Aliens - The Truth is Coming (Book of Aliens 1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

It was a view he expounded on in different ways at different times, but it was a view that got bleaker as he got older, and why not? It certainly seemed as though things worsened as time passed. Talk of the greenhouse effect, over-hunting, pollution, extinction and over-population were subjects that never went away, just got bigger. An elephant in the room that should have been hard to ignore, and yet somehow everyone did.

  It was something I often thought odd. My father could look up into the night sky and see such wonder, yet when he was grounded and looking at the human race his world view became quite dark.

  Fortunately, I found the perfect distraction.

  It was something that always worked so well; try and steer the conversation toward aliens.

  It was a subject that could not fail to make him smile. My father, as you might have gathered, was not a well-educated man, but he was someone who, when he really wanted to know about something, would read about it and in that way, rather than through traditional education, he would learn. And he was a thinker. He never said it, but I am sure he would sit and think about all kinds of things. Coming to his own conclusions. I do not know how many of them he shared, especially in any great detail.

  Aliens though… Well he would always be happy to talk about them.

  “I don’t think there have ever been any aliens come to Earth,” he said once. “But that don’t mean that there aren’t any. Did you know that there are considered to be some three hundred billion - let me say that again, it’s such a huge number - three hundred billion stars in our galaxy. We don’t get to see that from the ground. With t’naked eye they reckon, on a good night, y’can see about a thousand. Lookin’ up there it looks like a lot eh?

  “But it ain’t. It’s not even a million, not even close, and then you think of a billion and that ain’t close t’the full amount of stars either.

  “Three hundred billion. It buggers the mind. I think it’s one of those figures that is just hard too comprehend, to come to terms with. But it is what it is. And if you want to generalise a bit - well let’s say that each of those stars has eight planets like our sun. Suddenly you`ve got umm, about two and a half trillion planets, an` that don`t take into account any planet-sized moons and the like that are out there orbitin` gas giants, or planetoids like Pluto.

  "Just tryin` t`get your head around a number like that is next t`impossible isn`t it eh?

  "When y`consider that many planets, then thinkin` that there ain`t no more lifeforms out there, well it seems damned impossible t`me.

  "I know that some of the scientists will have proper equations and things like that; hell they`d claim that my math is over simplified an` damned naive. I know that and it`s not the point. What I`m sayin` is that there are a damned lot of stars out there and that means a lot of planets, to my mind.

  "So if there ain`t life on some of `em, it`s a sad old thing.

  "Now add t`that the galaxies and super-galaxies. Well they think that there is something like one hundred billion galaxies and times that by your two and a half billion planets, then tell me there ain`t no more life out there. Seems highly improbable, don`t it? They might not be able to travel from star to star, but then why should they? We can`t."

  It still makes me smile now, even in the darkest of times; closing my eyes, I can hear my father talking away with all that enthusiasm and it makes things a little easier to bear. A little lighter.

  ***

  Things changed, of course; they always do.

  In the mid 2010’s it was announced that Earth, was heading toward environmental collapse. I’m sure there were plenty of people out there, many of them industrialists, who would have claimed that it was all speculation and fear-mongering from environmentalists.

  “It’s all there,” my father told me when I and my young family joined him for lunch one Sunday. “They been saying it’s goin’ t’happen for years and then denyin’ it for years. Still are. Yet here we are with floodin’ unlike anything I ever heard of, an’ that’s down t’the rains an’ winds. It ain’t just us though. America gets the worse snow it’s ever had, incredible heatwaves in Australia. Milder weather. Wetter weather. All change.

  “Course, I think this was something that was always goin’ t’happen. Inevitable, you might say. The world’s always been changing and this planet of ours is not really in its natural state. All this talk of polar ice caps meltin’ may well be happening, but t’me it seems as though things are going back to the way they should be. Did y’know that back in the time of the dinosaurs Antarctica used t’be a tropical jungle? Less ice, I guess. More water. Hotter. More humid.

  “That all changed when a lump o’ rock smashed into the planet, wiped out the dinos and changed the environment in an instant. Since then it’s slowly, very slowly been going back to how it was.

  “From humanity’s point of view, the impact wasn’t a bad thing, ‘cause it triggered a set of circumstances that allowed us to evolve. But the rub is that we’ve screwed it all up. We’ve knocked the scales out of balance and things are going the way they would have without us, only but our meddlin’ made it go a lot faster. And the scary thing is, it might be faster than we can evolve to cope with.” He shrugged and smiled, “But I don’t want t’talk as if it’s the end of the world. I’m pretty sure that humanity as a whole is determined and clever enough to adapt to survive, but I figure it’s goin’ t’be a hard path to get there.” He leaned back in his chair; it almost looked as though he were offering up a prayer. “We screwed things up when we stopped goin’ into space. We should have been on Mars by now.

  “Heh, too many eggs in one basket. I just hope we don’t break too many payin’ for it.”

  The reports estimated environmental disaster by the year 2020. They were wrong. Technically, the world tipped into collapse in 2025. Of course, for people things seemed to carry on in the manner they always had, there seemed to be no truly visible change, but change the world did.

  The details were well known, but just to emphasise the point: Natural disruptions increased; bad weather, flooding, drought, forest fires, sudden drops in temperature; the weather played havoc with certain crops and plants. It created, at best, shortages in certain food types, wheat being one of the most obvious, and at worst, whole areas became uninhabitable in both the third and modern world. More species became extinct or teetered on the edge. And still the icecaps melted: sea levels rose.

  The thing was, official environmental collapse was when a series of conditions were met (in theory), and that meant the label came into effect. The world did not stop spinning or come to a sudden end. Life carried on.

  My father would have said it was a continuation of the rot that had set in a long time before, and the rot that would get worse. The world would not end in a day, it would be a long, drawn out process, encompassing centuries. But that was the tipping point, where the precarious balance between man and nature inevitably passed the point of no return.

  And not in a good way.

  My father was little more than fifty-five, still young in many ways, but young means nothing when illnesses are brought into the equation of life. No-one noticed - well, I suppose some people did- but various sicknesses began to become more prevalent. There were more cancers, more variants of old illnesses and a fair share of new ones.

  Dad did things the old fashioned way; kept his mouth shut when he started to feel sick and brushed it off as a simple upset stomach, or a virus. Turned out it was stomach cancer. By the time the pain got so great he could not ignore it, it was too late. There was nothing that could be done.

  Just wait.

  Then die.

  He decided he wanted to pass-away at home. and although we knew it would be a strain on Mum, who would want to deny a loved one? The local hospice provided nursing and spiritual and emotional support.

  It was so strange, seeing his bedroom slowly fill up with specialist equipment, but the biggest thing -in some ways, the hardest thing- was the small red box, on
ly a little bigger than a box of matches. Sealed, only to be opened by a Terminal Care Nurse; two tablets that, when ingested, would bring his life to a gentle, peaceful end.

  To be used when the pain became too much.

  Virtually bed ridden, though he bore it well to start with, his deep thoughts became darker. One of the last times I saw him, he was sitting up in bed, the curtains open. His face was thinner than ever, but he smiled and after a few brief words I sat next to him and held his hand. Together we stared out through the window. For once it was clear, something that was becoming rarer, but that night the velvet of the sky was pierced by the brilliance of the stars.

  It seemed to me, for a brief moment, that nothing mattered. I was a young boy once more sitting next to my dad on a clear night. Neither his sickness nor the world’s decline meant anything.

  "D`you remember all their names?" he asked suddenly, and I told him I could not. He managed a smile. "Cancer. Damned thing eatin` my guts away. Makes y`think, though.

  "Said it before, we should have been out there by now."

  I squeezed his hand and said something about meeting all those aliens that had to be out there. He shrugged, "Let me tell you what I think.

  " ‘Alien’ does not really mean what y`think, y`know that?

  "In this day an` age ‘alien’ has become synonymous with bug-eyed monsters from outer space. I say alien, and that is what most people think of.

  “But it is a word that had been applied to creatures from outer space and has stuck. Originally I think it meant `other` but it means so much more. Different. Hostile. Incompatible. Conflicting. Heh, you can tell I have been thinking too much, eh? Trouble is, that here, there is not much else t`do.

  "Thing is though, think of the squirrel. Red ones, they were natural t`the British Isles and then grey ones got here later. They were alien. Did not fit in the same way; were bigger, stronger and they virtually wiped out the reds. Y`see, something might be brought in t`do something specific, like stoats t`control a rabbit population. But old stoat, he has no indigenous predators, and suddenly he`s a bigger problem than the rabbits.

  “I figure it’s the same as this cancer. It`s wrong, different and bugger me, is it aggressive. Those damned cells are alien to my body and there is nothing that can fight ‘em off. Perhaps slow `em, but it`s all just a holding action. Slowly, surely just doin` what they do, they`re eatin` me away `til boom I`m gone.

  "Are those cells doin` anything wrong?

  "Who knows. They`re just being what they are. Destructive things in an environment in which they thrive. The biggest irony being once I`m gone then so are they. There`s no point in them except to destroy. There you go.

  "Which brings me back to those aliens." He pointed out the window, coughed and winced. “Aliens. Something that is out of place in this environment, come from a different place. Something that works against the world it is in. Destroying it just by being there. Like a cancer."

  He looked out the window, breath hissing in and out of his lungs and I guess, this once, he was not looking at the stars but that which lay beneath them.

  The planet we had all but destroyed.

  "You ask me where the aliens are?"

  He tapped his chest.

  "We`re already here."

  Table of Contents

  Foreword by Andrew Angel

  Acknowledgements

  In Plain Sight

  Geometry

  Gods of the Ice Planet

  Island Visit

  Even The Klin Are Only Human

  A New Dawn

  Rent

  Salvage

  The Devil’s Rock

  The Man Who Wasn’t Dead

  We Three Remain

  Welcome to Cosmic Journey

  The Zoo of Dark Creatures

  Here