by Mike Luoma
The eldest of the Eldred is clearly taken aback. He glances at the other four Eldred with him.
“Look,” BC says, “you made it sound like this was all a million years ago.” BC forces his point. “This was all in the past! You never told me you had one of them stored away on ice!”
“Please, calm yourself, Campion,” the eldest of the Eldred says. “We were impressed by your candor. Al-Salid was also quite forthright, but we could not reach him after he left us. That is why we came to see you. We are here because we need your help.”
“My help?” BC asks, disbelieving. “Are you sure? How can I help you?” BC pauses for a thought. “And how can we be sure you aren’t here just to wipe us out, infect the rest of us with some plague, to advance your plague to the next stage to finish what you’ve started? Nip this Ancient Enemy thing in the bud?”
The Eldred exchange glances between them.
Looks like that course of action was at least considered!
The eldest of the Eldred looks back at BC.
“We need your help. Yes,” the eldest tells BC. “We believe you can help us track down this ancient one.”
“You think I can help you do that?” BC asks, incredulous.
“Yes. You think as he does. You share many characteristics with him that we do not,” the eldest of the Eldred says. “You think as he does.”
“I really don’t think I do,” BC protests.
“Well, certainly, you think more as he does than we do. We think, therefore, that your help could be valuable to us. Your perspective.”
“Okay,” BC says. “But I still don’t understand! How could you let this happen?”
“It was not our doing!” the eldest of the Eldred protests. “It was the Snakt who found his capsule and kept it hidden. We did not know that Dolomay was still alive.”
“Dolomay?” BC asks, hearing the name.
“Dolomay was a mid level military commander who fell out of favor and was labeled a criminal. He was frozen, his body placed in suspended animation and encapsulated, and placed in orbit of the homeworld of the Ancient Enemy as an example to others. When their world was destroyed, Dolomay and his capsule were cast out among the stars and forgotten. Eventually the capsule drifted into the space controlled by the Snakt and they found and recovered him.”
The eldest of the Eldred looks to the other Eldred, as if deciding what to say, how much to tell. The eldest seems to stare down his companions, and then continues.
“As I’ve said, the Snakt kept the capsule secret for hundreds of thousands of years. Then we discovered their secret. And we then kept that secret for six hundred years more. We substituted a fake capsule for the real one when we removed Dolomay from their homeworld. The Snakt to this day do not know they no longer possess the actual capsule.”
“You people sure do like your secrets, don’t you?” BC asks.
“It was the prudent course of action,” the eldest of the Eldred assures BC. “And Dolomay in his capsule stayed safely on our world of Eldray for over four hundred thousand years. We couldn’t open the capsule, and we dare not try to penetrate it for fear of cataclysmic self-destruction. The Ancient Enemy was fond of that sort of trap. The Snakt had let it be for much the same reasons. Neither race was capable of operating the capsule. We had assumed that it would remain inert, as it had for a million years and more. But then something happened, something triggered the capsule, and it all changed. Dolomay was awakened.”
“What happened,” BC asks. “What changed?”
The eldest of the Eldred looks down. “It is our own fault.”
“How?” BC wonders out loud.
“We brought you to Eldray,” the Eldred tells BC. “The capsule was close by the statue we brought you to and showed you. Somehow, your presence there triggered the capsule’s mechanisms. We can only guess the apparent cause and effect, but the two events were nearly simultaneous.”
“Why didn’t you stop him?” Anita asks.
“He escaped before we realized he had awoken,” the Eldred explains. “We did not find the empty capsule until just after Al-Salid had left us. By that time, it was clear that he had thawed out days earlier and made his getaway.”
“And you think we’ll know where to find him? How?” BC asks.
“We believe he is heading for your world, if he is not there already,” the eldest tells BC. “There are none who will aide him within our expansive jurisdiction,” the alien explains. “And he can blend in with you and your race quite easily. So, you see, we need your help. We cannot move among you ourselves without causing panic and pandemonium, we would imagine.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right about that,” BC admits.
Man… what a fucking bombshell! Gotta think this through.
“But if he’s all you say the Ancient Enemy was, how can we stop him? Never mind find him in the first place?” BC asks.
“As we’ve said, you think more as he does than we do. We believe you can help us figure out how he will behave, where he might go.”
Riiiiight.
“So, where do we start?” BC asks. “Did he take one of your ships?”
“We, uh…” the eldest of the Eldred pauses, “we don’t know.”
“You’re not giving me much to go on, here,” BC tells them.
The Eldred exchange glances among themselves again.
“Do you have a picture of Dolomay?” BC asks.
The Eldred shake their heads, obviously puzzled.
“Can you describe him?” BC asks.
The glances shoot between them once again.
“Don’t you even know what he looks like?” BC asks.
“We do,” the eldest of the Eldred tells BC. “We do not, however, have any sort of pictorial description to provide to you.”
“No picture?” BC asks. The Eldred shake their heads in near unison.
BC shakes his head.
“Could you describe him?” Anita asks.
“What?” BC and the Eldred ask in unison.
“We can get an artist,” she tells them. BC doesn’t know what she’s driving at and looks at her puzzled.
“What?” she protests. “We have artists here! They can draw a likeness based on the Eldred’s description.”
“That’s a great idea, Anita!” BC exclaims.
“A what? Description? Drawing? Can draw? What is this?” The Eldred asks.
“A drawing,” Anita tells the alien. “A likeness… a picture?” she tries. The Eldred look back at her blankly. “Are you unfamiliar with the concept of art?”
“Art?” the eldest of the Eldred sniffs. “We have heard the word. Seen the term.”
“Seen the term?” Anita asks, her chance to be incredulous. “It’s a form of creation,” she tells them.
“Creation?” the eldest of the Eldred asks her, clearly not understanding. Maybe the Eldred have no means of original expression because they themselves are creations. A created race.
“Look!” Anita says loudly, exasperated. “We can at least try it, right? I think it will be easier to just do it than it will be to explain the process to you.” She turns on a nearby com. “Do we have any artists on base right now?” she asks.
BC hears the low volume voice as it responds, “We’ve got at least one designer on base, if not an actual artist, Anita.”
“Can you have them join me here in meeting room one J?”
“I’ll get right on it,” the voice assures her and signs off.
“When the artist gets here,” Anita tells the Eldred, “you’ll tell him what features Dolomay has, what he looked like, and they’ll try to recreate his image on a piece of paper.
“We see,” the Eldred says.
A thin young woman with long dark hair enters the room carrying a sketchpad and a box of pastels.
“Hi! Oh wow,” she says, her eyes going wide at the sight of the Eldred.
“Hi Martha,” Anita greets her. “The Eldred here would like to describe a person to you, so
that you can draw his picture. Can you do that?”
“I can try,” she says.
Martha spends about a half an hour trying to draw Dolomay. BC and Anita try to help by asking the Eldred questions.
“Tall or short?” BC asks.
“Tall,” the eldest of the Eldred answers.
“What color hair? How long was it?” Anita asks.
“Blonde, and short.”
“Fat or thin?”
“Thin.”
“Cheekbones high or low?”
“High.”
“What color were his eyes?”
“Blue. Light blue.”
The girl finishes her drawing and holds it up for all to see.
“How’s this?” she asks the eldest of the Eldred.
“That… that appears to look like him,” the alien confirms.
“Handsome devil,” BC says.
“He looks like a Nazi,” Anita says. “The chiseled jaw, the steely eyes, the blonde hair.”
The others in the room look at her blankly.
“Nazis? World War Two? Germany? Twentieth Century?” She asks, trying to prompt them. The rest just shake their heads.
“Doesn’t anyone follow history anymore?” Anita asks rhetorically.
“He won’t blend in too easily if he looks like that,” BC says, thinking out loud. “Guy like that’ll stand out in a crowd pretty much anywhere. He’s what? Six six?”
“Yes, six feet and six inches,” the eldest of the Eldred says.
“Tall,” Anita says, nodding.
BC winces.
A headache?
Now?
Here it comes, building, the hammering…
“Headache?” Anita asks.
BC nods.
“I’m going to have to cut this short. I’m sorry,” BC tells the eldest of the Eldred. “But I can meet with you again later.”
“If you must,” the eldest of the Eldred says.
“Yeah,” BC says, wincing again as the pressure builds at his temples. “I’m afraid I must. Please excuse me,” he asks them, and then ducks out of the room. He grabs a passing tech.
“Is there a lounge nearby? A place where I can lay down?” BC asks her.
“Are you okay?” she asks BC.
“Not really,” he tells her.
Do I look like I’m fucking okay?
Do I look like I want a conversation?
Why do you think I need a place to lie down?!
“Come on, this way,” she says. She leads him down the hall to a small employee lounge with a couch long enough for him to lie on.
“Thanks,” BC tells her.
“No problem. Hope you feel better,” she says, and then leaves him alone. He crashes onto the couch and passes out.
BC feels like he’s dreaming. He’s lying on the couch in the lounge, but the walls of the room fall away, leaving him surrounded by a blank grayness. He once again feels like he’s in the center of a vast quiet ocean of gray, and once again a loud voice “speaks” inside his mind, not in his ears. AHA! SO, THERE YOU ARE!
What?
You? Who are…
I’VE BEEN HOPING TO FIND YOU AGAIN.
Now I know you can’t be God, because God is omniscient! He can see everywhere! And you, obviously, can’t or you’d have found me sooner. What is this place?
IT IS WHERE WE SPEAK TO EACH OTHER LONG DISTANCE. IT IS NOWHERE AND
EVERYWHERE AT ONCE. IT IS THE SEA OF OURSELVES. YOU ARE NOT ALWAYS HERE, YOUNG ONE. YOU COME AND GO. I CANNOT FIND WHAT IS NOT THERE. NOW, YOU ARE
HERE AGAIN.
Who are you?!
WHO DO YOU SAY I AM?
I don’t know, you’re not the same, not like that first time on Fortune Station. HOW DO YOU KNOW I AM DIFFERENT?
There is no sound here, but somehow you sound different. I can’t put my finger on it, but something is different.
You’re… smaller, somehow; somehow more closed off.
CLOSED OFF? INTERESTING. YOU SENSE THE DISCIPLINE. THAT’S GOOD.
I don’t feel closed like that.
NO. YOU DO NOT HAVE THE DISCIPLINE. YOU ARE WIDE OPEN TO ME.
When you can see me.
CLEVER. YOU DO NOT TRUST ME.
A statement.
A TRUTH.
You can see that?
What else can you see? I can feel something… slippery, oily, greasy… what are you doing in my head!?
LEARNING YOUR LANGUAGE.
LEARNING WHO YOU ARE BERNARD CAMPION. LEARNING…
Get out of my HEAD!!
DO NOT SHUT ME OUT!
How are you closed? Let me see, it feels like this…
DO NOT! DO NOT DO….
Huh. That seems to have shut him out…
BC wakes up. The strange dream still with him. The headache is gone. BC tries to hold on to the memory of the dream. He doesn’t like what it implies.
Great! I’m arguing with myself inside my head. Or, the alternative: Some kind of creature got inside my mind, but somehow I blocked them and pushed them out.
It felt real, not like a “vision” or fantasy. Nothing “holy” feeling about it. Just Holy Shit! Was it real? What was it, if it was real?
Who can I talk to about this? “Hello, Anita? Yeah, I’m hearing voices and feeling greasy presences inside my head. Wanna chat? How fast would the straightjacket and medication appear? Time to drug Pope BC, he’s lost it!
BC sits up on the couch. One of the Vatican entourage, Reverend May, is sitting across the room in an easy chair, reading a book. She looks up as he rises.
“Hello, your holiness,” she says. “Feeling better?”
“Yeah, the headache seems to be gone,” he tells her.
“Maybe you shouted it out,” she says quixotically.
“What?”
“You yelled out in your sleep,” she informs him.
“What did I say?”
“I believe it was,” she clears her throat, and attempts to mimic BC. “’Get out of my head!’ you said, something like that.”
“Was that all I said?” he asks her.
“That was it. So, like I said, maybe you shouted it out of your head.” She closes her book and gets up. “I can show you to your apartments if you’d like to lay down on a bed and rest, instead of that cozy little couch,” she tells him.
BC stands up.
“Sure, let’s go,” he says.
Maybe get some real sleep, this time. No more invaded dreams!
May shows BC to his apartments, the old Van Kilner residence on the base. He’s pleased to see they’ve cut a quick passageway to Van Kilner’s old apartments for him, eliminating the long stroll down the endless corridors.
I’m not a fan of all that walking.
Back in a proper bed inside the quiet apartment, BC is able to embark upon a relatively eventless sleep for the rest of the night. He wakes up refreshed, but for a few seconds he can’t remember where he is.
Where am I?
What happened?
Oh yeah, the asteroids.
That fucked up dream last night in the lounge!
BC sits up in bed. Suddenly, the thrumming begins again behind both of his temples, the headache coming on once again.
Headache! Fuck. Just stop, okay… just STOP!
The headache stops.
It stopped! Finally!
BC sits in bed, waiting for the headache to return.
Nothing!
BC smiles. He closes his eyes.
All of a sudden, BC feels like he’s surrounded by a crowd of people, all yelling different things at him, all at once. He opens his eyes. No one else is in the room, but he can still hear the cacophonous choir of voices in his head.
This is worse than the headache! I can take one voice inside my head, but this? SHUT UP!
The noise inside his head stops.
Ah. Quiet.
The discipline?
Wonder why I just thought of that.
Shut up! Keep out!<
br />
I should put up signs.
Maybe I am losing my mind.
Maybe this is something the Eldred are doing to me. A mindfuck to go along with their plague. Maybe this is it. I’ve lost my fucking mind!
A pleasant but insistent beeping interrupts BC’s train of thought, derailed as it may be. An alarm? I don’t remember setting one. No, it’s the com. Nice tone. Must have been Van Kilner’s choice.
“Hello?” BC says.
“BC?” It’s Anita.
“Hello, Anita,” BC says. “Sorry about yesterday’s quick exit there. One of my headaches came on pretty strong.”
“Bad?” she asks him.
“At first it was bad,” he tells her, “but then it got kind of weird.”
What should I say? I can’t tell her.
“Weird?”
“Yeah,” BC says, thinking fast. “It turned into a strange dream. I’m okay now.”
Hope she drops it.
“Okay? You know I’m, I mean, we’re all worried about you, BC. There are a lot of people depending on you, now.
“You’ve become an important person, whether you like it or not!”
That would be “not”.
I don’t like being on the news every time I sneeze.
“These headaches,” Anita starts, but trails off.
“What?”
“BC, you’ve become a symbol of hope for people, but these headaches… they’re… Here? Away from everything? We can keep them under wraps. I don’t think the Eldred are going to tell the media,” she says. BC can hear her chuckle on the other end. “But out in public? If people see you doubling over, it’s…” she tries to finish the thought. “It’s going to be bad. All I’m trying to say is be careful, people look up to you now.”
“I don’t want them to look up to me,” he says.
“You’re the pope! You’re the top CEO!” Anita exclaims. “Get used to it!” she tells him.
“It might not be an issue anymore,” BC tells her. “I think I might be getting these headaches under control.”
“Really?” she says. BC can hear the doubt in her voice over the com.
“I know it might sound crazy,” BC starts.
If she’ll go with me on this, maybe… MAYBE I can tell her more.
“But this morning, I felt one coming on… and I was able to make it stop and go away!”
“How?” she asks.
“I thought it away! Just thought for it to stop,” he says.
