Proxima Rising

by Brandon Q Morris

  Adam packs some food, a flashlight, and a rope in a shoulder bag, then they start out. They quickly find the way out of the forest, and right beyond it is the zone where the trees went to war, their ‘footsteps’ still visible as deep holes in the ground. Adam walks in front, while Eve stays close to the edge of the forest. He waves her to come closer to him, but she rejects this invitation with an unequivocal gesture. She probably feels safer there, he assumes. Adam examines several of the holes, one after another. He makes his way to the edge and shines the flashlight inside—they have a depth of three or four meters. Sometimes there are roots protruding into the hole from the side, but Adam discovers nothing that looks alien-made. He moves from hole to hole, but even after half an hour he is without success. Since this is obviously the wrong strategy, he rejoins Eve near the edge of the forest.

  “That’s no use,” he says.

  “Then let’s go back,” Eve suggests. “We have been out here for almost an hour. If Marchenko comes back early and finds us gone, he’ll die of fright.”

  “No, he’s a tough guy,” Adam insists. “I’ve got a better idea.”

  He waits for Eve to argue with him, but she does not do him the favor. She just purses her lips slightly.

  “We have to go where the trees came from, the south,” Adam says.

  “But you said we wanted to go to the north,” Eve says with a sigh.

  “That was nonsense. I was wrong. We won’t find anything in the north. Those trees are back where they came from.”

  Eve’s face brightens at this, and she replies, “But not the ones in the south.”

  “That’s right,” Adam confirms. He remembers the tree left behind. What could have happened to it? “The root system of the trees is huge,” he continues. “It’s there that we’ve got a better chance of finding something.”

  But Adam begins to doubt his own plan. How high is the chance to discover a ruin on the area covered by a single tree? Is this any better than digging around at random?

  Eve notices Adam shaking his head and asks, “What are you thinking about?”

  “Nothing,” he replies. “I just... never mind. If you come along with me to that hole, I won’t bother you anymore, I promise.”

  Eve nods in agreement, and Adam is glad but tries not to show it too much. He already knew she would not deny his request.

  The only problem is that they do not know exactly where the southern group of trees came from. After the fight both of them had concentrated on the northern group marching home, because it had passed nearby. The other group might have come from farther away.

  “We have to mark the spot where we have to reenter the forest later.”

  Adam blushes. “Sure... right,” he says, “I was about to suggest that.” It is good that Eve remembers, otherwise their return might have become complicated.

  The two first follow the tracks of the northern group until they reach the battlefield. Two trees lay here now, even though only one fell. Is this some kind of solidarity?

  “Perhaps its partner laid down to die with it,” Eve wonders.

  The two gigantic trees are immobile and their roots stiff, and they are truly awe-inspiring. In spite of the somber scene, Adam is glad, because the second tree doubles their chance of finding something. From almost 0 to almost 0, his mean little doubt tells him again. Adam has to be careful not to show what he is thinking. “Come on,” he says.

  Eve stares at the two tree corpses. There is a strange smell in the air, not of putrefaction but of lavender.

  Adam takes Eve’s hand and pulls her away. She finally follows him, and for 20 minutes they keep walking parallel to the edge of the forest. This spot is where the trees entered the forest. Adam is reminded of the fairytale about Hansel and Gretel. He looks at Eve who is cheerfully walking next to him. No, he thinks, this has nothing to do with that old story. How could we ever lose our way considering these tracks?

  The forest around them seems monotonous. It is as if they’re moving through a huge hall, with the canopy of leaves shielding them. Adam does not think he will ever like this planet, let alone the forest. Everything here takes place without variation. There are neither nights nor seasons, and here inside this ‘hall of eternal peace’ there is no breeze, nor is there anything to see but smooth tree trunks 200 meters tall.

  After another half an hour Eve stops. Adam has an idea of what is about to happen.

  “We have been walking for almost two hours,” she says in a soft voice, as if talking to an infant.

  Adam hates her tone of voice. “Then it won’t hurt if we go another 30 minutes...” he insists.

  “No,” she interrupts him, “I don’t want Marchenko to worry when he returns. We don’t even have the two-way radio with us.”

  Okay, she is right. But what if it really isn’t very far anymore—if we are giving up three minutes before reaching our goal? Adam cannot stand the feeling of missing out, but at the same time he knows he cannot convince Eve with his arguments.

  “Another 15 minutes, please?” he pleads with puppy dog eyes. Eve notices his trick and laughs, but it still works. Adam knows this, even though he can tell she is struggling with herself. Of course, he cannot reveal that he is aware of it.

  “Please?” he repeats. Now his glance is not as obvious.

  “Fine,” Eve replies, conceding. “But then we really are turning back. I will turn around in 15 minutes no matter what you are doing.”

  Adam nods. “That’s only fair,” he says. “Then let’s use the remaining time well.” He walks ahead faster, and Eve follows him willingly.

  After ten minutes Adam is about to give up, but just then the ground changes. The tracks of the trees decrease, while at the same time the ground around the trunks looks churned up. His heart is beating faster. They have found the area where the trees came from. Now the two of them just have to search for the spot where the two tree corpses once stood. Adam points this out to Eve, and she smiles slightly at his eagerness.

  However, when they suddenly stand at the edge of a wide pit that is at least five meters deep, Eve does not smile anymore. She is stunned. Adam notices her amazement before he sees the hole, and Eve can barely stop him by grabbing hold of his arm. She uses her other arm to point downward. There is a gray building, reminiscent of a Greek temple. Five columns rise about one meter out of the ground, covered by a roof that has the cross-section of a flat triangle. In his mind, Adam is cheering—they themselves have found more proof, all on their own, without Marchenko! Adam is eager to go down and examine the building more closely, but Eve holds on to him. He glares at her, but she does not falter. She knows him too well.

  “No, you won’t go down there now,” she says.

  “Eve, I have to. There is no other way.”

  “You don’t have to do anything. We are going back to get Marchenko, and then all of us will examine this building together.”

  “Marchenko won’t believe us.”

  “You know he is not like that.”

  Eve is right. That is a stupid argument, Adam admits to himself. But if they walk back now, they probably will not return before tomorrow. Adam cannot wait that long. He is so close, and now he is supposed to leave before even touching this mysterious structure? Impossible!

  Eve’s look tells him the matter is decided, though Adam is allowed to advance a few more meaningless arguments. It is obvious, however, that he will not be able to persuade her. Therefore he simply takes a few steps forward, one... two... three. Adam then steps into the void and briefly waves his arms before he loses his balance, tilts forward and falls headfirst into the pit.

  “ADAM!” Eve’s scream reaches him the moment he hits the sand. Now he is shocked, as he imagined his descent differently, more graceful. He sits up and rubs the dirt from his burning eyes.

  “Are you injured, Adam?” Eve asks anxiously.

  “No, I am alright... it was a soft landing,” he replies sheepishly.

  “No pain?”

 
; Adam pats down his body but finds nothing to worry about. His heart is starting to beat more slowly. There’s no reason to panic, his plan worked. He is exactly where he wants to be.

  “No, I’m not feeling any pain, just a lot of sand between my teeth and on my face,” he answers.

  “That was so stupid of you!” says Eve in an annoyed voice. She might even be right, but now he wants to do what he jumped into the pit for—touch the building that had been hidden from this world for so long.

  “Adam, please be reasonable and come back.”

  He hears real concern in her voice. That is nice to hear, but he still has to get into the structure first. He is almost exactly in the middle of the pit, and the tree must have previously stood right above it. We would have never found it by digging at random, he concludes.

  Adam finally reaches the structure. His hand brushes against a piece of wall that reminds him of a beam. It must be his imagination that he seems to feel a slight tingling while doing so. He walks once around the building, which measures about four by five meters. They will only be able to tell how tall it is after they have excavated it. There are numerous symbols on the slanted roof. Do these provide enough text to decipher the language now? he wonders. Finally, Adam looks at the columns near the entrance. They do not appear to be made of stone, but the surface instead feels like that of the tree trunks.

  “Okay, I am coming now,” he calls out to Eve, and she seems a little relieved.

  Shortly before reaching the slope, Adam reaches into the bag still hanging over his shoulder. “I am going to throw the rope to you,” he says.

  Eve manages to catch the rope on the third attempt.

  “Very good,” Adam praises her. “You see, I thought of everything.”

  “You are crazy,” Eve replies, but he shakes his head.

  “Now you hold on to the rope and I pull myself up on it.”

  Adam takes the rope in both hands, and the rough material cuts into them. He quickly notices that he has not really thought his plan through. He is stronger than Eve, but this does not help, since he is also considerably heavier. If both of them pull on the rope, Adam will never get up, he will instead pull Eve downward. They need a tree to wrap the rope around, but there is none in reach. The rope is simply too short. Adam tries to get a running start to get up the slope, but it is too steep. And the soil is too soft to climb, and he repeatedly slips back down.

  “Shit!” he yells in frustration and sits down on the dry ground.

  “That’s what we get for doing this,” Eve says, but she does not seem to be too upset.

  Why is she so calm—now of all times? He would better understand if she scolded him and his idea loudly. “I won’t make it out of here by myself,” Adam’s voice sounds husky.

  “I congratulate you on this objective assessment,” she replies.

  Yes, Eve can really be sarcastic, he reminds himself. Now she will probably go to get Marchenko. Just what he needs.

  “I am walking back to the camp,” Eve says. “Marchenko might already be waiting for us, and he is the only one who can get you out of there.”

  Not Marchenko. That would be the worst possible defeat for Adam, but he does not say that aloud. Objectively, he has to admit that Marchenko now represents his only chance for survival. Adam feels anger rising in him, anger at himself and the universe.

  “See you later!” Eve shouts, “and don’t do any stupid things while I am gone!”

  To Adam, it sounds as if she means ‘any additional stupid things.’ He waves at her but does not manage to say a word. Eve quickly disappears from his field of view. For a moment he still hears the crunch of her feet on the forest floor, and then he is all alone. Now Adam is no longer in the mood to examine the building, the very reason he had jumped into the pit in the first place. He will just sit here in the dirt, getting bored, bemoaning his fate, and preparing for Marchenko’s inevitable lecture.

  Adam is abruptly startled. Is something here? No, his body was just about to topple sideways. He must have briefly fallen asleep and now he wonders, how much time has gone by? He forgot the communicator in the camp, his only way of telling time. Adam rubs his eyes, forgetting that his fingers are still dirty.

  “SHIT!”

  The word reverberates in the pit. Acoustic resonances down here are different compared to the hall-like space formed by the leaf canopy, where sound has to travel a long way to return as an echo. He starts drawing figures in the sand with his foot. He tries to remember the glyphs on the beam and to imitate them. Perhaps he can discover similar shapes on this strange temple? If mankind interpreted the radio message correctly, its senders must have moved on two legs and possessed two arms. Did they worship their gods here? Or was it once perhaps a place to conduct business? Adam tries to imagine life in those times. The trees cannot have existed at the time the structure was originally built. He looks at the trunks. They appear to have been standing here for a very long time. So, the building he discovered must have been deserted for thousands of years.

  Suddenly a leg appears between the columns.

  Adam notices the movement right away. He wants to jump up and run, but at the same time he is so fascinated that he cannot avert his eyes and stays rooted to the spot. It cannot be one of the actual aliens, as those must have died out long ago or left. But it is undeniably a leg that is coming out of the low opening. It moves very slowly, but soon it becomes clear that it must be very long. Half a meter, one meter, one and a half meters, two meters—when is the body going to appear? Instead, a second leg follows—one that is not any shorter—then one more, two, three... eight thin legs push forward into the open. At their ends there is something Adam at first identifies as hooves, but their bottom appears to be movable. It must be suckers! Whatever is crawling out of its home now should be able to climb smooth walls.

  Adam thinks about all eight-legged creatures he knows about: Insects have six legs, spiders have eight. But those are categories from Earth. Who knows if he might actually be facing one of the current rulers of this planet? He looks around frantically, but the pit offers only one hiding place, and this creature has occupied it first. Is it alone? Adam has never seen a real spider, but apprehension sends a chill through his body at the idea of soon being faced with a giant version of one.

  At first a different body part of the creature appears, though. It looks like a proboscis. The tip is almost ten centimeters wide. If Adam is lucky, this animal uses it to suction water or other liquid nutrients, like male mosquitoes on Earth. But perhaps the creature is hungry for a meal of blood, like female mosquitoes, which need iron and protein for developing their eggs. Adam shakes his head. Humans cannot really be on the menu of Proxima b inhabitants. He would be completely indigestible to them, because his body chemistry is so different. But does the spider know it would get an upset stomach from eating him?

  The proboscis moves in every direction, as if the animal uses it to sniff around. It is obviously attached to a body that now comes fully out of the dwelling, pulled by the legs. The torso of the creature is surprisingly small, perhaps half the size of his own. So this thing would not be able to swallow him in one piece, as some snakes do with their prey. And this animal does not seem to have teeth. Adam cannot detect anything like a mouth.

  But he certainly can see its eyes—there are dozens of them. They are placed in a circle around the base of the proboscis and all around the torso of the creature. The eyes are looking in all directions, but one of them is staring straight at him. It has a diameter of about five centimeters. A dark green dot swims on a white background—contracting and expanding—this must be the pupil. Adam recoils when a kind of eyelid quickly moves over the eye from below, and the eye appears wetter afterward, as if the creature were about to cry.

  Adam still wants to run away, but he cannot avert his gaze. His own eyes feel dry and he is unable to blink. The creature’s strange eye has completely mesmerized him. He has never seen such a being before, but at the same time
it feels familiar—perhaps from nightmares—even though at least the eye does not seem menacing. ‘I won’t do anything bad to you,’ it seems to say. Of course this could also be a strategy to give its victim a false sense of security.

  The creature stands up. It is huge, almost three meters tall, but at the same time the long, thin legs make it appear extremely fragile. Its proboscis is sweeping across the ruin. Will it react if Adam stands up as well? Maybe he should remain seated, since some animals only react to movements. The creature seems to have noticed him, but right now it must be classifying him as neither a threat nor a source of food. That is, unless it is clever enough to realize Adam has no way out.

  The animal turns around. The eye that has so far been watching him now disappears from Adam’s view, and another eye focuses on him. Adam’s heart starts beating faster, but the animal begins to stride away with huge steps. Nothing can be heard, as the weight is distributed across the eight legs, allowing for almost noiseless movement. Whatever it selects as its prey will not hear it coming.

  The creature effortlessly masters the slope that is keeping Adam imprisoned. It places one leg above it, then a second, gains momentum with the other legs, and lands on top. The spider stops for a moment, stretching itself as much as possible. Its proboscis is moving across the trunk of the nearest tree, as if searching for something. Could the animal be hungry? It leans two legs against the trunk. Then a smacking sound can be heard, indicating the feet now adhering to the tree bark. The next two legs follow. The spider places them further up. The animal manages to stand on four legs very well, but when it lifts the next pair of legs toward the tree, it starts to sway. After a few seconds, the creature stabilizes itself. Now it’s time for the last two legs. Look how flexible these long, stick-like limbs are! Adam estimates they must have at least six joints.

  Yet it is not enough for the creature to climb the tree. The body seems to be too heavy. It slides down and slams against the trunk and the ground. The animal utters a high, piercing sound, and Adam thinks he can hear pain and frustration in it. Why is it down on the ground, if it really does not belong here? The creature stands up again, its proboscis moving back and forth over some mushrooms. It briefly touches their surfaces, but then shrinks back. The giant spider sinks to its knees, and it seems to be close to giving up. Adam senses the emotions of this extraterrestrial being, even though no two creatures in the universe could be more alien to each other. He realizes something very special is happening to him, and he is grateful for it.