3zekiel (First Contact)

by Peter Cawdron

  To my surprise, Lady’s sheltering from the rain, sitting in a gap between the roots. Normally, the gorillas stay well clear of the village now it’s grown in size. Humans are too noisy.

  Lady runs branches through her mouth, stripping berries from the thin twigs. The sun breaks through the clouds, streaming through the leaves, casting long shadows as the storm slowly clears and rain drips from the tree.

  I come to a halt, suddenly feeling overwhelmed as memories come flooding back.

  “Lady?”

  “Lady and Jana, right? That’s what you told them, isn’t it? That you came for us.” She signs, speaking aloud as her fingers move. “Look, Lady. It’s your friend Josh.”

  “Whoa.”

  My head seems to swing around me. I’m dizzy, on the verge of collapsing, unsure of my footing. I reach out, touching at one of the thick roots winding its way over the jungle floor, grabbing it not just for balance, but for surety, trying to determine what’s real.

  “Josh?”

  “I—I don’t understand.”

  Lady looks up and grunts. In the cool morning air, her hair has bristled, giving her the appearance of being meticulously groomed. It’s as though she’s just walked out of a hair salon, if there was such a thing for gorillas. Water beads on her shoulders, rolling off her greasy hair as she rocks forward onto all fours. Her eyes go wide. From behind pitch black skin and a broad, flat, open nose, she smiles.

  “OOH. OOH.”

  Lady avoids showing her teeth, but smiles broadly, revealing the lush pink inside her cheeks as she stretches her mouth wide in excitement, rushing over to me on all fours.

  “Lady told me what you did for her, how you found her, how you cared for her and fought for her.”

  I stumble backwards, confused, looking around me at the trees, listening to the call of the birds, watching monkeys swinging between branches, obscured by the leaves. Ants wind their way over the trunk of the Kapok tree, twisting as they follow contours in the bark, marching in single file, carrying bits of leaf from the jungle floor.

  “Are you okay?” Jana asks, reaching out and taking my hand. Her fingers entwine with mine. “It’s okay. They said it might be a bit much at first.”

  Lady rocks up to me on her knuckles, pressing them deep into the soft mud. She snorts, sniffing the air, and reaches out a clubbed hand.

  “It’s for you,” Jana says. “A present.”

  I hold out my hand and Lady places a handful of torn grass in my open palm. I feel everything, the subtleties of the breeze catching my wet clothing, the touch of her warm fingers against my skin, the thin strands of grass resting on my outstretch palm. The smell, the sounds.

  “Is this real?”

  Jana smiles, rocking her head to one side. “Yes, silly.”

  Lady tears another handful of wet grass, throwing it into the air, wanting to dance beneath it, but it’s sodden and heavy, falling rather than drifting to the ground. She twirls regardless, wanting me to copy her. Feeling numb, I go through the motions, raising my hand and sprinkling the grass so it falls on my hair and shoulders, but I’m lost in a daze.

  “She says, you’re pretty,” Jana says.

  “Just like her,” I mumble, remembering something more than a dream.

  “Pretzel,” I say as the realization strikes my mind like a bolt of lightning.

  “He’s in Raka’s hut.”

  We walk out from beneath the Kapok tree. The clouds have cleared and yet others remain, only they’re hundreds of thousands of miles beyond us, out in the depths of space, trapped within a gas giant that, to my mind, looks like Jupiter, but how could it be so close? Stunned, I come to a stop in the mud, dripping wet and looking up at the sky in awe.

  “Where—are—we?”

  “We’re here,” Jana says. “They brought us home.”

  Rather than being blue, the sky is dark, bordering on black even though we’re bathed in sunlight. Clouds swirl through the atmosphere of a gas giant. The planet rises slowly over the tree line like a full moon on a crisp winter evening, only it’s easily ten times the size of the moon. Layer upon layer of milky-white creams blend with oranges and browns, swirling within the distant planet, forming an intricate tapestry of curves and layers like oil drifting on water.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Jana asks.

  “Yes.”

  There are eddies and whirlpools in the clouds, entwined with each other, forming interlocking patterns. It’s as though van Gogh painted the sky. Although they must be in motion, the clouds appear locked in place. They bump up against each other, curling like waves at some celestial beach. Smokey blue threads weave their way between turbulent hurricanes of ruddy brown, only there’s no eye to these storms, rather some other swirling pattern rises up from beneath, filling the gap. There are white clouds, but they’re elongated, appearing like a thin smudge stretching around the planet—a layer of butter cream icing slathered in between two sections of some gigantic cosmic cake.

  To one side, there’s a small black spot, perfectly round, blotting out the clouds on one tiny section of the planet. As I stand there struggling to take in another world, I realize the blot is moving—not quickly, but with a smooth motion that’s unmistakable. It’s then I see a moon out in space, well beyond the planet, casting its shadow on the clouds of the gas giant.

  “And… And Pretzel’s here?” I ask.

  “Of course. Come on.”

  I struggle to tear myself away from the alien world dominating the sky. For Jana, it’s as though nothing is out of place, which is perhaps the most unsettling point of all. She pulls gently on my hand, leading me over to Raka’s hut.

  As we approach, I can hear talking within.

  “Waikiki,” Garcia says. “The Outrigger Hotel. Hell, I’d settle for the Hilton, but tell them Waikiki in Hawaii.”

  “They’re not going to know what Waikiki means,” Pretzel replies with his back to the door. Garcia’s lying on a cot with his hands behind his metallic head, apparently staring at the ceiling. One of the shutters is open now the rain has passed. Sunlight streams in, only it’s not from our sun. I pause by the door, intrigued, trying to glean understanding from their conversation. Jana squeezes my fingers. I suspect she’s as curious as I am about the references to Hawaii, although my curiosity extends a little further.

  Garcia says, “You’ve got to tell them. We don’t live in mud huts.”

  Pretzel counters with, “You’ve got to remember, to them, there’s not much difference between a mud hut and a mansion. Just a bit of plumbing and a few wires. It’s all primitive by their reckoning.”

  “Oh, man. I cannot live the rest of my life in a mud hut.”

  “Okay, I’ve found a scan of homes in Malibu. There are floor plans. Blueprints.”

  “Is there a lap pool? If there’s a lap pool, I’ll take it.”

  Pretzel laughs. He’s holding what looks like a computer tablet, only it’s circular in shape rather than a rectangle. As he shifts his weight, stepping to one side, he notices our shadows in the doorway.

  “Oh, hey, Josh.”

  Garcia sits up swiftly, swinging his legs over the cot and getting to his feet. “Hey, buddy. How are you doing?”

  Pretzel says, “Jana was supposed to let you sleep in.”

  Jana lowers her head, not so much from being scolded but as though she’s been caught out being cheeky. She grins.

  Pretzel pretends to be angry with her, but it’s beyond him. “We were supposed to go together, remember?”

  “I wanted him to see Lady,” Jana says in her defense.

  Pretzel shrugs. Good enough reason for him. He and Garcia walk out into the sunlight.

  “So what do you think?” he asks, gesturing with his hand to the village and the jungle beyond. Birds squawk as they always have. Flies buzz through the air. Millions of insects call for each other now the rain has stopped. Branches bend and flex, drooping under the weight of monkeys swinging through the canopy, screaming at each other.r />
  “Where are we?” I ask, although I know where we’re supposed to be. This is my home, my village, my jungle. I recognize everything. The weathered rocks dotted between the huts, too big to move so the villagers built around them. Several boulders have trees clinging to them, with their roots clambering over them, following a tortured path down to the soil. Others are worn from where generations of hominids have sat on them, resting from the heat of the day. Hominids, not humans, as regardless of what my dad might say, there were people here long before us.

  Pretzel is silent, letting me take everything in. I walk over toward one of the rocks. I can see the datum point where all this started. I remember Jana holding a pole as someone peered through a laser sight, calling out the height above sea level. I think it was Pretzel that spray painted the number on the rock, or it might have been Dr. Angela O’Brien. I’m not sure. It’s still there, though. My fingers linger on the paint, running slowly over the rough texture, only it’s not real. Not the original. This is some facsimile, a re-creation, and yet I’m glad it’s here as it’s a testament to her life.

  Pretzel rests his hand gently on my shoulder, knowing it takes time to process the magnitude of all that’s unfolded.

  “We’re home,” he says. “That’s what this place is.”

  “It was Jana’s choice of name,” Garcia says.

  “I figured, Earth was already taken,” Jana replies.

  “Home?”

  They all nod.

  “So this is it?” I ask. “There’s no going back?”

  “There’s nothing to go back to,” Garcia says. “Not in the jungle.”

  “Where is it?” I ask. “Where’s our real home?”

  “Earth?” Pretzel replies. “He points at the ground on an angle, circling slightly with his hand. “Around 780 light years that way.”

  “Which—which star is this?”

  “Dunno. It’s probably not even visible from Earth. There are roughly three million stars within a thousand light years of Earth—of which we can only see a couple of thousand from Earth with the naked eye, so it could be any of them, I guess.”

  “So which constellation are we in?” I ask.

  “Constellations aren’t my thing,” Pretzel says. “I should have paid more attention to astrology, I guess. Who would have thought that would ever come in handy?” He laughs. “We see constellations as things that are flat, but they’re not, so the shapes are distorted in the sky. I tried looking for Sirius as it’s so bright from Earth, but it’s only about 7 light years away from the Sun. From out here it’s just another nameless dot in the sky. I think I’ve spotted Orion, but it’s kinda messed up. Betelgeuse is obvious enough, but everything else is skewed and stretched. It’s like someone threw a star map in a blender.”

  Pretzel smiles. He’s trying to put my madly beating heart at ease.

  “We can never go back,” he says softly, reiterating Garcia’s point. “There’s nothing left from our time. Our journey took roughly 1200 years, from what I can tell. These guys don’t exactly speak in terms of years, so it’s more a guess than anything. If we were to return to Earth, it would be like someone from ancient Babylon being dropped in Times Square. Spacetime is a strange beast.”

  “But Earth’s still out there somewhere?” I ask.

  “Oh, yeah. They can see them—humans like us—spreading out from our solar system. They’ve had numerous interactions since our time, but it’ll be hundreds of years before those reports arrive and we’ll be long dead by then. We thought of First Contact as an event, but it’s a process spanning thousands of years!”

  “I don’t understand,” I say. “How is that even possible?”

  “During the First World War, news was shipped across the Atlantic in tin cans. Films from the Battle of the Somme arrived months after the attack had ended. The horror the public expressed at the butchery of American soldiers dying in muddy trenches was for a fight that was long over.

  “Back then, even seemingly instant forms of communication, like telegrams, took days to reach the families of fallen soldiers. Sometimes weeks. Even months depending on how difficult it was to identify the dead. In some ways, it’s a bit like that. They can see humans establishing an outpost in orbit around Jupiter, but it’s probably long gone by now, or tripled in size. They can see our probes reaching out beyond the Oort cloud, racing toward nearby stars, but those spacecraft aren’t there anymore. They’ve moved on. Several of them are heading this way. One of them is big enough to sustain a crew, but it’ll be several thousand years before it gets here, so dozens of generations will live and die before they make landfall here at Home.”

  I’m in shock.

  “But the aliens. H—How did they do all this?” I ask, gesturing around us. Were it not for the gas giant rising over the trees and the pitch-black sky in the middle of the day, I could swear I was back home in my old village in Africa.

  “They thought it would make us feel safe,” Jana says.

  “Waikiki,” Garcia replies, laughing. “Waikiki would make me feel safe.”

  Pretzel says, “Once they realized they’d caught intelligent beings in their dragnet, they went to extraordinary lengths not to hurt us. Their scientific ethics committee demanded that a habitat be established before we were revived. They’ve waited hundreds of years, carefully building up the jungle, reconstructing the village from their scans, and all so we’d feel at home.”

  “This is our home now,” Jana says, squeezing my hand, wanting to assure me everything’s going to be okay. I don’t know how she can be so confident.

  Garcia hands me a bottle of water and I drink heartily.

  Pretzel says, “They woke us based on our ability to absorb emotional change, with Jana going first. Apparently, we all needed her.”

  Typical Pretzel. He scrunches up his face a little, raising an eyebrow and nodding in admiration at a teenaged girl from a tiny village in the middle of the African jungle.

  “Where are they?” I ask, trying to hide my trembling hands and the quiver in my voice as I put the bottle down.

  Pretzel points up in the sky.

  Garcia says, “They don’t even have a planet.”

  “What? How is that possible?”

  Pretzel smiles. “They evolved around the moon of another gas giant in this system. Just as we once spread out between continents, they jumped between moons, establishing their civilization in orbit around a planet that looks a lot like Neptune.

  “This particular moon is smaller than Earth, but has a dense core, so gravity is similar, but get on even a small hill and you can see the curvature. I think Home is closer to Mars in terms of its size. Maybe Titan.”

  “And them? What do they look like?”

  “Like starfish,” Garcia says. “Kinda like those spider robots we saw, but without the chrome.”

  ‘They struggle in one gee,” Pretzel says, “So all our meetings occur in orbit.”

  My eyes cast up, catching the sight of a thin strand reaching from the jungle into the sky, marking the location of another space elevator. “Oh, wow.”

  “Do you want to meet them?” Jana asks, bubbling with enthusiasm.

  “There’s no rush,” Pretzel says.

  I nod and force a smile, trying to be brave.

  “You only just woke,” Garcia says. “Are you sure you’re up for this?”

  I lie.

  “Absolutely.”

  With a sense of resolve, I take hold of Jana’s hand again. What I really want to say is, ‘I want to go home,’ but this is our home now. It’s not that I want to go back to the jungle—I want to return to America. In all my years in Africa, I never doubted there would be a time I’d walk the streets of Boston again, or stroll through Central Park in New York. But now, that’s all gone.

  Doubts crowd my mind, but with Jana, I feel I can do this. The future is ours, I tell myself, the future is exciting, not threatening. Perhaps that’s the greatest lesson I learned from my father—to face my fear
s, not run from them.

  Jana smiles. The warmth in her fingers gives me strength. It seems we both got our ticket out of the jungle, although not quite in the way either of us expected.

  The End

  Afterword

  Thank you for taking a chance on 3zekiel. I hope you’ve enjoyed this novel as much as I have. Without your support, stories like this aren’t possible. Books live and die based on the enthusiasm of readers. Without you, this is just a manuscript shoved in a drawer somewhere, so thank you for being part of the journey.

  I’d like to thank Luann Miller and David Jaffe for their assistance in reviewing the preliminary draft of this novel, along with Petr Melechin, Chris Roberts, Rob Engel, Ken Bruce and Bruce Simmons (who’s been helping with beta-reads since the early days of Anomaly, Monsters and Little Green Men). Retired U.S. Army medic Bob Bickford also helped with insights into the military activity in this novel.

  As much as possible, I base my stories on established science. I’m not a fan of Ancient Aliens but if we are ever visited by extraterrestrials at some point in the future, it would be valid to consider whether we might have been visited in the past as well, simply because such an undertaking is too vast for a single journey. In the same way we’ve sent multiple probes to Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, etc, it would be highly unlikely for ET to show up just once.

  The movie Independence Day also recognized this point. Although it showed vast armadas of spacecraft, huge base ships and dozens of mile-wide atmospheric craft, these were tied into the earlier (mythical) Roswell crash. Why? Because the risk/cost associated with an interstellar expedition is so extreme any explorer would want to be absolutely sure about the return on their efforts. I’ve taken that idea and extended it further, tying it into obscure texts from the Bible as a past record that could possibly be reinterpreted in light of some future encounter.

  Why does this story revolve around alien machines instead of aliens themselves? In Confessions of an Alien Hunter, SETI scientist Seth Shostak points out that, given the extreme distances involved in space and the ridiculous amount of time required to traverse star systems, let alone entire galaxies, if extraterrestrials ever do reach Earth it will probably be in the form of von Neumann machines—self-replicating robotic probes spreading throughout the universe. This type of exploration was popularized in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey where a sentient alien monolith observes the rise of Homo sapiens from the lunar surface, and later journeys to the moons of Jupiter.