The Secrets of the Universe (Farther Than We Dreamed Book 1)

by Noah K Mullette-Gillman

  Avraam then walked over to Wu Gwei and his opponent. He lifted the alien up by its tail and tossed it against a wall. Some of the stones fell away and they could see the courtyard outside beyond.

  “Are you… Batman?” Charlie asked.

  The big man laughed. “Bruce Wayne or Dick Grayson? You must be Superman, no?”

  “No,” Charlie replied, a little surprised at the 23rd century warrior’s knowledge of DC Comics.

  Gloryannana ran out of the shadows and was out through the hole in the wall faster than any of the rest of them. Charlie, Avraam, Wu Gwei, and Kalligeneia followed closely behind.

  4

  As the team walked out into the town again, they heard and saw their shuttle bursting through the biomass far above. Shreds of red matter were raining down in streamers. The bright silver hide of the spaceship emerged from the burning red cords.

  “The Gods descend,” Kalligeneia announced pointing up to their chariot in the sky.

  The aliens were running and panicking. Their sky was falling down. Some of the creatures were massive, twenty or thirty feet tall, but they ran like thundering children.

  Avraam raced after a few, his mouth open and possibly drooling. He glowed like the sun, filled with a delirious love of combat.

  One of the females which had been alone with Charlie ran up to him, knelt down, and wrapped her arms around his ankles, begging and pleading in the strange language. Her feathers, which had seemed small and subtle on her back before, stood up tall and long in fear now. They were white, blue, and green.

  Charlie disentangled himself and then found himself patting her awkwardly on her head. “It’s okay. You’ll be…um…. fine.”

  “She’s cute,” Gloryannana teased.

  “I’m glad you approve. We’re registered at the rock quarry,” Charlie laughed.

  Wu Gwei was down on one knee. He opened a cabinet in his chest and began to work to work on his electronics with what looked like a soldering iron.

  “Are you okay?” Kalligeneia asked him.

  Wu Gwei gritted his teeth, continued working, and did not reply.

  The shuttle set down inside of the aliens’ arena. It disappeared from view behind the raised seating. The group began heading over towards it. Charlie extricated himself from the serpent-woman and walked up to Wu Gwei. “How worried about you should I be, Gwei?”

  Between clenched teeth and jaw, the Chinese cyborg replied, “Never worry for any of us, my captain, we are eternal as the stars.”

  “It’s as bad as that?”

  “At this point, my concern is not destroying this village. It’s worse than I estimated.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  The cyborg stopped his work. He sighed and then closed the metal panel in his chest. “Tell my successor to avoid any internal power sources over level fifteen. Warn him that when Fock is new, he’s belligerent.”

  He looked lost in thought for a moment. He stood up, looked Charlie in the eye and smiled. “And spend more time in the studio with him. Our musical exploration is more important than having adventures on these xenoworlds.”

  “Yeah, I was hoping there was something I could do to keep you from dying,” Charlie replied, surprised by how moved he was.

  “No. I don’t think so. Doctor Aelfwyrd and I took too much of my flesh away for my upgrades. I need to control the explosion.”

  “How do we do that?” Charlie asked, looking around at the poorly made stone buildings. It was all barely better than rubble.

  Doctor Aelfwyrd and Kalligeneia came running over. Aelfwyrd pushed Charlie aside roughly and began to scan the cyborg with a lit up metal tube. It changed colors and beeped as it “read” him. Aelfwyrd’s face was turned up in a deep-set frown. He shook the device and began the scan again.

  Wu Gwei waved his hand at the device. “David, it’s okay. I understand what’s happening.”

  “It’s not bloody okay.” Aelfwyrd shoved the metal tube back into a pocket inside of his jacket. He walked around behind the cyborg and opened a hatch behind the right shoulder.

  “I remember the first time I died,” Wu Gwei said to Charlie Daemon.

  “On Primus-3?”

  “Oh, no. I don’t know anything about that. I mean when the great Avraam Fock defeated me. It was a good death. I deserved it. My time had passed. You know, there was a time when I was the hero. I destroyed monsters, monsters like you would never dream of. The grand-children of Kalligeneia’s nightmares.

  “But I didn’t know when to stop. I wanted the war to go on forever. If I couldn’t fight monsters from the Geft, then I thought I could defeat the evil in men. I was horrible, Charlie. You of all people would have hated me. I hope… I hope you never find a good history book, because when you do, our friendship will be over.” He smiled as he said the last sentence.

  “I don’t know if you’re responsible for what happened in that other life anymore,” Charlie replied.

  “It was me, wasn’t it?”

  Charlie shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  Doctor Aelfwyrd closed the panel on Wu Gwei’s shoulder. He stood up again. “Next time you’re going to use a level 14 power source.”

  “Good.” The cyborg nodded stiffly.

  The doctor looked at the captain. “We need to get back. He’s only got about a minute.”

  “What about the village?” Charlie asked.

  “I’ve inverted the flow of his power source. He’s going to implode. We really need to get away from him.”

  Charlie nodded. He, Aelfwyrd, and Kalligeneia started to run. Charlie then noticed the female serpent which had wrapped herself around his ankle was still there. He ran back, grabbed her, and forced her to run away with the group.

  There was an incredibly loud sound, not at all like an explosion, but more like someone scratching their fingernails across a balloon. Charlie turned back. The cyborg stood with his arms spread wide. He looked white and empty, just a blank silhouette. There was no face to see, no details. It was like he had been cut out of the world. Charlie felt a force pulling him towards Gwei, a reverse wind. He felt a weight, a gravity forcing him sideways towards the implosion. His feet slid a few inches. He had to lean backwards to steady himself.

  Kalligeneia fell to the ground and slid about three feet through the dirt. She had been holding a rock, to defend herself with. It shot out into the air and disappeared within Wu Gwei’s white silhouette.

  There was a second sound, similar to the first, but even louder. The white silhouette where Wu Gwei had stood violently expanded outward into a white dome about ten feet high. What looked like vanilla lightning cracked around the surface.

  But that didn’t last for long. Another high pitched sound hit them all. It was deafening. The white dome suddenly shrank into a small white ball hanging in mid-air. The ball shrank and shrank until there was nothing visible left of it at all.

  Where the dome had been, there was clean and smooth crater. It looked like it could have been cut with a laser.

  Charlie took a step forward. Kalligeneia grabbed him roughly and held him back. “Just because it’s small, doesn’t mean it isn’t still there.”

  “Right.” Charlie nodded. He turned and walked towards the arena where his crew were waiting.

  March 2300

  Director Allambree Alawa woke up within his white octagon, bathing in the morphic fluids which aided his body’s continuing adaptation to life on the planet Griffon. The doctors said that it wasn’t unusual for patients sleeping in the octagons to have dreams of being born. Allambree didn’t recall that ever happening to him, but he was amazed at how deep and sound his sleep was in the medical chamber. He was sometimes glad that his body had not been designed for this world and he had to use the octagon.

  Rudire crystals were removed magnetically from his eyes and a cleansing fluid was washed over his skin. It refreshed and healed him. He had never had a scratch or a bruise that lasted more than two days since he started usin
g the octagon.

  The eight foot tall Aussie was one of the strange lost not-colonists of Titan, genetically crafted to live on the moon of Saturn prior to the discovery of the aggressive indigenous worms and the subsequent cancelation of the colony. He was one of a thousand or more human beings designed to live on a world he was unlikely to ever be able to even visit.

  He dressed quietly, then walked slowly and gently into the cafeteria to drink his tea and eat his breakfast. A few of his staff members were there already, but most of them were still in their private quarters reading their NUS-balls and sharing memes.

  Thin and tall, Allambree was always hungry and never delayed a meal. He ate three regular servings and then saved some meat-chocolates to snack on later.

  Their base was known as Roma. It had been built in space, nearer Earth, and flown through a hyper-gate all the way to Griffon where it made planetfall, anchored, and became a permanent addition to the planet.

  Roma now sat atop a dry ancient river-bed, just outside one of the largest of Griffon’s dead cities. All of the cities on Griffon were dead. Mighty Griffon was a corpse world. But it had not always been. Griffon had once been the home of a magnificent intelligent humanoid race. It was almost everything humanity had been dreaming of finding in the cosmos.

  Except that they were indeed all dead by the time humanity found them. A beautiful and complicated world-wide civilization had apparently self-destructed centuries before our probes and explorers could find them. The aliens had left behind millions of burnt and disintegrating skeletons. Men and women – it was impossible not to think of them that way – so close to humans in appearance. Their hair was composed of tiny delicate feathers. Their noses and mouths jutted out gracefully in bestial muzzles. But they had two arms each. Two legs, a head. They walked upright. Each hand was composed of four long fingers and a shorter opposable thumb.

  They lived in houses with round doors. Typically, hundreds or thousands of them would all live together in vast stone complexes reaching up thirty or forty stories up into the sky. It seemed that the Griffons had a technology which allowed them to pour and craft stone into whatever strength and shape they needed. These aliens were mountain-builders. They were sculptors and masons.

  After breakfast, Allambree took a short walk to his office. With a wave of his hand, he commanded his electronic office assistance program to play back recording number 72. He sat back in a pseudo-leather chair, holding a notepad, and carefully watched it all again.

  There was no evidence that the citizens of Griffon enjoyed such a thing as “television,” but their government did have the technology to record moving images. It seemed to be an almost sacred act for the Griffons. They always looked nervous and spoke in a way which felt awkward, to Allambree, when he watched the video recordings.

  But there were plenty of audio recordings, decades and decades, millions of hours of audio recordings. Radio seemed to have dominated their lives. From the number of devices and recordings found, it seemed that they never went a moment of the day without listening to one another singing or speaking. Many of the researchers guessed that there was a rich tradition of drama among the humanoids, but the fact was there was no way to know. They had not yet translated a single note of the Griffon language.

  It seemed to be the case that the people of that world had all descended from something very similar to birds. As well as the sparse feathering which they bore instead of hair, their bones were thinner than ours, and they did hatch out of eggs a couple of weeks after their mothers gave birth to them. Their voices were far more complicated than anything on Earth. More than three million distinct sounds had been catalogued, and there were estimates that the language may have contained twice that number of words.

  It dwarfed English. If it was what it appeared to be.

  And yet, Allambree often found himself sitting just this way watching carefully to try and find the simplest and most common of basic expressions. There had to be a word which directly translated as, “no.” Didn’t there?

  That afternoon, Allambree went out into the alien city. He carried a pouch with reserve oxygen for emergencies, but the doctors assured him that he should be able to survive on the surface for as long as a week, with no ill effects, as long as he remained calm. If his heart rate got too high there was a danger that he could asphyxiate.

  Many of the crew were Homo Sapiens Sapiens and so they required rebreathers and thin protective suits at all times. Allambree’s physiology might not be a perfect match for any world he would ever live on, but it was a better match for Griffon than most old-fashioned human beings. For the past three days they had been working through a series of warehouses near what they believed to be a capital or center of the city. As director, he came down to check on their work and see if any sense could be made of all the truck-loads of artifacts they were uncovering.

  He found himself thinking about the word, “no” some more. Even dogs, cats, and horses could be taught that. They had a concept for it. Could an intelligent mind view the world in another way, or was that basic term necessarily universal?

  “Director. I want to show you a room we’ve uncovered.” It was Amarna, a pretty younger archeologist who grabbed Allambree by the arm. He would have protested, but the woman seemed so excited. Allambree smiled and followed her.

  He wasn’t sure of her background. He thought that she looked like she might be Indian, although her name was obviously Egyptian. The strange thing about the girl was that she appeared to have naturally blonde hair, not just on her head, but in her eyebrows and even lightly growing on her arms. He remembered that she had a background in statistics, but didn’t recall the details of her professional background just then.

  They walked through a roped off passageway and carefully out into one of the protected chambers. The floor was littered with rubble and what appeared to be ancient garbage. They were both incredibly careful as they made their way along a sanctioned path. The bones in this section were not burnt. A group of 27 adult Griffon skeletons had apparently died in a heap. The current theory was that they had starved together.

  They were deep inside of the building, inside of the artificial mountain, by then. In order to get to the surface one would have to travel through six stone walls, seven chambers, and over a thousand feet. The theory was that these large structures were capital buildings, but without an understanding of the language that remained just an unproven theory.

  “You reckon the Griffons turned to cannibalism before they died?” Allambree asked.

  “Not these ones. Digital scanning doesn’t show the biting or cutting marks on the bones we would associate with cannibalism. But I do believe this is a murder scene. Why would they have all died in that same spot? What were they waiting for? Who left them there?”

  “There’s a dark thought.” Allambree almost laughed. “What do you know to support that?”

  “You were on Hermes. You saw what the people there were like. I have a theory that the Griffons were even worse. They weren’t gruesome like the Shadow People of Hermes-11, but I believe this was a totalitarian planet.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m beginning to believe it’s a miracle that Earth isn’t. Look at these hard stone walls. Look how many of their apartments were deep within, far away from the sunlight. There’s a theory, well, I’m writing a book. I have a theory I call the Satan Theory.”

  “Oh?” Allambree was concerned.

  “I believe civilization is a by-product of slavery. You don’t get inventions or buildings or even advanced agriculture unless a small group of people are working many other people almost to the point of death,” Amarna struggled to express herself.

  “That’s not our history. The freer people are, the faster we move forward. Look at what has happened in just the last century since President Daemon.”

  “That’s recent. That’s the miracle built up on top of 30,000 years of slavery. I believe we’re going to find that humanity is unique in the un
iverse for making that turn. Where you see pyramids, you should imagine whips and chains. Where we find science, we should picture the guinea pigs. I’ve done some research and I believe that when our ancestors became religious, they took a turn which we should not expect to find on other worlds. And when they imagined a kind and loving God… well that was the miracle itself. It was irrational. It was a defect at odds with all evidence and allowed for us to become what we are.”

  “Well that sounds like an exciting story, but until we have the data we’ll have no idea whether you’ve got anything or not. We’ll consider the data. Personally, I think you’ve lost the plot.”

  She looked hurt. She paused and looked at him for a moment and then continued leading the way through the chamber into a smaller section which had only recently been opened.

  They passed by a large drink machine and two chairs, which had been unwrapped only recently and left for the team. Allambree stopped to enjoy a small cup of water.

  “So, you believe religion is insanity?” he asked.

  She thought for a moment before answering. “Of course, there are bigger minds than us in the universe. We may never know the answers to any of the bigger questions. But to think the big minds care about us, to think our lives are even interesting to them, that’s insanity. I think we’re like ants to them. No, wait. We’re less than that. We’re not even real. We’re ideas. The kind of ideas you have when you’re lying in bed at night, you don’t bother to write down, and then forget all about the next morning. Call them Gods, or just giants. We’re not worth them noticing us.”

  “Well, that’s depressing.” Allambree did laugh now. “Look, if there’s some bloke in the sky, wouldn’t he be just as compassionate as he is all knowing? If he’s big, maybe he can see all of us little people?”

  The two walked along just a little further. The tools on the floor told Allambree that this area had been worked on in the past day or so. A hole had been cut in the wall next to a large door. It was just big enough for a person to squeeze through.