“Sure will.”
We both headed back to the village. Samantha had a sack full of equipment salvaged from the ship to sort through, and I had to put my boots on if I was going to attempt to reach the broken obelisk. I hadn’t worn them since I had taken them off the first day at the oasis.
It was still early in the day, so I decided not to wait. Lacing up my boots, I grabbed a few supplies and a sack of food. Then I started for the obelisk.
The walk across the bare plain was rough but bearable. Leo kept up with me easily, even bounding ahead to sniff different rocks. For my part, I was already missing the warm sands of the oasis under my feet. And still the broken obelisk loomed far away.
Chapter 21
We had arrived.
After hours of walking across the rocky plain, I now stood in front of the broken obelisk. The bottom half of it towered above us, a straight, proud twin of the one in the village. But about halfway up, the obelisk had snapped, leaving a jagged edge. The top half lay nearby, on the ground.
Just like the obelisk in the village, this obelisk was covered with runes.
Nearby was something else that had been completely invisible to me when I had viewed it from the oasis. A flat surface, made of the same black material as the obelisk, was embedded into the rock nearby. The surface was as smooth as glass and a square about thirty square feet wide.
Immediately, I busied myself taking pictures of all the runes as I had promised Samantha I would do.
Leo started sniffing the smooth surface in the ground. I took pictures of the surface, too, just because it was odd. It didn’t have any runes on it that I could see. After that, I got Samantha’s pocket computer to start analyzing the runes on the obelisk.
Leo took a tentative step onto the smooth surface.
“Notice anything about it?” I asked him. “I wonder what the aliens who lived here before used it for.”
Lifting the computer, I pointed it towards the distant horizon. Was there really nothing else out there? No more oases like the one we had found?
I could see nothing but bare rock as far as the computer’s scanner could make out. I scanned the horizon a second time, more slowly…
There was a shape among the rocks. It was unmistakable.
There was a third obelisk out there.
Three obelisks. I lowered the computer in shock.
There were three. Could there be more?
“Samantha,” I spoke into the wrist communicator. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes!” Her voice came through. “Find anything?”
“Yes. I’m at the obelisk, and it’s broken about halfway up. Other than that, it looks exactly like the one back at the village. There’s another thing here, too… a smooth area of the ground that looks like it was paved with the same stuff used to make the obelisks.”
“Alien landing platform?”
“Maybe. But it seems a bit small for that.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. I looked into the distance—the distance in the opposite direction from where you are—and I saw another one. Another obelisk. There’s a third one out there, Samanatha. It looks to be the same distance away as this one is to the oasis.”
“Another? And spaced equally distant. This is an interesting conundrum.”
“Agreed.”
“You should head back here, Alan. You don’t want to be out there after dark.”
“Also agreed.”
I arrived back at the alien village just as the suns were setting. The aliens and Samantha had already eaten dinner, but they were happy to sit with me while Leo and I ate.
“Where did you go? We missed you today,” said J.
“Exploring,” I answered. “It’s kind of a hobby of mine.”
“I used to explore,” J said wistfully. “But now there isn’t so much to explore.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“This place used to be bigger,” she answered. “It’s grown smaller over the years. Less to explore. Fewer trees.”
“The oasis has gotten smaller? Or the planet?” asked Samantha.
“The oasis,” said J. “I think it used to be much bigger.”
“It was,” said D. “I think I remember another obelisk.”
“You had two obelisks?” I asked cautiously, thinking of the broken one I had just visited. They knew about it?
“Yes, I think so.”
“We could fly,” said G. “I remember that.”
M shook her head. “You must have been dreaming. I don’t remember any of it.”
“You don’t remember the other obelisk? Maybe it was a dream.”
“It wasn’t a dream,” said Samantha quietly.
M shot her a confused look. “How would you know?”
“Maura,” she said. “You were Maura once, weren’t you?”
M shook her head. “I don’t know what you mean. Is this humor on your world?”
“I think I heard that name once,” said J. “I like it.”
“Jennifer,” I said. “Your name was Jennifer.”
I couldn’t hold back, and I knew it. Samantha’s eyes met mine, and I knew we were thinking the same thing. I wanted answers, and I could tell Samantha wanted them too. Especially since the fate of the rescue ships hung in the balance, and perhaps our own fate.
Maybe the aliens remembered enough about being human to help us. But we would only know that if we spilled the news of what we had discovered.
I heaved a deep breath. “The ten of you were born human. You were once the crew of a ship that crash landed here fifty years ago. Since that time, the obelisk has been rewriting your bodies and your minds. That is why you can’t remember.”
Chapter 22
The ten aliens were looking at me, eyes wide, minds processing.
I knew what they were thinking. They were wondering if I was a madman. Or they were trying to remember their pasts, to see if I was telling the truth.
One of them laughed softly.
“Do you disbelieve me? I found your ship.”
“We don’t have a ship,” said M.
“You do, but you forgot. And you all have names. Long ones, compared to the ones you use now.”
Samantha pulled the nametag slips from her pocket and arranged them on the table so the aliens could see them.
“Do you expect us to believe you?” asked D. “Why would the obelisk rewrite us? This place feeds us and keeps us alive with its bounty. It wouldn’t hurt us!”
“It didn’t hurt you,” said Samantha. “It was designed to help an alien race recover from traumas by rebuilding their bodies and taking away traumatic memories. It rebuilt your bodies, too, but it doesn’t know how to build human tissue, only alien. So after long enough, you all started to appear alien. And your memories of the crash and the rest of your lives started to dim.”
“M, this one looks like you,” said J, pointing to one of the name slips.
“What?”
“Look at it. It does.”
The aliens were taking this all so calmly. Of course—their brains had been rewired that way.
Crowding around the slips on the table, they all started looking at the nametags, murmuring as they peered at each picture.
Samantha shot me a worried glance. I, too, was hoping we were doing the right thing by telling them what we knew.
“Why have you told us this?” asked E.
“Because,” I said, “we need your help.”
“For what?” asked M.
“Because maybe you know how to get off this planet. Or maybe your ship can—if you can repair it. I don’t know. But I do know that if we don’t do something, people are going to come here thinking to rescue us—there was an automatic rescue call that our ship sent off—and they’re going to crash. Just like your ship crashed. Just like ours did. And if they crash, they might die. Innocent people, sent to rescue us, are going to end up down here trapped just like us, or dead.”
“I’m not follo
wing,” said M. “Not at all. And being here isn’t a prison. We love it here.”
“No, it isn’t at all. That’s why you never wanted or tried to leave. Then you forgot who you were and where you came from,” Samantha said.
“We’re not telling you any of this to anger you. We mean no harm, but we think you have a right to know,” I said. “Samantha translated the writing on the obelisk, and you might want to know what we found. Do you?”
Ten pairs of eyes stared at me. I could almost see their minds working, natural curiosity growing stronger and fighting against skepticism.
“Tell us,” said M.
For the next two hours, Samantha and I explained everything we had found. We told the aliens about the Lifeblood, the writing on the obelisk, and even the other obelisk I had found. I had saved a copy of Maura’s ship’s log onto Samantha’s computer, so I played the recording before a rapt audience of ten aliens whose facial expressions slowly changed from their normal calm to sadness.
Were they remembering? I couldn’t tell. Fifty years was a long time to be under the calming spell of the obelisk.
They asked a lot of questions, many of which were about their former selves. They seemed fascinated that they once were human, and I noticed J, K and M in particular kept looking at the pictures on their badges and touching their own features, as if to compare.
Perhaps they believed me.
I made sure to stress that I had no intentions of taking them away from this planet unless they wanted us to, and that even if they wanted to leave, we still had no way of getting off-planet. At this point, all I wanted was to know if they had any knowledge that could help us.
At last the stream of questions started to abate. Perhaps it was the calm of the obelisk, but none of them seemed particularly perturbed to discover the truth.
“I remember the oasis being bigger,” said J, with more conviction in her voice this time. “It was. It reached all the way to the rocks in the west. But it’s been growing smaller, bit by bit each year.”
“I remember being in space,” said G. “I remember looking out a window and seeing the blackness. There were stars, too, just like we see at night.”
“I don’t remember space,” said M, a trace of sadness in her voice. “I don’t remember any of it. But I don’t remember anything else, either. I don’t remember much before I was here, just a feeling of peace. Like I was sleeping in the middle of a flower.”
“You should show us this ship you found,” suggested K. The others murmured in agreement.
I looked over to Samantha. She shrugged.
“All right. Let’s go to the Lifeblood.”
The aliens swarmed over the remains of the Lifeblood, filled with a gentle curiosity.
They inspected the hull as Samantha and I stood back to watch as, one by one, they disappeared inside. We could hear them murmuring to each other as they explored.
“What do you think?” I asked Samantha. “Will this help them?”
She shook her head. “It’s been fifty years. It was a miracle they remembered anything about the trip here at all. I don’t think we have much of a chance with this.”
“We might, though.” I didn’t want to give up hope.
We waited.
D and J emerged from the hatch, shaking their heads. “It won’t work. We’ve all been putting our heads together, trying to remember.”
“And?”
“We have bits and pieces, little snatches of memory. It’s just enough to know that we won’t be able to get this thing to fly again. It is far too damaged, and we don’t have a power source big enough to power the whole thing.”
I lay in my bed in my hut, the lush blankets piled around me. It was a cool night, but the blankets kept me warm. More than that, though, they made me cozy. Coziness. Relaxation. I needed those. I wished for sleep, because if I was asleep, I could forget for a little while about the fate that lay ahead.
We had no way off the planet and no way to get a message through to hyperspace to warn the rescue ships that were speeding along towards us. We would only be able to watch as the rescue ships closed in on us until they crashed and burned. If they were lucky, perhaps some of the people aboard would survive and join us together in the village. Then, together, we would watch as our bodies slowly changed into alien forms and our memories faded away. We would live long lives, perhaps endless lives, in sweet oblivion.
And there was nothing we could do to change it.
I turned over in my bed and tried to relax.
Leo lay sprawled on the floor next to my bed, opening an eye to glance at me whenever I moved.
“I’m sorry,” I said to him. “I’m sorry I brought you into all of this. You shouldn’t be here. I should have left you with Katelyn. You should be sleeping on the floor of her dorm room, not this floor. She should be up late at night, studying while sitting curled up with you. You should be getting fat from all the ridiculous treats she would probably bring you. I’m sorry you’re here and not there.”
He stared at me, then closed his eyes. What would the obelisk do to him? I doubted its healing power could work on him, since his body type was so different. What then? Would he grow old and die as we all turned into youthful aliens before him?
I’d never see Katelyn again. Or Useia. I had thought of her every night, but my hopes of seeing her again dwindled more and more. Now they were nonexistent.
I shut my eyes and fell into a restless sleep.
“Alan! Alan! Wake up. Wake up!”
Opening my eyes, I saw that it was still dark, though not as dark as when I had fallen asleep.
Samantha stood there in my doorway, one hand on her pregnant belly, the other upraised and holding her pocket computer.
“What is it?” I croaked.
“Alan! In all the excitement today I completely forgot about something. The translations! Of the runes on the broken obelisk! The computer finished processing them! You won’t believe this!” Had she run all the way here? She seemed a little out of breath.
“You found out what the runes say?” I edged up onto my elbows. Leo awoke and padded over to her. He started purring, rubbing against her legs like a cat. What an odd creature he was.
She approached, trying not to trip over the suddenly loving kvyat. “The other obelisk, the broken one out in the wilderness, has different writing on it than the one here in the village! There’s something connected to it, deep underground.”
Chapter 23
“It’s a computer. There is a computer deep underground that controls the obelisk—all the obelisks. There’s supposed to be a full ring of them around the planet’s equator. This whole planet used to be oasis.”
I was sitting up now. “But I didn’t see anything there. There wasn’t a computer interface of any sort.”
“I know. I’m checking that out. There’s a few directions on the obelisk, but not much.” She frowned, studying the computer. “It only got a partial reading of the runes. You’ve got to go slower when you scan them in. It did get one word at least, though: ‘ships’ and
“What? Ships?” I was on my feet now, somehow. “As in, spaceships? That could take us somewhere?”
She shrugged. “Could be. That is what it seems to confirm.”
I was already pulling on my socks and shoving my feet into my boots. “I’m going back there. I have to find out what it says. I’ll scan it again. Slower, like you said. We have to find out what the runes say.”
She watched me as I got ready. “Don’t go alone,” she said quietly.
“I won’t. I’ll have Leo, too.”
“Take one of the aliens.”
“Why?”
“Because you and I don’t know what you’ll find. Maybe this will help with jogging one of their memories. And it’s safer to go in numbers.”
“All right. Who do you want to wake up and ask to come along?” The suns were already beginning to turn the sky pink at the edges, so we wouldn’t be waking the aliens up too early,
at least.
“I’m already awake,” said M, poking her head in through the doorway. “I’ll go with you.”
“Good,” said Samantha, sounding satisfied as she crossed her arms over her round belly. “Finish getting ready, and I’ll go get some sacks of food for you.”
She turned to do that, and I saw that two more aliens, C and J, had come up behind her. They were holding sacks of food and containers of water.
“We’ve already done so,” said C.
“We want to help, any way we can,” said J.
I felt a smile spreading over my face as I saw the rest of the aliens standing behind them. Everyone was awake, somehow.
In a few minutes, I was ready. Armed with food for the day and Samantha’s computer, M and I set off for the broken obelisk, Leo at my side.
M kept up a good pace, for which I was grateful.
After about a half an hour of walking in silence, M spoke up. “I want to be called Maura again.”
“Really? But you don’t even remember being Maura.”
“Maybe not, but it was my name all the same. I want to use it again, not just the one letter I haven’t forgotten.”
“All right. Maura it is.”
“There’s more. The others want to be called by their full names again, too. We were talking about it last night, after you went to bed.”
“I can do that.” I knew I would have to look at the name tags again as soon as I got back to the village—I hadn’t memorized everyone’s human names yet. But I was glad they wanted to use them again.
By the time we reached the broken obelisk, the sun had climbed high in the sky. While Leo went to sniff rocks and Maura looked around, I busied myself finding the rune Samantha had pointed out earlier, the one that supposedly meant ship. It was the only rune on its side of the obelisk, though all the other sides were covered with runic writing. That was odd. Why hadn’t I noticed that before?
“I’ve found your ship rune. I’m scanning it again,” I said to Samantha, via my wrist communicator, as I slid the computer’s scanner over the rune.
Across The Universe With A Giant Housecat (The Blue) Page 11
