“It has always made that sound,” said E. “We don’t know how to stop it, but it hasn’t hurt anything.”
“Is it a machine?”
“We tried to dig the obelisk up once, or at least find the bottom of it. We gave up twenty feet down—it just keeps going.”
“No wiring or anything?”
“No. Smooth sides, no writing on the underground part.”
“Are there any files around here? Or books, even? Anything that could be a clue as to what it does?”
“Nothing. Just what you see here. Why are you curious? This place is a wonder and has been good to us,” said E.
“Where do you come from?” asked Samantha. “You weren’t born here, were you?”
E shook her head. “None of us were. We came here a long time ago from another world on a damaged ship. This place has been our home since then and saved us from death. We’ve had great happiness here.”
My stomach started to growl, so I left in search of food, leaving Leo with his adoring populace.
Inside the food hut I found M and K, who were seated on cushions, playing flutes.
“There’s food for you on the table there,” said M, pointing to a bowl heaped high with the same colorful fare as yesterday. I dug in happily, savoring the exotic tastes.
“Has anyone else ever come to this world?” I asked between bites.
“No, but we have met your kind before, long ago in passing.”
“When?”
“A long time ago. We don’t really keep track of time here. It flows lazily by us as we enjoy our days.”
That much I could easily understand. It was my second day among these aliens and it had all flown by in a pleasant instant.
“What are your days like?” I wondered. “What do you do here?”
M smiled, then she and K launched into a long explanation of everyone’s hobbies. D loved carving, and would often carve dead wood and repair any huts that needed it. B and T were in charge of finding new fruit trees and knowing when each ones flowered so that the fruit could be harvested. C made pottery using clay she found by the waterfalls and a kiln she had made. We had eaten from some of her pottery last night, even. Everyone played music, usually at night together.
M herself liked to cook and create new foods from the fruits and other things they ate. “But no one has been doing much of anything since you came here,” she said. “Everyone is far too abuzz with curiosity about you. How long are you planning on staying among us? You are welcome, of course.”
“Well, maybe only a few weeks. We’re not sure yet.” That was the truth: we weren’t exactly sure when the rescue ships would get here.
“We took a vote this morning before you, Samantha, and Leo awoke. We have decided to invite you to stay with us—permanently.”
I froze in astonishment, an orange berry halfway to my lips. “You want us to stay?” I asked. “Really?”
“Our little tribe would love to have you as new members, provided your intentions are pure.”
“They are,” I blurted. “We didn’t even think we’d find anyone on this planet, honestly. We thought we would die out there on the barren rock.”
“You would have been right,” she said solemnly. “There is nothing but death out there. We tried to go out there once, several years ago. We nearly died. There is no running water, no plants or animals. Just rocks and wind.”
I got more excited with every step I took.
I had followed M’s instructions exactly, but they were hardly necessary. The aliens had made a wide path leading to the spring. The path was marked with little wood carvings every few yards, probably the work of D, the carpenter.
I heard the water trickling before I saw it. And when I did see it, I broke into a run in my excitement. The hot spring!
There were several pools, all lightly steaming and intensely aqua. Bright red flowers grew beside them among the rocks, and a mineral scent pervaded the whole place.
I chose one of the pools and approached it.
I had expected Leo to remain on the banks of the pool, shooting me skeptical glances as I bathed. Instead, the moment he saw the water, he scampered over to it, giving the surface of the steaming pool a hearty sniff. Then, satisfied, he splashed into the water, paddling about with obvious delight.
The sight of him swimming made me laugh, a strange sound. It had been weeks since I had allowed myself to relax enough to enjoy things. Well, that would change right now.
Unbuttoning my pants, I slid them off my legs and threw them aside. My other clothes followed until I was as naked as the day I was born… but I barely noticed. A steaming hot pool awaited my aching muscles.
I slid into the water. It felt like a warm hug that I never wanted release from. Shutting my eyes, I stretched, working my shoulders back and forth and splaying my fingers. My back felt amazing, like it had never even been injured.
Leaning back against one of the rocks at the edge of the pool, I luxuriated in the moment, digging my toes into the soft sand at the bottom. The only sounds around me were the splash of Leo playing and the rustle of the palm trees as the wind made them dance back and forth.
Opening my eyes, I spread my arms in front of me in preparation to paddle to the other edge of the pool.
A smear of pale blue on my left arm caught my eye. Curious, I pulled my arm closer to inspect it.
In the place where I had burned my arm three days ago operating the fire-starting kit, the wound had completely healed and a scar had formed. But it was no ordinary scar: the skin that had grown over where the wound had been was the same pale, ashy blue as the aliens’ skin.
Thinking maybe it was just a smudge of something, I tried to scrub it away. But the pale blue skin didn’t budge: it was fully part of me.
Suddenly the hot pool didn’t feel so comfortable. My skin crawled at the realization: there was alien skin on my arm.
How had it healed like that? The burn had been a bad one, one that I probably would have been told to see a doctor for if I had been anywhere civilized. But it healed up easily; the new skin wasn’t even tender.
And I hadn’t noticed it happening because my sleeves had covered the wound.
What if…?
I looked down at my chest, where there had been several small wounds where the medical vest had been affixed to my body. Sure enough, the wounds had fully healed. The new skin that had grown over them had taken on a decidedly bluish, ashy cast. It was very slight, as the wounds had been starting to heal already, but it was still there.
There was alien skin on my chest.
On my back I knew there were more small scars, since a lot of the medical technology had been inside my back, where my spine had snapped. I couldn’t twist around and see, but I was sure I had alien skin there, too.
What was happening to me?
All my desire to relax having evaporated, I climbed out of the pool.
Leo gave me a quizzical look but followed me out of the water, shaking out his massive fur coat like a dog.
“There’s something weird going on, Leo,” I explained, stepping into my boxer shorts and pulling them up. “Something very weird. I think I need to find out what it is.” I threw on my pants and my shirt. “Come on. We’re going to have a little look around this paradise.”
For the next three hours, Leo and I explored the oasis. I wasn’t even sure what we were looking for. I simply kept going, my bare feet making faint squeaks in the pale sand as I walked.
I saw even more exotic fruits and flowers, growing on ever stranger trees. In places the forest was so thick I could barely see the sky; in others, it thinned and I felt a breeze.
Leo was a good companion, walking silently beside me the whole time. He seemed to understand my worry.
What was I even looking for? Some cave with a secret book that would reveal everything? This was ridiculous. Why couldn’t I just have asked the aliens about their history and why their skin was growing on me?
Because I was afra
id they would lie. Or worse—they would know I had found out their secret and turn nasty, perhaps.
I didn’t want to take that risk. Not yet. Not until I knew more.
I brushed aside a tangle of vines and kept going. I was nearing the end of the oasis—soon it would just be the bare rock of the planet. In fact, I could glimpse the end of the oasis though the trees already, and my heart sank.
I had come to the end of my search and I hadn’t found anything. I wasn’t going to leave the oasis and risk getting lost out on the planet, so I would have to turn back instead. I’d have to go back and face the aliens, paste on a smile, and pretend I hadn’t noticed that their flesh was growing on my skin.
I stood at the edge of the oasis, looking out onto the bare world beyond. The sky was stark, bare of clouds. The planet’s three suns, all different sizes, had begun to creep towards the horizon.
And light glittered off something to my left, hidden in the trees and covered with vines.
I turned—and stared.
Buried in vines and undergrowth was something metal. I crept closer and almost froze.
It was a part of a spaceship.
Chapter 18
The spaceship had been here a long time—it had even partially sunk into the ground, vegetation growing over much of the rest of it.
Guessing based on the style of the hatch, I pegged it as being several decades old.
The writing on the side had almost worn off, but I could still read it.
It said Lifeblood.
I read the name over and over, but it was unmistakable. It hit me with the shock of cold water.
The Lifeblood had vanished fifty years ago. And here I was, having found it.
The Lifeblood had been a famous ship, and not in a good way. It was a legend and a cautionary tale every child had been taught about in school.
It had been a deep space explorer ship, the first of its kind. It was also the first to use a new kind of hyperspace engine. The engine was supposed to have been lighter, faster, and better in every way. It was also supposed to have been thoroughly tested.
Except that it hadn’t been. The company that had manufactured the engines had been so sure they would work, that they had hurried through the testing phase, faking a few of the test results. Any of the engineers who protested this were fired and their claims dismissed as sour grapes.
So, with the public none the wiser, the Lifeblood had its new engine installed and prepared for its first deep space exploration mission. The crew was a small one, mostly scientists.
The launch was one of the most celebrated in history. No ship had ever dared to go as far into space as the Lifeblood would. There was even talk—unconfirmed, of course—that they were going to meet with aliens.
The Lifeblood’s celebrated launch went smoothly, the crew sending back videos of themselves popping champagne corks as they zoomed towards deep space.
But then they started to go too fast. Unable to slow down, they zoomed past all the then-known space and went further. The crew sent back panicked communiqués, saying they couldn’t stop the ship or even slow down. The ship was gaining speed at an alarming rate, going further into deep space than was originally planned.
Several rescue ships were sent out to try to catch the Lifeblood, but it was no use—they could never hope to catch up with the Lifeblood’s incredible speed.
Then the communiqués from the Lifeblood stopped. She had vanished only days after her launch, going too far into space for anyone to communicate with her. She was gone, lost to space.
In the past fifty years since then, technology advanced forward and so did humanity’s horizons. Explorers found new worlds and founded new colonies. Humans explored more and more of the galaxy. Every time some team of explorers set foot on a new world or a new moon, the news feeds blossomed with opinions on whether or not they would find the Lifeblood. She was the spacefarer’s Atlantis.
And I had found her.
I stood there for several minutes, simply staring at the name on the side of the ship. Leo sniffed the ship’s hull and then stood back, satisfied.
I walked around what I could of the ship’s perimeter, inspecting it. For a crash, it was not too bad. Perhaps the crew had found some way to slow the ship down a bit. The damage was concentrated on the nose of the ship; leaving the stern almost unscathed. The crew could have perhaps survived this crash, if they had been able to brace for impact properly and had not been in the bow of the ship when it had crashed.
Reaching the hatch, I pulled it open, revealing the darkened interior of the ship. Leo bounced inside and I followed, keeping the hatch flung open to let in light from outside.
Stepping inside the ship was like stepping back in time. All the ship’s hardware was, of course, from fifty years ago. To my modern eyes, it all looked horribly dangerous. Even the paneling on the inside of the cabins made me cringe: it was so unsafe and prone to bursting into flame compared to what was inside the Dragontooth or the Indomitable.
How had this ship crashed? Perhaps I could access the log to find out. Where would I find that? There were so many buttons and screens in this old ship! It was overwhelming. And wiring everywhere—it was a wonder the place didn’t simply explode the moment they turned it on.
I checked to see if anything was still working. No luck—it had all gone dark.
I explored the entirety of the ship, finding nothing but more non-working technology and a non-working science lab of some sort. What I did not find were the bodies of the crew. The ship was empty of them.
As I stopped to consider this, Leo began sniffing at something on the other side of the cabin. I noticed that next to him, sitting atop a surface covered with switches and buttons, lay several slips of some sort of plastic.
I picked the first one up. It was about half the size of my hand and had some material coating one side that made it almost stick to my hand.
I flipped it over and saw that it was some sort of nametag or ID badge. The name on it was Maura Meriwether, and above the name was a picture of a dark-haired woman. I picked up another of the nametags and read it: this one belonged to the fair-haired Nikolai Williamson.
Scooping the nametags up, I carried them over to the hatch so I could get a better look at them in the light.
Once I was again in the light of day, I held up Maura Merriwether’s card.
And nearly dropped it in shock.
Maura Merriwether was the human version of M.
Chapter 19
I stared at the tiny picture on the nametag.
Sure, Maura’s hair was much shorter than M’s and her features were absolutely human. But if Maura’s features had been sharpened, her skin tinged ashy blue, and her hair allowed to grow, she would look exactly like M.
Quickly, I held up Nikolai Williamson’s nametag. He looked exactly like the human version of N.
It was uncanny.
I looked through the other nametags. A man named Thomas Quinn looked like T; a man named Dorolian Norsopian looked like D; a woman named Eleanor Liefwig looked like E, a woman named Claudia Svenson looked like C; a woman named Karen Gardener looked like K; a woman named Jennifer Zoros looked like J; a man named Bruce Rambert looked like B; and a man named Genesis Ulik looked like G.
Five men and five women, same as the aliens.
Some of them were young in their name badge pictures; some were old enough to be the parents of the others. But their alien lookalikes were all the same age. Also, some of the human men had beards or other facial hair; none of the aliens did.
These humans and the aliens living in the oasis had some sort of connection. I knew it.
Pocketing all the name badges, I left the ship, motioning for Leo to follow me.
The walk back to the village was a blur. My mind was far, far too full of questions for me to even pay attention to my surroundings.
Leo was oblivious to this. He frolicked about happily, sniffing everything along the way.
Inside my pocket lay t
he ten badges, half maddening mystery and half clue as to what could be happening to me—and what had happened to the aliens.
Or were they even aliens? Were they humans who had instead changed somehow?
Or had they somehow taken the humans’ bodies and changed them? The possibilities and explanations piled up in my head, each freakier than the last.
I couldn’t appreciate the whisper of the trees as the breeze blew among them or the cool squeak of sand under my feet. The scent of the flowers and fruits made no impact on me. I kept walking, my head buzzing with too many thoughts.
Perhaps I should have just stayed aboard the Dragontooth with Katelyn. We had been happy there. It had been a simple life, and true enough, there had been the occasional murderous stalker, but for the most part we had been very happy. We had had late nights of stargazing and long, relaxing days of just letting the ship take us places. We had explored several planets and watched Leo wolf down the weirdest of foods. It had been our life.
And now she was half a galaxy away, probably worried sick about me. And she would be right to—I was marooned among strange aliens who clearly had a secret.
I should have known this paradise was too good to last.
As I neared the village, I heard the aliens bustling about in the food hut, getting ready for their evening meal. I cringed inwardly. Though I was hungry and happy they were so keen on keeping us fed, I dreaded having to paste on a smile and pretend I was ignorant of what I had just found in the Lifeblood.
What if they were just fattening us up to do to us whatever they had done to the crew of the Lifeblood?
Heading past the food hut, I found Samantha inside her thatch hut, lying on a pile of multicolored pillows. In front of her was a wooden platter heaped high with different fruit.
She was dictating notes into her pocket computer as she tasted each one.
“Samantha, I need to talk to you,” I announced in a tone of voice that conveyed how important this was.
She looked up, unperturbed, and set the computer aside. “Very well. Care for a slice of fruit? I’m categorizing them.”
“No, thank you.” After my discovery, I suddenly didn’t trust anything here. Which, I realized, was ridiculous of me: I still had to survive some way until the rescue ships came.
Across The Universe With A Giant Housecat (The Blue) Page 9
