by E M Gale
“Clarke is not right! There is nothing that will go wrong with this!” Rob stalked over to a helium-neon laser that I had thought was left there for junk, but which I now noticed was focused right at the ball lightning.
‘Uh-oh,’ I thought.
“Uh-oh,” I said.
“But let’s find out!” declared Rob with a manic grin as he flipped the switch.
‘Shit, I want to be somewhere else!’
I ducked and covered my eyes. There was a loud rushing sound, and then silence. It was like all eternity had been stretched out, then we hung in space for a moment, then reality pinged back into shape around us and I sank to my knees and sprawled forwards.
I smelled something unfamiliar, but somewhat less like the science lab and more like grass.
A Solipsistic Nightmare
It was hot and slightly humid as I rolled onto my back and cautiously opened my eyes the tiniest crack. The light flooded in, so bright I thought it was the laser. I squeezed them tightly shut and moved onto all fours, putting my head down and opening them again, praying that I wouldn’t go blind. I was staring at something that looked a little like grass, but was a bit darker than grass usually was, with rounder, fatter leaves. I tried to sense something else, to call up the heightened sensing state, but I still couldn’t. So I sat on my haunches and looked around.
‘This isn’t the lab.’
I was surrounded by green rolling hills, purplish vegetation and a strangely deep-blue sky. Rob, Anna, Jane and Mark were looking utterly dumbfounded. Their bags and coats that they hadn’t been holding were scattered around in the long grass; the lab equipment was nowhere to be seen.
They were standing roughly where they had been in the lab. Rob’s hand was still raised from where he had switched the laser on. His mouth was open and his eyes wide. Something about his pose reminded me of a child’s discarded doll.
I lay on my back, putting my hands up to block out the sun, and looked at the strangely dark sky. I enjoyed the feeling of the sun on me for once; it felt like winter had lasted for years. But it was odd: the sky shouldn’t be that colour. It was too dark, too purplish a blue. I had once seen a picture of what colour the sky would appear during the day if there were no dust in the upper atmosphere, a deeper, almost purple, blue. I remember thinking that it was a beautiful colour. Similar to the colour I was looking at.
“I’ve gone mad,” I mumbled to myself. That was the only sane explanation. I shut my eyes, counted slowly to ten, opened them again. The sky was still that odd colour and I was still lying on the not quite right plants looking at it. I sat up again. My friends were still rigid with shock. Jane’s eyes were wide, Anna’s mouth was moving as if she was talking to herself, but not putting enough breath behind it to be audible. Rob had lowered his arms and was looking around himself in wonder and Mark was just shaking his head.
I stood up, carefully wiping the dirt from my trousers. My movements were slower than usual to keep me calm. Then I looked around again.
‘Yup, this still isn’t the lab.’
Jane had turned to look at me, I guessed because I had been the only person to move this whole time. Doing my best to stop the hysterical laughter rising up within me, I looked back at her. She was quiet, so I would have to ask the question.
“So–”
Anna was startled out of her reverie by my voice.
“–where the hell are we?”
There was no useful reply from them.
“This can’t be happening,” Mark said, then he started repeating it over and over.
Jane was rocking from side to side slightly and Rob was still just staring at the horizon. Anna just shook her head in mute incomprehension. Oddly, despite how my friends were faring, I felt OK. The shock had left me. I held my hands up. They weren’t shaking. I checked the pulse in my neck. It was fast, but not that fast. It seemed I was the first to recover from our… well, I didn’t know what to call it, so I settled for ‘telelocation’. Then the thought occurred to me:
‘I am probably the first to recover since I have been dealing with the impossible all day. They, however, have just been shocked out of normality, without any sexy vampires to ease them on their way.’
This time I couldn’t stop it; the laughter bubbled up and I just laughed and laughed until I cried.
This seemed to startle them and they didn’t join in. Wiping my eyes, I stopped, stood up straight and asked them again:
“So where do you think we are?”
Anna shook her head vehemently. “I don’t know. But please, please, Clarke, don’t ever laugh like that again!”
That stopped me cold, the last of the hilarity now a distant memory.
‘Laugh like what?’
Rob was the next to recover. “We’re… we’re, well…”
Jane was sobbing behind her hands now and Anna walked over to her and put her arm around her, rubbing it up and down her back. I didn’t know if that helped Jane, but I was sure comforting her helped Anna; she seemed calmer faced with a problem she knew how to deal with.
“This is a trick, isn’t it?” declared Mark. He snapped out of his stupor and rounded on Rob. “Well, very funny! Very bloody funny! I bet you feel very clever now!”
Rob shook his head in confusion.
“It’s not a trick, Mark,” I interrupted, “and until we know the lie of the land, I’d suggest you keep your voice down.”
“You’re in on it, aren’t you? You with your, ‘It’s not safe, don’t do it,’ while all the time you were distracting us so he could set this up!”
“What?”
Mark turned back towards Rob and started jabbing his finger towards Rob’s face. “And then you distracted us, shouting at her, so she could… could… pull this trick off! Whatever this is!”
‘Well, I suppose yelling is better for him than stupefaction. Yell it all out, Mark.’
“I bet we’re still in the bloody lab. This is a wall painting she unfurled, or a projection from a fancy projector you’ve got stashed somewhere. Well, fuck you both and your crappy jokes. I’m leaving!” And with that, he turned his back on us, held his hands out in front of him and started walking. I’m sure in his mind he was feeling for the door to the lab, but with his eyes shut to ignore the illusion, head cocked to the side to listen and his hands held out, he looked like a zombie. I couldn’t help it, I found myself laughing all over again. Anna eyed me uneasily, but not as uneasily as before, so I guessed that was good.
‘I can’t really go through life not laughing.’
“Come back, Mark,” shouted Rob, “it’s not a trick, I swear to you!”
Mark stopped walking and collapsed to his knees. My guess was that he had opened his eyes and noticed that the ‘projection’ had changed the way the real world does when you walk forward. Mark picked himself up and slowly trudged back up towards us.
I felt steady enough to look around me in more detail. We were on a hill covered in the unfamiliar plant. Of course, I’ve not seen all the grass in the world. I once went to visit a friend in Hampshire and he laughed at me when I asked him why the trees were different there. They seemed to have vine things growing on them and choking them. He told me they were just trees.
‘So… not London grass then. But given that I’ve not seen too much of the world, that doesn’t mean anything really.’
Off in the distance stretched more hills. The landscape was undulating smoothly, a deep green shade under the purplish-blue sky. Below us were small shrub-type things, and in the distance a wood of trees of a slightly purplish-green. It was utterly alien and truly beautiful.
I breathed slowly and calmly. The air was tinged with a slightly acidic smell, also not something I recognised, but it was similar to the peaty smell of very wet earth. The breeze caused the trees to rustle in the distance. The ‘grass’ wasn’t long enough to rustle, which meant that there was something round here that ate it.
And that was it, that was all I could find out by looking a
round me. I tried again to bring back my enhanced sensing state, but I was starting to get a headache. I decided to leave consideration of questions such as whether I would get my enhanced senses back, and turned back to the problem at hand.
I smiled and said to the others, “It’s beautiful here, isn’t it?”
Jane looked at me as if I was completely crazy, but Anna asked: “Do you know where we are, Clarke?”
‘Well, I guess that’s a recovery. She has, at last, asked a useful question. Although why she thinks I would know where we are when I have been asking them that, I don’t know.’
Mark had joined us again by that point, so I gave her an answer to the best of my ability.
“Well, I could be wrong, and I really think we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that you’re all products of my imagination and I’m stuck in some sort of a solipsistic nightmare”–the look on their faces was bemused confusion, but I endeavoured on–“but leaving that aside for the moment, I really, really don’t think we are in the lab any more.”
Rob’s face was a mixture of fear and joy as he said: “This, this, man, is total Nobel Prize territory!” His grin was immense.
“Oh, yeah, definitely, well done.”
Rob started to dance around, singing something like, “La, la, la, a Nobel prize for me.” Jane was now looking at him as if he was mad and Anna was smiling in a slightly worried way.
“It’s… not a trick then?” Mark asked me.
“Not one I’m in on,” I replied, watching Rob’s dancing with amusement.
“So… where are we then?” Jane asked, clutching her fists under her chin.
“I don’t know…” I stopped because I really wasn’t sure I had enough evidence to voice my idea. I looked up.
‘The sky is not a normal blue colour.’
“But you suspect…?” asked Anna. She’d known me longer than Jane and was better at reading me, I think.
“Well…” I started. “And again, I don’t rule out that I’ve gone crazy–”
“I don’t either,” said Jane under her breath, but I heard her and stopped talking.
“Clarke, just tell me where you think we are!” yelled Anna.
Rob stopped dancing and turned to us.
“I don’t think we’re on Earth.”
They took in that new idea and digested it for a moment as I watched the cloudless sky.
“Well,” said Rob, “we’re not in the lab… I think I’ve discovered teleportation! Yay! But that doesn’t mean we’re not on Earth. We could be in Africa.” He looked around himself and shrugged.
“Not on Earth?” asked Mark, wonderingly.
“Teleportation?” said Jane.
“You ever seen plants like that?”
Rob shrugged. “Yeah, Madagascar.”
“Look at the sky.” I pointed. “You ever seen a sky like that anywhere?”
Rob looked up. “It is an odd colour, I’ll grant you that.”
“Yeah, kinda like the colour that the sky on Earth would be if we didn’t have much dust in the upper atmosphere, but that’s never happened, not on Earth.”
Rob looked up at the sky again. “You’ve got a point there, Clarke.”
I sighed. “Of course I could be wrong, but–”
“We can’t really be on an alien planet, can we?” interrupted Jane, casting around for someone to agree with her.
“No, of course not,” said Mark, shaking his head. “It can’t be.”
“But if Rob and Clarke think we are…” Anna sounded scared.
I sighed again, irritated. “It doesn’t matter whether we are or not,” I stated. They all looked at me in surprise. “Unless I’ve missed something, we can’t get back from here now, so–”
“What? We can’t get back?” interjected Jane in panic, looking at me.
“I don’t think so. Rob?”
He looked at me hollow-eyed.
“Uh… well…” He looked around him, searching, I suspect, for a Tesla coil and helium-neon laser that he knew wouldn’t be there. However, our bags and coats were, so I picked mine up.
“Oh, my God!” yelled Anna. She grabbed Rob’s arm. “We can’t get back! What will we do?”
I held my index finger up, preparing to list what we needed to do. “Well, we need to move, scout out the terrain, find some food, shelter, information. We need to know where we are and start looking for a way back.”
They nodded, shocked anew at this new thought. I was a bit surprised. I would have thought that the ‘Where am I?’ and ‘How do I get back?’ questions would have followed hot on the heels of ‘What just happened?’ Guess I was wrong.
“It doesn’t look like any part of the machine came through with us, so there’s nothing wrong with leaving this bit of land, right?” I looked at Rob. It was, after all, his experiment.
“Yeah, I guess so.” He seemed rather subdued now.
“Well then, let’s go find ourselves a town. I hope this bloody planet is populated with something civilised.” I looked around again.
‘I can’t see any roads over the rolling green hills, but down from where we are, towards that wood, there might be one. After all, it’s the lowest point round here and thus the most logical place to find one. That’s if the creatures that build the roads on this planet live near water, like humans do.’
I spun around on the spot three times, stopping so that I was facing down the valley towards the woods.
“Let’s go that way.” I smiled and pointed forwards. I started walking and, to my great surprise, they picked up their things and followed. Not one of them asked me why. I glanced back. Rob’s shoulders were hunched, Jane was frowning, Anna was close to tears and Mark looked annoyed.
At the bottom of the tree-covered valley there was a path. I stopped and tried to send my senses out, to no avail. The path was about the same size as a moderately used path on Earth. Thus, either it was a moderately used route for human-sized creatures, a highly used route for smaller-than-human-sized creatures or a rarely used route for larger-than-human-sized creatures. At this point I decided to give up reasoning and just see what would happen next.
“Wooo, a path,” said Jane. “You going to spin around on the spot again to figure out which way we should go now?”
I blew the air out of my mouth and frowned at her.
“No. Obviously, we go downhill. That’s probably where a town or city would be.”
“Hey, are you sure we want to find whatever creatures there are on this planet?” asked Mark, eyeing the tree-like plants worriedly. He was obviously working on the little-used path for larger-than-human-sized creatures scenario.
“We really need to gather more information about where we are,” I said. “The best way to do that is to find the tourist information office, or the nearest cultural equivalent.”
“‘Nearest cultural equivalent’?” repeated Anna in a dazed voice.
We ambled down the path. Hours passed, despite the fact that the sun had been high in the sky and had barely moved for the whole time. The path was stony and hard going; we had to take it slowly or risk sprained ankles. For us, it was probably approaching two a.m. by the time the ground started to level out and the path got wider.
The vegetation was green, but with a blue tint to it, rather than the yellowy-green of plants on Earth. However, they seemed to have roughly the same shapes as Earth’s plants. There were small scrubby spiky-looking bushes growing around the stones, bigger-leafed varieties under the trees and trees that were different to those on Earth. There was no way they could be mistaken for Earthly trees, not even if you were blind. I stopped walking to run my hands over the bark of one near me. It was textured, but in strange hexagonal patterns unlike any I had ever seen. The leaves had a four-fold symmetry to them, unlike the two- or five-fold I had seen on Earth. They were admittedly the same size, but no-one could mistake their bluey-green hue for the rich palette available to Earthly trees.
“What are you doing, Clarke?” asked
Jane wearily. The others had collapsed into a heap on the leaf-bound floor next to the path.
“Looking at this tree. It’s amazing, it’s completely different from any tree I’ve ever seen on Earth!”
“Is it?” asked Anna, and then she yawned loudly.
“Doesn’t look it to me.” Mark shrugged.
“Me either,” added Rob.
“Who cares about trees?” asked Jane, yawning as well.
“Seriously, guys! Can’t you see the difference?”
They all shook their heads.
“It’s just a tree,” mumbled Jane.
“The bark? It’s hexagonal. And the leaves? An odd shape, no?” Their expressions ranged from the annoyed to the apathetic, via dumbfounded.
‘Why does no one ever notice trees?’
“Well, let’s get moving then.” I yawned. “There’ll be a town or something eventually.” But they didn’t get up to their feet.
“I’m exhausted,” moaned Anna. “It is past midnight and we’ve been walking for hours! These shoes aren’t made for the countryside.” She pointed at her stiletto-heeled boots. I refrained from pointing out that my heels were as high.
“But the sun’s up,” I protested, sinking down, my back against a tree trunk.
‘Actually, now that I’ve stopped moving, I do feel tired. Plus, sleeping during the day has never been a problem for me.’
“It doesn’t matter,” said Mark. He yawned. “It’s dark enough under here and the leaves are soft.”
“Let’s camp here for the night!” declared Rob, sweeping his arms wide.
“I’m not listening to you. You’re the idiot who got us here in the first place,” said Mark.
“Nobel Prize-winning idiot,” corrected Rob with a grin.
“What the hell? Who cares!” Mark got up, turned his back on Rob and wandered a short distance away from us to find a bit of forest floor to bed down on.
“Shhhhh, guys, calm down,” I suggested, watching the path warily. “Let’s at least move further into the woods. And we should organise a watch rota.” Anna was already lying down, using her jacket as a pillow, her eyes shut. I’d seen her like that before in classes: she was out. It was amazing how quickly she managed to sleep. “Or, y’know, let’s camp right here.”
