Trace the Stars
Page 20
“Then tell me about your people.”
“You cannot understand them.”
“Then use small words and similes.”
“I am that already.” She put her hands out, dramatically.
“So frustrating!” I punched the mailbox mounted in the wall. The door to my box popped open and a dozen letters spilled out onto the dingy carpet. I ignored them. Somebody would probably clean them up. “I came here to learn about you.”
“Would you like to talk about it over dinner?”
“Sure.” I’d had dinner with her hundreds of times. It was always great, but I never learned much about her or her kind. I was just feeling a moment of self-pity. Otherwise, I never would have said, “Sometimes I wish I could go home.”
“I’m sorry.” She wasn’t.
She waited until I started back toward my open apartment before she went out the front door. Suddenly a new idea hit me. I turned and followed her.
Outside the apartment was strange. Everything was flat black with recessed lighting. Sharp corners jutted out from the walls making the path crooked. I can only assume alien artistic architecture was the reason. I used to think the angular protrusions and twisting halls were the actual shapes of the ship’s interior, but now I don’t believe that. I can’t trust my eyes.
I stayed far back and followed as Monster zigzagged through the main corridor. Her high heels didn’t click against the hard floor. My shoes were making no end of noise. I slipped them off and followed in much quieter stockings. The floor was icy cold.
I’d memorized all these halls some time before. There were a few branches leading off the main hall. Most terminated at dead ends. A few ended in closets with cleaning supplies or utility access panels. I had no idea what the panels controlled. The indicator lights didn’t blink. I fiddled with some of the controls once. Nothing happened.
Knowing all the juts and switchbacks of this hall made it easy to follow from a distance. So far, Monster hadn’t turned back to look at me once. Most likely, she and every other alien on this ship knew exactly what I was doing. But I held out hope that even telepathic beings would have to intentionally concentrate to access my mind. There was no way I could shield my intentions now. My hope was that they didn’t bother to “look in” on me very often. It wasn’t something I planned. It just came out of following a sudden impulse.
Toward the far end of the long corridor, Monster turned down one of the small branches, which I knew previously to be a dead end. I dashed for the edge and looked down in time to see her move through a wall without making a sound. It disturbed me, just like when her mouth went out of sync when she talked. I rushed to the same wall and plunged my hand straight through.
The rock was not an illusion. I could feel a barrier there. I had thoroughly explored this hall, like all the others. I had pushed and kicked this exact wall, looking for seams or moving parts. Yet now my arms pushed through it like soft sand. See what I meant about not trusting my eyes? I only hesitated a moment before rushing bodily in.
The walls shifted. Instead of black and angular, they were white and round. The light came through semitransparent panels blended seamlessly into the walls. Equipment jutted out from the ceiling, mounted on white metal bars. There were no tables or computers, but as a scientist, I recognized this equipment as something used in experiments. It resembled the equivalent machinery on Earth. I thought I could identify an oven, spinners, shakers, containers, and maybe refrigerators storing samples I couldn’t see.
Distracted by the plethora of new information, so rare since my arrival, I forgot to hide from Monster. Looking around now, I didn’t see her. Where had she gone?
There were a few places unbroken by equipment or lights. They matched the one behind me. So I figured they had to be more of those doors.
I walked over to one and pushed through. It felt just like plunging my hands into a warm beach or gritty clay.
For a moment, I am positive I remember seeing two floating sparks of light rapidly twisting around in a tall column as if a small streak of lightning trapped in a high, invisible cylinder. We were in some kind of castle dungeon with medieval torture instruments everywhere. I remember a rack, stocks, an iron maiden, and several others I couldn’t identify. I know it’s crazy, but that’s what I saw. One second later, the lights flared and Monster was standing there next to a UPS deliveryman. The room was still gray, but the heavy rock walls shifted to look like metal and all the devices suddenly became computers.
“Fido?” Monster couldn’t suppress her shock at seeing me there. I was thrilled to have surprised them. I’m positive the other guy entered my mind and did something. Maybe he changed what I really saw into those torture devices and then computers.
I long suspected them of messing with my mind. Why hadn’t they erased my memories completely? No idea. Either they had limits on how much they could mess with my thoughts or they possessed some ethic, which prevented them from changing too much. Or maybe they just didn’t care. It’s not like I had anybody to tell, anyway.
I refused to let go of the instantaneous image I had seen before it shifted. I closed my eyes and memorized it. Even then, I knew it was morphing somehow. I don’t know if they did it or my own brain somehow re-created what I saw with images it could understand. It’s the only explanation for why there would be gothic torture devices on a spaceship.
“What are you doing here?” Monster pressed. The other guy’s projected image had dark skin and brown clothes. Monster was wearing a white lab coat I am sure she hadn’t had on when we talked minutes before. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Why not?”
She reached to the side of one computer and suddenly a lever appeared there. She pulled it. I knew computers didn’t have levers—I swore it wasn’t there before or after she pulled it. She pushed some random buttons on the keyboard. “My boss will be angry if he finds you here. Go home. We can talk about this over dinner.”
“Why am I here? Why did you bring me on this ship? Who is that guy?” I crossed my arms and leaned to one side. I wasn’t moving from that spot without some answers. To them it must have been like a cat hissing to defend its interest in some morsel of meat fallen from its owner’s plate.
Monster glanced at the being behind her. “He’s somebody I work with. Please come out of this room. We can talk in the foyer.” Her mouth was moving twice as fast at the end as she went through the portal.
I followed her. I could learn nothing more from that room now.
We went through the same door, but didn’t come out in the same place. The white room was square now with light fixtures on the wall and shelves of books hung in strange places where equipment used to be.
“I already saw all of this,” I said. “There’s no point in hiding it from me now.”
Monster bit her lower lip. I guessed she was trying to express concern, but it just looked manic. “You shouldn’t be able to go through those doors,” she said in an urgent voice. “If my boss knows you’ve done it, you will be in danger.”
“Why? I can’t tell anybody what I see here. How could it possibly be a problem for me to see what you do?”
“I don’t have time to make you understand right now. Please go home. I promise I’ll tell you all I can later.”
“Okay,” I said. I knew I wasn’t going home. I finally had access to more than the corridor outside my apartment. I wanted to see everything before they changed the barriers. I had given up my whole life to see aliens and technology. I wasn’t about to surrender now because of some vague threat.
“Don’t,” she said. How stupid! I had forgotten she could read my thoughts. Now she knew what I was planning. “I chose to take care of you because others of us will not be kind to you. They will not let you live if you don’t follow their rules.”
I let that sink in. I absorbed it and understood the threat. “Okay,” I said flatly. I didn’t want to die. I turned and walked out before I could think anything else.
I knew Monster would have her mental eyes trained on me now. I also knew they would be fixing those barriers soon. It was unlikely they would ever make that mistake again. Normally, I’m sane, but just then I didn’t care if they killed me or not.
I turned down a random branch and moved to the end. I found a wide, unbroken expanse of wall and pushed through. On the other side, the room was blue. It resembled a sphere with some kind of spiral path working around like a screw to the top and bottom. My socks soaked in water from the twisting platform. It was so humid. Water actively condensed on and ran down the sidewalls. It collected at a drain in the floor. What purpose could this room serve? It made no sense.
Seeing no other obvious doors, I pushed back out into the black hall. I moved further down the path to another open expanse of wall, leaving wet footprints, and pushed through again. This time the room was green. It was unbelievably huge, maybe half a mile square and fifty feet tall. Despite the green walls, the ceiling was white with warm light. Wide, serrated leaves attached to thick vines covered the whole floor. I was standing on black soil. The smell was bitter and overwhelming. There were dozens of doors all around the outside of the room, but I doubted I could work my way through the gnarled jungle that knotted together and poked up all across this vast space. A huge hole in the center of the ceiling pumped air in that moved out through hundreds of ducts on the sides. So they needed oxygen, and they used plants to produce it. The satisfaction at having finally learned something about them set my head spinning. My eyes began to tear up and my breathing went heavy. This room was beautiful. It filled me with emotions. In here, I felt no homesickness.
I didn’t stay nearly as long as I wanted. I was manic. Every moment I knew my precious time was running out. I pushed back out into the hall and ran to the next branch. Now I was leaving bits of wet dirt to trace my path.
Each room was another revelation. I saw something that looked like a processing plant. I saw huge towers in a hot warehouse that I could only guess were fuel. My mind saw nuclear cooling towers, but I couldn’t even pretend to know if that was what they were.
Most of the rooms had doors leading in other directions, but I only ever went back into the black corridor. In one room, I saw some rapidly orbiting lightning at the far end and turned right back around. I was sure those images were what the aliens looked like to me. However, if they needed oxygen, they had to be more, right? Maybe they used the oxygen for the fuel? No time to process. I rushed to another branch. If this was the main corridor, why hadn’t I ever seen any of those aliens in it except Monster?
The next room I explored was adjacent to the corridor closest to my apartment. Fleshy pink color and very dim lights greeted me. Huge cylindrical containers revealed a storage house of some kind. They were clear with bluish fluid pumped in at the top and out the bottom. A grayish cloud floated in the center of each one. When I moved closer and looked inside one, my euphoria ended.
The grayish clouds were people wrapped in what looked like gray yarn. Some curled up in fetal positions. Others stood like proud soldiers. Even though I had little background in biology, I knew they were preserving these people. The humans inside were definitely alive. A quick survey showed me they represented a full spectrum of genetic phenotypes. Each was a different race with the full range of hair colors. If their eyes were open, I was sure at least one would have every color. Tall and short, wide and thin, it was a collector’s set of representative samples of human DNA.
I studied them all. One woman in the middle of the group caught my eye especially. She was near my age with medium skin, dark hair, and a cute expression. They didn’t seem to be in pain. The whole thing made me sick to my stomach. How could I have been stupid enough to think they just wanted to take me along as a novelty?
I didn’t know what to do. I wandered, in shock, back through the black hall to my apartment. I closed the door and curled up on my recliner. We were all just lab rats they wanted for some unfathomable science project. Unlike the others, I was the behavioral science specimen.
I wanted to lash out. I wanted to scream. Instead, I started to cry. What was I supposed to do now?
I wanted to go back and free everybody they had in stasis. What good would that do? It’s not like we could go home. The aliens would probably just gather them all back up and put them back. Except one. One they would keep out to replace me. I would get to see just how medieval those machines in Monster’s lab could get.
Even if we somehow managed to escape and hide, what could we do? We’d still be on this ship, far away from Earth, with no possible chance to get home. There simply was no solution. Those people were better off in stasis. Too bad they didn’t have one extra capsule. I’d have volunteered to join them.
I wanted to personify my captors as horrible, wicked creatures. Nevertheless, deep down I knew they did not act out of malevolence. They were just like me. Driven by an insatiable curiosity, they forged across the dark abyss. If we possessed the technology of this ship, humans would do the exact same thing. They found cute little animals of comparably small intelligence, and deigned to study them. As much as I wanted to hate them, it would be hypocrisy.
That’s probably why they chose me. They knew, despite the emotional trauma, I would understand the driving principle behind their behavior. They had tried to make me happy the best they knew how. Monster even looked a lot like the girlfriend I left behind.
As we sat over Italian food that was actually worth the exorbitant price I paid for it, Giselle had a big smile on her face. I asked, “What are we celebrating?”
“I just got a big promotion at work. They made me manager over the entire service center!” Her voice was low, perhaps too well enunciated. I never figured out if she had been good at working in a credit card call center because of her diction or if it had become a part of her as an adaptation to that job.
“That’s great,” I said, lifting my glass. “Now you won’t have to spend all day on the phones, right?”
“Not as much,” she said. “I’ll spend more time training people to take calls instead. I’ll still have to deal with the worst customers, of course.” She meant the ones that wouldn’t work with the regular callers to fix their overdue accounts.
“I’m really happy for you. Does it come with a big raise?”
“Of course.” Her eyes were half closed and she was looking down at me over her nose. She only did that when she was sizing me up for her plans. “How was work for you today?”
“The same as always,” I said. “No new world changing information yet.”
“So you haven’t decided if you want to stay with it or not?”
“I don’t know. It’s okay, but it’s not great. It’s just not what I expected.”
“What would your ideal be? What is everything you could hope for in a job?”
“I don’t know. Something strange and impossible to believe.”
“Stranger than astrophysics?”
I laughed. “Good point.” She looked off into the distance while I continued to struggle with my inability to appreciate what I had worked so hard to become. I knew she didn’t love her job. She still made more than I did. To her, work was just something you did to pay the bills. In that moment, her face changed. She was dissatisfied, too. Just not with her job.
I let the tears fall freely now. How could I have missed it all this time? Giselle had loved me. I was the one that hadn’t appreciated her. I couldn’t even be happy at her celebration dinner. I defined myself by my job, and it left her playing second fiddle. She would have been okay with it if I had really loved the job. But being lower in priority than a job I didn’t appreci
ate was too much. That was on me.
It had taken me years in solitary confinement aboard a spaceship and a shocking foray into how small our minds really are for me to understand. One thing for sure, the aliens had chosen very poorly. I was a terrible specimen of human behavior. I lacked the best human quality: love. For all my star charting, I had failed to see the only good thing in the universe was right next to me.
No wonder they weren’t surprised at my not warming up to Monster. If they could see into my mind, they knew I was a cold, selfish jerk. Obviously, that was why they chose me. They thought I would be happy alone with just a puppet of a person to fill whatever small need I had for other people. Until now, they were right.
I was deluded enough to give everything up for a chance to see what real aliens were like. Now, years later, it was ruined. I’d had a glimpse of what they really are, but all the excitement was gone. All the drive to learn died. Or maybe the discoveries had just been anticlimactic. In retrospect, none of it was surprising.
I expected them to have some advanced technology for cloaking the ship. Now, I think they just picked a remote location and depended on their telepathic ability. I thought they must have had some advanced power source that let them fly through space at relative speeds. However, it really just looked like some kind of nuclear power. The plants for oxygen and food were exactly what a ship would need for sustained flight through space. The only thing remarkable was their form—some kind of pulsing lightning that twisted around a central column.
I’d finally seen what I came for, but the vision of so many humans just sitting there in stasis ruined it. I think because that’s what I was, too. Sure I was moving, eating, and watching old television. Yet I was little better than a body in stasis. It’s debatable which of us got the better deal. I was so tired of pretending to live. I was so sick of just spending time to spend it. I needed somebody. I needed another human being.
Sometimes when I have a really great idea, it’s like an electric buzz from my mind sets every cell in my brain dancing. This wasn’t one of those moments. It was more like, one plus one . . . duh! I wasn’t the only human on this ship.