by Al Macy
Missing were images of damaged structures. Apparently, their paranoid nature led them to overbuild—make their structures stronger than necessary. Trees were uprooted, fields looked like they’d been plowed, but the dome houses were fine. The flock watched in silence.
Marbecka turned from the display to me. “The danger has, in probability, passed. The confluence rift collapsed, leaving destruction behind. But this event substantiates that we must act to accelerate our schedule.”
“And my request for information?”
“Affirmative. We had allocated, on this day, a period within which you would have the opportunity to ask questions. We will tell you more about our situation. If confirmed that we have exited the woods, we shall engage in a field trip.”
The heavy doors to the storm shelter opened, and two celanos waddled directly toward me. “Hello, you may be using my name of Drenast. I am a man.”
Drenast sported red feathers, not blue. The top part of his beak was white, as were the feathers near his eyes. The bottom part of his beak was black. He spread one wing and swept it in a gesture toward the flock. He held out his right hand, with his wing folded back.
I turned to Marbecka. “Certainly handshaking is not your custom.” Wouldn’t touching the alien be too scary for them?
“No, definitely no,” she said. “Drenast is mentally ill, as is Cree.” She clicked her beak toward the smaller one.
Cree nudged me in the chest with her beak, hard enough to rock me back. “I am all female.” She gave my left bicep a squeeze.
I’d eaten chicken feet at a dim sum restaurant in San Francisco once. Her hand reminded me of that. I smiled at Cree then turned to Marbecka. “Mentally ill?”
She bobbed her head. “They are zealos. Celanos, but with a genetic mutation. This DNA error makes them overly bold and confrontational. Like you. In most situations, this has negative adaptive value, but in our present situation, their overly aggressive nature has been chosen with appropriateness for your person guards.”
Drenast clicked his beak toward Marbecka. “Asshole.”
Marbecka looked at me. “Observe what I am saying?”
Drenast pecked at Marbecka, who flinched back. “All non-zealos are little bundles of angst. Some are worse than others.” He jabbed his hand toward Marbecka.
I scrunched my eyes closed and reopened them. This had to be some kind of surreal dream.
Marbecka led us to the exit. “Be of understanding, Jake, that we celanos enjoy the intricacies of language. Know we are firm-wired to acquire language. I am of assurance that every celano with a holoviewer can now, and does, speak English passively.”
“Passably,” I said.
“Yes, both passively and passably.” She bobbed her head. “Thanks.”
Cree slapped me on the back with her wing. “It was in particularness that I enjoyed your adventure journal, but my inner human developed sadness when your extra-species companion expired, not to say less also the old woman.”
Ah, the video journal. Apparently all my lessons had been televised like some reality show. They’d recovered photographs from my smartphone and integrated those into the narrative.
With Marbecka leading the way and my new bodyguards on either side, we headed toward the aircraft port. Twice, Cree nudged me with her beak, then looked off as if examining something on the ceiling. She may have pinched me on the butt, too.
* * *
We boarded a craft like the one that had rescued me. Entering through the cargo hold, most of my companions fluttered away up a central shaft.
Drenast guided me into a freight elevator and pecked a button on the wall. “How much does it suck to not fly?”
Rhetorical question? I couldn’t read his body language. “Uh … true, I wish I could fly.”
“Yeah?” He flicked his wings. “Well, deal with it.”
The doors opened and Drenast extended a wing. “Here’s the bridge, not being of the variety that extends over a river. Dumb language.”
The bridge seemed to be in the center of the craft—the safest spot. It was circular, just like the bridge in Star Trek. The central area was empty, however, and perches extended around the periphery. Six celanos sat facing the middle, a few with holographic controls in front of them.
The aircraft popped straight up, causing me to stumble. The floor dissolved.
Damage from the confluence was clear: A thin line of tornado-like destruction stretched from horizon to horizon. Not only were trees uprooted within this strip, but the ground itself had been disturbed, as if huge gophers had tunneled along its path.
Marbecka pointed to the line. “We had luck. I explained before how a confluence rift could result in stripes of adjacent universes. How you could walk from one to the other. However, in this case, the confluence didn’t extend to the ground. The damage you see resulted from a disparity in atmospheric pressure. Like damage from tornadoes.”
I looked down at the sparsely populated East Bay. At home, houses would pack this region. Before the die-off of 2018, there had been 2.5 million people living in the region.
“How many dinobirds are there on the planet?”
Marbecka had never objected to my name for her species.
She bobbed her head. “We have almost three million souls on Earth, and another million distributed among other planets.”
“You’ve colonized other worlds?”
“Yes, of course. Our technology is far advanced from yours. In addition to conventional modes of propulsion, we have developed quantum engines which greatly simplify space travel. That technology dictates the triangular topology of our ships.”
They’d added a chair for my benefit. I sat down, and the craft accelerated to the northeast.
I leaned back. “I told you about the asteroid hit that wiped out the dinosaurs in our world. Am I correct that that did not happen here?”
“Quite so.” She bowed her head down briefly. “This impresses me with your reasoning, Jake. We possessed no such catastrophe. Dinosaurs had trouble adapting to changing climate conditions, yes, but survived. Only small animals of your taxon, mammals, existed.”
Her feathers ruffled, then smoothed. “Larger mammals could not compete with my ancestors, and never evolved. In your universe, apparently, evolution was reset to relatively primitive creatures. You started from scratch. We did not. Our ancestors were already advanced at this time. So, and I apologize, we had a sixty-million-year head start in relation to you. I appreciate that Homo sapiens have existed for less than one-half million years.”
I shrugged. I hadn’t been sure of that number. Interesting, though. What if human civilization had existed for millions of years instead of just tens of thousands? “Could I have the drawing device?”
Marbecka retrieved a tablet from her ankle. She unfolded it and handed it to me. I drew myself as a stick figure, then drew a passable likeness of a huge tyrannosaur. I tapped it with my stylus. “This is what we call a Tyrannosaurus rex. It’s my understanding that meat-eating dinosaurs like this, along with many other varieties, were successful before the asteroid hit. But I saw no large creatures like that when in the preserve. Why not?”
“We extinguished them.”
“You killed them all?” I raised my eyebrows.
“Yes, of course. Fifty-one million years before this date of today, my ancestors targeted over five hundred species that were a threat. We killed them from our airships with goddamned ray guns and caused them to go extinct.”
“Didn’t that upset the balance of nature? The ecology?” I squinted at her.
“Please define ecology.”
“Ah, sheesh. It’s the, um, the study of the relationship between different animals and the environment.”
Drenast spoke up. “Yeah, hello, of course it was upsetting to the ecology. Big fucking deal. We didn’t care.”
I checked with Marbecka. She bobbed her head. I drew a croc-monster and showed it to her.
Marbecka’s crest popped up and
she turned away. “We don’t go near the water.”
Ah. That explained why the San Francisco Bay Area wasn’t developed.
“What about the small dinos that captured me?” I unlocked the tablet and handed it back to her.
“Those have become a threat only recently. Gretzers will be targeted soon.”
With some probing, I learned more about dinobird world. Their governments played very little role in their existence. Apparently, the innate flocking behavior reduced conflicts. Wars were unheard of. They even had trouble understanding the concept of war among members of the same species.
There was limited agriculture. No wheat or corn fields. The society was based on hunting and gathering, with hunting confined to capturing small mammals, grubs, and insects.
We passed several more lines of destruction and landed at a community on a mountain surrounded by a vast plain. We might have been near Denver. San Fran to Denver in twenty minutes.
Marbecka took me on a tour of two museums, one concerned with natural history, the other with science and technology. The first included holographic dioramas with dinosaurs even I recognized: triceratops, velociraptors, pterodactyls. A video documented the careful extermination of all species dangerous to the dinobirds.
Exhibits at the science museum described the development of their technologies, such as force fields, holograms, and nanomedicine. The time scales seemed crazy. Spaceflight was developed forty-three million years ago, for example.
On the return trip to California, I asked, “What are you going to do about the impending collision?”
“We have devised a procedure which, if an implementation is manifested in two parallel universes, as example being yours and mine, may divert the disaster.”
“May?”
She bobbed her head. “We are still in uncertainty of the cause of the problem and are continuing our experimentation. This problem is a real mother. Yet our measurements suggest that abundant haste be applied.”
* * *
I was hanging with my new buddies, Cree and Drenast, at my new apartment. I’d come to like Drenast despite his abrupt nature and aggressiveness. It’s just the way he was. Cree, I hadn’t figured out, but I hoped she just liked me like a brother.
The dinobirds had done a good job of reproducing a normal-Earth apartment for me. It was a big improvement over my laboratory-slash-prison cell. A material similar to felted wool carpeted the floor.
They’d installed a couch, coffee table, recliner, and a few perches. Screens on the walls displayed scenes from around the world, and the high ceiling glowed light blue. The ceiling also held a swing. It was more like a trapeze, and I used it for chin-ups every morning.
Off the living room, my bedroom held nothing but a feather bed and a chest for clothing. Yes, feathers. Go pluck yourself, right?
Drenast had brought an illegal drug, which turned out to be alcohol. Fermented from berries, then distilled, it tasted like gin. I guess it was illegal because its dosage wasn’t controlled by a machine.
I leaned back on the couch and put my feet on the coffee table. “Why does Marbecka say you are mentally ill?”
Cree roosted on my guest perch, twisting back and forth rapidly. Making herself dizzy? “Zealos are not mentally ill. Not, not, not.”
“Then why did Marbecka say that?”
“Because we are in possession of more aggressiveness.” Drenast put air quotes around the last word. I must have done that at some point during my lessons. Apparently, if I used a word or mannerism once, the entire population picked it up. Parts of the nightly newscasts were even delivered in English. Just for the fun of it?
I sipped my drink. “Here’s something I don’t get. You guys have been on your planet, in something like your present form, for over sixty million years. You have written records that go back that far. Yes, you’re more advanced than we are, but at the rate science progresses in my world, in sixty million years, we’d—”
“Two reasons, Einstein.” Drenast rolled his head around. “First, observe yourself. You look like you just made an emergence from your egg—no feathers, hardly any fur.” He walked over to me with that parrot waddle and tugged on my shirt with his beak. “Could you survive outside? Without clothes and tools? I scoff.”
“Yes, but humans make tools, houses, support one another.”
“Precisely spoken. After a short rearing period, release any celano into the wild, and he will survive with ease. Okay, okay? No hardship will be experienced. Yes, he will in all probability join a flock of similar-minded celanos. Clothing? I crap on clothing. Seeds, grubs, lizards. All plentiful. Schooling. Not needed, although some choose it. We acquire language in a period of a few weeks, only.”
“Predators we have expunged.” Cree tilted down until her head was by the floor. “In probability, half our population lives in a primitive state, with intention. Perhaps more. Very few choose to live in buildings and so forth. Got it, sailor?”
“But you could have more individuals. You could develop so much faster. You’d have more artists, musicians, scientists like Marbecka.”
“Right. That’s the second reason,” Drenast said.
“Yeah?”
“What’s the fucking rush? It’s not a competition. Shut up, Cree!”
Cree had started squawking. Or singing. She’d flown up to the swing directly above me.
She and Drenast acted like an old couple that had been married for years. I twisted around and looked up at her. “Cree?” I yelled, “Cree!”
She stopped squawking and tilted her head.
“Are you two together? Married?”
She dropped forward in a swan dive and rotated around the swing’s perch until she hung upside down. One flutter of her wings halted her motion, and she ruffled my hair with her beak. Something tickled my ear. Her tongue? She whispered, “You want to see us do it?” The smell of alcohol breath and partially digested grubworms washed over me.
“Uh, no thanks. Maybe another time.”
“Do it? Do it?” She repeated it over and over in my ear until she sounded like a dripping faucet.
I stood, weaved over to my kitchen alcove, and refilled my glass. “Hey guys, changing the subject here, and quickly, Marbecka hasn’t answered my questions about space travel. I was sure I saw some launches when I was in the reserve.”
“Ah,” said Drenast. “Those would be old trading ships.”
“Who do you trade with?”
“The Foegon colony, duh.”
I frowned. “Your colonies are on other planets?”
“No, asshole.” Drenast picked up a leaf and nibbled on it. “The Foegon colony is next to Mars’ largest moon. You called it Phobos. It was the only extra-Earth moon you were aware of, apparently.” He snorted.
Cree spun in circles on her perch, her long tail whipping through the air. “Foegon, Phobos, Foegon, Phobos. Fee fi fo fum.”
Drenast said, “And what no one seems to fathom, dude, is the reality that colonists want Earth. The celanos in our government need to get the sticks out of their cloacas and think outside the envelope.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re all uptight, as if they have sticks—”
“No, I got that. What is it your government doesn’t fathom?”
“The non-zealos understand neither aggression nor confrontation. We have zero wars here on Earth. Our flocking instincts place everyone on the same page, got it? So, they are missing all the obvious signposts.”
“What signs?”
Cree flew back to the floor and waddled to the floor-mounted perch. It took her a few tries to hop up onto it. “One, some of our ships have up and disappeared, that which never happens. Two, they keep requesting us to let them start a colony on Earth. Three, some of the medicine they provided us was tainted, resulting in sickness.”
“That doesn’t sound conclusive.”
“You’d see it. It’s obvious to us mental defectives.” Drenast air quoted the last two words.
“We should endeavor to wipe them off the face of the solar system.”
“Are they zealos, like you?”
They both flipped their wings up then down, the dinobird equivalent of a shrug. Then Cree rotated forward on her perch, smashed her head on the floor, and stopped moving.
Drenast looked at me and burped. “Good stuff, huh?”
CHAPTER NINE
Marbecka perched across a table from me. Drenast and Cree ate at another table. We were in the research facility’s cafeteria, next to a picture window with a dramatic view of the fields and forests where Walnut Creek should have stood. The residential domes blended into the landscape so well they might have been mistaken for rock outcroppings.
Anyone from my world would have recognized this standard cafeteria: tables arranged in rows with some greenery planted here and there.
Marbecka had acclimated to me and could sit close without distress, like a pet parakeet who eventually tolerates, or even welcomes, your hand in the cage. Drenast and Cree, of course, had never been shy, due to their pathological absence of the fear gene.
I stared at the huge egg, over easy with a side of lizard bacon, on my plate. The celanos and I had come a long way with respect to food. I’d finally convinced them that I would not grow to like the football-sized live grubs. Nor the locust salad.
At the end of May, the dinobird scientists proclaimed that they’d learned enough English. It was almost time to send their dumb messenger boy—me—back home.
Bad news, though. They had assumed the universe collision was a natural phenomenon. Some new results brought that into question. If they were wrong, they’d have to modify the instructions that I was to carry back. My transportation was put on hold.
Why did they always have to be so damn careful? The confluence rift demonstrated that time was running out.
I pushed to get sent back immediately. Would Charli have resigned herself to my absence after a year? I pictured a return like that of the Tom Hanks character in Castaway, coming back to a wife who was happily married to a new husband. Unacceptable. Of course, Hanks was gone for years. Plus, he was a fictional character. Charli would wait at least a year, wouldn’t she?
