twenty years in bio-suspension. By the time you get out of it, I’ll be, like, your dad’s age.”
“I sure hope so,” Naya said.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing.” Then she hugged him again.
I hugged him too. “Be safe, okay?”
“You too. Send videos.”
“We will.”
Then Naya and I joined Ila, my parents, and 1,018 other people on the shuttle up to the transport that waited in low orbit to take us to Planet Choom. The living conditions on the transport were even worse than the Mars station—nobody had their own compartment, and we all had to sleep in our bio-suspension pods, which were in one giant room together.
Fortunately, we were only on the transport for two days before we all went into suspension and woke up the next morning—or twenty years later, depending on how you looked at it—in a solar system sixty trillion miles away, ready to start a new life on Choom.
But there was a problem. During the twenty years we were asleep, the aliens had changed their minds about us.
THE FIRST THING I heard when I came out of suspension was Mom’s voice.
“Hey, Lan,” she was saying. “Hey. Hey. Time to get up, Lan.”
I could feel her fingertips gently pushing the hair off my forehead. When I opened my eyes, she was smiling down at me. I smiled back and sat up.
Then I barfed.
Or I would’ve, if there’d been anything in my stomach. Since it was empty (they don’t let you go to sleep for twenty years on a full stomach), I mostly just dry-heaved into the little bucket Mom held for me.
“It’s okay,” she said as she patted my back. “Everybody does that when they come out of it.”
“Why aren’t you doing it?”
“I’ve been up for a day or so. Your father has too.”
“Morning, sunshine.” I looked up and saw Dad sitting on the edge of Ila’s pod, holding her hair back while her face was buried in her own bucket. “Long time no see.”
“It doesn’t feel like it,” I said, looking across the crowded pod room. Everyone was like us—either just getting up, or holding a bucket for someone who was just getting up.
“It’s weird, right? Twenty years went by, just like that.”
I heaved again. “How close are we to Choom?”
“Pretty close,” said Mom. “We’re in orbit.”
“Are we landing soon?”
Mom and Dad looked at each other. “Well…”
“What?” Mom’s tone of voice sent Ila’s head jerking up out of her bucket. My sister’s face was gray, and there were fat, dark circles under her eyes. She narrowed them at Mom. “What’s going on?”
“There’s been a complication,” Mom said in a quiet voice. “As soon as everybody’s awake, we’ll explain it.”
* * *
—
AN HOUR LATER, Mom stood at the front of the pod room with Dr. Chang and General Schiller, just like they had when they’d played the invitation video for us back on Mars.
This time around, they didn’t look excited. They looked worried.
“When the first of us came out of bio-suspension,” General Schiller explained, “we radioed Choom’s government for landing instructions. Instead of answering, they sent this video. We figured you’d best see it for yourselves.”
The communal screens on each wall of the room flickered to life with the image of a single Zhuri in close-up, its compound eyes fixed on the camera.
“Heeeeyeeeeeeheee…”
After a moment, the translator kicked in:
“The Unified Government of Choom regrets to inform you that our people have agreed the human species is too violent and emotional to live among us. Our society has no conflict. Your presence would threaten our peace.
“For your safety and ours, we ask that you leave our orbit immediately. Please do not attempt to enter Choom’s atmosphere, or our defensive weapons will vaporize you. We wish you safe travels and a pleasant future. Goodbye.”
Then the video ended, and the yelling began.
There was a lot of crying too.
The yelling and crying went on for a long time, mostly because there was nothing else we could do. The GC had sent a dozen messages down to Planet Choom since getting the video, but nobody would answer them.
It didn’t seem like the GC’s fault to me. A lot of people blamed them anyway.
“How can you let them do this? They invited us here!”
“It’s as big a mystery to us as it is to you,” Dr. Chang said.
“Did you lie to them or something? Are they just finding out now what humans are really like?”
“Absolutely not,” said Mom. “We were open with them from the beginning about Earth’s entire history. We sent thousands of hours of historical and cultural videos. They knew everything there was to know about us.”
“We gave them the whole kit and caboodle,” General Schiller agreed. “Warts and all. That’s why it took them so long to invite us in the first place.”
Most people wanted to leave Choom’s orbit right away. But we couldn’t, because we didn’t have enough fuel left to go anywhere.
Even if we did, there was no place to go.
“We haven’t logged a message from the Novo group since six months after we left Mars,” Dr. Chang explained. “At that point, they’d just begun their journey. We’ve heard nothing further since they entered bio-suspension.”
“Are they okay?” someone asked.
“We don’t know,” said Dr. Chang. “They’d been having problems with their communications array. The radio silence could be that…or something worse.”
“Why don’t we go to Novo?” someone else suggested.
Dr. Chang shook her head. “We’re close enough now to analyze Novo’s atmosphere. It has no oxygen. Terraforming it is beyond our ability. We can’t live there.”
“What about the Earthers? How are they doing?”
This time, all three of the GC members shook their heads sadly. “They went dark pretty soon after they got to Earth,” said General Schiller. “The final message made it clear things didn’t work out too well for them.”
My eyes welled up as I thought about Jens and the others.
“Let’s just go back to Mars!” somebody called out.
There was more head shaking from the GC. “Even if we had the fuel,” Mom explained, “by the time we got there, the station would’ve spent forty years exposed to Martian windstorms. Its life-support systems would’ve failed a long time ago.”
“This is nonsense!” bellowed a tall, red-faced man named Gunderson. He’d been a football coach back on Earth, and he still seemed to get a kick out of yelling like one. “Are you telling me we spent twenty years burning fuel, crossing half a galaxy, just to turn around again ’cause these folks got cold feet? I say we call their bluff! Put ourselves down on that planet and tell them we ain’t taking no for an answer!”
Some people really liked hearing that. They clapped and whistled. But General Schiller wasn’t impressed. “Mr. Gunderson,” he said in a low but firm voice, “Choom’s society is fundamentally peaceful—but that warning in the video about vaporizing us was no joke. These folks have weapons technology that makes us l
ook like cavemen throwing rocks. We call their bluff, we’re going to get our heads handed to us.
“More than that,” the general added, “I want to remind you that the kind of thinking that says we can get what we want by attacking people was what cost us our planet in the first place. I’d like to believe we all learned a lesson from that. I know I did.”
Gunderson didn’t like getting scolded by a general. He crossed his arms and stuck out his jaw like a pouty little kid. “What the heck else are we gonna do?”
“We’re going to keep trying to talk to these people,” replied Schiller, “and pray they start talking back.”
After that, Mom delivered a big pep talk about how it was a scary situation, but we were going to get through it together, and in the end we’d all look back and be proud of how we’d helped save the human race and met this challenge with courage, and unity, and good cheer. I think it must’ve been really inspiring, but I didn’t hear a word of it, because I was so anxious and scared that I couldn’t think straight, let alone listen to a speech. I didn’t sleep a wink that night, and it wasn’t just because I’d gotten twenty years’ worth of sleep the night before.
Considering all the sniffles, whimpers, and muffled tears echoing through the darkened pod room that night, I don’t think anybody else slept either.
* * *
—
AFTER WE’D SPENT a couple of very bad days in orbit, Choom’s government finally started to talk to us. At first they just traded messages with the GC—mostly apologies, along with more requests for us to leave. But then Mom managed to talk them into doing a live videoconference in the pod room with the whole group of us.
“But we look awful,” Ila said when she heard the news, and it was true. What was left of the human race looked exactly like you’d expect from a room full of starving people who hadn’t changed their clothes in twenty years.
Mom just nodded. “That’s the whole point. If they can see us, they might feel some sympathy. And they’ll realize we’re not a threat to them.”
