The Alien Accord

by Betsey Kulakowski

  “We’ll tell my boss you’re doing a documentary on the new radio telescope I’m designing,” Michael said.

  “Why don’t we tell your boss the truth?” Lauren said.

  “The truth?” Michael’s brow lifted, intrigued.

  “That’s what we’re all about,” Lauren said. “The truth is ... and yes I hear myself, and I can’t believe I’m saying it ... we’re making a show about our family history and my most interesting brother. Does it get any more innocent than that?”

  Rowan had an epiphany of his own. Lauren had finally made peace with their mission. Finally, he could see, they might actually get to make a television show. And not just any show. This had the potential to be something really big; huge, in fact. A broad grin spread over his face. “Okay,” he said, with a nod of his head. “Let’s make it happen.”

  Chapter 10

  It took three days to get the details worked out and the travel arrangements made. They caught an early flight out of Tulsa and flew into LaGuardia where they had a long layover. Henry had slept most of the flight and was rambunctious; ready to take in all the excitement of the bustling airport. Rowan was ready to stretch his legs and offered to take him on a walk down the terminal. Michael went to find the restroom and left Lauren at their gate. She’d been up since three in the morning. It was almost noon. They had three hours to find some lunch and prepare for the long red-eye flight over the Atlantic into Heathrow.

  “Coffee?” Michael startled her as he approached with a cup in her face. “I hope you like mocha.”

  The perfume of coffee and chocolate hit her as she reached for the tall cup. “Oh, God bless you,” Lauren gasped, taking it, wrapping her hands around the cup. It was hot and comforting and she anticipated the effects of the caffeine bringing her to life.

  The cup was nearly empty when Rowan returned with a fussy baby. “Someone needs a clean diaper and some lunch,” he said, reaching over her for the diaper bag.

  “Want me to change him?” she asked, setting her cup down.

  “No, I got it,” he said. “You cook. I clean.”

  Lauren smirked and let him handle the messy business. When he returned, Henry was somewhat happier, but he reached for his mother babbling, “Mama mama,” as she took him. He wrapped his fists in her hair and hung on for dear life.

  “Are you good here?” Rowan glanced around. The crowd had dispersed, and this part of the terminal seemed quiet.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Go look around and find us some place good for lunch.”

  “Sure,” Rowan said. “Michael? Need to stretch your legs?”

  “Yeah,” he said, unfolding his long lean frame, glancing back at his sister, who nodded for him to go on as she settled in to nurse the baby.

  * * *

  After lunch, Lauren found an empty seating area near their gate and put one of Henry’s blankets down on the floor by the window so he could play and watch the airplanes. Rowan’s phone needed to charge, so he went to find a place to plug in the power cord. Michael seemed content to shadow his brother-in-law. Lauren decided it would be good for the two of them to get to know each other.

  Lauren smiled as she watched Henry pushing up on his arms. He looked like he might scoot off the blanket. He was ready to take off crawling in earnest at any time, and Lauren knew it wouldn’t be long before he started walking. Before she was ready, she’d be chasing a toddler up and down airport terminals. Maybe she’d let Rowan do that. She smiled to herself. He could use the exercise.

  Henry startled her by squealing in delight, and she realized she had drifted off into thought. She looked at him, then followed his view, and realized the security officer was walking through the area with the largest German Shepherd she had ever seen in her life. It was dark and looked vicious. Henry, however, rocked on his hands and knees grinning brightly, drool running down his chin as he lifted one hand to reach for the dog, even though it was too far away to touch.

  Lauren smiled but scooped him up and snatched up his blanket as the security officer moved closer. Henry had caught his attention and he made eye-contact with Lauren as she caught Henry’s hand and leaned in and said, “We mustn’t touch. He’s working. He’s a good dog though.”

  “Ma ma ma ma...” Henry began to babble, looking up at her then reaching out towards the dog wagging his fingers to get the beast to come closer.

  “We can’t pet the puppy,” she said, taking his hands.

  He frowned at her. “Pup pup ...”

  Lauren smiled as his voice raised louder and higher in pitch. “Pup pup,” he screeched. The dog had seen Henry and looked like it wanted to come over, but his handler seemed oblivious as they continued walking through the chairs. The dog returned to sniffing bags, his eyes still on Henry. Finally, the handler figured out what was going on when Henry screeched so loud the whole terminal looked his way.

  The handler stopped just a few feet from Lauren so Henry could see the dog. He squirmed his hand loose and reached for the canine, but Lauren held him back, and his giggles turned to whimpers. “No touchy, sweetheart.”

  Henry stuck out his lip but sat back against her, as if he understood. The handler managed a faint smile towards Henry, nodded to Lauren, but went on his way with his dog. Henry whimpered again. He turned and looked up at his mom, frowning as the dog left. “It’s okay, Henry. We’ll find a puppy we can pet.”

  Henry slammed back against her chest and reached up, grabbing her hair, yanking her braid. He was brooding. It made Lauren smile, even though it hurt. His personality was beginning to shine, and clearly, he was an animal lover. She couldn’t wait to take him to Yellowstone when he was older and introduce him to the wolves. She spent over a year studying them so long ago, and he might just follow in her footsteps if he didn’t become the next Indiana Jones, like his dad hoped he might be.

  Henry yanked her hair, hard. “Ouch!” Lauren snatched it from his grasp. Then looked down at Henry who laughed at her, his chubby cheeks dimpled deeply. “You are mean.” She teased, tickling his tummy. “Yes you are! You are a mean baby! You pulled your mommy’s hair. That’s not nice.” She scolded him, but it was playful, and she tossed her braid over her shoulder. She picked him up, turning to stand him up on her knees. He stood and grinned at her, sticking his finger in his mouth, slobbering down his shirt. The hint of a new shiny white tooth she hadn’t noticed before appeared from his lower gums. “What’s this?” she asked, craning her head to get a better look. “No wonder you’ve been so slobbery.”

  “What’s going on?” Rowan asked as he approached with two coffees.

  “He’s got a new tooth,” she said, turning him where Rowan could see. Rowan made faces at him to get him to smile and gurgle, and he saw it too.

  “Well it’s about time!” he said. “Maybe that’s why he’s been so fussy. I figured he’d have a couple more by now.”

  “This isn’t fussy,” Lauren said. “Henry’s a good baby.”

  * * *

  They made it to London without any issues. Lauren caught a few hours of sleep with Henry on her chest. They made the most of the layover, to eat, refresh and stretch their legs, but Lauren was tired. Henry was tired, too. She knew how hard it was for him when he got off his schedule.

  Lauren lifted her head, cocking an ear to try and make sense of the PA announcement. She groaned, sitting back in her chair.

  “What was that?” Rowan asked.

  “Our flight’s been delayed,” she said. “Mechanical issue.”

  After a four hour delay, the flight from Heathrow finally boarded. For their final leg of their trip, Michael had the seat to her left, Rowan and Henry had the seat across the aisle to her right. This time, it was Rowan’s turn to nap with the baby, and as soon as they were cleared to do so, he leaned his seat back as far as it would go. Soon, he was snoring softly with the baby laying across his chest.

  “Have you ever heard the sounds made by stars?” Michael asked, leaning against her.

  “I didn’t reali
ze they made sounds,” Lauren said.

  Michael held up a finger, then reached for his phone. He paused and handed her his headphones which were connected. He pulled up an audio file and hit play as she put the earbuds into her ears, cupping her hands over them to block out the sound of the plane’s engines. She didn’t know what to expect, but she certainly didn’t expect what she heard. If she could compare it to anything, it would have been the tones made by running a finger around the rim of a water glass. The sounds were varying, deeper at first then higher the next. Two tones came together blending in almost a pulsating rhythm then splitting as one faded off in one ear; the other lingering a moment longer.

  “Oh my gosh,” Lauren gasped. “That’s beautiful.” She handed the headphones back as the recording ended.

  “That was captured by the Hubble telescope,” he said.

  “Hubble did that?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I recorded it while I was visiting at NASA.”

  Lauren detected the sadness in his voice. She put a hand on his arm and leaned against him. “Michael, I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  He leaned against her in return. “Thanks. Kitty and I hadn’t been seeing each other that long.”

  “I can tell it was ... special,” Lauren said.

  “We dated in college and only reconnected a few days before ...” He paused. “So, my team ... we weren’t looking for, you know.” He pointed up, his eyes darting towards the heavens, so he didn’t have to say the word. Aliens. He hesitated, clearly fighting to let his emotions go. “Finding this signal was just a pleasant happenstance. We were testing an upgrade I designed that had just been installed on the dishes in the array.”

  “That’s amazing,” Lauren said. “So you’re looking for more sounds like that?”

  “More or less,” Michael said. “Some of the things we’re listening for are the return signals sent by Voyager, and other probes sent into deep space.” He hesitated, then continued. “What I want to do is figure out what is noise, and what is sound.”

  “What’s the difference?” Lauren puzzled.

  “Noise is just the unwanted sound in the background,” he said. “If you listen now, you’ll hear a lot of noise ...” He paused a moment for her to hear to the rumble of the engines, the sounds in the cabin of the flight attendants preparing for beverage service, etcetera. “Sound has substance, there’s a meaning behind it. Speech, signals ... communications.”

  “I don’t guess I ever thought of it that way,” Lauren admitted.

  “One of the things I accomplished was getting permission to use the Hubble to listen for these radio bursts in the area we pinpointed. It’s a region of space marked by the Southern Cross, or the constellation known as Crux.”

  “You are allowed to use the Hubble?”

  “Kitty gave me a day with it, but I put in an official request for more time before I left,” Michael said. “If my request is approved, I can access it from my lab. I haven’t heard back yet..”

  “And if you don’t get your request approved?” Michael pursed his lips and raised his brow, lifting his shoulders. No words were needed.

  Space ... the final frontier. Lauren knew little about it. She’d spent her career investigating the mysteries of this world. She hadn’t had time to worry about the mysteries of other worlds. The ancient gods, she had surmised, were not of this world, but they had given her an amazing gift. She’d had little time to wonder where they were from or why they were here. She was grateful for their blessing; happy to have helped them find their missing child, even though it was too late to save its life.

  “There was a physicist named Lem Stanislaw.” Michael brought her back from her thoughts. “He theorized that there might be two reasons why we couldn’t translate messages from outer space: the linguistics gap and the intelligence gap.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” Lauren said.

  “Lem suggests that because our languages come from two different evolutionary paths, we don’t share enough reference points for us to be able to understand what the message means. There’s no Rosetta Stone, so to speak.”

  “Okay, that I can comprehend.”

  “The other factor is intelligence—not so much that we’re too stupid to understand, just that intelligent life on Earth might not look or behave similarly. I went to a presentation at Cambridge a few years ago. Two of the speakers made the argument that there is a universal grammar of languages on earth and that this grammar should exist in extraterrestrial languages too, especially their syntax. I don’t think I buy that, but I’m just an engineer. What do I know of languages?”

  What do I know of languages? Lauren thought to herself. While she knew many languages, she was not a linguistics expert. She had studied ancient migration patterns and how they influenced cultures in one of her college courses. Rowan had said that his guide at Chichén Itzà had undergone DNA testing and found that many of them descended from Mongolians. There had been many debates about the existence of a land bridge between Asia and Alaska, and as far as she was concerned, the Maya’s very existence was proof of that. The ancient gods may have intervened at some point, but there was no evidence to convince her of that, even with everything she knew.

  It was a point that occupied her mind throughout the night as she gazed out over the dark blue sky, dotted with soft clouds illuminated by moonshine and starlight.

  Chapter 11

  Michael’s lab wasn’t at all what Lauren expected. First off, the main telescope was on a mountaintop some fifty miles away. The rest of the array were scattered about the tip of Africa, including some as far away as Australia. There were thirty-eight in all. Each of the giant dishes pointed towards the sky and could be controlled from the remote location; which was an obscure office building on a campus, next to a military installation.

  Michael had the limo bring them to the lab first so they could go through an orientation on safety and security protocols; as well as how the operations worked. They had non-disclosure forms that had to be signed. It meant the lab had final say on what information could be released. It would be easy enough to film the show, with the waivers they were granted, but all video would become property of the project and subject to tight scrutiny before it could be aired on television. Lauren had expected there would be some kind of NDA, but the strictness of it caught her a bit off guard.

  “Legal’s not going to like this,” she said under her breath as they were loading back into the limo to head to their apartment.

  Lauren hadn’t slept since the flight to London and was practically dead on her feet. Somehow, she managed to keep going. “I’m sad we didn’t get to see the actual telescopes,” Lauren said to her brother as he came to bid them adieu for the day. He had work to do but promised the driver would deliver them to the apartment and he’d come to see them that evening after they’d gotten some rest.

  “There’s plenty of time to see them while you’re here,” Michael said.

  Lauren would just have to be happy with that, for now.

  If the lab was a letdown, the apartment most certainly was not. The bellman met them at the door of the hired car and helped them with their things. Inside the lobby, the concierge stopped to greet them and had the bellman take their things to their apartment while they took care of some paperwork. The bellman said something to the concierge in Afrikaans, and Lauren looked up at the concierge, her brow lifting.

  “What?” Rowan asked.

  “You speak the local dialect, mum?” The concierge grinned brightly. Lauren answered in Afrikaans.

  “Your accent is beautiful.” The concierge complimented her, then looked to Rowan, holding Henry. “We have a crib being brought in for your son.”

  “Oh,” Rowan said. “Thanks.” He looked at Lauren as they turned for the elevator. “Swahili too?”

  “Afrikaans,” Lauren said. “It’s one of the dozen or so languages spoken here.”

  Rowan looked at her skeptically. “Really?”

 
“Most of the people in South Africa speak English and another language,” she said, matter of factly. “Most are true polyglots.”

  “Like you?”

  “Well.” She shrugged with a lifted hand. “No one is really like me. Are they?”

  “True enough,” he said, shaking his head. Lauren yawned, and Henry followed suit. “Come on.” He put an arm around his wife. “Let’s get settled so we can get some rest. I’m sure your brother will want to get started as soon as possible.”

  “Me, too,” Lauren said.

  * * *

  Despite finding their accommodations luxuriously comfortable and only a few brief hours of sleep in transit, Lauren was restless. She lay across the middle of the king-size bed in boneless relaxation, but her mind was racing a million miles an hour. The sudden comfort of having come to terms with her brother and, to a lesser degree, her mother, was oddly pleasant. She had her reservations about her mother’s motives, more so than her brother’s. Lauren had come to consider her mean and manipulative, and just down-right evil. She always felt like it was her own fault that her father had left; like he hadn’t wanted another child, least of all a girl. Six sons would be enough for any man, right?

  Would Rowan want that many kids? They hadn’t talked about a limit, but he’d been thrilled to have Henry and she suspected he’d be ready for a second if the time ever came, even though she was perfectly content. The most she’d ever heard him say on the subject was, “I’ve always wanted to be a dad.” Or “I’ve always wanted kids.” Kids, plural. More than one. Lauren had never even planned to have one. Before Henry, they’d taken steps to prevent parenthood — steps that proved ineffective. In hindsight, she’d been grateful. Henry was a blessing and if their children were all as good as Henry, she’d consider having another one. After all, what were a few more stretch marks at this point?

  Then there was Michael’s mysterious screams from outer space. Now that she had heard the stars, she couldn’t imagine what might be screaming through the cosmos. Perhaps she’d seen too many episodes of Star Trek. She’d always imagined space to be a very peaceful place, like a quiet dark ocean of nothing but happy little comets and peaceful floating asteroids. Now she lay wondering if the shrieks were coming from dark matter or wormholes, or little green men from Mars — or Crux — or wherever it was.